On hell – Stephen Greenblatt in NYRB (in 2018):

‘“I think hell’s a fable,” the famous professor proclaimed—a surprising declaration not only because it was made in the late sixteenth century, when very few people would have dared to say such a thing, but also because he was at that moment in conversation with a devil to whom he was offering to sell his soul. The professor in question was Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan tragedy. Bored with his mastery of philosophy, medicine, and law, Faustus longs for forbidden knowledge. “Where are you damned?” he asks Mephastophilis, the devil whom he has conjured up. “In hell,” comes the prompt reply, but Faustus remains skeptical: “How comes it then that thou art out of hell?” The devil’s answer is quietly devastating: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Did Marlowe, a notorious freethinker who declared (according to a police report) that “the first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe,” actually believe in the literal existence of hell?’

(…)

‘It is difficult to say, but it is clear that hell was good for the theater business in his time, as exorcism has been good for the film industry in our own.’

(…)

‘The Hebrews wrote their entire Bible without mentioning hell. They had a realm they called sheol, but it was merely the place of darkness and silence where all the dead—the just as well as the wicked—wound up. For the ancient rabbis, heaven was a place where you could study the Torah all the time. Its opposite was not a place of torture; it was more like a state of depression so deep that you could not even open a book.’

(…)

‘The Penguin Book of Hell does not offer any explanation of how Christianity, from a contradictory jumble of ancient notions (Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman), arrived at the full-fledged nightmare that the editor calls “the most powerful and persuasive construct of the human imagination in the Western tradition.” Plato made an important contribution by imagining graded punishments for sinners, as did Virgil, by giving the underworld a more graphically convincing topography and by urging anyone with a secret crime to atone for it before it’s too late.’

(…)

‘The gospels’ good news is closely conjoined, on the authority of God’s own son, with repeated dire warnings about a place where the worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched, and there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

(…)

‘Demons—here called the “angels of Tartarus”—carry out special tortures designed for particular types of sinners. Hence, for example, a “lector”—a reader of the lessons in church services—who did not follow God’s commandments: “And an angel in charge of his torments arrived with a long flaming knife, with which he sliced the lips of this man and his tongue as well.” The eyewitness’s expressions of horror are answered by the reassurance from his guardian angel that it is all part of God’s plan: “I mourned and groaned for the human race. In response, the angel said to me, ‘Why do you mourn? Are you more merciful than God?’”’ (…)
‘The problem is not tenderness on my part—an impulse to forgive and forget or a hope for the criminal’s repentance and rehabilitation—but an inability to enter into a metaphysical system ruled by an omnipotent creator whose endless love is shadowed by an endless rage.’

(…)

‘Jews always had a prominent place in Christian hell; in the celebrated twelfth-century mosaics on the wall of the basilica in Torcello, they boil in a special pot of their own.’

(…)

‘But already in the sixth century, one of the first great writers about hell, Pope Gregory the Great, ruefully acknowledged that the warning is not very effective. And the long history of human behavior bears witness to the truth of this acknowledgment. The strictly instrumental use of hell finally boils down to a remark quoted by Voltaire: “My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your servant, your tailor, and your lawyer to believe in it.”’

(…)

‘But notwithstanding the hell-monger’s intentions, the burning child leads us away from theology and toward Freud: the words “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” lie at the center of one of his most famous dream interpretations.

(…)

‘Hell is the last recourse of political impotence. You console yourself—you manage to stay asleep, as Freud might say—by imagining that the loathsome characters you detest will meet their comeuppance in the afterlife.
But Voltaire and the Enlightenment carried a different message: wake up. Throw out the whole hopelessly impotent fantasy; it is, in any case, the tool not only of the victims but also of the victimizers. We must fight the criminals here and now, in the only world where we can hope to see justice.’

Read the article here.

Father, don’t you see I’m burning?

(My own son, 3 years old, often shouts at me: ‘Daddy, look at me. Put away your phone. Look at me.’ Probably he is burning as well.)

The only world, yes, but what if justice eludes us all the time?

Hell in afterlife, in order to regulate human behavior didn’t work out well.

Hell, here, as regulator of human behavior, didn’t produce very convincing results either.

And of course, the Jews have a special pot of their own.