Hell and Damnation

A Sinner's Guide to Eternal Torment

Marq de Villiers

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780889775848
• eBook ISBN: 9780889775862
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Hell and Damnation, bestselling author Marq de Villiers takes readers on a journey into the strange richness of the human imaginings of hell, deep into time and across many faiths, back into early Egypt and the 5, 000-year-old Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. This urbane, funny, and deeply researched guide ventures well beyond the Nine Circles of Dante's Hell and the many medieval Christian visions into the hellish descriptions in Islam, Buddhism, Jewish legend, Japanese traditions, and more.

Epilogue

Belief in gods and devils has been a force for stability and order over the millennia, no? For good, even?

It is often so argued, anyway.

Yet consider what happened after Christianity supplanted the chaotic but essentially pliant polytheisms of the Greeks and Romans. After Theodosius declared Christianity the sole authorized religion of imperial Rome (in 380), the formerly put-upon Christians went on a revenge rampage: not just widespread vandalism of “pagan” temples and artifacts, in the Taliban manner, but countless lynchings and atrocities too. For example, as Catherine Nixey recounts, “in Alexandria in 415 CE, the philosopher and teacher Hypatia was mobbed, stoned, flayed, ripped to pieces and burned by a gang of Christians, who accused her of witchcraft.” Thereafter classical learning, literature, and philosophy were all suspect. “Being pious in the new faith meant not only participating in public religious practice but also a moulding of hearts, minds, art, architecture and reading matter to fit the new ‘reality.’ ” 1

Was this political or religious? Or both?

Whichever it was, for more than a thousand long years after that (except for a few luminous intermissions, like the fleeting Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth century) church-driven obscurantism and intolerance reigned, witches and heretics were burned, the peasantry sank into a glum torpor (to emerge in furious violence every few half-centuries), literacy—such as it was—retreated to the monasteries and cloisters that offered feeble shelter in the intellectual gloom (the monks themselves ever fearful of the demon-ridden world without), knights and their masters warred and killed and pillaged, kingdoms came and went. No, the church didn’t cause the Dark Ages; that was due more to the disintegration of empire, the dissolution of civic authority—and plague. And in any case, the other church, that of Islam, kept the bright flame of intellectual activity alive. But . . . the Christian church surely didn’t help. For all those dismal centuries church fathers took seriously Saint Augustine’s notorious admonition to abjure intellectual effort as inherently sinful. “There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger,” the good saint told his followers. “This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man should not wish to learn.”

“Remind yourselves,” Yuval Harari admonishes, “that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Qur’an. For millennia, much of what passed for ‘news’ and ‘facts’ in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld.”2

It wasn’t just that a life without God and the devil was too frightening to contemplate; through much of this period, it was almost impossible to imagine a system of divine justice that didn’t involve punishment, because hellfire had become a central tenet of Christian doctrine. The communitarian (not to say communist) ethos of Christianity’s founders, with its injunctions to charity and humility, gave way to official rage. Shape up (listen to your betters) or ship out (be consigned to hell) had become the whole point.

It’s not hard to find stern warnings in church councils, ancient and less ancient:

• “If we do the will of Christ, we shall obtain rest; but if not, if we neglect his commandments, nothing will rescue us from eternal punishment.” (Second Clement 5:5, 150 CE)
• “No more is it possible for the evildoer, the avaricious, and the treacherous to hide from God than it is for the virtuous. Every man will receive the eternal punishment or reward which his actions deserve. Indeed, if all men recognized this, no one would choose evil even for a short time, knowing that he would incur the eternal sentence of fire. On the contrary, he would take every means to control himself and to adorn himself in virtue, so that he might obtain the good gifts of God and escape the punishments.” (Justin Martyr, First Apology 12, 151 CE)
• “For the unbelievers and for the contemptuous and for those who do not submit to the truth but assent to iniquity, when they have been involved in adulteries, and fornications, and homosexualities, and avarice, and in lawless idolatries, there will be wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish; and in the end, such men as these will be detained in everlasting fire” (Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 1:14, ca. 160 CE)
• “To the lovers of evil shall be given eternal punishment. The unquenchable and unending fire awaits these latter, and a certain fiery worm which does not die and which does not waste the body but continually bursts forth from the body with unceasing pain. No sleep will give them rest; no night will soothe them; no death will deliver them from punishment; no appeal of interceding friends will profit them.” (Hippolytus, Against the Greeks 3, 212 CE)
• “But if anyone dies unrepentant in the state of mortal sin, he will undoubtedly be tormented forever in the fires of an everlasting hell.” (A letter to the Bishop of Tusculum, 1254, from Pope Innocent IV [1243–54])3

But still . . . Even in the medieval despond, resisters could be found

As Philip Almond put it in his profile of the devil, by “1550 it was as impossible not to believe in the devil as it was impossible not to believe in God.” Or, as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his novel The White Company, “Man walked in fear and solemnity, with Heaven very close above his head, and Hell below his very feet. God’s visible hand was everywhere, in the rainbow and the comet, in the thunder and the wind. The Devil, too, raged openly upon the earth; he skulked behind the hedgerows in the gloaming; he laughed loudly in the night-time; he clawed the dying sinner, pounced on the unbaptized babe, and twisted the limbs of the epileptic.”

But could you reject both?

There were flickers of independent thinking among the embers of intellectual life, and here and there a skeptic was to be found, reprising the ancient Greeks and forerunners of the Enlightenment itself. Some think, indeed, that skepticism was widespread. John Arnold, professor of medieval history at Cambridge, has argued that even in medieval Christendom the notion of a single, unified faith was a mirage, and that there was always a spectrum of belief and unbelief. He maintains, therefore, that the dark vision conventionally ascribed to the Dark Ages is just not accurate.4

Take defiant Thomas Tailour of Newbury, England (to whom this book is deferentially dedicated), who was punished in 1491 for calling pilgrims fools, denying the power of prayer, and doubting the survival of the soul after death. At his trial for heresy, Tailour reaffirmed his ridicule of those who went as pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the reputed site of the tomb of the apostle James, because “seynt Jamys had no fote to come ayenst them no hand to welcome theym neither tonge to speak to theym,” but was just a piece of stone, no more. When a man or woman dies in the body they also die in their soul, he declared, for as the light of a candle is put out by casting it away or in other ways quenched by blowing or shaking it, “so is the soul quenched by death.” For this heresy he was sentenced to public penance, and was lucky to escape the death sentence, though he remained under threat of execution by burning should he repeat his offence.

Also in 1491, Isabel Dorte of Berkshire admitted that she had spoken openly ayenst worshipping no ymages of seynts and pilgrams doying, shewing that no man shuld wourship no stykes nor stonys ne nothing made or graven with mannysd hand. She was arraigned for heresy, and sentenced to go on a pilgrimage herself. Around the same time, William Carpenter was prosecuted for casting aspersions on the clergy, asserting that it were better to geve a porem...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• who invented hell, and for god’s sake why?
• Hell-free zones
• Where the hell is it?
• Hell’s executive suite
• Hell’s unruly boardroom fracas
• Can there really be romance in the heart of hell?
• Once you’re in, what’s it like? A survey of A-list hells
• Eternal torment: who does what to whom, and why
• The peculiar physics of hell: How long is forever?
• The Watchers and the origin of hell
• Hell’s earliest tourists
• Some Buddhists go to hell for the damnedest reasons
• Hellish travellers in classical antiquity
• Inquisitive Christians go to hell
• The great poets as tour guides
• A brief detour to heaven
• Epilogue
• Bibliography