The Road to Hell:
Sublimating Suffering & the Collective Unconscious
When considering the various manifestations of the imagination during the early Middle Ages, such as visual art, literature, folklore and visions, one notices a certain Hell-centric obsession. The Apocalypse of St. Paul was but one example of this outpouring, notable because “it was the most widely known of all narrative tours of Hell.”[1] This vision is, further, useful to both the theologian and historian: among other things, it contributes to building the concept of Hell, and it reflects the development of church institutions and rituals.[2] But these are facile observations: they do nothing more than “connect the dots” in the endless descriptions of how the concept of Hell evolved. The truly interesting question is why the concept evolved—not from the perspective of the Church hegemony, since its politicized use by that faction is fairly plain—but from the perspective of the layman. Why did the layman embrace an idea that was so counter to his well-being, so antonymical to his peace of mind? Why did he not only embrace it, but embellish it, obsessing over its punishing details and graphic horrors? One answer to these questions exists beyond the “facts” of history in the more nebulous arena of the human psyche, as revealed by Jungian insight.
The Apocalypse of St. Paul evidences the Church’s positive theology on the matter of the afterlife and it reflects greater codification of rituals and hierarchy. While retaining continuity from the Apocalypse of Peter, this work edifies the theology of judgment and punishment, revealing the specific workings of the “divine justice administration,” portraying an afterlife scenario not unsimilar to a night court arraignment.[3] Further, finer categories of sins are depicted, weighting not just the absolute sin, but the degree to which the offender indulged in the sin. New categories of sins are included, such as false monasticism and denial of specific tenets of faith. The additions of “offenses against ritual and improved techniques of categorization are signs of the church’s institutionalization” and so offer the historian a sidelong glance at the evolution of the Church and its doctrine.[4]
Concurrent with this edification of doctrinal integrity, many historians see political motive behind the Church’s mobilization of Hell. Barbara Walker, for example, contextualizes the visions of Hell as serving to demonize symbols and acts formerly associated with the Goddess—at least those symbols and rituals which were not easily hijacked and assimilated into Church “tradition”. Declaring that the “Great Goddess ‘whom Asia and all the world worshippeth’ must be despised and ‘her magnificence destroyed,’” the Church created a huge, gaping hole in the psyche of the medieval mind and then created perverted transmutation as back-fill, designed to displace all vestiges of humanity’s synthesis with Nature (the Goddess) and the primacy of the female role.[5] Thus, the inescapable expressions of humanity—sexuality, child bearing, joy in food and drink, humor—became imbued with the treachery and torment of sinfulness. Considering these documented and explicit intentions, then, it is easy to be persuaded by the idea of Hell—or any religious doctrine—as a potential political tool, thus rendering Jerry Walls’ observation that “Jesus’ teaching on Hell, as recorded by the New Testament authors, did not arise from a sublimated desire for revenge [or other a-spiritual motives], but rather came to us as part of the highest revelation of a loving God” seemingly naive and deeply seated in denial about the historical unfolding of Christian doctrine.[6] However, while Walker’s understanding of the historical transition between a Goddess-centric culture and a God-centered culture is persuasive and factually sound, it still does little to explain the layman’s embrace of Hell ideology. What need of his did Hell fill?
Many worthy scholars may respond to this question by citing the kinder side of politicization; that is, Hell ideology was indeed mobilized to serve a social end or psychological need and, in many cases, this end need was justice. Although the use of Hell as the ultimate equalizer is seen in Judaic texts, it is a concept upon which Christianity exquisitely capitalizes; in fact, some perceive Christianity to be, fundamentally, an equity movement, with Jesus as its chief revolutionary.[7] The words of Alan Bernstein sum-up this argument nicely, stating that “belief in future punishment is a manifestation of the sublimated desire for vengeance. Belief in punishment after death becomes necessary when no sign of restoration is visible in this life.”[8] It is not a great leap, then, to conclude that the medieval mind embraced Hell for its promise of justice, especially since the Middle Ages were, for most, such a prolonged lesson in injustice.
Unfortunately, however, even if Christianity is entirely predicated upon the ideal of equity and Hell originated, through God or humanity’s good intention, as a place for “just desserts,” faith in this function is not likely to have carried-over into the social and psychological climate of the Middle Ages. This is because that era was Hell: the socio-economic circumstances ensured that the oppressors (and oppressive social institutions) were, if not actual agents of the Church, then variously degreed noblemen who, through endowments of money and power, had considerable access to the Church and, therefore, to absolution. As one screenwriter insightfully noted, “no biblical Hell could ever be worse than [their (the peasants’)] perpetual state of inconsequence.”[9] Consequently, it seems unlikely that any lay peasant would have looked to either this life or the next for justice, but would have, rather, seen Hell as an echo of his everyday experience.
If anyone questions the validity or severity of the lay peasant’s plight, consider the work of Jules Michelet. Michelet rightly emphasizes the consuming fear of the medieval man—not the modern fear of failure, but the more devastating fear of futility. This fear of futility arose from the extreme of immobility, making emigration impossible, and the pervasive uncertainty as to the fruition of any work. A man could, literally, break his body in the attempt to harvest minimal sustenance, only to have the entire harvest confiscated by the landowner.[10] And what is Hell, essentially, if not a manifestation of futility, of suffering without the promise or hope of respite? Nor was the “Hell on earth” limited to a feeling: this was a time when rape was institutionalized through the practice of “first fruits” or “marriage meat-offering.” As Michelet states, “The appalling notion of a hell where God uses the wickedest souls, the most sinful of all there, to torture the less sinful, delivered up to them as playthings, this noble dogma of the Middle Ages was literally realized.”[11] Thus, non-noble laymen were not only serfs of the body, but serfs of the spirit, as well. And so, if Hell did not deliver, in this era, the hope of justice, then the question of why the ideology of Hell was so ardently embraced remains unanswered.
At the beginning of this paper, it was noted that humanity in the Middle Ages displayed an obsession with Hell, an addiction to its details and to the embellishment of those details. Jungian psychology views addiction as a spiritual wound rent by the absence of an archetype: the consequent hole causes the need or compulsion to fill the mind or body with alternatives. The process of including or replacing archetypes, according to Jung, is an interplay between the internal and external, a need created by circumstances, resolved by the imagination and delivered by dreams.[12] Which archetype needed to be restored or replaced during the Middle Ages cannot be conclusively determined: so many are prospects, even from a cursory investigation—the Goddess, nature, justice, freedom, hope. Nor is the specific missing archetype the crux of the issue, since part of Jung’s paradigm is a belief in humanity’s ability to create new solutions and archetypes through the functional mechanisms of imagination and dreams; but, in the Middle Ages, the presence of a cultural obsession demonstrates that those mechanisms were not working.
Michelet states that the “break-down” was in the mechanism of imagination. Partly because “pagan backsliding” was one of Church’s most enduring concerns, and partly because in the emerging feudal system that infantalized most people through enforced dependency, imagination was effectively forbidden. As Michelet writes, during the Middle Ages “it [was] expressly forbidden to invent, to create. No more originality; no more legends; no more new saints…Forbidden to innovate in the forms of worship with new melodies; inspiration is prohibited…Forbidden for clergy or monks to confer on peasants the tonsure that enfranchises them.”[13] This process, these two social forces in combination, turned the medieval man “into a dead man, a non-entity, a brute beast,” devoid of the will to imagine, to create anew his world.[14]
Some may argue that while expressions of imagination can be interdicted, a man’s subconscious cannot be stopped: in sleep, a man’s imagination remains unmolested, free to explore through dreams. However, in the Middle Ages, even humanity’s dreams were taken. Because dreams were suspected as demonically-induced, “dreaming had become a hazardous nocturnal activity”, since “the Church was always diligently looking for sinners who might be in collusion with or possessed by satanic forces.[15] “Dreaming became something people tried actively to suppress.”[16] “Dreams, in effect, had been banished,” and, as seen during the Dark Ages and Nazi Germany, a sort of madness ensues “when the authorities limit people’s autonomy and prevent [imagination] from flourishing” by banishing dreams or restricting the range within which they operate.[17] Ironically, that which the Church feared resulted because of its actions: Father Meseguer, a Jesuit priest, wrote about the problem with dreams, saying, “’The invasion of the conscious by the unconscious eventually leads to madness, through intermediate states which become more morbid with the progressive invasion by the unconscious.’”[18] This is precisely the “madness” of Hell and the Hell-centric obsession of the populace. And yet, contrary to the Church’s fears, the madness was not the result of active dreaming, but the suppression of those dreams which normally act to healthfully discharge the encroachment of the subconscious.
Thus, Hell became a depository for two fundamental needs: the need to imagine and the need to dream. Hell became the only sanctioned target for embellishment, through stories and art: in fact, it was encouraged to let the imagination run wild when it came to Hell, since the more nasty, the more effective the image became. Hell also represented a sort of waking nightmare, full of surreal dream images and symbols of the subconscious.[19] In this dream, reconciliations were possible: the women skewered by their eyebrows and submerged in fire of St. Paul’s Apocalypse may have reflected the insane torture of peasant laywomen marked for judgment as adulterers because they had been raped and also the desire to punish the noblewomen, not for their own infidelities with knights, but for their orchestration of the peasant women rapings. Therefore the collective Hell nightmare contained, as Jung predicted, “’ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, [and] irrational experiences.’”[20]
The intention of this paper was to move beyond yet another “report” on the building blocks in the road to Hell, uncovering, instead, why anyone wished to travel that road in the first place. Though some historians have nearly asked this question, arriving at answers just off the mark, such as the need for vengeance and justice or the politicization necessary to initiate a paradigmatic shift in the culture, they still have not asked nor answered why someone’s nightmare became, in effect, the collective dream of a continent. It is the conclusion of this paper that this answer can be found through the application of Jungian insight, and the answer is this: in a time and culture where humanity’s imagination and dreams are taken, a madness ensues. And in this madness, the insane embrace the nightmare, because it is the only vision that they have left.
Notes
[1] Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1993) 293.
[2] As part of this evolving doctrine, another point becomes clear: the organized Church placed great authority in Paul. In order to understand this point, it is necessary to review Paul’s understanding of judgment and Hell. In 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 and 5:5, Paul assures the reader that though a period of purification may be necessary, everyone is eventually saved. Since this belief is clearly in contradiction with the Apocalypse’s pit of “everlasting torment” where “there will never be any recollection made of” the sinners. It seems reasonable to extrapolate, then, that if the Apocalypse of St. Paul was not written by Paul, given the date, nor an accurate rendition of Pauline ideology, then the only reason to ascribe the document to Paul would be to weight the vision’s theology with credibility and authority through Paulinean association. This is a cornerstone of the road taken later in Church doctrine, since Augustine uses parts of this vision, and its implicit authority, in his refutation of Origen, cementing eternal fire and brimstone in Christian doctrine.
[3] Ibid, 293-5. This work not only contains elements of continuity, but probably relied on the fact that the reader was familiar with both works; in this way, the author did not have to duplicate detail of the punishments. This “administration” undoubtedly also reflects the Romanization of Christianity, in that the course of judgment is extremely orderly and bureaucratic, including “public defense” angels as case representatives, victim “testimony” and an appeals system.
[4] Ibid, 297.
[5] Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper, 1983) vii-xi, quote from viii.
[6] Jerry Walls, “Books in Review: The Formation of Hell,” First Things: a Journal of Religion and Public Life (October 1994) 64-6. Brackets mine. This is not to suggest that information contained within sacred texts cannot possibly be derived from revelation, but merely to underscore the malleability and use of such information, once in the minds of men.
[7] For one discussion of this interpretation, refer to The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (New York: Summit Books, 1991).
[8] Bernstein, 202.
[9] Jeannine Dominy, screenwriter, Dangerous Beauty, dir. Marshall Herskovitz, 1998.
[10] Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft: the Classic Study of Medieval Superstition, trans. A.R. Allinson (New York: Citadel Press, 1992) 32.
[11] Ibid, 35.
[12] “A World of Dreams (Vol III),” Wisdom of the Dream: Carl Gustav Jung, dir. Stephen Segaller (RM Associates, 1997).
[13] Michelet, 15.
[14] Ibid, 20.
[15] Robert Van de Castle, Our Dreaming Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1994) 83.
[16] Ibid, 84.
[17] Ibid, 84.
[18] Ibid, 85.
[19] It is important to note that this experience of Hell was, like the rest of life, delineated along class lines. Because nobles and educated men had access to other cultures through travel and books, and because they did not experience the same degree of daily futility, their imaginations were freer to create and embrace another alternative, ie, the vision of Hell as an alchemical/mystical analogy. When looking at the history of alchemy and other esoteric traditions, they seem to be the exclusive domain of the upper classes.
[20] Van de Castle, 174.