Pope Benedict wants to revive the concept of hell. Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent, revisits its depictions in literature
Pope Benedict regrets . . . that hell is not talked about anymore. He said so in a sermon on a visit to Rome's Fidene suburb last Sunday. "Jesus came to tell us everyone is wanted in paradise, and that hell, about which little gets said today, exists and is eternal for those who shut their hearts to his love," he said.
So, hell hasn't gone away, you know, not even in Ireland this week, when so much else has.
Theologians would have it that,like love and marriage, it's the same with heaven and hell: you can't have one without the other. Though they wouldn't put it like that.
Important to belief in both is the concept of free will - if everyone were predestined for heaven, where would the freedom be there?
Hell, then, is that state designated for those who willingly, "with full knowledge and full consent", as the old catechism would have it, turn their backs on God.
Belief in hell, of late, is not what it used to be. This, it must be said, is not something many regret. It is unlikely there will be much celebration at the revival initiated by Pope Benedict.
One group, however, may greet its return with more enthusiasm than most. I refer to our artists, that segment of humanity who put such vivid flesh on the concept in literature.
There was Dante, famously in his Divine Comedy(not the group fronted by Neil Hannon). Dante lived from 1265 to 1321. He saw hell, so to speak, as a great inverted cone that pierced the centre of the Earth. At the top was the point where Lucifer and his angels hit the earth, like a meteorite, when cast from heaven. Over the gates to the underworld are inscribed the words, "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"
At its core of nine circles resides the arch-traitor himself, Lucifer, weeping as he relentlessly chews on the bodies of three other traitors, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. With Jeffrey Archer nowhere to be seen.
Then there was John Milton who, in his Paradise Lost(1667), described hell as A dungeon horrible, on all sides round/As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible/Serv'd only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doelful shades, where peace/And rest can never dwell, hope never comes/That comes to all.
We learned it at school. Just the thing for adolescent imaginations. And then there was Fr Arnall's hellfire sermon in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just in case Milton didn't get to us.
Hell, said Fr Arnall, is "an abode of demons and lost souls [ a bit like our class at school] filled with fire and smoke . . . It is a never-ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air . . . All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as a vast reeking sewer . . ."
Not much left to the imagination there.
Personally, I am attracted to the attitude of John Pake Casserly, an old neighbour at home in Ballaghaderreen.
Once asked whether, when he died, he would go to heaven or hell, he replied "I don't mind. I have friends in both places."
He died in 1999 and has been resting with friends since.