HELL: A Fierce Jesuit, by John Casey

From After Lives

A famous exponent of Jesuit eloquence was Jeremias Drexel (or Dresselius), a Bavarian Jesuit who lived from 1581 to 1638.  His specialty was eternity.  He sought to dramatize for his listeners and readers the idea of everlasting punishment, using every possible rhetorical technique.  He talks of a “stone in Arcadia, called Asbestos,” which being set on fire burns continually; and of a certain kind of flax “which is so far from being comsum’d by the Fire, that it is wash’d and cleans’d by it.  Thus shall the Damn’d Burn, but the Fire shall never be Extinguish’d; they shall always Burn, but never be consum’d; they shall seek for Death in the Flames, but shall never find him.”

The pain of loss of the beatific vision will never have an end, because in hell there is no possibility of satisfaction – i.e., paying for sin: “Their Torments shall continue many Millions of Years without one sweet or refreshing Moment.  They shall gnash their Teeth with cold, and the Fire shall force them to lament and weep.  If the Gout or Stone is in one short Night, severely painful and grievous to us, consider we with ourselves how shall we endure to lie in the Flames Night and Day for Thousands of Years.”

Even a momentary (mortal) sin brings damnation, for ever sin is against the infinite majesty of God, so even a momentary lapse can incur eternity.  Drexel’s eternity is expressed in virtually the same words as his (fictional) Joycean fellow-Jesuit, Father Arnall used: “shou’d God say to the Damn’d, let the Earth be cover’d with the finest Sand, and let the World be fill’d therewith; let Heap be pil’d upon Heap, till it reaches up to the highest Heavens, and let an Angel, every Thousand Years, take a grain from it [and, after all has been cleared, the dead would be released from hell], how would the Damn’d rejoice?  But alas!  After millions and millions of years, there remain more Millions, and still more Millions for Ever and Ever.”  And if you were to take from eternity as many years as there are stars in the firmament, drops in the ocean, spires of grass in the field, motes in the sun, or atoms of sand upon the sea-shore, not one moment of eternity would have passed.  If one of the damned were to shed a tear every hundred years, and all the tears shed were to be kept together, until they made a sea as large as the ocean that surrounds the Earth, “how many Millions of Years may we reasonably suppose to pass away, before this tedious Effusion of Tears wou’d make a little River, and what is a River, to the vast great Ocean?  And yet if this could possibly be done, we might then truly say, now begins Eternity.”

Drexel is also an expert on the imagery of exclusion – in capturing the dread sense of how few shall be saved.  He speaks of the vision of a woman miraculously brought back from the dead, who stood before God’s tribunal together with sixty thousand souls who were summoned from all parts of the universe to stand before their judge “and they were all Sentenc’d to Eternal Death, Three only excepted.”

But why should we be surprised?  Only eight human beings were saved in Noah’s ark, the rest of mankind being drowned.  When Moses led out of Egypt six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children, a promiscuous multitude also following the camp, only two of so great a number came into the fruitful land of Canaan, while “to the rest the Wilderness was a capacious Grave.”  The statement in the Apocalypse that 144,000 shall be saved means that of all the Jews from Abraham to the end of the world, less than one in a thousand will escape hell.

Drexel lists the torments of hell as darkness (inner and outer), weeping, hunger, intolerable stench, fire.

Tenebrae: 

Of all the plagues of Egypt described in Exodus, the outer darkness is alone called “horrible.”  The inner darkness is even worse, for the deprivation of the sight of God is the greatest punishment of the damned.  We will know that when we die.  The falcon, when its head is covered with the leather cap, its eyes blindfolded, has no desire to go after magpies or doves or herons.  But once the pileous is removed, nature rushes him on – it is impossible to hold him back, except with extreme force – he breaks chains and thong, and no one can do anything with him, even with the hunter holding his feet in his arms.  Held back, he would be injured, so violent is the force of nature as soon as he sees what he desires at a distance.  Man is the same.  As soon as we see God we want to rush to him.  While we exist in this life, our eyes are hooded; we are in darkness.  But as soon as we see God the veil is removed – the cover is removed by death, and we are freed from it for all eternity.  So if we are excluded from God for ever and ever, this is to us an unspeakable punishment.  Of the pains of Gehenna, by far the most unendurable is to be shut out from the glorious sight of Christ and God.

Fletus:

Weeping is another grievous torment.  Tempus vivendi, tempus flendi – the time of living is the time for tears.  After death they are useless.  Angels find tears of repentance in the living fragrant, for they reveal holy grief, divine love – “Blessed are they who weep, for they shall be comforted.”  But in hell the tears stem from rage, pain, despair, envy, and obstinate malignity.  Hell will be filled with the hideous howling of the damned – a horror in itself – as they gnash their teeth from rage (stridor dentium), filled with the despair of the fire that can never be quenched and the worm that never died.  In the cruel gardens of Nero, where Christians were burned to make noctural torches, what sad outcries, what lamentations there must have been!  Imagine thousands and millions and thousands of millions impaled over the flames, what hideous screams!  Add to that the howlings of the demons who will be yelling at them from close to!  Among the damned there will be no sleep, no quiet, not even for a single moment.  Whereas in Heaven, there would have been the choir of angels, the songs of martyrs and apostles, here you will be among ulcerated, diseased cadaverous human beings yelling as in a super-heated hot room at the baths, their skin a venomous mass of slavering putrefaction, weeping and screeching as they experience pain and stench, hearing the howls of others in the same state.  These are the mores in the Hall of Satan, everyone burns with ardent hatred of everyone else, and everyone would, if he could, tear everyone else with his teeth.

Fames:

Hunger will be a punishment designed especially for gluttons – people who, like Heliogabulus, vomunt ut bibant, bibunt ut vomant – who vomited in order to drink, and drank in order to vomit.  Gluttons will eructate in the most frightful way, their stomachs will rumble thunderously, and they will always be shouting out with hunger.

Foetor:

Drexel was particularly interested in the intolerable stench of hell.  The damned will be in a very straight prison house into which the filth of the whole world pours.  It is a cloaca most filthy (actually “shitty” – faeculentissima), a cavern most noisome (graveolentissimam).  All the concentrated sulvurous rotten-egg smells of this world put together are as nothing in composition with the foetor of hell.  And the very bodies of the damned themselves, crammed into this tiny space, hugely increase the foul stench, for every one of the damned is an immensely smelly, wormy, putrid corpse.  There will be flatulence, corrupt air from the huge multitude, and all the smells from the World Sewer.

At this point, Drexel engages in a memorable – perhaps unique – calculation, as he works out how tightly the damned will be squashed together in hell: There will be a hundred thousand million of them, and they will have to fit into one square German mile.  They will be penned like dogs or pigs, or like grapes in a winepress, like pickled tuna in a barrel, like bricks in the furnace of a lime-kiln, like a ewe-lamb on the spit, like plums being flambed, like sheep having their throats cut in the market.  No wonder they will stink to high Heaven!

Ignis:

Who among us dares touch fire, let alone put his whole finger in the flame of a candle, let alone his whole arm – his whole body?  Nothing is more excruciating than fire.  But the difference between fire on Earth and in hell is that here it produces light and splendor.  But the fire of hell burns without light, except with such light as enables the damned to see the foul society in which they live (other damned souls and demons).  Our fire consumes what it burns – hell-fire does not.  Our fire burns only while it has material on which to feed; but there it is nourished forever by divine justice, which never sleeps and is inextinguishable.

So there the damned will lie for millions upon millions of years, millions of centuries, millions of millennia, in a place that is profundissimus, tenebricosissimus, foetidissimu, et quod lugubre cogitatue, remotissimus a caelo, mille clathris ac feris, repagulis ac claustris mille obseratus – “most deep, most dark, most fetic, and what is lamentable to think on, most remote from Heaven, with a thousand bars and grates, bolts and doors, shut up a thousand times over.”