PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HELL
SCOTT G. BRUCE is a professor of history at Fordham University. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Undead and the author of three books about the abbey of Cluny: Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900–1200 (2007); Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet: Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe (2015); and, with Christopher A. Jones, The Relatio metrica de duobus ducibus: A Twelfth-Century Cluniac Poem on Prayer for the Dead (2016). A coeditor of The Medieval Review and an active member of the Medieval Academy of America, he has lectured in Israel and throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe and has held visiting research appointments at Technische Universität Dresden, in Germany; the Universiteit Gent, in Belgium; and Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He worked his way through college as a grave digger.
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Translation, introduction, notes, and selection copyright © 2018 by Scott G. Bruce
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Translations and renderings into modern English by Scott G. Bruce, unless otherwise indicated.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following copyrighted works:
“Tartarus, Prison of the Titans” from Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod, translated by Dorothea Wender (Penguin Classics, 1973). (In a volume with Elegies by Theognis). Copyright © Dorothy Wender, 1973. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
“Odysseus at Death’s Door” from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagels. Translation copyright © 1996 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
“Socrates Ponders the Punishment of Souls” from The Last Days of Socrates: Euhyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo by Plato, translated by Christopher Rowe (Penguin Books, 2010). Translation copyright © Christopher Rowe, 2010. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
“Into the Realm of Shadows” from The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagels. Translation copyright © 2006 by Robert Fagles. Used by permission of Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
“Dryhthelm Returns from the Dead” from Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede, translated by Scott G. Bruce. First published in The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters by Scott G. Bruce. Translation copyright © 2016 by Scott G. Bruce. Used by permission of Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
“Warnings from Beyond the Grave” from Dialogue on Miracles by Caesarius, translated by Scott G. Bruce. First published in The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters by Scott G. Bruce. Translation copyright © 2016 by Scott G. Bruce. Used by permission of Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
“The Hell of Treblinka” from The Road: Short Fiction and Essays by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova. Copyright © by E. V. Korotkova-Grossman and F. B. Guber; translation © 2010 Robert Chandler. Used by permission of the Vasily Grossman estate c/o Robin Straus Agency, Inc., New York, acting in conjunction with Andrew Nurnberg Associates, Ltd., London. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Robin Straus Agency, Inc. for permission. Reproduced by permission of Quercus Editions Limited.
“Fire in the Sky” from “Testimony of Yoshitaka Kawamoto,” Voices of Hibashuka, Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK. http://inicom.com/hibakusha/yoshitaka.html. (Used under a Creative Commons license).
“A Sentence Worse Than Death” by William Blake, originally published on Solitary Watch (www.solitarywatch.com) and in Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, edited by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd (New York and London: The New Press, 2016). Copyright © 2013 by William Blake. Used with permission of Solitary Watch.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Bruce, Scott G. (Scott Gordon), 1967– editor.
Title: The Penguin book of hell / edited by Scott G Bruce.
Description: New York: Penguin Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021796 (print) | LCCN 2018022760 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705275 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131625 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Future life. | Hell.
Classification: LCC BL545 (ebook) | LCC BL545 .P46 2018 (print) | DDC 202/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021796
Cover art: Tormented Souls in Purgatory. Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves. Netherlands (Utrecht), c. 1435. The Morgan Library & Museum / Art Resource NY.
Version_1
For Giles Constable,
lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore
who led me through dark places
“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,” he began, “especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?”
“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.
“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”
“A pit full of fire.”
“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning for ever?”
“No, sir.”
“What must you do to avoid it?”
I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.”
—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, JANE EYRE
I descend from grace
in arms of undertow.
I will take my place
in the great below.
—TRENT REZNOR, “THE GREAT BELOW”
Contents
About the Editor
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction by SCOTT G. BRUCE
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgments
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HELL
Realms Forbidden to the Living:
Ancient Greece and Rome
Tartarus, Prison of the Titans: From Hesiod’s Theogony
Netherworld Megafauna: From Seneca’s The Madness of Heracles
Odysseus at Death’s Door: From Homer’s Odyssey
Socrates Ponders the Punishment of Souls: From Plato’s Phaedo
Into the Realm of Shadows: From Virgil’s Aeneid
Early Christian Hellscapes (c. 100–500 CE)
The Fire and the Worm: From the Apocalypse of Paul
The Rich Man and Lazarus: From the Gospel of Luke
Death’s Defeat: The Harrowing of Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemus
On the Lip of the Abyss:
The Early Middle Ages (c. 500–1000 CE)
Beyond the Black River: From the Dialog
ues of Gregory the Great
Behold, the Fire Draws Near Me: From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Dryhthelm Returns from the Dead: From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
The Island of the Fire Giants: From The Voyage of Saint Brendan
Into the Deepest Dark:
The Vision of Tundale (c. 1150)
Welcome to Hell
The Punishment Fits the Crime
The Great Below
Teaching the Torments:
The High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300)
Lessons in Horror: From the Elucidarius of Honorius of Autun
Preaching Pain: From a Medieval Priest’s Manual
Three Tales of Torment: From Caesarius’s Dialogue on Miracles
Warnings from Beyond the Grave: From Caesarius’s Dialogue on Miracles
The Abominable Fancy: From Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica
Abandon All Hope: Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320)
Through the Gates of Hell
The Filthy Fen
The Boiling Blood
The Forest of the Suicides
Trapped Under Ice
A Heartbreaking Consort of Woes:
Early Modern Afterlives (c. 1500–1700)
The Sharp Pangs of a Wounded Conscience: From a Sermon by William Dawes
Into That Eternal Furnace: From Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti’s Hell Opened to Christians to Caution Them from Entering into It
A Living Death Shall Feed upon Them: From John Bunyan’s The Resurrection of the Dead and Eternall Judgement
The Dread of Hell Peoples Heaven:
The Nineteenth Century
Hell for Children: From John Furniss’s The Sight of Hell
A Place at Odds with Mercy: From Austin Holyoake’s Heaven & Hell: Where Situated?
Hell of Our Own Making:
The Twentieth Century and Beyond
The Death Factories: From Vasily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka”
Fire in the Sky: From the “Testimony of Yoshitaka Kawamoto”
The Sum of Suffering: From William Blake’s “A Sentence Worse Than Death”
Guantánamo Mixtape: Music from American Detention Camps
Notes
Index
Introduction
Hell, the punitive afterlife of the Christian religion, is arguably the most powerful and persuasive construct of the human imagination in the Western tradition. A subterranean realm of eternal suffering, a prison for sinful souls governed by a fallen angel who surpassed all other creatures in wickedness, Hell has inspired fear and thereby controlled the behavior of countless human beings for more than two thousand years. Despite advances in scholarship that have called into question the authority of the Christian scriptures and scientific developments that have changed the way we think about the human race and our place in the cosmos, the idea of Hell has remained tenacious in Western thought. In modern discourse, “hell” serves as an all-pervasive metaphor for any kind of difficulty (“hard as hell”) or extreme (“hot as hell”), but the word has lost none of its religious currency in our so-called age of reason. A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of American adults still believe in the existence of a place “where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.”
The tenacity of the belief in Hell in the modern world invites inquiry into its long history. Depictions of a punitive afterlife are as old as writing itself. Ancient Mesopotamians imagined a grim otherworld in “the house of dust,” while ancient Egyptians trembled at the thought of the judgment of the death god Anubis, but these traditions did not exert as much influence on Western culture as the realms of shadow and gloom awaiting the dead as portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures (Sheol) and in Greek and Roman literature (Hades). The account of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld and the descriptions of its landscape and megafauna in The Aeneid of the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) were especially formative; the poem would exert an enormous influence on medieval intellectuals and poets, especially Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE). The earliest Christians thus inherited a rich tradition of thoughts and images about the afterlife from their Jewish and pagan contemporaries, but they were not slavish imitators of other religions in their thinking about the underworld. In the centuries between the time of Christ and the triumph of the Church in the lifetime of Saint Augustine (354–430 CE), Christian thinkers began to delineate the contours and function of a distinctly Christian Hell, informed by ancient models yet particular to their own understanding of original sin and God’s inscrutable mercy.
During the first millennium CE, early medieval authors invented a punitive underworld with distinctive features and dire inhabitants and articulated its details in popular stories unauthorized by the Church, including the apostle Paul’s guided tour of Hell in the company of an angel and the tradition that Christ descended to the underworld during his three days in the tomb in order to rescue the virtuous Jewish patriarchs from the prison of Hades, the so-called Harrowing of Hell. They also composed vivid and fanciful visionary tours of Hell, its inhabitants, and its torments written with didactic intent to help monastic readers avoid the sins that would bar them from Heaven. The articulation of these beliefs as official Church doctrine took almost a millennium to work out, but by the High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300 CE) theologians like Thomas Aquinas were explaining with detached reason the kinds of punishments that evil persons could expect in Hell and the relationship between the blessed and the damned. At the end of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri wedded medieval popular beliefs about the punitive afterlife and the reasoned deductions of scholastic thinkers about the workings of divine punishment in his towering poem The Divine Comedy. His poetic portrayal of Hell (Inferno) represented the apogee of the punitive underworld in the medieval imagination.
Early modern thinkers challenged medieval understandings of Hell during the Protestant Reformation. In the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers agreed with their Catholic rivals that Hell was the destination of the wicked, but they were much more likely to couch the punitive afterlife in abstract terms of remorse and wounded conscience rather than in concrete terms of torment in Hell-fire familiar from the Catholic tradition. New scientific knowledge and social change in the nineteenth century brought the concept of Hell to the center of debate once again, as Victorian Christians cast doubt on the merciless perpetuity of infernal punishment, while defending their belief in the afterlife in the face of evolutionary theories forwarded by Darwin and other scientists. During this period, secular criticism of the very concept of Hell abounded. Surely, the idea of a punitive afterlife had no place in a world governed by science and reason?
Despite the erosion of traditional religious beliefs in the modern era, Hell has survived and prospered. While the belief in Hell as an actual place has declined in recent centuries, the idea of Hell has endured as a dominant metaphor and, frighteningly, as an inspiration for how to treat other people. From the world wars and the Holocaust to the plight of prisoners and detainees, the political calamities of the modern world have increased the currency of the concept of Hell as a metaphor for torment and suffering. Although many modern people have turned their backs on a literal understanding of Hell as a place of future punishment, they nonetheless draw inspiration from imaginative traditions about the punitive afterlife to cause suffering to others in this present life, to “give them hell.” The modern technologies and rational ways of thinking that supposedly mark our progress over earlier generations now allow us to commit mass murder and replicate infernal landscapes at the touch of a button; in an ironic reversal, we have become the very demons our ancestors trembled to meet when death foreclosed on their lives.
In this book, the reader will discover the many forms that the torments of Hell have taken in the Western imagination, with sinful souls
immersed in rivers of fire, gnawed away by giant worms, bound up in fiery chains, trembling in intense cold, and devoured whole by hellish monsters. The landscape of Hell is as diverse as its torments. In medieval visions, monks and knights traversed towering mountains, dark valleys, and fetid swamps filled with demons and mythological creatures. In modern accounts, Hell became a vast prison of red-hot iron and choking smoke with great gates built to withstand the seething tide of furious, tormented souls who crashed inexorably against them in their futile attempt to escape their suffering. The literature of Hell boasts famous villains, but most of the damned are ordinary people like you and me, each judged to be deserving of eternal punishment for their own private sins. Stories about Hell were almost always didactic and hortatory; they were written to teach the reader by evoking fear and thereby to persuade the sinner to seek absolution through confession or, better yet, to avoid sin altogether. This does not make them any easier to read. More frightening still, even as Hell has begun to lose its grip on the modern imagination as a place of eternal punishment, it has persisted as a dominant metaphor in Western society and has played a formative role in the ways that we treat one another. Despite all our recourse to reason and compassion, the power of Hell has not been undone.
SCOTT G. BRUCE
Suggestions for Further Reading
Almond, Philip C. Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Bernstein, Alan E. The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
——— . Hell and Its Rivals: Death and Retribution Among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.
Casey, John. After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Ferguson, Robert A. Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
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