John Pake Casserly knew all about Hell. Most of his earthly life it was etched on his morning face. By about five in the evening, however, all going well, Heaven would have set in once more. Such was the pattern of his daily existence in Ballaghaderreen.
John Pake was deeply attached to drink and it made his mornings misery. He managed thanks to the great humanity of the Sharkey family and the affection in which he was held by the rest of the town. It helped, so that when he died last January he was well into his 70s. His mornings could be said to be Hell in an increasingly fluid concept.
Being a very intelligent man, he was aware of this fluidity where both Heaven and Hell were concerned. So that when he was asked once where he would go when he died, Heaven or Hell? he replied, "I don't mind. I have friends in both places."
Purgatory he understood, too. I saw him do it once. It was St Patrick's Day, 1996, and he had been asked to lead the town parade. He stayed off the drink the night before so he could do the job properly. Dressed as St Patrick, he marched through the streets that afternoon, every nerve in his frail body twitching for Ballagh and Ireland. Later the entire town seemed to want to assist in that initially delicate task of bringing peace to his racked soul. When he was like that, body and soul were inextricably linked. For who can tell the sufferer from the suffering?
I was reminded of John Pake this week when reading Pope John Paul's remarks on Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory. Both because of John Pake's observation on his own destiny and the clearly visible, truly hellish vision that were his hangovers.
Hell is not a place, Pope John Paul indicated. It is, like New York, a state of mind. John Pake would have understood.
Hell, like the poor, will it seems, always be with us. Just when we thought it was safe to sin again, we are reminded that "it hasn't gone away, you know". And, like so much else, it is not what it used to be.
"Hell is murky," said Macbeth. "Hell is other people," said that other Jean Paul (Sartre) in his play Huis Clos (In Camera). "Hell? Hell!, . . . hell is working in this place," said the lady in the shop when asked whether they had any books on the subject. "Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!" spoke voices to the young Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man after that lurid hellfire sermon.
". . . the fire of Hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness . . . amid which bodies are heaped one upon another without ever a glimpse of air . . . all the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world . . . a pestilential odour . . . the immortal soul is tortured eternally . . . an eternity of agony . . . the damned howl and scream at one another . . ." was how that fearful Jesuit Father Arnall described it to the young Stephen and his classmates.
The truth is artists, and some theologians, love Hell. Dante, in his Inferno, gives over-indulgent rein to his agitated imagination on the subject. And then there's that old Puritan John Milton allowing himself excess only when it comes to the dreamedup punishments that await the unworthy (most other people!)
Here he is on Hell in Paradise Lost: A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,/As one great furnace flamed: yet from those flames/ No light, but rather darkness visible/Served only to discover sights of woe,/Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/And rest can never dwell, hope never comes/That come to all: but torture without end/ Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed/ With ever- burning sulphur unconsumed. Such is Milton's righteous zeal in illustrating the sheer awfulness of Satan that his imagination outstrips his indignation and he ended up, by default, creating a Satan who is by far the most interesting character in the whole of Paradise Lost. Oh, sweetest revenge, when our passion should defeat our prejudice.
Revenge is probably a prime reason for the human need to believe in Hell. That deep desire to see those who get away with murder in this life - but above all those who enjoy greater good fortune or more courage than ourselves - suffer grievously and forever.
It has also been used extensively through the ages by authority to frighten the rebellious into line. How else do you deal with (s)he who will not be obedient? Unless you resort to killing. They did that, too, of course. But it's not always seemly in the name of God. "The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living. He rejects the consequences implied by death. If nothing lasts, then nothing is justified: anything that dies has no meaning . . . the rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the fatal obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or a religion. Rebellion is a form of asceticism, though it is blind." So wrote Albert Camus in The Rebel.
Confronted with that, is it any wonder that in lesser times authority should have resorted to the crude and desperate imagery of terror? But it doesn't work anymore.
So nowadays there is greater emphasis on persuasion and on Hell as a state, as opposed to it being a place. "The images with which Hell is presented to us by Sacred Scripture must be correctly interpreted," said Pope John Paul recently. "They demonstrate the complete frustration and emptiness of a life without God. More than a physical place, Hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God."
Nowadays, it seems, the traditional image of Hell and dear old dreadful Satan is to be found only in Kit-Kat and Tayto ads. Another institution bites the dust.
But nostalgia remains what it used to be and still there are those who cling tenaciously to the old horrors. Fundamentalist Christians, of course, and another fearful Jesuit, Father FX Schouppe who, in his 1988 book, Hell, assures us "the dogma of Hell is the most terrible truth of our faith. There is a Hell." And he quickly resorts to the revenge element: "The existence of Hell is in harmony with the immutable notions of justice engraved in the human heart." Hmmm.
It is also for everyone in the audience, he tells us. Which is why there is a DIY section in his book on "How to avoid Hell".
But not everyone is moved anymore. Some are like that woman who, according to storyteller Eamon Kelly, was altogether too sanguine about Hell. In his tale The Hereafter, he recalled how she remained curiously unperturbed by a particularly passionate hellfire sermon given during a mission in the parish. As with anyone whose lovingly executed handiwork is greeted with indifference, the priest was not a little miffed.
"How is it," says he, "my good woman, that you were so unmoved by all the suffering in Hell's flames?"
"Yerra, Father," says she, "I'm not from this parish at all!"