In early modern Christian doctrine, Hell was suspended in a thick network of concepts and connotations. The immortality of the soul, divine judgment, post mortem punishment, the resurrection of the body, revealed doctrine, and a morally static afterlife – all these concepts were woven together in the traditional teaching on Hell. And all these concepts and connotations were questioned as never before in the seventeenth century – first by radical Christians, then by the radical Enlightenment. A challenge to any one of the concepts could have seismic effects on the entire concept of Hell, and the stakes were high. Unlike the belief in ghosts or witches, the doctrine of Hell was preached quite deliberately to deter sin, stir consciences, and maintain the social order. In a 1686 letter the devotional author Matthew Henry presented the accepted view that “Heaven and Hell are great things indeed, and should be much upon our hearts, and improved by us as a spur of constraint to put us upon duty, and a bridle of restraint to keep us from sin.”45The famously dissolute free-thinker Matthew Tindal said the same in his 1697 tract on religious toleration, though with less straightforward conviction.46 He placed atheists and deists outside the bounds of toleration because they denied “the Existence of a God, or that he concerns himself with Humane Affairs; it being the belief of these things that preserveth them in Peace and Quiet, and more effectually obliges them to be true to their Promises and Oaths, and to perform all their Covenants and Contracts.”47 Denying the efficacy of ghosts, spirits, and witches was already dangerous – witness the career of Balthasar Bekker – but denying openly the existence of divine post mortem punishment in Hell went beyond the limits of even radical Enlightenment discourse. Confounding Hell’s dark existence meant unleashing on an already troubled world all the crime, excess, lust, and deceit kept in check by fear of eternal punishment. Was Hell a nocturnal illusion that even the most enlightened had to maintain?
We are accustomed to think of the challenges to Hell in the seventeenth century as theological and intellectual, originating in extraconfessional Christianity and in the radical Enlightenment. But traditional Christian Hell as understood and preached by the established churches of early modern Europe was built from the raw materials of daily life, not merely from Christian doctrine and Scripture. When Christians described Hell, they spoke to all five senses, creating a bricolage of experiences. Early modern authors, following a long tradition, distinguished between the poena damni (internal suffering) and the poena sensi (external sensual suffering) that would be experienced in Hell.48 Some of the most significant challenges to Hell in this period arose from the same realms of experience used to make traditional Hell real.
The constitution of Hell through the senses and through lived experience has already been discussed by scholars of early modern culture and belief. Carlos Eire has argued that early modern Christians might “relate experiences in this world to what they had seen and heard about the infernal regions, thereby receiving a foretaste of what might await the five senses after death.”49 As Eire has suggested, the moans and wails of criminals punished in the town square, the smell of the burnt flesh of a heretic, the pain of passing a kidney stone (or of giving birth), the bitterness of an herbal remedy – all could be part of the experience of Hell.50 Eire and other scholars have suggested that early modern people imagined Hell in terms of extreme experiences of torture, pain, and suffering. Using daily life as a category of analysis broadens this approach by considering Hell in terms of mundane early modern experience rather than focusing on the extreme experiences.
Early modern descriptions of Hell drew their force from the often terrifying experience of darkness and the night in everyday life. How did shifts in attitudes toward darkness and the night relate to changing beliefs in Hell? I argue that the “dark foundations”51 of Hell in daily life and experience were shifting in the second half of the seventeenth century – with profound implications for Hell itself.
Darkness and the night evoked many emotions in early modern Europe, but fear was assumed to be foremost. It was an easy leap from fear to Hell. The Scottish Presbyterian Elizabeth Nimmo (née Brodie, d. 1717) fused everyday darkness with Hell in an incident recounted in her journal or “spiritual narrative”:
I was afraid I had sinned the sin unto death. One Sabbath night when my trouble was very great … I was immediately challenged, though the challenge seemed to come from the Devil: “O,” says the enemy, “you have now sinned the sin unto death.” I knew not how to go alone … and after I had lighted my candle, and had read half a side of a book in octavo, then the temptation came in sorely upon me that the room was full of devils to carry me to Hell. I thought I had no comfort but the burning candle, and out it went without any visible cause, whereupon I thought I should have dropt down to the pit.52
Nimmo’s account of a solitary nocturnal encounter with diabolical temptation resembles both the confessions of accused witches and La Tour’s penitent Magdalene (Figure 3.5). Nocturnal Hell was still very real to Nimmo in rural Scotland in the late seventeenth century, but for some of her learned and urbane contemporaries, the night was now associated with the freedom to question the very existence of the Hell she so feared.53
From Milton to Spinoza, seventeenth-century Europe produced both vivid evocations of Hell and the first truly resonant denials of its existence. Europeans challenged the orthodox doctrine of Hell in the seventeenth century as never before. Denunciations of eternal torment issued from both radical Christian and secular pens. Positions ranged from the annihilationist argument (represented, for example, by Thomas Hobbes) that the wicked would be destroyed (usually after some time in Hell) and only the saved would enjoy eternal life, to the universalist claim (first advanced by Origen) that eventually all souls would be saved.54
But these denials of Hell present a strange paradox. After assessing the range of denials in his masterful study of The Decline of Hell, D.P. Walker examines the early modern understanding of the social function of the orthodox doctrine. Aside from a few millenarian Christians, all agreed that without the fear of Hell, society would collapse. As a deterrent to sin and crime, eternal damnation was too important to be questioned publicly. As Henry Dodwell put it in 1698: “in this age of licentiousness, there is hardly any doctrine … of more pernicious consequence than that … concerning the finiteness of hell torments.”55 Learned doubts about the duration or existence of Hell were too dangerous to be shared with the common people. The conflict between learned disbelief and the social function of eternal punishment led to a “double doctrine” of Hell in which those who denied its existence privately affirmed it publicly.
Authors were quite clear about the double doctrine of Hell. The English Platonist and clergyman Thomas Burnet (1635?–1715) printed his universalist treatise De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium (Of the State of the Dead and of Those who are to Rise) privately and in Latin.56 Translated and published in English, Dutch, and French after his death, in its pages readers found this warning:
whatever you decide, in your own mind, about these punishments being eternal or not, the received doctrine and words must be used for the people and when preaching to the populace, which is inclined to vice and can be deterred from evil only by the fear of punishment.
Burnet’s attempt to limit access to his writings about Hell failed, despite his warning that “if anyone translates these things, which are addressed to the learned, into the vulgar tongue, I shall consider it done with ill will and evil intent.”57 Even Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, who denied post mortem rewards and punishments alike as contrary to disinterested virtue practiced for its own sake, admitted that “the principle of fear of future punishment, and the hope of future reward … is yet in many circumstances a great advantage, and support to virtue” for those too impulsive or weak to strive for virtue for its own sake.58 The issue also figured in debates between French Protestants and Catholics in the second half of the seventeenth century. When confronted with Pierre Jurieu’s publication of Origen’s denial of eternal torment, the French Protestant pastor Elie Saurin agreed with Bossuet, bishop of Meaux:
The crime, or rather the imprudence, consists in M. Jurieu’s having informed the people of a thing which could only scandalize and could not in any way edify.59
A range of seventeenth-century writers agreed that the denial of the orthodox doctrine of Hell should be presented in terms either intellectual or esoteric, so that “none of the Wicked shall understand, but the Wise shall understand.”60
Rare were men like F.M. Van Helmont, who in 1684 denounced this secrecy, asking:
Is it sufficient ground for preaching this Doctrine [of eternal damnation], to concede that it will terrify and affright people from sin? Does God need any Lie of man’s making, to deter people from sin? Or shall we lie for God?61
In similar terms Pierre Bayle denounced the self-interest which led Arminian theologians like Jean Le Clerc and Issac Jaquelot to conceal their belief in universal salvation. If they revealed that they agreed with Origen and would “exclude no one from the bliss of paradise,” they would be driven from the Netherlands by the “Ministers of the Flemish and Walloon Churches … [because] the dogma of eternal torment seems too precious and too important to allow it to be attacked.”62 Bayle then rehearses the social defense of the orthodox Hell, which “restrains vice by the fear of eternal damnation”; denial of eternal punishment “opens the door to all crimes [and] encourages all criminals.”63 Of course, Bayle did not believe that the denial of divine punishment necessarily led to immorality and vice, but his challenges to the theological foundations of Hell were always concealed or indirect.
Working with anonymous, posthumous, and unpublished works, Walker carefully exposes a variety of intellectuals who concealed or obscured their disbelief in orthodox Hell. In England personal ties connected Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), John Locke, and Isaac Newton in shared disbelief in orthodox Hell.64 On the Continent debates and denunciations shed light on the disbelief of Spinoza, Bayle, and many Arminian theologians. Walker argues that “probably many disbelieved in eternal punishment, but none of them published against it in his lifetime and under his own name.”65 In 1730 William Whiston quoted Samuel Clarke as having said that “few or no thinking men” affirmed the doctrine of eternal torment.66 Many followed Burnet’s advice and publicly affirmed the traditional doctrine while privately denying it.67 For the learned, this “double doctrine” of Hell – one for the enlightened, another for the common people – presented to the vulgar a simulated inferno designed to deter them from sin.68
The “double doctrine” reveals the imprint of nocturnalization on the intellectuals’ loss of faith in Hell during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For men such as Spinoza, Burnet, or Newton, Hell, like darkness, had become a nonentity, with no existence of its own. But the double doctrine unearthed by Walker reveals that Hell, if not real, was still important for its social functions. Like darkness on the baroque perspective stage, Hell was created and dispelled to produce specific effects. When men who did not believe in Hell encouraged preaching and teaching about Hell as if it were real, they staged eternal damnation.
Threats of eternal damnation functioned like stage effects, reliant on the manipulation of darkness in the night. The utility of darkness in baroque theater merged with the utility of the fear of Hell in the comments of the master theater designer Joseph Furttenbach. In a guide to theater techniques published in 1663, he described how “Lucifer would be brought on quickly from Hell and let down again amidst flames and smoke. Especially when the lights are dimmed for night, this gives quite a terrifying effect.”69The double doctrine of useful lies about Hell simulated the realm of the prince of darkness for an audience of the ignorant and undisciplined, like a flash of fire from a staged Hell, to produce “a terrifying effect.”
Hell had become a theatrical display, a simulation based on darkness and illusion. This was clear to someone like Burnet. Writing against the orthodox teaching on Hell (but in Latin), Burnet was especially angered by the orthodox claim that the elect will take pleasure in viewing the eternal torment of the damned. Burnet cast this whole scene – the saved looking down on the torments of the damned in Hell – as a “spectacle on the stage.” Driven to irony, he asks:
Consider a little … what a theatre of providence this is: by far the greatest part of the human race burning in flames for ever and ever. Oh what a spectacle on the stage, worthy of an audience of God and angels! And then to delight the ear, while this unhappy crowd fills heaven and earth with wailing and howling, you have a truly divine harmony.
Of course, the double doctrine itself was ironic, affirming Hell on one level while denying it on another. Hell had become a useful artifice or a necessary evil – much like the darkness of which it was made.