The Penguin Book of Hell (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

 
9780143131625: The Penguin Book of Hell (Penguin Classics)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143131621 ISBN 13: 9780143131625
Verlag: Penguin Classics, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Journey into the underworld through three thousand years of visions of hell, from the ancient Near East to modern America

From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk - a monster with a thousand giant hands; wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno and witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Scott G. Bruce is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Undead and The Penguin Book of Hell, and the author of three books about the Abbey of Cluny. He is a professor of History at Fordham University in New York City. He worked his way through college as a gravedigger.

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Contents

Realms Forbidden to the Living: Ancient Greece and Rome

• Tartarus, Prison of the Titans: From Hesiod’s Theogony
• Netherworld Megafauna: From Seneca’s The Madness of Heracles
• Odysseus at Death’s Door: From Homer’s Odyssey
• Socrates Ponders the Punishment of Souls: From Plato’s Phaedo
• Into the Realm of Shadows: From Virgil’s Aeneid

Early Christian Hellscapes (c. 100–500 CE)

• The Fire and the Worm: From the Apocalypse of Paul
• The Rich Man and Lazarus: From the Gospel of Luke
• Death’s Defeat: The Harrowing of Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemus

On the Lip of the Abyss: The Early Middle Ages (c. 500–1000 CE)

• Beyond the Black River: From the Dialogues of Gregory the Great
• Behold, the Fire Draws Near Me: From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
• Dryhthelm Returns from the Dead: From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
• The Island of the Fire Giants: From The Voyage of Saint Brendan

Into the Deepest Dark: The Vision of Tundale (c. 1150)

• Welcome to Hell
• The Punishment Fits the Crime
• The Great Below

Teaching the Torments: The High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300)

• Lessons in Horror: From the Elucidarium of Honorius of Autun
• Preaching Pain: From a Medieval Priest’s Manual
• Three Tales of Torment: From Caesarius’ Dialogue on Miracles
• Warnings from Beyond the Grave: From Caesarius’ Dialogue on Miracles
• The Abominable Fancy: From Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica

Abandon All Hope: Dante’s Inferno (c. 1320)

• Through the Gates of Hell
• The Filthy Fen
• The Boiling Blood
• The Forest of the Suicides
• Trapped Under Ice

A Heartbreaking Consort of Woes: Early Modern Afterlives (c. 1500–1700)

• The Sharp Pangs of a Wounded Conscience: From a Sermon by William Dawes
• Into That Eternal Furnace: From Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti’s Hell Opened to Christians to Caution Them from Entering into It
• A Living Death Shall Feed Upon Them: From John Bunyan’s The Resurrection of the Dead and Eternall Judgement

The Dread of Hell Peoples Heaven: The Nineteenth Century

• Hell Is for Children: From John Furniss’ The Sight of Hell
• A Place at Odds with Mercy: From Austin Holyoake’s Heaven & Hell: Where Situated?

Hell of Our Own Making: The Twentieth Century and Beyond

• The Death Factories: From Vasily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka”
• Fire in the Sky: From the “Testimony of Yoshitaka Kawamoto”
• The Sum of Suffering: From William Blake’s “A Sentence Worse Than Death”
• Guantánamo Mixtape: Music from American Detention Camps

Introduction

Hell, the punitive afterlife of the Christian religion, is arguably the most powerful and persuasive construct of the human imagination in the Western tradition. A subterranean realm of eternal suffering, a prison for sinful souls governed by a fallen angel who surpassed all other creatures in wickedness, Hell has inspired fear and thereby controlled the behavior of countless human beings for more than two thousand years. Despite advances in scholarship that have called into question the authority of the Christian scriptures and scientific developments that have changed the way we think about the human race and our place in the cosmos, the idea of Hell has remained tenacious in Western thought. In modern discourse, “hell” serves as an all-pervasive metaphor for any kind of difficulty (“hard as hell”) or extreme (“hot as hell”), but the word has lost none of its religious currency in our so-called age of reason. A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of American adults still believe in the existence of a place “where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.”

The tenacity of the belief in Hell in the modern world invites inquiry into its long history. Depictions of a punitive afterlife are as old as writing itself. Ancient Mesopotamians imagined a grim otherworld in “the house of dust,” while ancient Egyptians trembled at the thought of the judgment of the death god Anubis, but these traditions did not exert as much influence on Western culture as the realms of shadow and gloom awaiting the dead as portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures (Sheol) and in Greek and Roman literature (Hades). The account of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld and the descriptions of its landscape and megafauna in The Aeneid of the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) were especially formative; the poem would exert an enormous influence on medieval intellectuals and poets, especially Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE). The earliest Christians thus inherited a rich tradition of thoughts and images about the afterlife from their Jewish and pagan contemporaries, but they were not slavish imitators of other religions in their thinking about the underworld. In the centuries between the time of Christ and the triumph of the Church in the lifetime of Saint Augustine (356–430 CE), Christian thinkers began to delineate the contours and function of a distinctly Christian Hell, informed by ancient models yet particular to their own understanding of original sin and God’s inscrutable mercy.

During the first millennium CE, early medieval authors invented a punitive underworld with distinctive features and dire inhabitants and articulated its details in popular stories unauthorized by the Church, including the apostle Paul’s guided tour of Hell in the company of an angel and the tradition that Christ descended to the underworld during his three days in the tomb in order to rescue the virtuous Jewish patriarchs from the prison of Hades, the so-called Harrowing of Hell. They also composed vivid and fanciful visionary tours of Hell, its inhabitants, and its torments written with didactic intent to help monastic readers avoid the sins that would bar them from Heaven. The articulation of these beliefs as official Church doctrine took almost a millennium to work out, but by the High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1400 CE) theologians like Thomas Aquinas were explaining with detached reason the kinds of punishments that evil persons could expect in Hell and the relationship between the blessed and the damned. At the end of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri wedded medieval popular beliefs about the punitive afterlife and the reasoned deductions of scholastic thinkers about the workings of divine punishment in his towering poem The Divine Comedy. His poetic portrayal of Hell (Inferno) represented the apogee of the punitive underworld in the medieval imagination.

Early modern thinkers challenged medieval understandings of Hell during the Protestant Reformation. In the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers agreed with their Catholic rivals that Hell was the destination of the wicked, but they were much more likely to couch the punitive afterlife in abstract terms of remorse and wounded conscience rather than in concrete terms of torment in Hell-fire familiar from the...

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Verlag
Penguin Classics
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143131621
ISBN 13 
9780143131625
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Herausgeber
Bruce Scott G.
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Penguin Random House Ireland
https://eu-contact.penguin.ie

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