Heaven & Hell

Egypt

‘Harrowing of Hell’ Chora Church, Istanbul, ~ th c. manuscript

Hospices de Beaune, mid 15 th c.

the dead rise from their graves. Their souls are weighed by the archangel Michael. Above the earth hangs heaven, with a golden background. Centre Panel - Christ and the archangel Michael, who holds a scale. Next to them are Mary (on the left) and John the Baptist (right). On the second row are the twelve apostles. Behind them are a pope, a king, a monk, and to the right three women. The outer panels show the final destinations: paradise and hell. The angels in the upper side panels hold symbols from Christ's Passion: the cross, the crown of thorns, the stick with the spunge with vinegar, the lance that was used to prick into his side, and the pillar against which he was flagellated.

Dante (d. 1321) Dante conceives of hell as a funnel-shaped indentation beneath the earth's surface which grows increasingly narrow until at the very center of the earth it converges upon the form of Satan. At the moment of his fall (as we learn in the final couple of pages of Inferno), Satan plunged headlong from heaven, crashed into the earth, penetrated it to its center, and remains lodged there at the point furthest removed from the outer edges of the concentrically circular universe (and so, at least from that point of view, furthest removed from God). In his descent to the center, Dante passes through the Gate of Hell, crosses the River Acheron, bypasses three additional areas in the circles of incontinence and comes to city walls inside of which the most serious sins, heresy, violence, and fraud, are punished. Surrounding the city walls as a moat is the Marsh of Styx, the fourth circle of Incontinence. Immediately inside the walls heretics are punished, and then, in perhaps the most elaborate of all the circles, six categories of souls are punished for violence against neighbor, self, and God, in a single circle with three very different terrains. An impossibly deep and steep abyss separates violence from fraud - a series of ten concentric ditches carved out of the inner wall of the funnel, crossed by a series of spoke-like roadways that bridge the ditches and by which the poets can make their way to the center. In each ditch a different category of fraud is punished in a different, uniquely appropriate, way. Finally the lowest area of all in hell is located at the bottom of a deep circular well. Here, at the center of evil, all the infernal waters, and all the tears and blood of suffering humanity gather and freeze in the total absence of love. Here those souls are trapped in the ice who have been treacherous, that is, fraudulent to those who especially deserved loyalty. At the center of this frozen lake, his torso coming up above the surface, Satan himself, with his three faces, perpetually gnaws on Brutus and Cassius and Judas Iscariot.

Hieronymus Bosch (late 15th c.)

Michelangelo, Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel ~ 1540

Hell Today? Time Magazine - Cover story on Hell, , ,00.html 307, ,00.html Pope John Paul II – heaven, hell or purgatory is that they are states of being of a spirit (angel/demon) or human soul, rather than places – "Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner known and familiar to us, in which way we say that bodies are properly in place; but they are in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances, a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us." [St. Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q69, a1, reply 1]