The Story of Hell

Satan is Boring

Hell is boring. Dante understood this in a way that still impacts us with its power: in hell, you do the same damned thing over and over both because you want to and because you have to.

At the very center hell--and at the bottom, stuck in the drain of the cosmos as it were-- Satan stands encased in ice, miserably chewing sinners, flapping his wings, his face a mess of tears, blood, and snot, endlessly and mindlessly rebelling against God. Satan is boring, not frightful, in Dante's scheme. At first sight, Satan is pretty scary, but if you stood watching him for a few days or even a few hours, you'd get tired of it. "Let's move on, ok?" you would ask Virgil.

All the other sinners are boring, too, ultimately. If Dante the pilgrim had stuck around talking to them much longer than he did, he would have run out of things to say, and the damned would have said the same thing over and over. Imagine talking to Farinata for more than, say, 15 minutes. He would drone on and on about his family and how important he is, and you'd want to tell him to shut up but he wouldn't. Because he's is damned and so he will be talking about himself forever. How boring.

C. S. Lewis captured something of this cyclic element of forever turning against God's love in his magnificent The Great Divorce. In the endlessly sprawling city of Hell, people re-live their obsessions again and again, making everyone else want to move away from everyone else to some more distant point where you don't have to listen to others talk about themselves all the time, though you will continue to talk about yourself to anyone nearby. Artists, mothers, skeptics, everyone, yammer on and on. One reason they can't handle heaven is that they would  have to forget themselves to stay in heaven , and by definition being damned is being incurvatus est for all eternity. And we all know how boring self absorbed people are because we are all self-absorbed and damned to that incurving if it weren't for God's grace busting us loose.

Dante manages to tell a good story because he keeps moving through hell, seeing the sights on his way  back into the light, back to daytime on Mount Purgatory, and ultimately to the astonishing paradox of lighted nighttime in heaven as he ascends through levels of light up through the circles of stars, and then finally to see the love that moves the sun and stars. His movement as pilgrim allows him (and us) to keep the story-line moving, and this parallels our own pilgrimage through this present time. We move through time, never pausing for long because we are temporal creatures and are incapable of standing still, even if we wanted to. Though it sometimes feels as if our lives are passing far too quickly, that brief life is better than being frozen in an eternity of hateful repetition--being stuck in hell.

Dante the artist pulls off something marvelous--showing the spiritual truth of sin by telling a story of a man's movement through the immobility of hell. Yes, Francesca is moving, and yes the damned souls in the tar can jump in and out of it, and others can walk, crawl, or chew, but they make these motions over and over, mindlessly, without respite, and this is a kind of immobility. Dante tells us the truth of hell's boredom by coming up with the expedience of his journey. Part of Dante's artistic brilliance is to come up with this plot: the Inferno is a swiftly moving story about a place of ultimate boredom where nothing changes.

Hell, where everything is always the same

"It's All There In Plato"

At the very end of the Chronicles of Narnia, at the end of the book The Last Battle, Professor Digory makes the comment: "It's all there in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools." Digory is a character in several of the Narnia books, both as an adult and as a child who spent some time in Narnia. He speaks as a voice of reason, but of a certain kind of reason--one that is tempered with a transcendent viewpoint, a take on reality that says there is the real and then there is the really real that the real depends on (read that again; I think I got it right). Narnia is not a straightforward platonic version of our existence; rather, both Narnia and our world are reflections of a more perfect world, which you can call heaven if you want to, though that is not exactly accurate.

It's all there in Plato!

The point is that Earth and Narnia are real enough--food, war, friendship, sunshine, painful things are genuinely there and not delusions; but these are only impermanent, insubstantial instantiations of something even more solid, enduring, immutable.  Narnia and Earth are not somehow lesser places that in gnostic fashion are to be escaped from. Digory’s comments have more to do with the correct perception that as real as this present existence feels, the present corporeal world is relatively mutable, even insubstantial, compared with what is really Real.

Compare all that with St. Paul. In Colossians he writes, "Set your minds on things above, not on what is on Earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." In another place he writes of some whose minds are set on earthly things: "their end is destruction, their god is appetite," whereas Christians are citizens of heaven, and they will be transformed from a humble state to a glorified state that partakes with the deified body of Christ (Phil. 3. 19-21). I could easily cherry pick other passages that sound platonic, which is an argument that some informed have made: that Christianity is merely warmed over, plagiarized, dumbed-down Platonic thought. But such passages would help prove that the Christian vision, embodied in the Narnia stories and in Augustine’s writing, reflect a solid biblical witness: this earth is passing away, and we will eventually wake up to the more solid reality.

From this point on, I could multiply examples from philosophy, poetry, music, architecture, and so on, to show how the Western tradition in its mainstream Christian form helps us see that all those physical things--sound waves in air, ink on paper, electrical activity in brains, stone shaped into pleasing shapes--are in a sense only carriers of a truth that goes beyond the supposedly solid, material elements. The upshot is this: culturally, we are in a position where these ideas seem foolish. When we think of the “spiritual,” we tend to imagine smoky, wispy realities that are intangible. One reason to study older works of art, theology, and philosophy is that they can help us break out of this contemporary prison of thought.

It’s all there in Plato, in the sense that, as the Bible witnesses, our perceptions of the solidity of this world is an optical illusion that needs healing for us to get to Real Truth.

This is an icon of the Harrowing of Hell, but it's a great metaphor for The Christian version of coming out of Plato's cave.