Heaven & Hell
Egypt
‘Harrowing of Hell’
Chora Church, Istanbul, ~1315
14th c. manuscript
Hospices de Beaune, mid 15th c.
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the dead rise from their graves. Their souls are weighed by the archangel Michael. Above the earth
hangs heaven, with a golden background.
Centre Panel - Christ and the archangel Michael, who holds a scale. Next to them are Mary (on the
left) and John the Baptist (right).
On the second row are the twelve apostles. Behind them are a pope, a king, a monk, and to the right
three women.
The outer panels show the final destinations: paradise and hell.
The angels in the upper side panels hold symbols from Christ's Passion: the cross, the crown of thorns,
the stick with the spunge with vinegar, the lance that was used to prick into his side, and the pillar
against which he was flagellated.
Dante (d. 1321)
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Dante conceives of hell as a funnel-shaped indentation beneath the earth's surface which grows
increasingly narrow until at the very center of the earth it converges upon the form of Satan.
At the moment of his fall (as we learn in the final couple of pages of Inferno), Satan plunged
headlong from heaven, crashed into the earth, penetrated it to its center, and remains lodged there
at the point furthest removed from the outer edges of the concentrically circular universe (and so,
at least from that point of view, furthest removed from God).
In his descent to the center, Dante passes through the Gate of Hell, crosses the River Acheron,
bypasses three additional areas in the circles of incontinence and comes to city walls inside of
which the most serious sins, heresy, violence, and fraud, are punished. Surrounding the city walls
as a moat is the Marsh of Styx, the fourth circle of Incontinence.
Immediately inside the walls heretics are punished, and then, in perhaps the most elaborate of all
the circles, six categories of souls are punished for violence against neighbor, self, and God, in a
single circle with three very different terrains.
An impossibly deep and steep abyss separates violence from fraud - a series of ten concentric
ditches carved out of the inner wall of the funnel, crossed by a series of spoke-like roadways that
bridge the ditches and by which the poets can make their way to the center. In each ditch a
different category of fraud is punished in a different, uniquely appropriate, way.
Finally the lowest area of all in hell is located at the bottom of a deep circular well. Here, at the
center of evil, all the infernal waters, and all the tears and blood of suffering humanity gather and
freeze in the total absence of love. Here those souls are trapped in the ice who have been
treacherous, that is, fraudulent to those who especially deserved loyalty.
At the center of this frozen lake, his torso coming up above the surface, Satan himself, with his
three faces, perpetually gnaws on Brutus and Cassius and Judas Iscariot.
Hieronymus Bosch (late 15th c.)
Michelangelo, Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel ~ 1540
Hell Today?
• Time Magazine - Cover story on Hell, 2011
• http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29
307,2065275,00.html
• Pope John Paul II
– heaven, hell or purgatory is that they are states of
being of a spirit (angel/demon) or human soul, rather
than places
– "Incorporeal things are not in place after a manner
known and familiar to us, in which way we say that
bodies are properly in place; but they are
in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances,
a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us." [St.
Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologiae, Supplement,
Q69, a1, reply 1]