Hell Everywhere

Hell is not a Christian invention, though ignorant Atheists might try to say so. Religions from around the world have imagined a realm of divine punishment, and the representations of these ultimate scenes of judgment/punishment speak to a deep need for the Law to be carried out. C. S. Lewis, following the Apostle Paul and the rest of the Great Tradition of Christian thought, points out in Mere Christianity that all people know the Law (and Lewis provides support with the Appendix to The Abolition of Man, in which he lists the varieties of cultures that universally say things like don't steal, don't cheat on your wife). But Lewis goes on to say that no one keeps the Law. And then Lewis takes the next step, the one that we don't like taking because of our fallen nature--we habitually make excuses for why we didn't keep a law. We refuse to repent, in other words. 

The Law is engraved on our hearts, but our clouded brains and occluded inward vision keep us from knowing clearly how we have failed, and we--sinful brats that we are--pretend that we didn't do anything that bad or that we didn't do anything bad at all. But we can never escape our guilt and our dodges, so we suppress them. But these suppressions inevitably rise to the surface in mutated ways--hence the visions of Hell in so many cultures. 

We know something is wrong with us, but we cannot bring ourselves to see just how bad it is outside of the grace of God that comes to us in the fullness of the Law (Jesus, for instance, on the Sermon on the Mount says, yes you did commit adultery. Yes, you did lie. Yes, you did murder. Every single one of you. Balderdash, we reply. Jesus is just using Semitic exaggeration. He doesn't really mean what he said. We dodge). 

Depictions of Hell arise in distorted ways, though, because we want to minimize our own culpability and heighten that of others, so, like the Chinese hell, horrible people--people unlike decent folk--like ourselves--get boiled alive again and again, or torn apart by demons, or are grilled forever. Or mostly forever. One aspect of Buddhist hells is that the torment ends after a certain number of eons, and the sinner is reborn into a new life of destiny. Reincarnation in Eastern religions sometimes is preceded by a billion years in hell with demons who are actually purgative forces of Karma. Though hell still hurts.  You can even tour Chinese hell with the kids if you are looking for something to do on a weekend.

So, Muslim hell, Buddhist hell, Shinto hell, Zoroastrian hell--humans with a religious bent build hells because we know deep down that humans deserve judgment. But also deep down, we screen ourselves from judgment, finessing the hard words of Jesus by imagining hell might have a termination of some kind or that we ourselves won't be there, only the really, really wicked people will. 

How might this play out in popular culture? One way is that depictions of hell are horribly, horribly wrong, for the most part. Whether it is hell in Constantine, or hell in What Dreams may Come or hell in Jacob's Ladder, the reality of final separation from God, that Love that moves the heavens and the stars as Dante puts it, is deflated by poor theology and the need for entertainment. In some ways, there isn't really a problem with this on one level--movies are fantasy machines that allow us to escape our humdrum lives. The problem comes when someone watches something like Beetlejuice, where hell is obviously a joke, a prop for some Tim Burton-esque fun and so gets reinforcement that separation from the Maker is a residue of primitive belief, something fit only for movie fun; or someone watches something like the sci-fi/horror crossover Event Horizon and thinks that Christians really believe hell is a place of torture and thus cannot in any form or shape be taken seriously.  

What might be an antidote to false religious understandings of hell and false pop culture representations? You know the answer to that. The best Christian theology, the best art, and the best literature on the subject. Augustine. Dante. Milton. Lewis. Enjoy watching Homer Simpson in hell. It's just entertainment. Visit the Chinese hell parks. It's interesting culture stuff. But if you want the inside straight dope on what it means, turn to the real experts. 

Literature is Good for You

Simone Weil is one tough cookie. Her writings are both luminous and infuriating, enlightening and neurotic. But this isn’t about the relative merit of her work. Weil’s influence is assured, regardless of where one comes down on the clarity or helpfulness of her ideas about God, suffering, prayer, and salvation. Her unique vocabulary makes her difficult to understand, and I am not going to comment on the contentious possibilities of her work, though many readers across multiple denominational fences have found her to be inspiring. 

What I am interested in is Weil’s response to literature and what this can tell us about the inherent power of great  literature. What Weil can help us see is that the contemporary academic approach to literature censors some of the best things great literature can do for us. Weil--a mystic, a philosopher, a non-Marxist leftist, a klutz who tried to live out the Gospel--read literature like The Iliad or George Herbert’s poems and was lifted to a higher vision than the secular realm can account for. Literature at its best can have an intrinsic power that is now more or less denied in the secular academy. 

“Literature” is now a subject conditioned by academic speculation, controlled in classroom contexts, and burdened with au courant critical theory. At least that is what it has become for most people who encounter literature in the context of current academic study. Weil’s encounter with the power of literature helps us see that the boundaries between literature and theology is thin and permeable, and this is a good thing. Her reading of Greek classics and British poetry, for instance, flies in the face of most contemporary literature professors, yet Weil has far more academic and even leftist credentials in her little finger than an entire English department faculty will ever have. And she says that literature can show us something of God. 

Take, for example, the metaphysical poet George Herbert. Weil, who suffered from excruciating migraine headaches, learned to recite Herbert’s poem “Love” in order to concentrate and to lessen the pain. The internalizing of Herbert’s God-enraptured poetry helped ease Weil into Christian faith by helping her discover the palpable love of God, and this is a use of literature scorned by or ignored by nearly all modern academia. 

 

Another example. Weil also thought that The Iliad was suffused with a vision of life comporting with the deepest insights of the Christian vision of human boundedness. The epic showed that all human beings are subject to “force,” the violent necessities of passion, genetics, psychology, and culture. We are trapped but we know we want to be free. We hate violence, fear death, and just want to go home, yet when the blood lust of war strikes us, we want to kill and subjugate. Both sides--Greek and Trojan--and all warriors--major, minor, heroic or cowardly--are caught up beyond self-control, and Force rules all, making all turn temporarily into hateful monsters. When Force has run its course, for a while anyway, everyone returns to sanity and hates what he has become, but he will succumb again in short order until something breaks. Weil’s interesting take on the poem might or might not be true, but the point here is that she found Great Literature to be something more than a subject to write essays for in an English class. The Iliad offers one of the profoundest views ever composed in artistic form of human captivity and the hunger for freedom from necessity. Weil claims that literature at its best achieves an almost religious quality of revelation. 

Katherine T. Brueck, in her  The Redemption of Tragedy: the Literary Vision of Simone Weil, uses Weil’s ideas about literature to question recent academic trends that turn away from considering how and why literature can speak to us of pressing human realities. The qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty are laughed at in many (most?) colleges and universities, but Brueck deploys Weil's experiences  to challenge the hegemonic discourse (and grading practices) of institutionalized secular education. This so far is a minority opinion, but that doesn't matter. It is the truth. 

Speaking of Classical

Jay Heinrichs' book Thank You For Arguing is a nice introduction to how classical rhetoric can be repackaged for life in the 21st Century. The subtitle of the book, "What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion," points to the wide-ranging nature of the book. Heinrichs sometimes comes off a bit too cute here and there, but the book as a whole is a superb introduction to the power of classical rhetoric.

The book is broken up into numerous chapters, each of which explains a piece of classical rhetoric, supplying examples and summaries. It's a very useful tool either to gain an introduction to the discipline or to refresh one's familiarity with the nuts and bolts of how rhetoric can work in daily life.

Here in this season of political upheaval, it is also a good handbook on how bad some arguments can get, even while those arguments persuade people who don't know how to think through arguments.

Return of the Classical

Although it ultimately simplifies too much, it is still useful to think of the history of Western culture as a pendulem swinging between classical values and romantic values. Right now, we are in sort of a postmodern romantic mode for the most part. Television, movies, music, advertisements, even comic books generally promote a subjectivist individualism ("just listen to your heart!").

But the classical impulse never entirely disappears, even if it has not had much traction lately in the larger culture. This article on recent classical architecture is a case in point. Here and there, artists rediscover the value of classical ideals, with good results. It is possible that classical attitudes will never again become dominant, but they won't entirely die out.

A question about all this: what is the Christian response to embracing the classical vision for the postmodern world? The classical mind is not inherently Christian, but is there something in the classical mind that comports well with certain elements of the Christian faith? Christians thoughout the ages, both Catholic and Protestant, have thought so. But Christians for the most part today do not now see much value in the virtues of the classical orientation.