HELL.

Intuition of future punishments. — The Christian hell imitated from the pagan hell.

— The limbo. — Picture of the pagan hell.

— Sketch of the Christian hell.

Intuition of future punishments.

— In all epochs man has believed, by intuition, that the future life would be happy or unhappy according to the good or the evil practiced in this world.

The idea he forms of that life, however, is in keeping with his development, his moral sense, and his more or less accurate notions of good and evil; 3 punishments and rewards are the reflection of his predominant instincts.

Warlike peoples make supreme happiness consist in the honors conferred upon bravery; 5 hunters, in the abundance of game; 6 the sensual, in the delights of voluptuousness.

Dominated by matter, man can understand spirituality only imperfectly, imagining for future punishments and joys a picture more material than spiritual; 8 it seems to him that he must eat and drink in the other world, n yet better than on Earth.

Later, in the beliefs concerning the future life, one already finds a mixture of spiritualism and materialism: contemplative beatitude competing with the hell of physical tortures.

— Being able to understand only what he sees, primitive man naturally molded his future after his present; 2 to understand other types beyond those before his eyes, he would have needed an intellectual development that only time can complete.

Thus the picture he conceived of future punishments is but the reflection of the ills of Humanity, on a vaster scale, gathering together all the tortures, torments, and afflictions he found on Earth.

In scorching climates he imagined a hell of fire, and in the boreal regions a hell of ice.

The sense that would later lead him to understand the spiritual world not yet being developed, he could conceive only of material punishments; 6 and so, with slight differences of form, the hells of all religions resemble one another. The Christian hell imitated from the pagan hell.

— The pagan hell, described and dramatized by the poets, was the most grandiose model of the genre, and it perpetuated itself within Christianity, where, in turn, there were poets and singers.

Comparing them, one finds in them — apart from the names and variants of detail — numerous analogies; both have material fire as the basis of torments, as a symbol of the most atrocious sufferings.

But, singular thing! the Christians exaggerated in many points the hell of the pagans. If the latter had the cask of the Danaides, the wheel of Ixion, the rock of Sisyphus, these were individual torments; 4 the Christians, on the contrary, have for all, without distinction, the boiling cauldrons whose lids the angels lift to see the contortions of those being tormented; n and God, without pity, hears their groans for all eternity.

Never did the pagans describe the inhabitants of the Elysian Fields delighting their sight in the torments of Tartarus. n

— The Christians have, like the pagans, their king of the underworld — Satan — with the difference, however, that Pluto limited himself to governing the somber empire that had fallen to him in his share, without being evil; 2 he held in his domains those who had practiced evil, because that was his mission, but he did not lead men into sin in order to enjoy and gloat over their sufferings.

Satan, however, recruits victims everywhere and rejoices in tormenting them with a legion of demons armed with pitchforks to stir them about in the fire.

There has even been serious discussion about the nature of this fire that burns but does not consume the victims; n it has even been asked whether it would be a fire of bitumen.

The Christian hell thus yields nothing to the pagan hell.

— The same considerations that, among the ancients, had caused the realm of happiness to be localized, likewise caused the place of torments to be circumscribed.

The first having been placed in the upper regions, it was natural to reserve for the second the lower places, that is, the center of the Earth, to which certain somber cavities, of terrible aspect, were believed to serve as entrances.

The Christians too, for a long time, placed there the dwelling of the damned. In this respect, let us point out yet another analogy.

The hell of the pagans contained on one side the Elysian Fields and on the other Tartarus; Olympus, the abode of the gods and of deified men, lay in the upper regions.

According to the letter of the Gospel, Jesus descended into hell, that is, into the lower places, to draw from there the souls of the just who awaited his coming.

Hell was therefore not solely a place of torment: it lay, just as for the pagans, in the lower places.

The abode of the angels, like Olympus, was in the elevated places; they placed it beyond the starry heaven, which was reputed to be limited.

— This mixture of Christian and pagan ideas has nothing surprising about it. Jesus could not at a single stroke destroy inveterate beliefs, men lacking the knowledge necessary to conceive the infinity of Space and the infinite number of worlds; the Earth for them was the center of the Universe; they knew neither its form nor its internal structure; everything was limited to their point of view: the notions of the future could not go beyond their knowledge.

Jesus found himself, then, in the impossibility of initiating them into the true state of things; but, on the other hand, not wishing by his authority to sanction accepted prejudices, he refrained from rectifying them, leaving that mission to time.

He limited himself to speaking vaguely of the blessed life, of the punishments reserved for the guilty, without ever referring in his teachings to corporeal punishments and torments, which constituted for the Christians an article of faith.

Thus it is that the ideas of the pagan hell perpetuated themselves down to our own days. And it required the diffusion of modern enlightenment, the general development of human intelligence, for justice to be done to it.

But, as nothing positive had replaced the received ideas, the long period of a blind belief was succeeded, transitorily, by the period of incredulity to which the New Revelation comes to put an end.

It was necessary to demolish in order to rebuild, since it is easier to instill just ideas in those who believe in nothing, feeling that something is lacking to them, than to do so in those who possess a robust idea, however absurd.

— Heaven and hell being localized, the Christian sects were led to admit for souls only two extreme situations: perfect happiness and absolute suffering.

Purgatory is merely an intermediate and transient position, on leaving which souls pass, without transition, to the abode of the just.

No other hypothesis is possible, given the belief in the definitive fate of the soul after death.

If there are no more than two dwellings, that of the elect and that of the damned, one cannot admit many degrees in each without admitting the possibility of passing through them and, consequently, progress.

Now, if there is progress, there is no definitive fate, and if there is a definitive fate, there is no progress.

Jesus resolved the question when he said: — “There are many mansions in my Father's house.” n The limbo.

— It is true that the Church admits a special position in particular cases.

Children who have died at a tender age, without doing any evil, cannot be condemned to eternal fire. But, also, having done no good, they have no right to supreme happiness. They remain in limbo, the Church tells us, in that never-defined situation in which, if they do not suffer, neither do they enjoy beatitude.

The latter, such a fate being irrevocably fixed, is forbidden to them forever.

Such a privation thus amounts to an eternal torment, and one all the more undeserved, inasmuch as it is certain that it did not depend upon those souls that things should happen thus.

The same applies to the savage who, not having received the grace of baptism and the enlightenment of religion, sins through ignorance, given over to his natural instincts.

Certainly, he does not have the responsibility and the merit befitting one who acts with full knowledge.

Simple logic repels such a doctrine in the name of the justice of God, which is wholly contained in these words of Christ: “To each according to his works.”

Works, yes, good or evil, but practiced voluntarily and freely, the only ones that entail responsibility.

In this case the child, the savage, and likewise the one who has not been enlightened cannot be included. Picture of the pagan hell.

— The knowledge of the pagan hell is furnished to us almost exclusively by the narratives of the poets. Homer and Virgil gave the most complete description of it, though account must be taken of the poetic requirements imposed upon the form. The description by Fénelon, in the Telemachus, although drawn from the same source as to the fundamental beliefs, has the more concise simplicity of prose. Describing the lugubrious aspect of the places, he is concerned chiefly with highlighting the kind of suffering of the guilty, dwelling on the fate of wicked kings with a view to the instruction of his royal disciple. However popular this work may be, not everyone has its description present in memory, or has meditated upon it in a way to establish comparison, and so we believe it useful to reproduce the passages that most directly concern our subject, that is, those that refer especially to individual punishments.

— Upon entering, Telemachus hears the groans of an inconsolable shade. What is, he asked it, your misfortune? Who were you on Earth? Nabopharzan, replies the shade, king of proud Babylon. At the hearing of my name all the peoples of the Orient trembled; I had myself worshiped by the Babylonians in a temple all of marble, represented by a statue of gold, at whose feet the precious perfumes of Ethiopia burned night and day; never did anyone dare to contradict me without being at once punished; day by day new pleasures were invented to make my life more and more delicious. Young and robust, how many, oh! how many pleasures still remained for me to enjoy upon the throne! But a certain woman, whom I loved and who did not return my love, made me feel clearly that I was not a god: — she poisoned me, and… I am nothing more. My ashes were yesterday enclosed with pomp in an urn of gold: they wept, they tore their hair, they pretended feignedly to throw themselves into the flames of my pyre, in order to die with me, they still go to groan beside the tomb of my ashes, but no one mourns me; my memory horrifies my own family, while here below I already suffer horrible torments.

“Telemachus, moved with compassion before this spectacle, says to it: Were you truly happy during your reign? Did you perchance feel that sweet peace without which the heart remains oppressed and downcast in the midst of delights? — No, answered the Babylonian; — I do not even know what you mean. The wise extol that peace as the sole good; as for rage, I never felt it, my heart was continually agitated by new desires of fear and of hope. I sought to stupefy myself with the agitation of my own passions, taking care to keep up that intoxication so as to render it permanent, continuous; the least interval of reason, of calm, would have been very bitter to me. Such is the peace I enjoyed; any other seems to me rather a fable, a dream. These are the goods I weep for.

“Thus speaking, the Babylonian wept like a pusillanimous man, enervated by prosperity, unaccustomed to bearing a misfortune with resignation. There were near him some slaves slain in honorable homage at his funeral. Mercury had handed them over to Charon along with their king, granting them absolute power over that king whom they had served on Earth. These shades of slaves did not fear the shade of Nabopharzan, whom they held enchained, inflicting upon him the cruelest affronts. One said to him: “Were we not men equal to you? Senseless that you were, you deemed yourself a god, to the point of forgetting your origin common to all men.” Another, to insult him, said: — “You were right not to wish to be taken for a man, for in truth you were an inhuman monster.” Yet another: — “Well then?! where are your flatterers now? you have nothing more to give, wretch! not even evil can you do any longer: here you are reduced to a slave of your slaves. The justice of the gods is slow, but it does not fail.”

“At these harsh words Nabopharzan flung himself upon the ground, tearing his hair in a fit of rage and despair. But Charon urged on the slaves: Drag him by the chain, raise him up against his will. Let him not be able to console himself by hiding his shame: it is necessary that all the shades of the Styx witness it as justification to the gods, who for so long tolerated the earthly reign of this impious man.

“And he at once catches sight, very near him, of black Tartarus exhaling dark and thick smoke, whose mephitic odor would deal death if it spread through the abode of the living. This smoke enveloped a river of fire, a whirlwind of flames, whose roar, like the most copious torrents when they plunge from high crags into deep abysses, contributed to the fact that nothing could be heard in those tenebrous places.

“Telemachus, secretly emboldened by Minerva, enters that pit without fear. He first saw a great number of men who had lived in the humblest conditions, punished for having sought riches by means of frauds, betrayals, and cruelty. There, he noted many impious hypocrites who, pretending to love religion, had used it as a fine pretext to satisfy their ambitions and to mock the credulous: those who had abused even Virtue itself, the greatest gift of the gods, were punished as the most villainous of all men. The children who had cut the throats of their fathers; the wives who had stained their hands in the blood of their husbands; the traitors who sold their country, violating all their oaths, suffered, despite everything, lesser punishments than those hypocrites. The three infernal judges willed it thus, for this reason: the hypocrites are not content with being wicked like the other impious ones, but wish to pass for good and contribute by their sham virtue to the disbelief and corruption of truth. The gods, mocked and despised by them before men, employ with pleasure all their might to avenge themselves of such insults.

“Near these, other men appear, who are commonly deemed free of blame, but whom the gods pursue without mercy: they are the ungrateful, the liars, the flatterers who praised vice, the perverse critics who sought to besmirch the purest virtue; in short, those who, judging things rashly, without knowing them thoroughly, thereby harmed the reputation of the innocent.

“Telemachus, seeing the three judges seated condemning a man, dared to ask them what his crimes were. The condemned man, taking the floor, at once exclaimed: I never did any evil; all my pleasure was to do good: I was always generous, just, liberal, and compassionate; what, then, can be reproached to me? Minos then said to him: No accusation is made against you as regards men, but did you not owe less to them than to the gods? What justice, then, is this of which you boast? Toward men, who are nothing, you never failed in any duty; you were virtuous, it is true, but you attributed that virtue only to yourself, forgetting the gods who gave it to you, all because you wished to enjoy the fruit of your virtue enclosed within yourself: you were your own divinity. But the gods, who made everything, and made it for themselves, cannot renounce their rights; and since you wished to belong to yourself and not to them, they will deliver you to yourself, forgetful of you as you forgot them. Now seek, if you can, consolation in your own heart. Here you are now forever separated from men, whom you wished to please; here you are alone with yourself, you who were your own idol: know that there is no true virtue without respect and love for the gods, to whom all is owed. Your false virtue, which for many years dazzled the naïve, is going to be confounded. Men, judging vice and virtue only by what pleases them or troubles them, are blind as to good and as to evil. Here, a divine light overturns their artificial judgments, condemning often what they admire, and at other times justifying what they condemn.

“At these words, the philosopher, as if struck by a thunderbolt, could scarcely hold himself up. The delight he had once taken in reviewing his moderation, his courage, his generous inclinations, was transformed into despair. The sight of his own heart, the enemy of the gods, brings him torments; he sees, and cannot help seeing himself; he sees the vanity of human prejudices, which he sought to flatter in all his actions. A radical revolution takes place within his whole inner being, as if all his entrails were being churned; he recognizes himself as another; he finds no support in his heart; conscience, whose testimony had been so agreeable to him, revolts against him, bitterly incriminating him for the folly, the illusion of all his virtues, which had not had for their principle and their end the worship of the Divinity, and there he is, troubled, dismayed, seized by shame, remorse, despair. The Furies do not torment him, it being enough for them to have delivered him to himself, so that he may expiate through his heart the vengeance of the despised gods. Seeking darkness, he cannot find it, for an inopportune light follows him everywhere; on all sides the penetrating rays of truth avenge the truth that he disdained to follow. All that he loved becomes hateful to him as the source of his endless ills. He murmurs to himself: O senseless one! I knew, then, neither the gods, nor men, nor myself, for I never loved the true and only good; all my steps were deranged; my wisdom was nothing but folly; my virtue was nothing but pitiless and blind pride: — I was, in the end, my own idol!

“Finally Telemachus recognized the kings condemned for abuse of power. On one side, an avenging Fury presented them with a mirror reflecting the monstrousness of their vices: there they saw, without being able to turn their eyes away, the gross vanity greedy for ridiculous praise; the cruelty toward those whom they ought to have made happy; the fear of truth, the insensibility toward virtues, the predilection for cowards and flatterers, the lack of application, the inertia, the indolence; the limitless distrust; the excessive pomp and magnificence built upon the ruin of the peoples; the ambition for vain glories at the cost of the blood of fellow citizens; the ferocity, in short, that each day seeks new delights in the tears and the despair of so many wretched ones. These kings beheld themselves constantly in that mirror, finding themselves more monstrous and hideous than the very Chimera vanquished by Bellerophon, than the Hydra of Lerna struck down by Hercules, and than Cerberus vomiting through his three throats a black and venomous blood, capable of infecting all the races of mortals that live upon the Earth.

“On the other side, another Fury injuriously repeated to them all the praises that the flatterers had lavished on them in life and showed them yet another mirror in which they saw themselves such as flattery had painted them. From the antithesis of the two pictures sprang the torment of self-love. It was to be noted that the worst among these kings were those who had received the greatest and most resplendent praises during life, since the wicked are more feared than the good and shamelessly demand the vile adulations of the poets and orators of their time.

“In the depths of those shadows, where they suffer nothing but insults and mockeries, their agonized groans are heard. Nothing surrounds them that does not repel, contradict, and confound them in contrast to what they supposed in life, mocking men, convinced that everything was made to serve them. In Tartarus, given over to all the caprices of certain slaves, these make them in turn taste the cruelest servitude; painfully humiliated, no hope remains to them of modifying or softening their captivity. Like an anvil under the hammer blows of the Cyclopes, when Vulcan urges them on in the incandescent furnaces of Mount Etna, so they remain, at the mercy of the blows of those slaves transformed into executioners.

“There Telemachus saw pale countenances, hideous and dismayed. Black is the sadness that consumes these criminals, horrified at themselves, unable to divest themselves of it as of their very nature; they have no other punishment for their faults than those same faults, they see themselves incessantly in the fullness of their enormity, presenting themselves to them in the form of horrible specters that pursue them. Seeking to escape that pursuit, they seek a death more powerful than the one that separated them from the body. In despair, they invoke a death capable of extinguishing their consciousness: they beg the abysses to absorb them, in order to flee the avenging rays of the truth that torments them, but they remain devoted to the vengeance that distills upon them drop by drop and that will never cease. The truth they dread to see constitutes itself a torment; yet they see it, and have eyes only to see it rise against them, striking them, tearing them to pieces, wrenching them from themselves, like the lightning, which, without destroying anything externally, penetrates to the core of the entrails.

“Among the beings that made his hair stand on end, Telemachus saw several ancient kings of Lydia punished for having preferred to labor the delights of an inactive life, when labor ought to be the consolation of the peoples and, as such, inseparable from royalty.

“These kings reproached one another for their blindness. One said to another, who had been his son: Did I not recommend to you so many times during life, and even before death, that you repair the ills that occurred through my negligence? Ah! wretched father! — said the son —, it was you who ruined me! it was your example that inspired in me the pomp, the pride, the voluptuousness, and the cruelty toward men! Seeing you govern with such carelessness, surrounded by infamous flatterers, I grew accustomed to prizing flattery and pleasures. I believed that men were to kings what horses and other beasts of burden are to them, that is, animals considered only insofar as they provide services and conveniences. I believed it, and it was you who made me believe it… suffering now so many ills for having imitated you. To these recriminations they joined the most bitter blasphemies, as if possessed by rage enough to tear one another to pieces.

“Like nocturnal owls, around these kings hovered the cruel suspicions, the vain fears and distrusts that avenge the peoples for the ferocity of their kings, the insatiable greed for riches, the false glory always tyrannical, and the listless softness that doubles sufferings without the compensation of solid pleasures.

“Many of these kings were seen severely punished, not for ills they had done, but for having neglected the good they could and ought to have done. All the crimes of the peoples, arising from negligence in the observance of the laws, were imputed to the kings, who must reign only so that the laws may exercise their ministry. There were also imputed to them all the disorders arising from pomp, luxury, and the other excesses that drive men to violence, instigating them to the acquisition of goods in contempt of the laws. Above all, the severity fell upon the kings who, instead of being good and vigilant shepherds of the peoples, took care only to ravage the flock, like devouring wolves.

“What saddened Telemachus most, however, was to see in that abyss of darkness and ills a great number of kings who, having passed on Earth for the best, condemned themselves to the punishments of Tartarus for having let themselves be guided by cunning and wicked men. Such punishment corresponded to the ills they had allowed to be perpetrated in the name of their authority. Moreover, the greater part of these kings were neither good nor evil, such was their weakness; the ignorance of truth did not frighten them, and just as they never experienced the pleasure of virtue, they could never have made it consist in the practice of good.”

Sketch of the Christian hell.

The opinion of the theologians on hell is summed up in the following citations. n This description, being taken from the sacred authors and from the lives of the saints, may all the better be considered the expression of orthodox faith on the matter, inasmuch as it is reproduced at every moment, with slight variants, in the sermons of the evangelical pulpit and in the pastoral instructions.

[First citation.]

— 1 “The demons are pure Spirits, and the damned, presently in hell, may be considered pure Spirits, since only the soul descends there, and the remains given over to the earth are transformed into grasses, into plants, into minerals and liquids, undergoing unconsciously the constant metamorphoses of matter. The damned, however, like the saints, must rise again on the day of the last judgment, resuming, never again to leave them, the same fleshly bodies that clothed them in life. The elect will rise again, however, in purified and resplendent bodies, and the damned in bodies stained and disfigured by sin. This will distinguish them, there being no longer in hell pure Spirits, but men like us. Consequently, hell is a physical, geographical, material place, since it must be peopled by terrestrial creatures, endowed with feet, hands, mouth, tongue, teeth, ears, eyes similar to ours, blood in the veins and sensitive nerves.” [First commentary.]

Where will this hell be? Some doctors have placed it in the very bowels of our globe; others, on we know not what planet, without the problem having been resolved by any council.

We are, then, on this point, reduced to conjectures; 4 the only thing affirmed is that this hell, wherever it exists, is a world composed of material elements, although without sun, without stars, without moon, sadder and more inhospitable, devoid of all seed and of the beneficial appearances that may perchance still be found in the most arid regions of this world in which we sin.

The more circumspect theologians do not venture, like the Egyptians, the Hindus, and the Greeks, to describe the horrors of that abode, limiting themselves to showing it to us as premises in the little that Scripture says of it, the lake of fire and brimstone of the Apocalypse and the worms of Isaiah, those worms that swarm eternally upon the corpses of Tophet, and the demons tormenting the men whom they ruined, and the men weeping, gnashing their teeth, according to the expression of the evangelists.

[Second citation.]

“Saint Augustine does not agree that these physical sufferings are merely reflections of moral sufferings and sees, in a true lake of brimstone, worms and real serpents glutting themselves on the bodies, joining their stings to those of the fire. He claims further, according to a verse of Saint Mark, that this strange fire, although material like ours and acting upon material bodies, will preserve them as salt preserves the bodies of victims. The damned, victims always sacrificed and always alive, will feel the torture of that fire which burns without destroying, penetrating their skin; they will be soaked and saturated by it in all their members, in the marrow of their bones, in the pupil of their eyes, in the most recondite and sensitive fibers of their being. The crater of a volcano, could they plunge into it, would be for them a place of refreshment and repose.” [Second commentary.]

Thus speak with all assurance the most timid, discreet, and moderate theologians; they do not deny that there are in hell other corporeal torments, but they say that to affirm it they lack sufficient knowledge, at least as positive as that which was given to them concerning the horrible torment of the fire and the worms.

There are, however, theologians more daring or more enlightened who give of hell more detailed, varied, and complete descriptions.

And although it is not known in what place of Space this hell is situated, there are saints who have seen it. They did not go there with the lyre in hand, like Orpheus; with sword in fist, like Ulysses, but transported in Spirit.

[Third citation.]

“Among this number is Saint Teresa. One would say, from the saint's narrative, that there is a city in hell: — she saw there, at least, a kind of alley long and narrow like those that abound in old cities, and she traversed it horrified, walking upon muddy and fetid ground, in which monstrous reptiles swarmed. She was, however, halted in her march by a wall that blocked the alley, in which wall there was a niche where she took shelter, though without being able to explain the occurrence. It was, she says, the place destined for her if she abused, in life, the graces granted by God in her cell at Ávila. Despite the marvelous ease with which she had penetrated that niche, she could not sit, or lie down, nor keep herself standing. Nor could she leave. Those horrible walls, lowering themselves over her, enveloped her, pressed her as if they were animated by a movement of their own. It seemed to her that they were drowning her, strangling her, at the same time that they flayed her and tore her into pieces. On feeling herself burn, she experienced, likewise, every sort of anguish. Without hope of succor, all was darkness around her, although through that darkness she perceived, not without dread, the hideous alley in which she found herself, with its filthy surroundings. This spectacle was as intolerable to her as the very constraints of the prison. n

“This was, no doubt, but a small corner of hell. Other spiritual travelers were more favored, for they saw great cities in hell, like enormous braziers: Babylon and Nineveh, Rome itself, with its palaces and temples ablaze, all the inhabitants chained; traffickers at their counters, priests gathered with courtesans in banquet halls, leaded to their wailing chairs, raising to their lips red flaming cups. Servants kneeling in seething cesspools, arms outstretched, and princes from whose hands the melted gold flowed in devouring lava. Others saw in hell endless plains, cultivated by famished peasants who, harvesting nothing from those smoking fields, from those sterile seeds, devoured one another, then dispersed, as numerous as before, lean, voracious, and in a band, going to seek far away, in vain, happier lands. Other wandering colonies of the damned immediately replaced them. Still others relate that they saw in hell mountains beset with precipices, moaning forests, dry wells, fountains fed with tears, brooks of blood, whirlwinds of snow in deserts of ice, barks crewed by the despairing, sailing seas without shore. They saw, in a word, all that the pagans saw: a lugubrious reflection of the Earth with its respective natural sufferings eternalized, and even dungeons, gallows, and instruments of torture forged by our own hands.

“There are, in effect, demons that, the better to torment men in their bodies, take on bodies. Some have the wings of bats, horns, scaly cuirasses, paws armed with claws, sharp teeth, presenting themselves to us armed with swords, tongs, pincers, saws, gridirons, bellows, all glowing, exercising no other office throughout eternity, in relation to human flesh, than that of butchers and cooks; others, transformed into lions or enormous vipers, drag their prey to solitary caverns; these transform themselves into ravens to tear out the eyes of certain guilty ones, and those into flying dragons, ready to hurl themselves onto the backs of the victims, snatching them away, terrified, bloodied, screaming, through tenebrous spaces, to fling them at last into tanks of brimstone. Here, clouds of locusts, of gigantic scorpions, the sight of which produces nausea and shudders, and the contact, convulsions; beyond, polycephalous monsters, gaping voracious throats, shaking upon their misshapen heads their manes of asps, grinding the damned with bloody jaws to vomit them up chewed, yet alive, for they are immortal.

“These demons of palpable forms, which so visibly recall the gods of Amenti and of Tartarus, as well as the idols worshiped by the Phoenicians, the Moabites, and other gentiles neighboring upon Judea, these demons do not act at random, each having its function. The evil they practice in hell is in relation to the evil they inspired and caused to be committed on Earth. n The damned are punished in all their organs and senses, because they also offended God through all their organs and senses. The delinquents of gluttony are chastised by the demons of gluttony, the slothful by those of sloth, the lustful by those of debauchery, and so on, in a variety as great as that of the sins. They will be cold, while burning, and hot, while frozen, equally avid for movement and for repose; thirsting and famished; a thousand times more fatigued than a slave at the end of the day, more sick than the dying, more broken and covered with sores than the martyrs, and that forever.

“No demon shirks, nor will ever shirk, the sinister discharge of his task, perfectly disciplined and faithful in the execution of the vindictive orders they received. Indeed, without this, what would hell be? The patients would rest if the executioners quarreled or grew weary. But there is no rest nor disputes for any of them, for, wicked and innumerable as they are, stretching from one extreme of the abyss to the other, never were there seen upon the Earth subjects more docile to their princes, armies more obedient to their chiefs, or monastic communities more humble and submissive to their superiors. n

“Almost nothing is known of the demonic rabble, of those vile Spirits who compose the legions of vampires, toads, scorpions, ravens, hydras, salamanders, and other nameless animals; the names are known, however, of many of the princes who command such legions, among them Belphegor, the demon of lust; Abaddon or Apollyon, of homicide; Beelzebub, of impure desires, or lord of the flies that engender corruption; Mammon, of avarice; Moloch, Belial, Baalgad, Ashtaroth, and many others, not to speak of their supreme chief, the somber archangel who in Heaven was called Lucifer and in hell is called Satan.

“Here is summed up the idea given to us of hell, under the point of view of its physical nature and also of the physical punishments suffered there. Peruse the writings of the fathers and of the ancient doctors; question the pious legends; observe the sculptures and panels of our churches; heed what is said from the pulpits, and you will know still more.”

— The Author accompanies this picture with the following reflections, the import of which we shall try to make each one understand:

[Fourth citation.]

“The resurrection of bodies is a miracle, but God works yet a second miracle, giving to these mortal bodies, already once used up by the passing trials of life, already once annihilated — the virtue of subsisting without dissolving in a furnace where the very metals would volatilize. Let it be said that the soul is its own executioner, that God does not pursue it and merely abandons it in the unhappy state it chose (although that eternal abandonment of an unhappy and suffering being seems incompatible with divine goodness), so be it; but what is said of the soul and of spiritual punishments cannot in any way be said of bodies and of their respective punishments, for the perpetuation of which it is no longer enough that God remain impassible, but, on the contrary, that He intervene and act, without which the bodies would succumb.

“The theologians suppose, therefore, that God works, effectively, after the resurrection of bodies, that second miracle of which we spoke. That, in the first place, He draws from the sepulchers that devoured them, our bodies of clay; He draws them out such as they descended there with their original infirmities and the successive degradations of age; He restores us to that state, decrepit, chilly, gouty, full of needs, sensitive to a bee sting, marked by the ravages of life and of death, and the first miracle is done: then, to these rickety bodies, ready to return to the dust whence they came, He grants properties they never had — immortality, that gift which, in His wrath (say rather in His mercy), He had withdrawn from Adam on his leaving Eden — and behold the second miracle complete. Adam, when immortal, was invulnerable, and, ceasing to be invulnerable, he became mortal; death followed close upon pain.

“The resurrection thus reestablishes us neither in the physical conditions of innocent man, nor in those of the guilty, being rather a resurrection of our miseries alone, but with an addition of new miseries, infinitely more horrible. It is, in some sort, a true creation, and the most malicious that the imagination has, perchance, dared to conceive. God changes His mind, and, in order to add to the spiritual torments of sinners carnal torments that can last eternally, He suddenly transforms, by the effect of His power, the laws and properties He Himself established from the beginning for material compounds, He resurrects sickly and corrupted flesh and, joining by an indestructible knot those elements that of themselves tend to separate, He maintains and perpetuates, against the natural order, that living rottenness, casting it into the fire, not to purify it, but to preserve it just as it is, sensitive, suffering, burning, horrible, and, as He wills it — immortal.

“By this miracle God sets Himself up as one of the infernal executioners, for if the damned can attribute their spiritual ills to themselves alone, in compensation they can impute the others to God alone. It was apparently too little, the abandonment, after death, to sadness, to repentance, to the anguish of a soul that feels it has lost the supreme good. According to the theologians, God will go to seek them in that night, at the bottom of that abyss, calling them momentarily to life, not to console them, but to clothe them in a horrendous, flaming, imperishable body, more pestilent than the tunic of Deianira, then abandoning them forever.

“Even so He will not abandon them forever, absolutely, since Heaven and Earth subsist only by the permanent act of His ever-active will. God will therefore have, unceasingly, these damned ones at hand, to prevent the fire from being extinguished in their bodies, consuming them, and willing that they contribute perpetually by their perpetual torments to the edification of the chosen ones.”

[Final commentaries.]

— We said, and with reason, that the hell of the Christians exceeded that of the pagans.

Indeed, in Tartarus one sees guilty ones tortured by remorse, before their victims and their crimes, overwhelmed by those whom they trampled in earthly life; we see them flee the light that penetrates them, seeking in vain to hide from the gazes that pursue them; there pride is brought low and humiliated, all bearing the stigma of their past, punished by their own faults, to such a point that, for some, it is enough to deliver them to themselves without there being any need to increase their chastisements.

Yet they are shades, that is, souls with fluidic bodies, images of their earthly life; there one does not see men resume the fleshly body to suffer materially, with fire penetrating their skin, saturating them to the marrow of their bones.

Neither does one see the refinement of tortures that constitute the basis of the Christian hell. Inflexible but just judges pronounce the sentence proportional to the offense, whereas in the empire of Satan all are confounded in the same tortures, with materiality as the basis, and all equity banished.

Incontestably, there are today, within the Church itself, many sensible men who do not admit these things to the letter, seeing in them rather simple allegories whose meaning ought to be interpreted. These opinions, however, are individual and do not make law, the belief in the material hell, with its consequences, continuing to constitute an article of faith.

— We might ask how there are men who have managed to see these things in ecstasy, if they do not in fact exist. It is not the place here to explain the origin of the fantastic images, so often reproduced with the semblance of reality.

We will say only that it is necessary to consider, in principle, that ecstasy is the most uncertain of all revelations, n inasmuch as the state of overexcitement does not always entail a detachment of the soul so complete as to impose itself upon absolute belief, often denoting the reflection of the previous day's preoccupations.

The ideas with which the Spirit nourishes itself and of which the brain, or rather the corresponding perispiritual envelope, retains the form or the imprint, are reproduced amplified as in a mirage, under vaporous forms that cross, confound themselves, and compose an extravagant whole.

The ecstatics of all cults have always seen things in relation to the faith with which they presume themselves penetrated, it being therefore not extraordinary that Saint Teresa and others, like her saturated with infernal ideas by the descriptions, verbal or written, should have had visions, which are not, properly speaking, more than reproductions by the effect of a nightmare.

A fanatical pagan would rather have seen Tartarus and the Furies, or Jupiter, on Olympus, wielding the thunderbolt. [1] A little Savoyard, to whom his parish priest was giving the description of the future life, asked him whether everyone there ate white bread, as in Paris.

[2] Sermon preached in Montpellier in 1860.

[3] “The blessed, without leaving the place they occupy, will be able to draw away in a certain manner by reason of their gift of intelligence and of distinct sight, in order to consider the tortures of the damned, and, seeing them, will not only be insensible to the pain, but will even be filled with joy and render thanks to God for their own happiness, witnessing the ineffable calamity of the impious.” (Saint Thomas Aquinas.)

[4] Sermon preached in Paris in 1861.

[5] The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter III.

[6] These citations are taken from the work entitled Hell, by Auguste Callet.

[7] In this vision are recognized all the characteristics of nightmares, it being probable that what happened to Saint Teresa was of this kind of phenomena.

[8] A singular punishment, in truth, this of being able to continue on a larger scale the practice of the lesser evil done on Earth. More rational would it be that the evildoers themselves suffer the consequences of that evil, instead of giving themselves the pleasure of procuring it for others.

[9] These same demons, rebellious to God as regards good, are of an exemplary docility as regards the practice of evil. None shirks or slackens throughout eternity. What a singular metamorphosis in one who had been created pure and perfect like the angels! Is it not astonishing to see them give examples of harmony, of unalterable concord, when men do not even know how to live in peace on Earth, but rather lacerate one another? Seeing the refinement of the chastisements reserved for the damned and comparing their situation to that of the demons, one may well ask which are the more deserving of pity — the victims or the executioners.

[10] The Spirits' Book, nos. 443 and 444.