Pessimism seems to be a newly popular theme in American cultural discourse. Having written a bit about worst-case scenarios, I was interested to get a review copy of Karen Cerulo’s Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Perhaps because I’m naturally optimistic by temperament, I’m finding Cerulo’s relentless pessimism a bit annoying, and, not coincidentally, finding a lot to disagree with in the book.
One point particularly struck me. Cerulo claims that “positive asymmetry” is demonstrated by the fact that, in theology and art, Heaven is given a detailed and appealing description, while hell is described only in vague and non-specific terms. She mentions, as an illustration of the latter point, an etching inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
My recollection of Dante is that the descriptions of Hell, and the various categories of sinners, were detailed and intricate, making the Inferno a fascinating book, while Purgatory was less distinctly graded and the Paradiso was unreadably dull. I haven’t read Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, but I get the impression that the same is true. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I thought this was one of the standard criticisms of religious art – Hell and the Devil are made much more interesting than Heaven and Hell.
Cerulo focuses mainly on paintings, and maybe she’s right on this score, but even here I’d hazard a guess that the work of Hieronymus Bosch is much more widely reproduced than any detailed representation of Heaven.
{ 25 comments }
clay fink 09.19.06 at 6:32 am
Milton’s description of Eden is actually very compelling and is much more vivid that his descriptions of heaven and hell. Milton’s Satan, of course, is one of the most interesting characters in all of western literature. Adam is also well drawn out – as is Eve. The big guy and his spoiled kid come off as your standard issue supreme beings, however.
hermit greg 09.19.06 at 6:57 am
Emmanuel Swedenborg’s heaven is documented more extensively than his hell, but he wrote about both quite a lot, and little about either is vague.
kid bitzer 09.19.06 at 7:42 am
I’m with you on this one, jq. Everyone knows there is a lot more to say about hell than heaven. And that our culture has said it (esp. Dante, of course).
Related to Tolstoy’s quip about happy families, and the other line about beautiful people all looking alike.
It’s perfection that gets misty and indistinct.
kid bitzer 09.19.06 at 7:44 am
but you’ve got a slight typo up there:
“Hell and the Devil are made much more interesting than Heaven and Hell”
Doesn’t it look like that second pair should by “heaven and the unnameable divinity”?
And surely your subconscious did not replace “God” by “Hell”, did it? Oh dear. What an inauspicious typo.
Randolph Fritz 09.19.06 at 7:46 am
Specific writing about heaven would probably have to include a lot of good sex, or some mystical equivalent thereof. Not real likely, in christian cultures thinks I.
Belle Waring 09.19.06 at 8:41 am
this is just backward. it’s widely agreed that hell is a more fertile ground for artistic representation. satan is by far Milton’s best character and Paradise Regained is booooring. not that I finished it, mind–which tells you something right there. the only slight angle of truthiness I can see is that devotional images of saints, mary etc. far outnumber those of demons, but a) there are some pretty obvious reasons for this, religious-practice-wise and b)even in this case there are plenty of demons bothering st. jerome, devils tempting christ, and so on. interestingly, in indian buddhist scriptures you can get some really extensive tours of heaven which are nonetheless somewhat interesting, though perhaps only by virtue of being exotic: wow, a hundred million million lotuses? thatsa lotta lotuses!
Lukas 09.19.06 at 8:43 am
Randolph – actually, Christian mystical writing has passionate descriptions of metaphorical-carnal love of the Savior, going beyond Christ as bridegroom to more explicitly sexual stuff. Of course there was precedent for this in the Song of Solomon.
Jared 09.19.06 at 8:46 am
Your suspicions are right about “Paradise Regained.” Even “Paradise Lost” gets dull after Satan leaves the picture, as everyone knows the role of God and Jesus in this literature is right in line with religious dogma. No suprises in God’s altruism; plenty of twists in Satan’s troublemaking, which is probably due to the fact that nobody is going to accuse you of heresy when you embellish on Satan’s bad-assness.
Jeffrey Kramer 09.19.06 at 9:35 am
And doesn’t world literature contain many more dystopias than utopias? (Or at least more that are worth reading.)
Pedantic note: Paradise Regained isn’t actually a description of paradise; it’s about Satan’s temptation of Jesus.
kharris 09.19.06 at 9:46 am
Just for fun, here is Milton, in the first few lines of Book 1 of “Lost”, offering us a splendid sprinkling of Hellish description:
“With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,…”
“… round he throws his baleful eyes
That witness’d huge affliction and dismay…”
“The dismal Situation waste and wilde, [ 60 ]
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:”
“There the companions of his fall, o’rewhelm’d
With Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire…”
This is great stuff. Can’t you just see the spit fly as this is read aloud?
Delicious Pundit 09.19.06 at 10:21 am
“The dismal Situation waste and wilde, [ 60 ]
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:â€
Yes, but we need to keep doing such things or America will be vulnerable to terrorism.
Rasselas 09.19.06 at 10:39 am
One reason for the superior definition of hell might be the expectation that individuality as we believe we know it at present will be ablated by assumption into the heavenly chorus, while our idiosyncrasies will be preserved in hell for the sake of the infliction of appropriate punishments.
Richard 09.19.06 at 11:44 am
re:12 – I’d say (without positive evidence as backing, however) that hell tends to be more clearly portrayed than heaven exactly because of the problem of individuality: there’s broad agreement across social classes and national boundaries that being endlessly torn to shreds or burned in a lake of fire is a Bad Thing, but probably rather less agreement on exactly what bliss looks like (whether it contains sex, or bodies, or individual consciousness, what people actually do with their eternity, when they don’t have any needs or ambitions to fulfill).
The Royal Academy of Art in London (Sackler Gallery) showed a gorgeous set of engravings from an illustrated Dante a few years ago: hell was lavishly detailed, with a mixture of close-up and overview scenes and distinguishable personalities; the purgatory plates had rather less vigour, and relied (IIRC) entirely on distant observer viewpoints; and heaven appeared a kind of theoretical, Platonically ideal, mathematical sort of space, where the figure of the narrator himself was one of the few recognisable elements; a sort of precursor to the common advertising strategy of placing the product in front of a featureless white screen. This struck me at the time as absolutely typical of depictions of the two environments in general: any depiction of heaven is understood to be metaphorical, a pale shadow of the unimaginable, illimitable; images of hell, on the other hand, are concrete, aimed at evoking visceral reactions, and understood to be literal, ‘true’ depictions.
hermit greg 09.19.06 at 12:35 pm
Would it be fair to say Cerullo is leaning too hard on the sublime, where vagueness and mystery itself signifies what there is to be afraid of?
Re: 13 — It’s worth plugging Swedenborg again. For him, that heaven is a metaphor is entirely the point: men are in heaven; men in heaven make societies, and societies are men; societies in heaven make heaven, and heaven is a man; heaven is a man is God. (Essentially.)
Rasselas 09.19.06 at 1:03 pm
Re: 12, I think that’s right, but I don’t think I conveyed properly what I had in mind about hell as the maintenance of the alienated individual, as distinguished from heaven as the explosion of the individual. Probably unduly influenced by a few unsystematically-absorbed statements by Hans Kung about hell as “distance” from God.
john c. halasz 09.19.06 at 1:36 pm
It’s been twenty years since I read it, but I thought the “Purgatorio” the best part of the “Divine Commedy”. The “Inferno” has sharply etched characters, an interesting moral framework for its causuistries, and supple moral psychology of sin and damnation, rooted in a combination of obsession and obtuseness and attributed in general to “perverse desire”, defined as desiring what one fears. But the grim materialism of an absolutely fallen world, which culminates in frozen treachery, in the notion of evil as absolute coldness, has its limits. In the “Purgatorio”, the shades/souls are curiously vibrant, Dante discusses his poetic/aesthetic ideas and brings off synaesthetic audio-visual effects. The overall feeling is one of solidarity amongst wayfarers. The “Paradisio” is heavily doctrinal and all white-on-white, blinding light, such the the intent of intensifing joy back-fires and yields diminishing returns. Two things I do remember from the “Paradisio” is that the heavenly saints look on the torments of the damned with satisfaction, even more than equanimity, almost like Brahmins looking on untouchables, and that on one planet, IIRC thematically dedicated to monasticism, mystical union/heavenly bliss is described in terms of the metaphor of an orgy, which ribaldry amidst sublimity was not uncommon in Medieval discourse. Perhaps the intrinsic problem is that human language has abundant means to express suffering or striving, but scarcely can express bliss or exstasy. Joy is not only purposeless and “irrational”, as well as, rare and unlikely, but is essentially ineffable, its effusions only banalizing. The effect of the “Paradiso” on a modern secular sensibility is more a depiction of infantile regression than an image of cosmically culminating fulfillment.
Ginger Yellow 09.19.06 at 4:32 pm
Those were Botticelli’s. You can see them here.
harry b 09.19.06 at 5:05 pm
Paradise Lost was the second best thing I was made to read at school. Closely followed by Emma and The Origins of the Second World War. Never got to Regained though.
John Quiggin 09.19.06 at 5:54 pm
Origins of the Second World War was impressive, but totally wrongheaded, I think.
BTW, Harry you’ve listed #2, #3 and #4 but not #1. Is this one of those things that’s supposed to be obvious?
kid bitzer 09.19.06 at 9:23 pm
no, it’s one of those things that’s designed to get you to ask “so what was the first best thing”?
Obliging of you to play straight man.
derrida derider 09.19.06 at 9:44 pm
It was Blake who in an aside first pointed out why Milton made Satan and Hell much more interesting than God and Heaven – “he was of the devil’s party without knowing it” (Blake meant that as praise – strange guy).
bad Jim 09.20.06 at 3:17 am
The devil always gets the best lines because he’s a crude, vulgar, pagan character, utterly fearless and free of restraint, available to be imbued with any attitude the author chooses. He’s the ultimate dramatic foil: any opinion he voices is perfectly deniable, and neither he nor those he criticises can complain.
Why, though, are Christianity and Islam considered monotheistic, when both stipulate the existence of a devil? And angels?
Stephen 09.20.06 at 4:24 am
I wouldn’t call the Paradiso dull by any stretch of the imagination but it is undoubtedly the case that you can read the Inferno purely for the scenery which you can’t do with the Paradiso. (It’s missing the point with a vengeance but it’s humanly possible.) Part of this is the change that takes place in ‘Dante’ in the poem. There is an element of ‘gee-whizz look at that’ from the human-all-too-human Dante of the Inferno – at one point an exasperated Virgil has to tick him off for eavesdropping on a conversation – by the Purgatorio he is not merely seeing sin as it is but repenting of it. Having been thoroughly purged of sin and raised into heaven by Divine Grace (Beatrice) he can hardly regard the abode of the blessed as a tourist attraction. Hence the focus of his attention shifts. This coincides, rather neatly, I think with the entirely human predicament of being able to invent interesting and macabre torments for the dammned but not suitable rewards for the blessed. Hell is just the worst bits of earth made eternal. Heaven is the Beatific Vision. Human language is much better at describing the former than the latter because we have rather more experience of it.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that, yes, Dante really disproves Cerulo’s thesis.
Ginger Yellow 09.20.06 at 4:43 am
Spurious pop culture analogy: in the episode(s) of South Park dealing with the Danish cartoon controversy, the criticisms of South Park are put in the mouths of a) Cartman, and b) a terrorist. Conversely the sympathetic characters Kyle and Stan are ardent Family Guy fans.
jason corner 09.20.06 at 9:38 am
At the risk of sounding mopey, could it be that there are just more (extremely) unpleasant things in the world than (extremely) pleasant ones to draw on as sources of imagery? Dante’s hell is made up of grotesque versions of real things that we consider just awful – insects, feces, extreme heat, being eaten, et cetera. There are lots of mildly nice things in the world, like food and beer, but the really, really astonishingly good things are just outnumbered.
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