The Devil's Dominion (II)

The cartoon image of Hell (above left) was ultimately replaced by a more subtle one based on Dante's Inferno.


By the 11th century, after centuries of devil and Hell mongering, some voices of reason sought to return rationality to the Church. One of the more notable was Anselm of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 (and credited with being the Father of Modern Scholasticism) who wrote a tract called ‘Fall of the Devil’.

In it, Anselm wisely sought to place limits on the Devil’s powers and those of his associates. After all, if they could run amuck under God’s Heaven with impunity then how could anyone argue for God’s omnipotence or omniscience? How can an omni-Being share power with an allegedly limited but defiled spiritual being, in other words? Even in the supernatural, one had to have certain basic rational principles – else one could as well consign it all to the blatherings of demented kooks!


Anselm was smart enough to see that this was the worm at the core of the apple of Satan-Hell belief. Now, Anselm was no John Paul I (the pope who sought revolutionary change in the Church in 1978, but who was killed just over a month after taking office when he was about to investigate the Vatican Bank) since he did believe a Loving God had the right to punish humans and he might have recourse to use Hell or purgatory to do so (‘The Devil’, by Peter Stanford, 1996, p. 151).

However, he vehemently denied that the Devil (aka Lucifer) had any right to carry out that punishment. He therefore could not be “God’s instrument” but an entity acting out of sheer malice and independence. Thereby, Anselm rejected that the Devil had any innate rights over Man (a standard view at the time) and argued instead that the focus ought to be on God, and Man’s debt to his creator.

Aquinas later backed Anselm to an extent, in his theological tract, ‘De Malo’ (On Evil), where he set out the four categories of evil. The first (absolute) he dismissed as pure abstraction and in any case illogical, since an absolute and unchallengeable evil would mean an equal counter-force to God, so the absolute Evil would also have to be a God: infinite, all knowing, all present etc. This made no sense.

Aquinas then set out the categories of metaphysical evil, which some humans could find themselves in by condition (but which they could climb out of with help) and the evil of privation – wherein humans suffered because of a lack of food, housing, security etc. The only one left, the evil of sin, was where the Devil came in as a tempter.

Unfortunately, despite relegating the Devil to the backwaters of theology, Aquinas made the error of going on and inventing a whole cosmology wherein the Devil and his hordes fit.

By this same point in time, a number of additional Councils had pondered and developed the basics of "Hell". What had initially been regarded as an afterlife abode akin to "Gehenna", the waste dump outside of Jerusalem for burning offal - later became "hotter" by agreement. As we know, the maximum temperatures for flame plasma (needed to burn offal) are around 1500-1800F. This wasn't hot enough for theological Hell-benders, so a number of them proposed Hell as being below the Earth's surface (hence the usual metaphor of pointing downward, to indicate being "Hell bound"). The putative basis for this change was the observation by many that volcanoes spewed out hot flames, ash and lava and what governed these towering fonts of horror had to have come from below and be at least as hot.

Thus, Hell became ensconced at some unknown deep level below the Earth's surface. Perhaps at its core, which contained molten iron at around 4,000F.

One might say that this was the earliest naive or childish fabrication of the place of eternal damnation, because:

1) Souls were deemed the entities to be punished, but they were immaterial and non-physical so a physical fire couldn't possibly confer any lasting damage, or any damage. (And no theologian of any repute could conceive or hypothesize how a "supernatural fire" that burned souls but didn't consume them could exist.)

2) No known fires lasted for eternity. Even the hottest stars eventually burned out. So how or in what way could Hell's fires be sustained? One couldn't just say "they're eternal" without any evidence or proof. That dog won't hunt.


The other problem conceived by some theologians, such as Aquinas, was that as more and more humans were added to Hell, more and more demons would be needed to help inflict torments, including keeping the fires stoked. This returned the Church's thinkers to the problem of "demon manpower" to keep Hell operating. Demon manpower meant considering once more the basis of demon reproduction. But many theologians didn't want to go that route, seeing in advance the slippery slope to which it would lead. (And indeed, the invention of succubi and incubi was allegedly one solution to the problem, and led to the mass burning of witches throughout the Middle Ages).

The problems became so intractable that by the late 13th century almost no one could see a way out. Then came Dante Alighieri and his insights.

Reconstructing Hell:


Dante's great contribution lay in using the power of his imagination, in his Inferno, to remake Hell away from its childish, cartoon Hellfire imagery.

Instead of unending "fires" which were impossible and meant numerous metaphysical problems, including demon reproduction, Dante invoked and created subtle forms of eternal torments peculiar to the violations of the damned. For example, in the 2nd Circle of Hell we find those condemned for their lust, "the carnal malefactors"- for letting their raw carnal appetites subdue their reason. They're the first ones to be truly punished in Hell. (The First Circle is not truly a punishment level but rather "Limbo" - for all unbaptized infants. Not even Dante could image them being sent to eternal perdition!) The souls of the lust -ridden are blown about to and fro by the ferocious winds of a violent storm, without hope of rest. This symbolized the power of lust to blow one about needlessly and aimlessly.

For some who think this tame compared to fires, think again! Imagine yourself trapped in a wind tunnel, unable to seize one moment, one second of rest or respite. The subtext of Dante was that one doesn't need the most horrific or even painful punishment to confer absolute grief and horror - only a grinding one that never ends.

Meanwhile, in the 3rd Circle, resided the gluttons ... embedded in mounds of mush - mostly reeking, decayed food they're unable to eat. Their senses are assaulted by it but they can't escape the mush pits. In addition, they're rendered sightless and heedless of their neighbours, symbolizing the cold, selfish, and empty sensuality of their lives. (See image). As they flail and scream for eternity, covered in sickening vomit and mush - unable to extricate themselves- they are also unable to help their fellow gluttons.

Again, the cleverness of the effect inheres in an orders of magnitude more sophisticated torment that never ends. To compare it to a cheap and obvious punishment like "fire" would be like comparing a symphony to a cartoon. One (fire - endless burning) discloses a primitive brain at work, only able to conceive of the most mundane punishment. The other discloses a kind of inherent calibration of pain that is awful at hundreds of levels at once, all subtle - all equally assaulting and all endless. The pain ranges from the asphyxiating, acrid "fumes" of supernatural vomit assaulting the damned, generated by millions of beings- to the inability to feed an unbearable hunger, since all that is available is the released effluent or garbage of "food" tossed away.

Only centuries later did Theologians recognize that even Dante's sophisticated depictions in the Inferno were too much like caricatures, and even more subtle versions of Hell had to be designed. So, by the early 19th century, one century after the Inquisition (which we will look at next) all the assorted Circles and levels of Hell were replaced by one single, simple theme that covered ALL punishments: the pain of loss. And again, anyone who thinks this isn't as bad as fire needs to consider having lost a loved one. That grief never ends.

So, in Hell's reconstruction, we see the initial childish cartoon Hell of fire and brimstone replaced, over about 11-12 centuries, by a subtle torment of simple loss. In addition, the Hell doctrine (as noted by theologian Hans Kung) was modified so that God did not confine a person there, rather the sinner chose to be there, apart from God - out of his Beatific Vision. This instantly removed the complaint about a "loving God sending his children to damnation" as well as removed the need for any "Satan" or other lesser demonic principalities. For if the person himself chose perpetual isolation and the unending pain of loss, no "Satan" was needed! We now understand “The Devil” or “Satan” is simply the projection of the most primitive brain imperatives onto the external world.

Was this an advance? To many theologians it was since it put the whole burden on to the damned (they effectively damned themselves by choice) , so there was no need for millions of demons to be at each sinner's side manning the fires or plunging pitch forks into hides. But as Kung and other theologians observed, severe theological and metaphysical problems remained. For example, if God was infinite and condoned isolation of the damned (granted, they chose it), then where was the "abode" of isolation? In truth, HOW could a truly Infinite Being could isolate itself from itself to allow such a condition? Thus, by the mid 1960s and the era of Vatican II, the concept of Hell itself began to fall into disfavor (though it was still the doctrine taught by many of the Vatican's outward emissaries - obviously to retain mind control on the waning flock).

But maybe this didn't come soon enough for the nearly one million victims of the Inquisition,m all of whom ended up as willful "collateral damage" - thanks to the Church's centuries own war with the figment of Satan. Thus, based on a phantasmagorical fiction embedded in its consciousness, the Church deliberately killed its own troops.