Directions to Heaven and Hell

For decades I used to ask my students where heaven was, then hell, and predictably they responded as one might expect, up and down respectively. Occasionally one would remark that there is no heaven or hell, but by and large their topographical sense was automatic, and conventional. There are, no doubt, many reasons for it. After all, I used to query them in the context of reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The poet positions the gods on the heights of Mount Olympus, a formidable terrain of gorges and drop-offs; it's the highest point in Greece. Conversely the realm of disembodied shades was invariably below. To get there a demigod like Odysseus had to slaughter a sheep in honor of Hades, the ruler of the underworld, then make his dreary way downward where the fantasms of former selves moped about.

Borrowing from the Greeks, the Romans also placed the divine realm overhead and the infernal one below. Published about 31 BCE, Virgil's Aeneid gave us a version of hell that the christians later adopted; the damned for Virgil were those who caused trouble for the emperor while the glorified had happily done his and the empire's bidding. Ovid's hell wasn't quite so ugly or politically charged, and his version of heaven was a great deal higher and more luminous than earlier versions, which allowed him to puff the emperor, so to speak. Published in 8 CE his Metamorphoses somewhat winkingly arrays the gods, including the deified Caesars, in the Milky Way, their homes spanning the universe along a glittering avenue, while average schmos in the underworld suffered an endless, barren winter. 

The writers of Christian stories, who began penning their works about a century after Virgil, as I say simply took on his classical topography of hell and heaven wholesale, switching out an earthly for a heavenly emperor, though with a twist. They converted Virgil's hell into something truly vile and horrific, a realm of teeth-gnashing and unimaginable suffering that far outdid anything Virgil could have ever imagined. It's incongruous that the christians' divine, despite being labeled a god of love, could be capable of such cruelty, unforgiveness, and sheer nastiness––that he could be as vindictive as many christians we encounter––but what we think of as hell today, the place that christan locate down-there, has basically survived and even gotten worse over the ages, despite the fact that elsewhere in the christian texts Matthew has Jesus admonishing humans to forgive an unlimited number of times, metaphorized in the figure "not seven times seven but seventy times seventy"; so such a pinched image of the divine seriously begs logic (18: 21-22).

The transformation to the christian era, piggybacking on what people call the pagan authors, didn't alter the calculus of up and down one bit, as almost all christian art and sermonizing attests. From standard medieval triptychs to Hieronymus Bosch's panels, Michealangelo’s chapel, and to any garden-variety, fire-and-brimstone televangelist today, god, the good, and the saintly live up-there while the evil, the satanic, and the Other are doomed for the below-place.

Up and down, bliss and suffering, heaven and hell are directionals we get most graphically in Milton's Paradise Lost. In that work, the last of the great epics, heaven suffers a mutiny, one in which millions of disembodied spirits are cast not only out but down. Never mind the logic of heaven falling short of its status as heaven, or the notion that spirits were subject to gravity: the rebellious souls were damned and fell straight into a lake of fire. Many critics, including near-contemporaries like John Dryden and William Blake, thought that the hero of the story wasn't any member of the christian trinity but Satan himself, in large part because he's so extraordinarily human, so complex, and therefore likeable; unlike the quasi-fascist divine. His questions about the powers-that-be are what get Satan in trouble; his challenging the status quo; and more specifically his queries about why primogeniture should determine political ascendance and not merit. Despite the author's requisite condemnations of Satan––Milton knew his audience––it's difficult not to fall in love with him, given his forward-looking mindset, one that in 1667 when the work was published already points to a democratic ethos. His smarts, his rational temerity in posing questions, induce him to say, Fuck you! to the divine, to the entire topography of divine and infernal, up and down, heaven and hell. He remarks in an extraordinary passage:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less then he

Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. (Book I, ll. 254-263)

The passage, written by a blind, puritan poet who'd been a party to a real-life regicide, to the beheading of Charles I, altered history with its mind-blowing, mind-centric positioning, one that christians have largely ignored. Milton understood that the mind is a divine entity in its own right, with a capacity to be fiercely independent; an agent that can create and alter our world, as well as create heaven or hell, a semiotics that changed both the history of politics and literature. There'd be no Captain Ahab without Milton's Satan, no Raskolnikov, Dorian Gray, Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Jim Stark, Sethe Suggs, or any other contemporary anti-hero railing at our existential condition, the social hierarchy most of all.

When I used to ask my students why the aerial and earthly were determined the way they are, they initially had no clue. But when we began to unpack upness and downness things became clearer. We're talking after all about known and unknown, opposing epistemologies. The topography of the afterlife was determined at a time when humans had never flown, and millenniums before recreational mountain climbing became a thing. No one with a pen had been "up there," so it was easy to position the gods in those spaces and ascribe to them avian powers and aerial flights, not to mention the ability to look down on all of us, the way a king disdains his realm from a castle tower.

If upness equated to unknowningness and bliss, down constituted its opposite. It is too, too familiar, i.e known, and given the association of suffering with living it wasn't a stretch for christians to simply amp up the volume on suffering in the infernal afterlife, though it required inventing a small-minded and small-hearted god. The christian hell became the struggle we daily endure, though on hyper-steroids, apparently with the divine's approval. 

What's more, the earth is that place we trash. We overmine and overplant, and therefore exhaust it. We shit and piss on it, literally. We dispose of our dead there. We pollute the hell out of it. All that and much more happens, aided by gravity, in the direction of the down-below. It would have been almost impossible for the ancients to devise a scheme in which heaven and the earthly were paired; it would take the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century to do that. Since the beginning of agrarian culture ten thousand years ago we've been on a mission as humans to exploit the earth in every way possible, and therefore ruin it. That is, the hell/downward link has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and worse: humans have also started trashing the sky. We know it now, having been up there, and once that happens look out. We've filled the stratosphere with junk, circulating at over 17,000 mph. We've made "conquering" the highest mountains a sport; no big deal. To say you pray to god "up there" begs the question, Up where? We now know what we'll find, and that would a great-big vacuum, one that really only knows out and away most of all. Mere dead, swirling matter. There's no longer uncharted sky for a god to inhabit. 

The topography of heaven and hell lives mostly these days, somewhat quaintly, in the minds of believers; dangerously so in some sense as we see among Trumpy and other christian-nationalist types who believe god has given us license to trash the planet all we want, to exploit it in the form of drill, drill, drill, and other kinds of destruction––after all, the good times up above commence only when they depart the world down here. Never mind the presumption that they'll be "up there" ultimately, and never mind too that they'll be, for all intents and purposes, dead matter. That attitude has not just created a hell-on-earth over the millenniums but landed all of us, believer or not, along with every other species, in it. Fortunately for many less believing types that topography has changed, and even reversed; it has at least become more complicated.

In writing the Eldorado Trilogy I knew I wanted to depart from the standard topography. It would ruin it to say how exactly, but I can say it takes Milton to another level. Nietzsche too, who repeatedly called for humans to know less; to cede certainty. To him, certainty was our problem, the very thing that long ago enslaved us to gods that we ourselves created, including the christian one.