In Our Time - Hell

Episode Date: December 21, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss hell and its representation in literature and the visual arts, through the ages from Ancient Egypt to modern Christianity. Why do certain religions have a Satan figure and others don’t? And why did hell shift from the underworld to here on earth in 20th Century representations?A fiery vault beneath the earth or as Sartre put it, other people - it seems our ideas of hell are inevitably shaped by religious and cultural forces. For Homer and Virgil it’s a place you can visit and return from, often a wiser person for it. With Christianity it’s a one way journey and a just punishment for a sinful, unrepentant life. Writers and painters like Dante and Hieronymus Bosch gave free rein to their imaginations, depicting a complex hierarchical world filled with the writhing bodies of tormented sinners. In the 20th century hell can be found on earth in portrayals of war and the Holocaust but also in the mind, particularly in the works of TS Eliot and Primo Levi. So what is the purpose of hell and why is it found mainly in religions concerned with salvation? Why has hell proved so inspirational for artists through the ages, perhaps more so than heaven? And why do some ideas of hell require a Satan figure while others don't?With Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; Margaret Kean, Tutor and Fellow in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford; Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum.

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KOTT KOTT. Don't JECD. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, and today we're discussing the history of hell.

A fiery vault beneath the earth, a frozen tomb, or as Sartre famously declared, other people. Our ideas of hell or the underworld are shaped by religious and cultural forces. For Homer and Virgil, it's a place you can visit and return from, often a wiser person for it. With Christianity, it's mostly a one-way journey and a just punishment for a sinful, unrepentant life. Writers and painters like Dante and Hiramish Bosch

depict a complex hierarchical world filled with the writhing bodies of tormented sinners. In the 20th century, hell can be found on earth in portrayals of war and the Holocaust, but also in the mind, particularly in the works of T.S. Eliot and Primo Levi. So what's the purpose of hell and why is it found mainly in religiongents concerned with salvation? Why, as hell proved so inspirational for artists through the ages, rather more so than heaven. And why does some ideas of hell require a Satan figure, while others don't? Joining me to discuss Hale is Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture,

Margaret Keene, tutor and fellow in English at St. Hilda's College Oxford, and Neil McGregor, Director of the British Museum. Martin Palmer, can we start by looking at the very early ideas of hell or the underworld? How do the Egyptians view it? Well, they view it essentially as something not terribly much to worry about. Essentially, until you've get the salvationary religions, the religions that essentially offer you a chance to make a choice as to which religion you will follow, you are brought up in your tradition, and there is a slight element in the Egyptian tradition of saying, you've got to behave, because if you don't, you could go into the jaws of the crocodile hippopotamus creature, Amut, and be devoured.

But in fact, nobody ever did. Or as far as we know, nobody ever did in terms of the mythology, you went for judgment after your death and if your heart was lighter than the feather of truth in the scales of justice, you were welcomed by Osiris, the god of the underworld, into the world of the gods, and you had really a very nice time. If your heart was heavier than the feather of truth,

then you were thrown into the jaws of Amit. But in order to forestall this, you would recite what is called the negative confession. I have not killed anybody. I have not stolen. I have not done anything. You would also make sure you had bribes with you to make your way through the underworld. And as far as we can see, nobody went to hell.

Nobody went into the jaws. So there's no depictions of actually hell itself. Do we have an underworld? Do we have the same tradition in Greek? Well, in Greek, again, the Greek tradition is that, yes, there is an underworld ruled over by Pluto or by Hades, the God Hades. And you can go to that, and there are souls writhing there. but it's almost more as though this is a sort of morality lesson.

You can go there and come back. You can voyage there. And I think it's the same in Chinese religion. You find the same idea that there is a judgment. But basically, if you know the rules, you've paid the money, you've got the ritual incantation, you go through. So there are no depictions that I know of of actually hell itself until you get into the Christian era, to be frank.

Margaret King, can you give us more detail on the underworld as depicted in Homer? Yeah. By Homer, sorry? Well, in the Odyssey, we have Odysseus wanting to leave the island of Circe, and he's told that he will be allowed to do that, but he must make a journey, and that journey will be to the underworld in order to consult with the prophet or the seer, Tyresius.

So he goes forward, and Tyresius comes up, as does his mother in a number of other individuals. He speaks to Tyresius, Tyresius gives him information, about what is happening at home with Penelope and tells him about his own death and also explains how to get home without more suffering. He talks to the shade of Agamemnon, he talks to the shade of Achilles.

And then he becomes a little bit frightened because of the mob almost of shades that are there. And he's worried that a monster will come, and so he leaves. Is there any sense in which Virgil's notion of hell was based on Homer and any sense in which he developed it? There is, I think, a new platonic emphasis

on an explanation of what happens in specifically the lower part of Hades and Tartarus that is to be put in place in Virgil's Hell. He definitely does refer us back to Homer. Aeneas will go to speak to the Sybil and this idea is now absolutely pivotal to the epic. Aeneas actually wants to go and speak to the shade of his father to see his father eye to eye.

So actually this is a pious journey and a journey for knowledge. That was also something that comes through the story of Odysseus that he's going down to see the seer to get knowledge. When you actually get into this Hades, unlike Odysseus who actually dug this trench and then did not cross that threshold with the shades coming up to him,

Virgil will actually have Aeneas journey through hell with the Sibyl as guide. And that route takes him to the gates of the city of Diss, where he can hear the groans and he can hear the rattle of chains. Neil McGregor, what depictions would you say were relevant to this discussion in Egyptian Greeks

Roman, just to put those in the context of what Martin and Margaret have been saying. Well, I think for obvious reasons, there's not really very much illustration of hell. There's lots of illustration of the underworld, of course, in Egypt, as the sole journeys and how the soul journeys, and indeed of the judgments against the feather of truth. But because there isn't really much about hell in the Egyptian account, there's not much illustration. And because the Greek view of hell particularly is just this rather shady, shadowy, an interesting place

where, I mean, like Achilles says, how miserable it is, you just hang around, like a bat squeaking. And you get the impression that it's, it's all a bit like kind of standing on Didcock Station in the fog, waiting for the train that doesn't come, it just goes on. And pictorially, that's not really interesting.

I think what's so interesting, what's so striking about the Greek and the Roman notions of her is that it doesn't offer much for the artist. And then, of course, everything changes once you get to Christianity. Well, let's get to Christianity and get stuck into hell now. Can we start with the harrowing of hell by Christ?

After the crucifixion, Christ descended into hell and there follows the harrowing of hell. Can you just develop that phrase and then tell us about the representations of it? Yes, this is really about a particular problem that the church has, that if Christ is the gate to salvation, then what happened to those people who didn't have a chance to hear him? So the immediate problem is those before the gospel.

and because the Hebrews have a very unclear view of hell and it's much more about the Greek and Roman one as far as we can tell, just a shadowy place, Christ visits those who were born before, in particular the prophets and the patriarchs and Adam and Eve. And from about the 4th century, that becomes a thing. And usually it's illustrated quite widely from the 11th 12th century on, and it's usually Christ standing on the gates of hell

which have fallen. He's standing, triumphant over the gates of hell, looking down on those who've been sitting, waiting for thousands of years. And from then on, those people are brought into the scheme of being saved, the scheme of salvation that the Christian church constructs. The real purpose of showing hell is to encourage you to repent. So you show that everybody's going to be judged and that people of all sorts are going to hell. So rather strikingly, in the great hospital in Burgundy in Bone, this wonderful hospital built by Roland around 1450, at the end of the great general ward, you have the last judgment showing people being taken to hell. Every sort of person is saved and damned. It's totally important that, that the rich, the clergy,

the tradesmen, the poor, the peasant, everybody may go to hell or be saved. And as you lie dying, you look at that. The artist, of course, has a real challenge, because St Augustine, quite early on, says that in hell there is torment beyond our imagining. Well, that's because of real challenge to any painter. I can imagine it. And so you get these wonderful worlds of Bosch, especially, who keeps pushing the limits. And how can you make hell even?

What is the nastiest thing that could happen? So you've got couples dancing to bagpipes on the top of his head, which on any of you must be one description of hell. But you've also got somebody who's being forced to marry a sow who is dressed as a dominion. and none. I mean, all these wonderful imaginings of what the nastiest thing that could happen to you is.

Martin, Martin, Martin, Pam, but hell wasn't always central of Christianity. There seemed to be a sudden explosive growth in about the 4th century AD. And it was all over the place, wasn't it? It wasn't just in Christianity. It wasn't. In Christianity, it's

almost exclusively within the Western Church. For example, in the Orthodox Church, the only icon of judgment and of the resurrection is the harrowing of hell. And there are no scenes of torture in it at all. In fact, you don't get any depictions of the terrors of hell until the fall of Constantinople in 1453,

which was seen as an augury of the beginning of the end of time. In the Western church, you get this extraordinary influence of the apocalyptic literature. And in particular, and Dante actually refers to this in the second canto, the apocalypse of Paul, which appears round about, the end of the third beginning of the fourth century. And that is really the first really thorough Christian exploration of hell. But yes, you get this enormous growth.

And I think the basic reason for this is that that's the point to which Christianity takes off as a major proselytizing religion. It is now out to save as many souls as possible. And the best way to do this is to scare the bejesus out of people and then tell them there's a way out. And that's why I think you get this enormous growth. I mean, essentially the apocalyptic tradition goes from Judaism into manichaeism, this extraordinary religion that emerges out of Persian religion.

You get the Zoroastrians writing an amazing account of the descent into hell. Then you go across to China, and you get this very strange phenomenon. In the 4th century BC, the philosopher Chuang Su has a wonderful conversation with a skull and says, wouldn't you like to be a human again? He goes, oh, no, no, it's much nicer down here. By the time you get to the 4th century AD, Buddhism has come in and is saying, ah, it's horrendous. And the Taoists and the Buddhists are competing with horrific visions of hell.

In fact, they're competing numerically. The Buddhists come in with eight hells. The Taoists say, oh, no, we've got 10. So the Buddhists go, we've got 18. So the Taoists go, we've got 24. And then the Buddhists cap them by saying we've got 84,000. In this point, the Taoists give up. But also in Hinduism, you've got an enormous explosion.

A few weeks ago, I was in Anka Wat, looking at the amazing sculptures of the 32 Hells and the 37 heavens. Nobody was looking at the heavens. Everybody was fascinated by the gruesome details. And that's from, what, the 11th century, but based on text from the 4th and 5th century. Let's hold it. Neil McGregor, you wanted to get in.

I'd like you to go into a bit more detail about Bosch, because people listening to this program, I should imagine all of them have seen Bosch. What's striking is that the Orthodox Church, the Eastern Church, doesn't focus on hell at all. It focuses on salvation and the redeeming Christ. It's the Western Church that focuses, much on hell. And it really gets into its stride in the high middle ages. In 1215, the Lateran

council decides that you have perpetual punishment. And you can argue, of course, that this is one of the instruments of the papacy, because if you have perpetual punishment, there's only one way out other than repentance, which, of course, is indulgence. And once you have a papacy that can get you out of all this, then the more that hell is represented, the more you're dependent on the church and the institutional church. So you can't take a very cynical, rather Protestant view, that the Roman church focuses in much of hell

because it becomes a great source of revenue. And that was particularly the case towards the end of the 15th century. And it's not accidental that Bosch is painting his very elaborate, absurd, extravagant images of hell at just the moment that Martin Luther is beginning to complain about the setting of indulgence

to get you out of it. What would have been the most frightening images for the time that he was depicting? The most frightening ones, I think, are probably the monsters, the bodies that are half human, half reptile, and gnawing at you the whole time. But I would be more disconcerted by some of the really alarming ones, like somebody who's been strung through the strings of a harp just running through his body and perpetually struggling with,

presumably somebody who loved music too much, or something of that sort. And I think what's so clever about him is that as you look at these hundreds of images, something is going to make you feel very uncomfortable. Margaret, one of the most graphic literary descriptions we have of the descent into hell is Dante's Inferno. Can you tell us about Dante's vision of hell

and where he drew is inspiration from? Initially, I suppose we have to see it as a Christian depiction. And therefore, the movement is to go down in order to reascend. And the movement down may be easy, but coming back up is hard, as is said, in Virgiline and is to be continued within this Christian framework. The way that he does the infernal is very structured. So you have nine circles.

And within those nine circles, we start with limbo, which is where we find the classical individuals who haven't got guilt, but neither do they have baptism in faith, and therefore they're stuck there. And after that you get the sins of incontinence, which are the sins of passion, if you like. And then it gets really spiced up

when you get down to about the seventh circle, where you get to the city of Diss, and this is the place where fires start. What is the centre, then, finally, of the Fetna, what's the core of it? The core is the ultimate sin, which within a feudal society, is going to be a traitor to your feudal lord.

And at the very, very core of this funnel of hell, you find the three-faced Satan, and the three-faced Satan has three mouths, each of them chewing on a very bad person indeed, Verutius and Cassius on each side and in the middle Judas. And Satan is in tomb, in ice. He is hairy and monstrous and has

bat wings and he is crying. And so the tears and this kind of like slabber and gore sort of spilling down from him. Thank you very much for that. I did let you run on because I was a transphix but I think we... Yes, well we've got the idea

as we can say. Can you briskly tell us about Michelangelo's depiction? Well Michelangelo is of course the great attempt to put bits of Dante into painting in the last judgment. On the Sistine Chapel wall, the altar of the Pope,

Christ in judgment, and pulling the good to him, driving away from him, the wicked. And that sense that the real punishment is separation from God. But Michelangoros does something completely extraordinary.

He brings in classical antiquities. You get care on pushing people off his boat, in fact, and you get people being pulled down into hell. And the violence of, the pulling down was, of course, what shocked the contemporaries, the nakedness, the vulgarity, the vines, the brutality, some a man has been pulled down by his balls into hell, which contemporaries think is very indecorous in the papal chapel. And his particular enemy, Chesna da Biajo, he shows as minos, with snakes all around him and the snake devouring his genitals. And this is in the

papal chapel. And contemporaries are very shocked by this indeed. What is, first, fascinating about Michelangelo is the enormous heroic scale of this great moment, and it will be the one, the great moment, the judgment, and then hell will be everlasting. And it will be a physical, as well as a spiritual hell. And it's too much. The contemporaries are so shaken by the violence and by the nakedness, the crudeness of it all, that, as you know, they then cover up the naked bodies. and indeed it's quite lucky that the whole thing wasn't destroyed. Now Margaret, I'm asking you to do massive tasks here, but we can't do this without talking about Milton and the Satan in Milton. Could you tell us what part Satan plays in Milton and what he brings to the notion of hell?

Yeah. I mean, there is a huge gulf there, and not least the gulf between a Catholic depiction, which is Dante, and then a Protestant depiction, which is Milton and a jump from 1300 to 1660s, which is obviously of importance. I suppose the great difference is the voice of the tempter or the voice of the rebel as opposed to something which is pictorial,

which is what you have at the base of the pit in Dante. And instead of that, Milton starts as often a very precipitous slip into hell within about 50 lines we're down there. We have no guide and we are in fact disorientated in a very specific and punning way. And into that kind of ghastly situation, and it does initially look quite traditional, a furnace of fire, of darkness visible, which is the great Miltonic phrase,

comes this voice, if thou beest he, but oh, how fallen. And it's a voice which is trying to make sense of it all, and it's the voice of the tempter. And in this phenomenal first speech by Satan, he says, what if the field be lost, all is not lost, the unconquerable will, the study of revenge, immortal hate and courage never to submit or be. yield, and that is Milton's Satan. And it's actually, one could argue it's based on many things.

One could actually argue that it's based in part on Dante, and with Ogolino and Ulysses, two of the great voices of sinners within the kind of the final circles in Dante's inferno. But just this voice of rebellion, this voice of opposition that despite whatever the odds, it will not give in, it will not give in to an authority, I suppose if Dante is there to assert eternal providence, which is a phrase from Milton, Milton is going to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men, which allows doubt in.

It's simply by opening up these opportunities to make choices to think things through for yourself. It allows doubt, not just making hell itself seem a kind of a literary construction, but potentially making God seem a tyrant or making the whole thing seem as if it's a fiction. Martin, during this conversation, people have talked about burning and freezing.

When does ice turn to fire in? hell and why? It was very interesting. The origin of fire actually comes from the Jewish tradition of hell, which is named Gehenna, which is named after a valley outside Jerusalem, where Molek, one of the great pagan kings, used to sacrifice children. And because that made it a place of abomination, it became the city rubbish dump. And because rubbish tends to combust and you burn it to get rid of it, it essentially was an eternal place of fire. It was always burning. And so the image of hell as fire comes from a municipal rubbish dump outside Jerusalem, which is quite splendid, really.

But I think the older image, and it's very intriguing, the older image is ice. You get that in the Zoroastrian tradition. Freezing hell. Freezing hell. And I think, and there's a very interesting work being done at the moment, between theologians, mythologists, and archaeologists, looking at almost a sort of folk memory of the worst times we can remember. if we think about, particularly in the context of climate change, we've lived in a sort of 10,000 year window of temperate weather,

moderately temperate weather with odd swings here and there, during which we've been able to develop agriculture and we've been able to have a very easy life, a domestic life, a settle life and city life. That's only about one fifth of the lifespan of homo sapien sapiens, our own species. For the vast majority of time, we dwelt in a very cold, water-locked up,

arid world in which it was very hard to survive and you were hunter-gatherers and life was tough and it was cold and we used to think that the last ice age which finished about 10,000 years ago took thousands of years to change it now appears it may have all happened in 7 to 10 years so there would have been a moment when in one generation quite conceivably you would have gone from living in cold frozen plains where you had to hunt whatever happened to make it through the winter, to a world in which you had strawberries and rinsberries and apples and rabbits and all the rest of it. So I think there is a very deep sense of a fear of cold, which goes back, interestingly, to these enormous archetypes. Now back to the drawing board, Neil,

I'm afraid. Milton and Dante are great inspiration as to William Blake. Can you describe his interpretation, though? Blake's view of Dante's view of hell is, I think, one of the most extraordinary things we've got because Blake does something completely different again, just as Martin gives us the Protestant view of the rebellion of Satan and that hell. Blake does something quite else. Blake cannot believe that God would not forgive. And Blake does something completely new. He turns hell into the world as it is now, the world we have made. And for Blake, hell is a world where we won't forgive and where forgiveness is denied by the state by us. And as he illustrates Dante going through hell.

He puts his extraordinary comments on it so that when Dante meets Paolo and Francesca, the lovers who are condemned for their adultery, to swirl endlessly round, restlessly, separated, painfully. Dante hears their story, then he faints. And above Dante, Blake shows Pablo and Francesca reunited in light. and all the way through Blake you get this extraordinary view and it's so sympathetic that this cannot be a Christian world.

No loving God could ever do this. And this is what we've made for ourselves by misunderstanding the love of God. And that enormous leap to turn hell into something not given by God but something we have created in our own minds is a huge achievement and visually very beautiful. I think, you see, I mean, that intrigues me because I think that goes back to the original Christian vision. If you look at, say, Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats, in which Christ judges people as to whether they're going to go into heaven or not,

it's on the basis of whether they cared for the sick and looked after the homeless and so on and so forth. It is about what you, the kind of person you were now. And I do think that how, to some degree, has been a little bit of a side bend in Christian thought, which is perverted. And I do think that Blake actually begins to bring us back. to a true Christian vision. Fine. Excellent. One of the things that Neil said takes me across to Margaret,

that the idea of hell being in the mind and the place that we make for ourselves began to pulse through very strongly in the last century. So let's just generalise rather. And Conrad, T.S. Elliot, Priam, Levi, and so on. Can you just give us an idea

of what was being said then? Yeah. I mean, it probably actually starts with Milton, as most things do in my mind. But I suppose one of the things that's happening in the 20th century is particularly this idea of the kind of of the journey down, being the journey in, so that it becomes something which is not so much

spiritual as mental or even psychoanalytical if we go with a Jungian type approach. And that what you're looking at instead of something about external punishment or torment is repression or anxiety or issues within. I suppose one of the key texts for this is going to be Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is sort of 1899, the first time that it's published.

So write on the colour. of the of the new century. And this journey down the river Congo, this journey to the inner station to meet your hero in some ways

in some ways to meet a new Tyresius, somebody who could give you truth, is also for the narrator, well, for the first of the impacted narrators, from Marlow, a kind of a journey of his own discovery.

And potentially to find that Kurtz has has destroyed himself or is in some way contradicting what one expected from the values is as unbelievable that the truth is the horror, the horror. And that moves through with the way that T.S. Eliot then wants to use that as an epigram for the wasteland, but Pound stops him from doing it. He then chooses Mr. Kurtz's dead as his epigram for the holomen,

this idea of futility of life, this idea of sterility, going back to that idea of ice, this idea of living in the arid space and wondering whether there's any redemption, wondering whether the prayers will work, wondering whether you can get out from that space, very much modernism. Not to such knowledge of what forgiveness, isn't this? That's a wise.

But in the 20th century, Rodham is still at the gates of hell, isn't he, hammering it out? As Conrad is writing, Rodin is working on his gates of hell. And you can see them at the moment in the Royal Academy. He does it in plaster. It is not custom in his life.

But what he does is extraordinary, because he looks at our contemporary society as being a kind of hell. And at the top of the gate sits the thinker, who's taken from Michelangelo's last judgment, Adam, looking down at the world as it is. And he sees this endless torment of people unable to be still, unable to be gentle, pulled, drawn, devouring each other. And throughout it all, what's so interesting with Rodan,

is this is driven by masculine desire. It's very unchristi, which, of course, puts it all down to the fault of the woman. Roder looks at the misery of the world in the gates of her and says this is because actually men, he means male men want too much. They want to impose themselves. The lust of men. The lust of men. And the over-energy of men turns our world now into a misery.

Finally, Martin Palmer, you said two or three times this conversation. You think it was almost a digression. I'm putting words in your mouth which is the last thing I'd ever try to do. But can you briefly say, do you think this digression is coming to an end in Christianity? Do you think hell is peering out? Yes, I think it is to a great extent,

although I think it has enormous powers of recuperary because it's so much fun at one level. I mean, it is. I go back to anchor what? Everybody was looking at the torture scenes, nobody was looking at the peaceful scenes of heaven. Exactly. And there is a horror movie element

to it all. But I think we've been through an enormous push in the 19th century of the revival of hell, and now I think we are accepting. It's what we make, not what we're given. Well, thank you very much. That was terrific. Thank you to Martin Palmer, Margaret Keene and Neil McGregor. Next week we'll be doing the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about History, Science and Philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.