Book 6, lines 266-293

[Previous: lines 236-265]

Christ leads some souls out of Hell, and condemns others to eternal punishment.

Talia per campos iactabant undique inanes.
Tum laeti obscuro pariter se carcere promunt,
ultoremque Deum supera ad convexa sequuntur,
sedibus ut placidum degant stellantibus aevum;
felices animae, gens iam defuncta periclis                       [270]
humanis, secura operum, secreta laborum.
Primus it ipse hominum generis pater antè, nec ora
conscius antiquae noxae audet tollere cœlo;
primores procerum inde alii non vana futuri
pectora, queis nivea velantur tempora vitta.                    [275]
Ingemuere illi, quos ob commissa cremandos
sorbet in abruptum, fundoque exercet in imo
Tartarus, eructansque incendia dira caminus,
unde animis miseris nullo patet exitus aevo.
Praecipuè rex ipse aulae illaetabilis alto                         [280]
cum sociis mœrens ducit suspiria corde;
et fortunatis sedem, quam liquerat ipse,
invidet aetheream furiis immanibus actus.
Illi iter ad cœli debentia regna tenebant
Aera per tenerum laeti, regemque canebant                     [285]
felices animae, quibus est in secula vitae
iam nunc parta quies, praeclusaque ianua leti.
Applaudunt volucres purum tranantibus aurae:
subsidunt Euri, fugere ex aethere nimbi,
arridetque procul clari liquidissima mundi                       [290]
tempestas: cœlo arrident rutila astra sereno.
Assurgit matutinis aurora volucrum
cantibus: assurgit rubefacta vesper ab aethra.

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These words from the shades carried across those fields.
Then, they joyfully left their dark prison
following their divine avenger up to
where the stars in vaulted heaven sit throned:
happy souls! freed from all human peril                             [270]
never again having to labour or toil.
First went the father of the human race, though
too aware of his ancient crime to look upward;
then other elders, whose souls had not prophesied
in vain, their brows draped with snow-white garlands.     [275]
But others groaned—flaming in punishment
for their sins, whirled sudden down into the depths
of Tartarus where dreadful firestorms raged,
from which there was no escape, eternally.
The King of that joyless realm distinctly                            [280]
lamented, pining in the depths of his heart
for the bliss he and his comrades had lost
cast furiously out through their own savage actions.

Meanwhile the others were drawn to heaven
through the thin air, singing joyful hymns to God               [285]
happy souls, who had lived worthwhile lives on earth
and now had won peace, closing the doors of death.
They were hailed as they swam through golden air.
The East Wind died down, the clouds dispersed,
the liquid sky greeted them, far from worldly                      [290]
storms: the stars of serene heaven smiled, dawn
rising in the morning to angelic songs;
then evening, a rosy glow rising to heaven.

------------

The East Wind in 289 is ‘Eurus’ (“Εὖρος according to some was the southeast wind, but according to others the East wind … Generally in the Latin poets the name Eurus is used for the east or southeast wind, as in Greek. Eurus is a wind of storm, described as a turbulent wind during storms and tossing ships on the sea.”)

Does Jesus mend the great bronze door he smashed down to harrow Hell on his way back out again? We have to assume he does, or else the remaining inmates would all have escaped. But Vida doesn't include that detail. Rather he dismisses the unsaved into the lower Tartarean depths in a few lines, and concentrates on the lighting effects of his heaven, at once dawn and dusk, golden air and peace. Kitsch but attractive.

Otherwise we're left with the quote-unquote ‘problem’ of Hell. The virtuous Patriarchs, from Adam on, didn't really ‘deserve’ to be in Hell. They were there on the technicality of having been born before Christ; so now that Christ has come they get out of jail, free. But those others, also born before Christ, without access to his gospel, lived bad lives and don't escape. Is that fair? Opinions vary. So far as I can see, from what must of necessity be a cursory rifling through the debates, the present state of theological wisdom is that the only way to reconcile belief in an infinitely loving and merciful God and the existence of eternal hell (and bearing in mind that thrusting someone into Hell hardly looks like what a loving person does to the individual they love) is to believe that hell is escapable after all. Here are the excellently-named duo Buckareff and Plug:

We have argued that the problem of hell is a problem for traditional theists who affirm that God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being who loves and desires to commune with us. The problem is particularly acute for what we call the traditional retributivist position. According to traditional retributivism, hell is a place of eternal punishment that at least some persons will experience. Against the traditional retributivist view of hell, escapism is committed to the truth of the conjunction of the following two claims:

A. Hell exists and might be populated for eternity.

B. If there are any denizens of hell, then at any time they have the ability to accept God's grace and leave hell and enter heaven.

Regarding (A), we endorsed an issuant view of hell. According to issuantism, hell is a place that God, being motivated by love for persons, has provided for those who do not wish to be in communion with God. [Buckareff and Plug, ‘Escaping Hell But Not Heaven’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 77:3 (2015), 247-8]

Not that everyone agrees with Puckerup and Chug's argument. Indeed, the point of the paper I've just quoted is to rebut the contrary argument that ‘if God must have an open door policy toward those in hell, God should have the same policy towards those in heaven’, an argument that ‘can be summarized as follows’:

1. If, according to escapism, there is no symmetry with respect to God's policies towards those in both heaven and hell, then escapism is not an adequate response to the problem of hell.

2. On escapism, there is no such symmetry.

3. Therefore, escapism is not an adequate response to the problem of hell.

They seem to agree that nobody, once they enter heaven, would want to leave it, but they don't agree that this asymmetry invalidates their infernal-escapism theology. I once published a science fiction story, in which a character stepped up from the top of Dante's Mount Purgatory and into heaven, meeting as he did so a woman who was going the other way. After a while, she expained, people in heaven tended to go back down Purgatory and spend time in Hell, just for a change of scene. So I don't see the symmetry problem here.

This, though, seems to me a rather arid way of approaching the topic. Timothy McDermott proposes a three-part anatomy of concepts of Hell: Sheol, Hades and Tartarus. First ‘Sheol’:

Sheol, in the Old Testament, means nothing more nor less than death. The word hardly ever occurs in prose except in the phrases ‘to go down to Sheol’, which means ‘to die’, and ‘to bring down to Sheol’, which means ‘to kill’. Sheol then, for the Hebrew, is not a place of torment for the wicked after death, but the state of death itself which overcomes both just and wicked alike. The only difference between people is in the way they go down to Sheol, the way they die. The great blessing granted to Abraham and Jacob was to breathe their last in a great old age, surrounded by their sons; this was ‘to go down to Sheol in peace’.

There is a hint in chapter 32 of Ezekiel that Sheol may be divided for ‘the uncircumcised and the slain with the sword’. And this hint is embroidered in the later Jewish apocalyptic books that are not part of the canon. But on the whole the Old Testament was puzzled as to whether wicked and innocent had different destinies beyond the grave. They liked to think the wicked would die in a particularly horrible way, but even here they were often disappointed; for, as Job says, ‘the wicked spend their days in prosperity and go down to Sheol in peace’. Sheol then is nothing more nor less than the state of being dead, presented metaphorically as a place. [Timothy McDermott, ‘Hell’ New Blackfriars, 48:560 (1967), 186-87]

Then there is the classical concept of ‘Hades’:

In the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament, Sheol is twice rendered as ‘death’, and on all other occasions by ‘Hades’, the name of the Greek underworld. When we meet the word ‘Hades’ in the New Testament, therefore, we must think of the Hebrew Sheol, the state of death rather than any place of torment after death. Indeed, the word occurs only 11 times in the New Testament, and five of the occurrences are Old Testament quotations where the original word was Sheol. And in another four occurrences ‘death and Hades’ are coupled together. So when we read in Matthew that ‘the gates of Hell’ will not prevail against Christ's church, the meaning is that the church will never yield to Sheol, the jaws of Sheol will never engulf her, she will not die. And when Peter preaches in the Acts that the Christ was not abandoned to Hades, he means that Jesus rose from the dead. [McDermott, 188]

But there is a third conception of ‘Hell’ in Judaeo-Christian thought, and it's Tartarus (Vida's preferred term). McDermott quotes 2 Peter 2:4 (‘When angels sinned God did not spare them : he sent them down to Tartarus, and consigned them to the dark underground caves, to be held there til the day of judgment’) and those bits of Revelation that mention the pit. Then he argues that the fires of Gehenna (another Jewish afterworld) signify not only punishment of the wicked but their annihilation: ‘statements that the fire will not be quenched do not immediately imply that the fire is everlasting. “Unquenchable” describes the quality of fire, rather than its duration; the word “unquenchable” signifies the finality of the fire, its absolutely irrevocable character ... [that is] the fire is precisely described as a “devouring fire” in order to imply total destruction with nothing left. For McDermott, then, the significance of Tartarus is not topographical: it is rather the spiritual state of life caught in the battle between Jesus and Satan:

The scriptures distinguish three periods in Satan's career: a period in heaven, lasting up to the resurrection of Christ; a period in which he is ‘thrown down to earth’, from the resurrection of Christ to the day of judgment; and a final period in which he is cast into hell, prepared for him and his angels. ... It is this new Death that I have called Tartarus, relying on the quotations from Peter and Revelation. For the Abyss into which Satan and his angels have been thrown until the day of judgment—until the day when our desire to be judged receives its disastrous nemesis—is our earth in its Pharisaism. The Pit of Tartarus is the pit in the middle of each of our own hearts, enclosed inescapably in self-respect and therefore in self-frustration. Hell as Tartarus is the ever-present threat of a completely irredeemable death that we keep alive in our own souls; and we feel it every day in the profound unhappinesses and frustrations that accompany love of self. [McDermott, 191]

It's an interesting argument. Then again, it's an ahistorical context here, and of limited relevance to what Vida is doing. A better way of coming at that, perhaps, might be to excavate the extent to which Hell was one of the points of disputation between Reformation Protestants and Counter-Reformation Catholics. It certainly wasn't a key one, but that doesn't mean it was unimportant:

In Late Medieval Christianity, the concept of hell was closely connected to the sacrament of penance. Hell could be avoided through the right use of penance. And the cleansing sufferings in purgatory could to a certain extent replace the eternal sufferings in hell. The Protestant Reformation rejected purgatory, and returned to a traditional dualistic view of the relationship between heaven and hell. At the same time, hell seems to lose some of its religious importance in early Protestant spirituality. [Tarald Rasmussen, ‘Hell Disarmed? The Function of Hell in Reformation Spirituality’, Numen, 56:2/3 (2009), 366]

So maybe McDermott's speculations are not so irrelevant, though more for Vida's Protestant inheritors than Catholic Vida himself. ‘The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in,’ as Sir Thomas Browne puts it in the Religio Medici; ‘I feel sometimes a hell within myself.’ Or in Milton's more resonant phrase: Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell.

At the head of this post: Tintoretto's ‘The Descent into Hell’ (Oil on canvas 1586; presently in San Cassiano, Venice).

[Next: lines 294-312]