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Overview
Although the Bible is largely silent on the issue, our world is completely riveted by the up-to-date visions of heaven and hell that stock bookstore shelves and are found everywhere on the Internet. But what are believers to think and to say about the “undiscovered country” that is the life to come—from the pulpit, at the hospital, or in our daily lives?
Peter Hawkinsoffers a fresh way to pose these questions, along with an imaginative framework for answering them. He challenges all of us, not just preachers, to think of Dante’s drama of the afterlife—heaven, hell and purgatory—as a true story describing the lives we are living now. To this end Hawkins uses the Divine Comedy to help us imagine what happens when we die as he works his way through Christian tradition, contemporary culture, a rich array of literature, and his own personal experience.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781596271074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2009 |
| Pages: | 122 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
Imagining the World to ComeBy PETER S. HAWKINS
Seabury Books
Copyright © 2009 Peter S. HawkinsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-107-4
Chapter One
No Worst, There Is None* * *
HELL
Christianity has been in love with hell for a very long time. For this fact Scripture alone cannot be held responsible: despite centuries of Bible thumping and proof texting, there is actually little to go on. The Hebrew Bible basically leaves us with a shadowy Sheol to which everyone, the just and the unjust, descends. Notions of a double resurrection—"some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Dan 12:2)—develop only late in the formation of the Jewish scriptures, two centuries before the Common Era. The New Testament writings have more to say about an afterlife, although largely in figurative language when Jesus is speaking in parables or in a prophetic discourse that is impossible to pin down. Paul's epistles are the earliest Christian writings, dating from the middle of the first century. He mentions Hades only once, and then in the context of the grave being swallowed up in resurrection's victory (1 Cor 15:54–55). The Gospel of John is similarly reserved on the subject.
The picture changes, however, with Mark, Matthew, and Luke, called the Synoptic Gospels because of their shared resources and point of view. In their pages, in a few memorable passages, we hear about a place of punishment called Gehenna where fire burns and the worm carries on its torments forever. In an end time prophecy forecasting when the Son of Man is to come again and take his throne in glory, Matthew's Jesus gives the basic ingredients of the Last Judgment scene that would become so prominent in Christian art: the division of humanity into sheep and goats, the sheep destined for a kingdom prepared for them before the foundation of the world, the goats "for the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (25:41).
At the conclusion of the New Testament canon, and thus accorded the Bible's resonant last word, is the Revelation according to St. John. It expounds on this eternal division, showing a bejeweled city of light on the one hand, a lake of sulfur and flames on the other. A rich apocalyptic literature followed in Revelation's wake. There are afterlife visions dating from the early centuries of the Common Era and attributed to Peter and Paul; these are followed throughout the Middle Ages by myriad accounts written in the names of saints, popes, monks, and lay people. In these works the fate of the damned burns brightest and for the greatest number of pages. Most often heaven is a radiant moment coming at the end of the tale; purgatory, if mentioned at all in the medieval texts, a mere flash. One wonders why the tradition chose to so accentuate the negative. Perhaps, contrary to the old saying, it was thought that more flies could be caught by vinegar than by honey, more souls saved by the fire and worms than by Jerusalem, our happy home.
Whatever power this fixation on damnation has had over Christian history—frightening the young and inspiring many a disabused grown-up to reject it all as hateful mind control—I am one of those who somehow never heard the call to flee from the wrath to come. In all my years of church-going, no preacher ever strong-armed me into repentance, challenged me to consider my eternal damnation or, so to speak, gave me hell. Was I lucky in this regard, or a willfully selective listener, or just plain hard of heart? It is true that my older brother was temporarily born-again, and with his dramatic turnaround from hoodlum to straight-A student developed a concern for the family's salvation. This was challenging: as a chronically well-behaved, eager-to-please little boy, I struggled with his emphasis on sin—mine in particular. How could I possibly acknowledge myself to be the worst of all sinners when I had so many Sunday School pins to show for my righteousness; when I was, well, so good? In fact, the "furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt 13:42) seemed impossible as a destination for anyone I knew, and after a time my brother's concerns about such things waned.
As a result, hellfire and brimstone held no lasting place in my youth, at a time when one is most vulnerable to being frightened—and manipulated—by religion. ("Give me a child at an impressionable age and she is mine for life," said the Scots Presbyterian Miss Jean Brodie in an echo of a famous Jesuit adage.) Instead, my contact was vicarious and literary. First, in an American literature anthology, there was Jonathan Edwards' notorious "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" warning the unconverted hearts of mid-eighteenth-century Enfield, Connecticut, that they are right now, though in perfect health and the pride of life, suspended "over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire," and hanging there by the slenderest of threads. In another sermon, "Heaven, a World of Love," Edwards is winsome, his vision of beatitude quite beautiful. Nonetheless, he turns in the end to "that dark world" where the Lord "exercises no love, and extends no mercy to any one object there, but pours out upon them horrors without mixture." It may seem to be a very strange "world of love" that requires this dark corollary, but here Edwards was working in a tradition that long preceded him and that spans denominational divides. The Inferno's Gates of Hell, before which Dante's damned souls famously abandon hope, also proclaim that the place of eternal suffering was made by "PRIMO AMORE" (3.6), God's primal love. When it came to the pairing of hell and heaven, Edwards was a medieval Catholic.
Later in my afterlife education came James Joyce, from whom I received a Roman Catholic version of hell-raising. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen Daedalus and his classmates are given a chapel retreat on the traditional "Four Last Things"; as usual, a great deal more attention is paid to the first three, Death, Judgment, and Hell, than to the fourth, Heaven. The Jesuit retreat master, Father Arnall, first addresses his "dear little brothers in Christ" with a text wrested from Isaiah 5:14: "Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure." Schooled in the meditative technique of Ignatius Loyola, the priest begins with an imaginative "composition of place." With rhetorical flourish he takes his impressionable lads where they are very likely to end up should his preaching not have its desired effect. What they are asked to see in their mind's eye is that hell's fire gives off no light but rather "burns eternally in darkness." He wants them to know that the "sickening stench" of this dark prison house "is multiplied a million fold and a million fold again from the millions upon millions of rotting carcasses massed together in the rotting darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus." Father Arnall then goes on to imagine the varied torments, the anguished company of the damned, and the onslaught of demons in their relentless psychological warfare. Particularly terrifying is the punishing voice of conscience now attended to, world without end, too late: "Why did you sin? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not repent your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of all your sins?"
All of this admonition takes place on day one, at the end of which (at least for this reader) there is nothing more to be said. Yet on the morrow Father Arnall marshals his adolescent charges for more, this time fuelled by Psalm 31:22: "I am driven far from your sight." The priest puts aside the "composition of place" strategy in order to consider the multiple ways the damned come to experience the pain of eternal loss. In the end, however, he nails his argument with an aural fantasy: hell is a vast dark hall utterly silent but for the ticking of a great unseen clock. Over and over it seems to repeat the same two words: ever, never ... ever, never. "Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains." It comes as no surprise that, though scared half to death in the course of the retreat, Stephen Daedalus eventually runs for his life—out of the world of the church. Given the chance, who would hesitate to follow him out the door?
Certainly not the famous preacher and public figure Henry Ward Beecher, who took flight from all notions of hell and in this regard, as in so many others, stood at the vanguard of changing religious sensibilities in post-Civil War America. It is easy to see his aversion as a reaction to his father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, for whom hell was a preoccupation. Lyman fretted continually not only about the salvation of his Litchfield, Connecticut congregation—"so many immortal souls are sleeping on the brink of hell"—but over the fact that not one of his many offspring seemed prepared to meet their Maker. "Their whole eternal existence," he lamented in his autobiography, "is every moment liable to become an existence of unchangeable sinfulness and woe." In their youth none of the Beecher children—an extraordinary brood, it turned out—escaped this fear. We see this in the very first entry in Henry's high school journal ("filled mostly with doodles, bits of homework, pithy sayings and the name, 'Nancy' scribbled over and over again in dreamy loops of ink"), which nevertheless shows him suffering from his father's consternation over Last Things: "I prove first that there must be a hell, and then it will appear evident that there must be a judgment."
In time, however, this Calvinist orthodoxy would be jettisoned not only by liberal pastors like Henry Ward Beecher but by the middle class urbanites that made up his Brooklyn congregation. Plymouth Church was arguably the first American "mega-church," a wide open door that, thanks to the pastor's eloquence, drew its congregation from all over Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as from farther afield. Walt Whitman came to hear for himself "the most famous man in America," as did Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln. Beecher rejected the old-fashioned evangelical fervor of the two Great Awakenings; in its place, he offered a "new age" spirituality of love and acceptance as the religion of the implacable Father gave way to that of a forgiving Son. In the name of love Beecher threw aside not only a reading of Scripture that mistook the metaphorical for the literal, but such cornerstone Calvinist doctrines as original sin, total depravity, and predestination. Twice on Sundays and then again at midweek people listened to the preacher transform their hard-line Protestant heritage with a new kind of feeling-based fervor; they could also read him in the leading newspapers of the day. As Beecher wrote in a New York Times column, with a candor that later brought him before ecclesiastical councils, "If I thought that God stood at the door where men go out of life ready to send them down to eternal punishment, my soul would cry out, 'Let there be no god!' My instinct would say, 'Annihilate him!'"
Strong words from a member of America's new religious establishment! Beecher loved to capture attention, to pull out all the stops. But I suspect that there was more than showmanship at stake here. No doubt because of his own strenuous religious upbringing, he was sincerely moved by those parishioners who still lived burdened by religious anxiety: "There are those who will not come into God's kingdom unless they come as Dante went to paradise—by going through hell." He, on the contrary, wanted to spare them fear about the "great furnace of wrath," wanted to lead them into an awareness of a divine love "that sacrifices itself for the good of those who err, and that is as patient with them as a mother is with a sick child." Calling himself a lover of mankind, Beecher even went so far as to repudiate his own religious tradition, insisting, "John Calvin can take care of himself." It was time to stop misrepresenting God by preaching salvation through the threat of damnation. It was time to wake up to God's mercy.
Speaking with his customary theatricality from the stage-like platform of Plymouth Church, Beecher told his flock, "To tell me that at the back of Christ is a God who for unnumbered centuries has gone on creating men and sweeping them like dead flies—nay, like living ones—into hell, is to ask me to worship a being much worse than the conception of any medieval devil as can be imagined." On another occasion he asked his congregation to recall Michelangelo's painting of the Last Judgment, not to savor it as an artistic masterpiece but in order to break its spell—the hold of hell on their imaginations:
Look at the lower parts of the picture, where with pitchforks men are by devils being cast into cauldrons and into burning fires, where hateful fiends are gnawing at the skulls of suffering sinners, and where there is hellish cannibalism going on. Let a man look at that picture and the scenes which it depicts, and he sees what were the ideas which men once had of Hell and of divine justice. It was a nightmare as hideous as was ever begotten by the hellish brood itself; and it was an atrocious slander on God ... I do not wonder that men have reacted from these horrors—I honor them for it.
The arch-villain Beecher is really calling into account here is not Michelangelo but Dante—the particular "medieval devil" who provided the painter (not to mention subsequent Western culture) with a surfeit of pitchforks, cauldrons, and fiends gnawing at the heads of suffering sinners. Long before the Last Judgment adorned the east end of the Sistine Chapel, Dante's Inferno was already in wide circulation: copied, illustrated, commented on, and even performed in the streets. (In a tribute to his influence, in fact, Michelangelo includes the poet in his fresco—looking at the damned but positioned safely among the blessed.) It is true that the Comedy's pilgrim only starts his journey in hell and has paradise as his ultimate destination, yet from the very beginning it is the poem's opening installment that has always captured and held popular attention. Today, even passing reference to Dante's "dolorous kingdom" (Inf. 34.28) serves as evil's gold standard, as convenient shorthand for denoting the unspeakable: "This is a tale of horrors," says the chief prosecutor of a UN court commenting on the intractable war in Sierra Leone; it moves "beyond the Gothic and into the realm of Dante's Inferno."
Where did the poet's vision of damnation come from? Like the folks on the Internet who share their "23 Minutes in Hell" in order to put the fear of God into all who hear them, Dante also claimed personal experience—in his case, not a rapture or out-of-body experience but an actual journey in the flesh. Some of his contemporaries took him at his poem's word. In Boccaccio's mid-fourteenth century biography of the poet we are told that some credulous ladies in Verona, where Dante spent two periods during his exile, crossed to the other side of the street when they saw him coming. They wanted to avoid the man whose grave mien and dark complexion were caused by the heat and smoke of Hades: "Do you see the man who goes down to Hell, and comes again at his pleasure, and brings tidings of them that be below?"
Gullible readers and poetic license aside, we are on surer footing when it comes to thinking about the literary sources Dante may have drawn on. These include the medieval Christian visions of the afterlife mentioned above, which pick up where the sparse and scattered references of Scripture leave off. As the genre developed in the Middle Ages, these works offered him a more and more detailed mapping of the afterlife, as well as some of the elements he would take up and transform. More influential, however, was the Aeneid, the pre-Christian text without which the Divine Comedy is unimaginable—and not only because Virgil, its author, is the pilgrim's guide for two-thirds of the way. The sixth book of the Aeneid is particularly important, with its account of the hero's descent to the world of the dead in order to receive his transforming vision of the future. Aeneas eventually receives this forecast in the Elysian Fields, which is as close as the ancient Roman world came to imagining what heaven might be like. On his way there the Sibyl, his guide, describes another realm they are not meant to enter but only to take into account. This is Tartarus, the antithesis of Elysium, an iron-walled city locked tight against all comers. In it the unjust suffer eternal incarceration and punishment:
Those who as long as life remained Held brothers hateful, beat their parents, cheated Poor men dependent on them; also those Who hugged their newfound riches to themselves And put nothing aside for relatives— A great crowd this—then men killed for adultery, Men who took arms in war against the right, Not scrupling to betray their lords.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY by PETER S. HAWKINS Copyright © 2009 by Peter S. Hawkins. Excerpted by permission of Seabury Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
FOREWORD....................ixAUTHOR'S PREFACE....................xiii
PROLOGUE....................1
HELL....................13
PURGATORY....................39
PARADISE....................68
EPILOGUE....................105
NOTES....................113
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................119