Hell

I just finished listening to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), which I liked a lot. I noted with interest that although James Joyce was considered a very radical writer and a founder of modernism, he based his aesthetic theory on his reading of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Real revolution always draws on tradition. 

Joyce was raised Catholic and attended Jesuit schools but eventually underwent a sort of religious crisis and left the church. His alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, does the same in Portrait of the Artist. Joyce focuses much of the crisis on an annual weeklong retreat the older schoolboys went on to spend seven days thinking about nothing but faith. One day was devoted to the Virgin, one to Angels, etc. And one day to the Last Things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven.. Joyce gives us a sermon preached by one of the priests on the horrors of hell that fills several pages of text. A sample:

Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. . . .

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. . . .

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever.

This is fiction, but all of this is, as Joyce tells us, taken from actual medieval and Renaissance theologians. The church really taught that this was the fate of all who died in mortal sin, so not just serial killers but anyone who masturbated or indulged in anger.

And this is where Christianity lost me. I want no part of a God who punishes. I know that these days there is much talk of hell as just being bad because you are deprived of God's presence or what have you. But I'm not having that, either; if God can fix us, he should, and if he can't he should let us disappear from the world.

The spirit of vengeance is contrary to everything I regard as holy, and I hate it.