New Christendom and the Concept of Hell

In the collection of essays that are a companion to Called by Name: Birth of a New Christendom, fictional character Maria Lisowski says: 

Again, I hear my atheist friends scoffing: “So what! Your so-called ‘bright light of the transcendent’ is nothing more than a manic exaggeration of what you call the ‘dim light of this world,’ fueled by the delusion that death isn’t the end. The people of this world whom you denounce show more respect and kindness toward one another and care more for animal welfare and the natural world than any religious civilization of the past. Maybe we don’t make things with the soaring beauty of gothic cathedrals, but neither do we dawdle in prayer while people starve, permit children to live in abject poverty, force a tiger to spend his life in a cage no bigger than his body, or beat a horse near to death as he struggles to pull a plow through rocky soil. I’ll take our ‘gray’ world any day over the so-called shining transcendence of religious civilizations that burned heretics or praised women who committed suttee or put to the sword conquered people who wouldn’t convert to the conquerors’ religion.” (1)

Lisowski’s atheist friend overlooks the fact that the moral progress s/he rightly praises resulted in large part from the actions of dedicated Christians striving to actualize Christian ideals. Historian Tom Holland’s best-seller, Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world, makes this point as he explains why Christian assumptions permeate today’s secular world. In the Preface, he shares a personal revelation that ultimately led him to write the book:

The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. . . So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. (2)

In the second half of the twenty-first century, according to Called by Name, advanced technology, especially robotics, enabled reformers to complete the effort to make Christian ideals an integral part of secular society: prosperity for all, compassion, peace, tolerance, respect, freedom, kindness, justice. Supported by technology, these values permitted the development of a new Christendom, which begins in rotating habitats in the Asteroid Belt.

New Christendom differs from secular society in three ways. First, God returns to the center of society. Second, New Christendom towns function as self-reliant, independent communes, which means that human resources related to making and managing money can be directed toward social and educational needs. Third, the principle of subsidiarity is fundamental to New Christendom. (3)

New Christendom also differs from the old Christendom in many ways. As Christianity affects today’s secular societies, the assumptions and values of the ancient world influenced Christianity and western civilization well into the modern era.

As the above quote from Dominion suggests, the ancient world had little value for the lives of inferiors and inflicted punishments that were brutal. The timeline of punishment discussed below demonstrates that these ancient values sometimes blatantly contradicted the ideals of Christianity. Two countries could go to war, with each believing that God was on their side. Slavery was accepted as part of the natural order. Obedience to one’s social superiors was mandated, and disobedience was severely punished. Millions lived in squalor while their rulers lived in splendor. Deviants were ostracized or pitilessly punished. The mentally ill were often treated as demon possessed. 

Though many individuals lived according to the true message of the Gospel, old Christendom as a whole was ruled by the Roman whip as well as the Christian cross.

Thus, in many ways today’s secular world, which emerged from cycles of Christian reform and the Enlightenment, is more “Christian” than the Christendom of the Middle Ages. Perhaps, then, some traditional Christian concepts might warrant a reappraisal. 

In the remainder of this essay, I briefly examine one such concept, hell, and how the socially accepted, brutal punishments of the ancient world may have influenced Christian beliefs about post-death judgment. I choose to focus on hell because the change in perspective between the old Christendom and today’s Christianity (and presumably a new Christendom, should it ever come to be) is so stark. 

We can begin with ancient Greek mythology, which all educated people before the modern era studied. The Greeks had many stories of eternal punishments meted out by the Gods. Ancient Origins describes several, including these two famous ones:

Prometheus stole fire from Olympus and gave it to mankind. He was chained to a rock. Every day an eagle would eat Prometheus’ liver. Every night the liver would grow back. This pattern repeated every day without end.

Sisyphus was a cruel, sadistic tyrant who made the mistake of betraying Zeus. Zeus punished Sisyphus by condemning him to push a boulder to the top of a mountain, then watch the boulder roll down. Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of useless effort and continuous frustration as he repeatedly and futilely tried to get the boulder to the top of the mountain. 

Probably no literary creation shaped Christendom’s vision of the afterlife more than Dante’s three-book  Divine Comedy. Though Purgatory and Paradise provide an uplifting view of the afterlife, Dante is mainly remembered for Inferno, which describes the punishments of souls in Hell. The imaginative torments that Dante invents for the sinners in Hell, including several popes, are governed by the concept of contrapasso, which is a form of poetic justice in which the punishment reflects the nature of the sin. Gustave Dore (4) illustrated some of the most compelling scenes from the Divine Comedy. His artwork is illuminating, especially for people like me who lack visual imagination. Here are a few from Inferno:

Early in the twentieth century, James Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man included a gripping “fire-and-brimstone” sermon that was worthy of Dante: (9)

Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. . . .

They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. . . .

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone too which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infest the whole world. . . 

And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast blowing and bursting, the bowels a redhot mass of pruning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls. . . . 

It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of divine vengeance. (10)

Rare would be the post-Vatican-II priest who would give such a sermon. (11) The modern Catholic Church does not talk about “divine vengeance”: “To die in Mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell.’” (12)

Nevertheless, less than 100 years ago, the mentality exemplified in Joyce’s sermon was not uncommon. As noted above, I believe that the mindset of vengeance and its cousin, brutality, had its roots in the ancient world. 

A quick examination of the history of punishment attests to the progress the modern world has made, despite its many defects. 

Punishment Timeline (13)

  337 Crucifixion is abolished in the Roman Empire (by Constantine, Rome’s first Christian Emperor)

1401 In England a law makes burning the punishment for heresy

1531 In England a law makes boiling alive the punishment for poisoners

1547 Boiling alive is abolished in England

1735 The last man in Britain to be pressed to death dies in Horsham

1792 The guillotine is introduced in France

1824 The scold's bridle is last used in Britain [The scold's bridle was used on women; it was designed to prevent them from talking, sometimes with a nail through the tongue.] (14)

1827 Breaking on the wheel is abolished in Germany

1829 Branding with hot irons is abolished in Britain

1868 The last public execution in Britain takes place.

1870 In Britain hanging, drawing and quartering is abolished (15)

1881 Flogging is abolished in the British army

1890 In USA William Kemmler became the first person to die in the electric chair

1924 In the USA the gas chamber is first used for an execution

1948 In Britain birching is abolished. (17)

1955 Ruth Ellis is the last woman hanged in Britain

1969 In Britain hanging is permanently abolished

1977 In the USA Gary Gilmore is shot by a firing squad. 

1977 The guillotine is used for the last time in France.

1981 Capital punishment is abolished in France

1982 Lethal injection is first used as a means of execution in the USA

1987 Corporal punishment is abolished in state schools in Britain

The often public punishments listed above reveal the capacity of human beings to inflict pain on others. But so do the slaughters associated with war through the centuries, as well as more recent atrocities such as the Holocaust and the mass famines engineered by Stalin and Mao. Given that religious doctrines have often “justified” pain, killing, and cruelty, it is not surprising that people viewed Hell as a place of torment and torture. 

We in the western, developed world are repelled by the massacres that fill history, the sadistic punishments that were once used to mete out “justice,” and the notion of a torture-filled Hell. But do we stand on this high moral ground merely because we live comfortable, safe lives? 

Maybe the mentality that gives rise to sadistic punishments and vengeful actions now appears in watered-down forms. Since we are discussing Hell, I’ll limit my speculations to the religious arena. I’ve heard people say, for example, “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” On its face, that statement doesn’t seem unreasonable. But the volume of hate levelled at the sin often drowns out the love ostensibly directed at the sinner. I sometimes wonder if some people view Heaven as a place where they can scream to those they expect (or want) to be damned: “Rot in Hell, sinner!” 

Fortunately, there are other views on Hell, views that emphasize free choice rather than punishment and divine (or human) vengeance. According to C. S. Lewis, for example, God, who is love, does not angrily  “sentence” people to Hell. Their stubborn refusal to accept and reflect God’s love puts them there. Lewis famously said, ““I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” (18)

Lewis insightfully and entertainingly elaborates on this idea in The Great Divorce, an allegorical tale about a bus ride from Hell to the foothills of Heaven. The following quotation is noteworthy:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. (19)

If a new Christendom ever does come to be, its idea of Hell will be much closer to Lewis than Dante. And its culture will be more merciful and loving than that of the old Christendom, in part because the new Christendom will emerge from today’s pluralistic, relatively tolerant and compassionate secular world. Maybe through His Divine Providence God continues to nudge us out of the messes we create and toward the end that only He sees.

Notes

(1) From “Afterlife”

(2)  Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world. New York: Basic Books, pp. 16-17.

(3)  Merriam-Webster online defines subsidiarity: “a principle in social organization holding that functions which are performed effectively by subordinate or local organizations belong more properly to them than to a dominant central organization.”

(4) The Dore illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. (1976). New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Images from https://commons.wikimedia.org/, “a collection of 121,179,901 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.”

(5) Grandgent, C. H. (1933). La divina commedia di Dante Alighieri. Boston: D. C. Heath, p. 28.

(6) Grandgent, p. 47.

(7) The Inferno of Dante Alighieri. (1932; 1964). London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., p. 203.

(8) Grandgent, p. 247.

(9) Fire and brimstone sermons are by no means limited to Catholicism. The Wikipedia entry on fire and brimstone says: “Preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were referred to as ‘fire-and-brimstone preachers’ during the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. Edwards' ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ remains among the best-known sermons from this period. Reports of one occasion when Edwards preached it said that many of the audience burst out weeping, and others cried out in anguish or even fainted.”

(10) Joyce, James. (1916;1977). A portrait of the artist as a young man. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, pp. 117-119.

(11) Although Joyce’s sermon may be literary hyperbole, the pre-Vatican-II Church did at least skirt with ideas of fire and brimstone. In its article on Hell, the Catholic Encyclopedia, initially published in 1907, says: “It is quite superfluous to add that the nature of hell-fire is different from that of our ordinary fire; for instance, it continues to burn without the need of a continually renewed supply of fuel. How are we to form a conception of that fire in detail remains quite undetermined; we merely know that it is corporeal. The demons suffer the torment of fire, even when, by Divine permission, they leave the confines of hell and roam about on earth. In what manner this happens is uncertain. We may assume that they remain fettered inseparably to a portion of that fire.” 

(12) Catechism of the Catholic Church. (1994). St. Paul, MN: The Wanderer Press, p. 269 (item 1033).

(13) The selected items in this timeline come from https://localhistories.org/a-timeline-of-punishments/. 

(14) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scold%27s_bridle 

(15) The image is from https://commons.wikimedia.org/, “a collection of 121,179,901 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.”

(16) From https://www.britannica.com/topic/drawing-and-quartering 

(17) The principal of my elementary school in the 1950s would occasionally whack miscreant children’s palms with a rattan cane.

(18) From https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/c-s-lewis-on-heaven-and-hell/  

(19)  Lewis, C. S. (1946; 2001). The great divorce. New York: Harper Collins, p. 75.