The Penguin Book of Hell

by Scott G. Bruce

  So, utterly bewildered, I stood still.

  I think he thought that perhaps I might think

  That these voices issued from those tree trunks,

  From people who concealed themselves from us;

  Therefore, the Master said, “If you break off

  Some little sprig from any of these trees,

  You will realize the error of your thoughts.”

  So I stretched forth my hand a little,

  And plucked a sprig from a great thorn bush;

  And the trunk cried, “Why do you injure me?”

  After it grew dark with the flow of blood,

  It cried out again, “Why do you mangle me?

  Have you no spirit of pity at all?

  We were once men, now transformed into trees;

  Indeed, your hand should be more pitiful,

  Even if we had been the souls of serpents.”

  Just like a green branch that is on fire

  Burns at one end, and from the other end drips

  and hisses with the wind that is escaping;

  So from that splinter issued forth together

  Both words and blood; at this point, I let the stick

  Fall, and stood immobile, like a man struck with terror.

  “If he had been able to believe,”

  My wise teacher answered, “O you wounded soul,

  What he had previously seen only in my verses,

  He would not have stretched forth his hand upon you;

  But your fate is so unbelievable that

  I made him do something that I regret.

  But tell him who you were, so that as a way

  To make amends, he can refresh your fame

  Up in the world, to which he can return.”

  And the tree trunk said: “Your sweet words are so alluring that

  I cannot remain silent; and do not be displeased

  That I am tempted to talk for a while.

  I am the one who had in hand both keys

  Of Federigo’s heart, and turned them to and fro

  So softly in unlocking and in locking,

  That I kept most men from his secrets;

  I kept faith, that glorious office,

  So well, that I lost my sleep and my pulse.3

  The harlot, who never turns aside

  Her painted eyes from Caesar’s dwellings,

  —She is the doom of all and the vice of court life—

  Inflamed against me all the other minds

  And they, inflamed, did so inflame Augustus

  So that my glad honors turned to dismal mournings.4

  My spirit, disdainful in its taste,

  Thinking by dying to escape disdain,

  Made me unjust against myself, the just.

  By the strange roots of this tree

  Do I swear to you that I never broke faith

  With my lord, who was so worthy of honor;

  And to the world, if one of you returns,

  Let him comfort my memory, which is lying

  Prone from the blow that envy dealt to it.”

  The poet paused and then said to me, “Since he is silent,

  Do not waste the opportunity, but speak

  And question him, if you wish to learn more.”

  And I to him, “Can you inquire once again

  About what you think I wish to hear,

  For I cannot. Such pity is in my heart!”

  Therefore, Virgil spoke again, “So that the man may

  Do for you freely what your word implores,

  Imprisoned spirit, once again please

  Tell us in what way the soul is bound

  Within these knots of wood; and tell us, if you can,

  If anyone is ever freed from this state.”

  Then the tree trunk exhaled with force,

  And the wind became these words,

  “In haste shall I reply to you.

  When the maddened soul abandons

  The body from which it tore itself away,

  Minos consigns it to the seventh abyss.

  It falls into the forest, and no place

  Is chosen for it; but where Fortune hurls it,

  There like a grain of spelt it germinates.

  It sprouts a sapling that becomes a forest tree;

  The harpies, feeding upon its leaves,

  Cause it pain, and a window for that pain.

  Like others, we shall return for our spoils on Judgment Day;

  But none of us may clothe ourselves in our bodies again,

  For it is not right to have what one has cast off.

  We will drag them back here, and along the dismal

  Forest our bodies shall be hung,

  Each on the thorn of the shade that harmed it.”

  We were still listening to the tree trunk,

  Thinking that it might want to tell us more,

  When we were surprised by a sudden crash,

  In the same way that someone hears

  The boar and chase approaching toward his stand,

  Who hears the crashing of beasts and branches;

  And look there upon our left-hand side, those two

  Naked and scratched, fleeing so furiously,

  That they broke every branch in their way.

  The one in the lead called out, “Now help, Death, help!”

  And the other, who lagged further behind,

  Was shouting, “Lano, those legs of yours

  Were not so quick at joustings of the Toppo!”5

  And then, perhaps because he was out of breath,

  He took shelter behind a bush.

  Behind them, the forest was full of black dogs,

  Ravenous and as swift of foot

  As greyhounds, who are released from their chains

  They set their teeth on the one crouched down

  And tore him piece by piece,

  And thereafter carried off his suffering limbs.

  Thereafter, my guide took me by the hand

  And led me to that bush, that to no avail

  Was weeping from its bloody lacerations.

  “O Jacopo da Santo Andrea!” it said,

  “What use was it for you to make me your shield?

  Am I to blame for your nefarious life?”

  When my master came and stood near the bush,

  and asked, “Who were you, who through your many wounds

  Spits out your sad words with blood?”

  And he said to us, “O souls, who have come here

  To look upon the shameful massacre

  That has torn my leaves away from me,

  Gather them up beneath the dismal bush;

  I was from that city which changed its first patron

  From Mars to the Baptist. Therefore, for this offence

  He will forever bring it sadness with the art of war.

  And were there not near the bridge over the Arno

  Some glimpses of him still remaining,

  Those citizens, who afterward rebuilt it

  Upon the ashes left by Attila

  Would then have labored all in vain.

  As for me, I hung myself in my own house.”6

  TRAPPED UNDER ICE1

  “The battle standards of the king of Hell advance

  Toward us; therefore, look ahead there,”

  My master said, “and see if you can see it.”

  As when a heavy fog settles, or when

  Our hemisphere darkens into night,

  And there appears in the distance a windmill

  I thought that I could make out a building like that

  And because of the wind, I
took shelter behind

  My guide, because there was nowhere else to hide.

  I was by now (I write this verse in fear)

  Where all the shades were completely trapped in ice,

  Their shapes glimmered through like straws in a glass.

  Some were lying prone; others stood erect,

  This one with his head raised, and that one with her legs aloft;

  Another bent like a bow, touching face to feet.

  When we had proceeded forward a little ways

  It pleased my master to show to me

  The creature who had once appeared so fair.

  Standing before me, he made me stop,

  Saying, “Behold Dis, and behold the place

  Where you must arm yourself with fortitude.”

  How frozen I became at that moment and powerless,

  —Reader, do not ask, for I cannot write it,

  Because all language would be insufficient—

  I did not die, and yet I did not remain alive;

  Just think for a moment, if you have any sense,

  What I became, deprived of life and death.

  The emperor of this kingdom of gloom

  Came up out of the ice at the mid-point of his chest;

  And I compare better with a giant

  Than do the giants with those arms of his;

  Consider now how large his whole body must be

  In proportion to those colossal arms.

  If he was once as fair, as he is now foul,

  And lifted up his brow against his Maker

  Then all tribulation must indeed proceed from him.

  O, what a marvel it appeared to me,

  When I saw three faces on his head!

  The one in front was a brilliant red;

  There were two others that joined with this one

  Above the middle part of either shoulder,

  And they merged together at the crest of his hair;

  The one on the right blended yellow and white;

  The left had the same dark color as those people

  Who come from where the Nile finds its source.

  Underneath each face sprouted two mighty wings,

  All six proportioned for a bird of great size;

  I never saw sails of the sea so large.

  They had no feathers, but they looked like the wings

  Of a bat; and he was flapping them

  So that three winds proceeded forth from him.

  Cocytus was frozen over by them.

  With six eyes he wept, and down his three chins

  Trickled his tear drops and his drool mingled with blood.

  In each of his mouths, his teeth were chewing

  A sinner, like flax pulled through a heckling comb.

  He tormented three of them in this way.

  To the soul in front, the biting was nothing compared

  To the clawing it received, which sometimes stripped

  The spine completely of all the skin that remained.

  “That soul up there in the greatest pain,”

  The master said, “is Judas Iscariot;

  With his head inside, he jerks his dangling legs in the air.2

  Of the other two, whose heads face downward,

  The one who hangs from the black mouth is Brutus;

  See how he writhes there, and speaks no word.

  And the other, who seems so stalwart, is Cassius.

  But the night ascends again, and it is time

  For us to depart, for we have seen enough.”3

  As he desired, I clasped him around the neck,

  And he weighed the best time and place to make our move,

  And when the wings were opened far apart,

  He grabbed hold of the Devil’s shaggy sides;

  From tuft to tuft we descended downward then

  Between the thick hair and the frozen crust.

  When we reached the point where his thigh-bone turns

  Where his haunch was thickest,

  My guide, with effort and panting breath,

  Turned his head around to where his legs had been,

  And clutched the hair, like one about to climb,

  So that I was under the impression that we were returning to Hell.

  “Hold on tight, for by stairs like these,”

  My master said, panting with fatigue,

  “We need to take our leave from so much evil.”

  Then through a fissure in the rock he came forth,

  And down upon its lip, he seated me;

  Then he took a wary step toward me.

  I lifted up my eyes and thought to see

  Lucifer in the same way we had left him

  But I saw instead his legs, held upward there.

  And if I then became confused,

  Let slow-witted people think how they failed to see

  What point it was beyond which I had passed.

  “Get up on your feet,” my master said;

  “The way is long, and the road difficult,

  And now the sun returns to the morning.”

  It was not a palace corridor

  There where we stood, but a natural cave,

  With an uneven floor and scarcely any light . . .

  My guide and I now entered that hidden road,

  To return once more to the shining world;

  And without care that we had no rest

  We mounted up, he going first and I behind,

  Until through a round aperture I saw

  The beautiful things that the skies above us bear;

  Now we came forth to look upon the stars.

  A HEARTBREAKING CONSORT OF WOES: EARLY MODERN AFTERLIVES (c. 1500–1700)

  In 1517, Martin Luther’s public protest against the sale of indulgences by the Catholic Church heralded the full-blown critique and rejection of centuries-old Christian traditions known as the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s actions had a profound impact on early modern thinking about the afterlife. By the early sixteenth century, Christian doctrine taught that there were at least five destinations for the souls of the dead: Heaven; Hell; Purgatory; the Limbo of Infants, for unbaptized children who died before they could commit personal sins but were nonetheless stained by original sin and thus ineligible to enter Heaven; and the Limbo of the Patriarchs, for those righteous Jewish patriarchs who could not enter Heaven until the resurrection of Jesus Christ (after the Harrowing of Hell, it stood empty; see pp. 47–56). The Protestants reduced the afterlife from five places to two: Heaven and Hell. They denied the existence of Purgatory and the Limbos because there was no direct proof in the Christian scriptures for their existence.

  Despite these fundamental differences in their beliefs about the afterlife, Protestant thinkers found common ground with their Catholic opponents on the topic of Hell. Both camps agreed that Hell and its torments were real. Both groups concurred about the function of Hell as a punishment for sinners and allowed that divine justice matched the severity of this punishment with the sin in question. Protestant theologians in mainland Europe and their Anglican counterparts in England were far less likely, however, to follow Catholics in their certainty that Hell was an actual, physical place underground. In 1714, the Anglican Tobias Swinden went so far as to publish a book called An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell, in which he argued that the sun was the prison of evil souls, because it had the mass to hold the unnumbered damned and the great heat necessary to punish them. While Catholic thinkers ruminated on the cruel varieties of corporeal tortures awaiting the wicked, Protestant theologians tended to emphasize the sinner’s banishment from God and wounded conscience as the worst aspects of Hell.

  THE SHARP PANGS OF A WOUNDED CONSCIENCE1

 
; Preaching before King William and Queen Anne in the early 1700s, the Anglican William Dawes (1671–1724), bishop of Chester and later archbishop of York, argued that Hell was an essential deterrent to bad behavior that allowed human society to function. Moreover, it had always been so. Every ancient society from the Israelites to the Muslims believed in infernal punishment of one kind or another. “We shall be hard put to it,” he wrote, “to give any one instance of a Man who has been so far able to shake off his Notions and Fears of Hell, that they should never after . . . haunt and perplex him.” Typical of Anglican theologians, Dawes’s sermon on “Hell-torments” emphasized the absence of God and the “lashes of their own guilty minds” as the principal suffering awaiting sinners in Hell. The undying worm of Christian scriptures is no longer a creature that gnaws painfully on the soul but a metaphor for the sinner’s eternal remorse. While Dawes did not neglect medieval traditions about Hell—the diabolical company awaiting the sinner, the pain of the fires, and the eternal duration of the torments that vexed the souls of the wicked—he demoted them to emphasize the interior Hell of the wounded conscience.

  Now our Reason and Scripture make the greatness of Hell-torments to consist in these particulars.

  First, In the Wicked’s being banished from the enjoyment of God, and all that fullness of Joy, and those Rivers of Pleasure, which are in his presence and at his right hand, for evermore, and in all the miseries naturally consequent upon such their banishment.

  Secondly, In the lashes of their own guilty Minds, and of all those vexatious Lusts and Passions, which they shall carry with them into another World, and which will be mightily heighten’d and inflam’d there.

  Thirdly, In the loathsomeness and uncomfortableness of the place of Hell, and the troublesome Conversion of the Devil and wicked Spirits, which they shall be there confin’d to.

  Fourthly, In the pains occasion’d by the Fire of Hell, or whatever is meant under that name.

  And Lastly, In the uninterrupted continuance, and eternal duration, of every one of these.

  First, in the Wicked’s being banish’d from the enjoyment of God, and all that fullness of Joy, and those rivers of pleasure, which are in his presence, and at his right hand for evermore: and in all the miseries naturally consequent upon such their banishment. For so runs the former part of that dreadful Sentence, which shall be pronounc’d against the wicked at the Day of Judgment, Depart from me, ye cursed. Not that the wicked shall depart from God, as never to see or remember Him anymore, and to lose all knowledge of Him and Heaven for ever. No, this, as sad a punishment as it is, would be but a very light one in comparison of that, which they shall then be doom’d to. They shall see God, or, which is the same thing, have a most quick and lively notion of Him, but without hopes of ever being reconciled to Him. They shall see Heaven, or at least have always a fresh remembrance of that glorious sight, which they had of it at the general Judgment, but still, as the Rich Man in the Gospel did Paradise, with an impassible gulf betwixt it and them.2