When the Books Are Opened: Jacobello Alberegno, the Last Judgment and the Book of Life
Jacobello Alberegno needed neither fire, monsters, nor particularly elaborate iconography to make the Last Judgment unsettling. The books were enough. In his Polyptych of the Apocalypse, the dead rise holding them before themselves, as though, once the history of a human life has ended, there remains a record that cannot be annulled by the mere fact of death. It is a remarkably intelligent image of biblical eschatology: in Revelation, the end of biological life is not the end of accountability.
The source of this imagery is the twentieth chapter of the Revelation of John. Before the great white throne stand the dead, “great and small”; books are opened, and then another book — the Book of Life. The dead are judged “according to their works” (Rev. 20:12–13). John constructs an almost judicial scene, but on a cosmic scale. Empire, city, office, and social hierarchy have disappeared. The sea gives up its dead; Death gives up its dead; Hades gives up its dead. All the institutions of temporal existence prove provisional before a single tribunal.
Particularly intriguing are the “books” themselves — the Greek βιβλία, biblia. The image does not suddenly appear in Revelation without precedent. It belongs to a much older biblical vocabulary. Daniel sees the Ancient of Days seated upon His throne: “the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened” (Dan. 7:10). Malachi speaks of a “book of remembrance” written before God for those who fear Him (Mal. 3:16). The Psalmist speaks of days written in God’s book before any one of them had yet come to be (Ps. 139:16). Revelation thus inherits an ancient biblical motif: God as the One before whom history does not dissolve into oblivion.
This strikes at one of humanity’s more practical convictions: that a sufficiently distant past eventually ceases to matter. Human beings possess a remarkable talent for granting themselves retrospective absolution. What was done yesterday acquires context today; after a year, justification; after ten years, a carefully revised interpretation. Memory is an excellent advocate for its own client. The apocalyptic book performs precisely the opposite function: it remembers without having a vested interest in falsifying the testimony.
We should not, of course, imagine God as a celestial archivist leafing through registers because He has forgotten what a person once did. This is the anthropomorphic language of revelation. The book signifies that before God nothing morally real becomes unreal merely because time has passed. In Scripture, remembrance and forgetting possess theological significance. God “remembers” not because something had previously slipped His mind, but because He remains faithful to truth and to His covenant.
There is also, in John’s scene, a subtle humiliation of every earthly hierarchy. Before the throne stand the “great and small.” Revelation emerged from a world that knew perfectly well who the “great” were. The emperor possessed titles, statues, coins bearing his likeness, and an apparatus of power capable of deciding the lives of others. With a single phrase, John places the emperor beside the nameless slave. Eschatology can be shamelessly egalitarian in this respect. Death observes no diplomatic protocol, and no box of honour has been reserved before the great white throne.
More uncomfortable still is the criterion of judgment: “according to their works.” For a Protestant reader, the phrase demands careful attention, since taken in isolation it might resemble an accounting of merits. Yet the New Testament is equally emphatic in rejecting the notion that salvation can be purchased through morality. “For by grace you have been saved through faith […] not as a result of works,” Paul writes (Eph. 2:8–9). He then immediately adds that we were created in Christ Jesus “for good works” (Eph. 2:10).
There is no contradiction here once the ground of salvation is distinguished from the evidence of a life transformed by it. Works are not the currency with which a human being pays for eternity. They are the visible consequence of whom a person truly trusted and what that person served. A tree does not become alive because fruit has been attached to its branches; a living tree bears fruit because it is alive. James can therefore declare, without violating Paul’s doctrine of grace, that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).
Revelation further complicates any simplistic moral bookkeeping because alongside the books there appears the Book of Life. If John’s intention had been to portray salvation as a reward for accumulating a sufficient number of good deeds, this second book would be largely superfluous. Yet it stands at the very heart of the scene. Elsewhere in Revelation it is associated with the Lamb (Rev. 13:8; 21:27). Judgment according to works and the Book of Life therefore stand side by side: human accountability does not abolish grace, and grace does not turn accountability into a fiction.
This distinction protects Christianity from two equally convenient distortions. The first says: if I am sufficiently respectable, God will owe me something. The second says: if salvation is by grace, the manner in which I live cannot matter very much. The New Testament rejects both. The Pharisee cannot present God with an invoice for his virtue, but neither does an appeal to grace provide theological immunity for evil.
This is why the detail painted by Alberegno is more penetrating than its medieval form might initially suggest. The dead do not stand before a mirror but before a throne. A mirror still permits us to concern ourselves with our own image. A throne implies the existence of a standard beyond ourselves.
Modernity is particularly uncomfortable with this possibility. It readily accepts spirituality as experience, symbol, therapy, tradition, or an element of identity. A God who possesses the authority to judge tends to inspire considerably less enthusiasm. Such a God violates a distinctly modern dogma: the conviction that the individual possesses the ultimate right not only to choose how to live but also to assign the moral meaning of those choices. The Judge of Revelation is remarkably tactless toward this dogma — He does not consult the defendant before delivering the verdict.
And yet the Christian vision of Judgment was not given merely to manufacture religious terror. It is also a promise of justice. If there truly were “nothing after death,” as contemporary materialism is fond of repeating, the consequences would be far more serious than the absence of heaven. It would also mean that there are wrongs that will never be judged, victims whose truth will never receive final vindication, and crimes that achieve perfect impunity the moment their perpetrators die. The grave would then be more than the end of a human being. It would also be the safest vault ever devised for injustice.
Revelation refuses evil that luxury.
The sea gives up the dead. Death gives up the dead. Hades gives up the dead. The books are opened.
This is precisely why Jacobello Alberegno’s small panels can be more disturbing than entire later galleries of infernal torment. They require no macabre spectacle. The biblical idea is sufficient: that there exists a Memory death cannot erase, a Justice that cannot be outwaited, and a Grace no human being can claim as a personal achievement.
At the end of history there remain the throne, the open books, and the Book of Life.
To some, this sounds like a threat.
To those who have suffered injustice, it may sound like a promise.
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