The Elucidarium, Part 3

Book Three of the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis was called De Futura vita, " Concerning the future life." By "future life" he meant the afterlife.

There are seven chapters to Book Three: The Elect, The Damned, State of Souls Before the Judgement, The Antichrist, The Resurrection, The Judgement, Eternal Bliss.

It begins with an explanation of the moment of death of "The Elect":

Master: Just as a bridegroom comes with a crowd of soldiers to fetch his bride and then, happily singing, leads her off, so when a righteous man comes to his end, his guardian angel comes with a crowd of angels and raises his soul, the bride of Christ, from the bodily prison and leads it into spiritual paradise and, with loud singing of the sweetest song and with bright light and the most pleasant odor, arrives at the heavenly palace.

For those on the other end of the spectrum:

When the wicked reach their end, a great noisy throng of demons, awful to see and dreadful in their actions, comes to get them. They drive the soul from the body with terrible torment and lead it cruelly to the prisons of Hell.

Honorius describes nine tortures, and now I'm wondering if Dante got the idea of nine circles from the Elucidarium. A lot of time is spent on details of how much and how the damned will suffer. He also makes clear that no one in the afterlife who is no damned will care a bit for the suffering of those who deserve it.

The master explains how the Antichrist will come to power:

He will command the whole world and will subjugate the whole human race to himself in four ways: First, he will gain the noble by wealth, ... Second, he will subdue the common people by terror because he will rage with great savagery ... Third, he will win over the clergy by wisdom and unbelievable eloquence, ... Fourth, he will deceive those who have contempt for the world, ....

The Elucidarium became enormously popular, translated into several languages across Europe for centuries. (The illustration is the title page of a German edition.) What Honorius produced influenced the day-to-day understanding of Christianity for generations, and no doubt led to several of the common ideas people have even today about the afterlife.

The idea of the Antichrist started early in Christianity, and the Middle Ages was very wary of him, always on the lookout for whomever might be the one who subjugates the world in three and a half years and fools the faithful. Tomorrow we'll look at the evolution of this idea in the Middle Ages, and at some of the people who were accused of being the Antichrist. See you then.