Christianity, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism, is also largely framed within concepts of judgment and, for those who fail to meet the necessary criteria, eternal suffering in hell. The Athanasian Creed, thought by modern scholars to date from the fifth or early sixth century and venerated by the Roman Catholic Church and many Protestant churches, ends with these words: “They that have done good shall go into life everlasting, and they that have done evil into everlasting fire. This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.”
Playing a key role in the development of the Christian doctrine of an ever-burning hell was Augustine, the influential fourth-century bishop of Hippo in North Africa. A leading definer of subsequent Christian faith, he wrote a number of books, some of which are considered to be among the great literary works of Western civilization
(see “Augustine: A Giant Out of His Time” and “Augustine’s Poisoned Chalice”).
Nearly a thousand years after Augustine, the Italian Dante Alighieri wrote
The Divine Comedy. Dante was a committed Roman Catholic, a politician, a poet and a philosopher. His work, like Augustine’s, is considered one of the cornerstones of Western religious ideas. In Dante’s story he takes a guided tour through the afterlife. He goes first to hell, then to purgatory, and finally to paradise, and he writes about everything he sees. His gruesome picture of hell has taken root in Western society, having inspired such notables as Michelangelo, Gustave Doré, Sandro Botticelli, John Milton and T.S. Eliot.
From where did Augustine and Dante get their ideas about a never-ending suffering in store for sinners? Is it biblical? It’s true that by the time of Christ, Judaism had incorporated related concepts into its belief system, though in earlier times it did not teach that an ever-burning hell was to be the fate of the unsaved. Nor did the early New Testament Church teach it. The doctrine has its roots elsewhere.
Dante’s guide through the netherworld was Virgil, the first-century-B.C.E. Roman poet. In his epic poem
Aeneid, the hero, Aeneas, is also taken on a tour of hell. Virgil’s graphic depiction of the dismal and macabre place profoundly influenced later artists and writers.
But the concept of hell as a place of torment predates Virgil as well. A number of ancient civilizations, including those of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt and Greece, held as part of their mythology the concept of an underworld—the realm of the dead. The first-century-B.C.E. Greek geographer and philosopher Strabo discussed the value of such myths, noting that “the states and the lawgivers had sanctioned them as a useful expedient.” He went on to explain that people “are deterred from evil courses when, either through descriptions or through typical representations of objects unseen, they learn of divine punishments, terrors, and threats.” In dealing with the unruly, reason or exhortation alone is not enough, wrote Strabo; “there is need of religious fear also, and this cannot be aroused without myths and marvels. . . . The founders of states gave their sanction to these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded” (
Geography 1.2.8).
