The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds.

Evil and divine retribution are uncomfortable topics for modern Christians. We prefer to see the former as a product of bureaucratic banality or improper socialization and the latter has been all but abandoned as a subject of sermons by even the wildest TV preachers. How is it, then, that such unpleasant themes as hell and the devil have played such a big part in the historical development of Christianity?

Alan Bernstein argues that the Christian Hell was shaped by views about death, the afterlife, and justice held by a variety of Mediterranean societies, with Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity exercising the greatest and most immediate influences. Approaches to death in both of these societies maintained a tension between "neutral death," the afterlife as a morally undifferentiated repository of human shades, and "moral death," the afterlife as punishment or reward for earthly deeds.

To provide a background to the Christian "moral death," Bernstein guides readers on a tour of Greek, Roman, and Jewish thinking about what happens to people after they stop walking on the surface of the earth. His classical sources will be familiar to anyone who bothered to take the classics and ancient history classes that most universities have ceased to require. Jewish ideas on the next world were often parallel to Greco-Roman ideas, a convenient phenomenon for the translators of the Septuagint and for Saint Jerome.

I found Bernstein's close reading of the Hebrew Bible and of the Book of Enoch, the major piece of evidence outside the writings of Josephus of a late antique Jewish belief in punishment after death, more original than his review of Greco-Roman ideas. Much of the latter seems to rest on scholarly interpretations that have long been common currency. This may be a matter of familiarity, however, and Bernstein does bring together a great deal of material in a highly readable style, so that almost anyone will find some new ideas and information in the collection of pre-Christian beliefs assembled here.

Although the Christian message was, from the beginning, concerned primarily with eternal life, the theme of eternal punishment emerged from apocalyptic Judaism in the pages of the New Testament. Bernstein's reading of the New Testament, however, indicates a diversity of understandings of this punishment among the authors of the Scriptures. Saint Paul, emphasizing the positive teachings of the faith, did not express a clear vision of hell and seems to have implied that the wicked would eventually simply disappear. The authors of the synoptic Gospels, by contrast, describe pains of eternal damnation that balance the joys of eternal salvation.

The Fathers of the church could interpret life after death from a variety of perspectives. Origen, perhaps the most original, argued for eventual universal salvation, following tutelary reincarnations that would eventually lead all beings back to the Neoplatonic One. Augustine expressed the dominant position in the church when he described symmetrical states of eternal suffering for the damned and eternal bliss for the saved.

It is only in discussing this last development, the acceptance of the view of symmetrical judgment by Augustine and other Christian writers, that Bernstein deals in even a tentative way with the issue of causation. He suggests that the need to achieve uniformity within the religion that had become the official belief system of the Roman world and the example of the Roman judicial system helped to promote the divide-and-judge model of the afterlife. Elsewhere in the book, there is no attempt to ask how social structures might have affected perspectives on death. There is also little effort to deal with specific questions of intellectual influence, so that we never know just how Hebrew or Greco-Roman sources led to the creation of early Christian theology; we are left with the image of a lot of ideas and myths simply floating around in the air of antiquity to be absorbed by converts to a new religion.

Skip a thousand years and we find that Augustine's heirs are exporting their beliefs to a new world and that the Prince of the Damned has assumed a central position in issues of damnation. Fernando Cervantes takes up this theological thread in the history of ideas, examining the role of demonology in the spiritual conquest of New Spain. Cervantes explores how Amerindians were demonized by early missionaries, how the Amerindians responded to this demonization, and how the devil gradually lost his hold on the collective imagination of a Christianized New World.

The Conquistadors saw the people of the major American societies as fairly civilized humans, and even worthy of respect in many ways, although this respect did not interfere with the business of pillage. By the mid-sixteenth century, though, the natives had become children of Satan in Spanish eyes and the native religions had become forms of Satanic idolatry. Cervantes argues that the early modern fascination with the devil was the result of a reaction, particularly notable among the Franciscans, against the medieval Thomist union of nature and grace in a single rational Aristotelian chain. The Franciscan nominalists portrayed God as a free agent rather than as an "unmoved mover" restricted in action by his position in a cosmos determined by reason. This nominalist elevation of the supernatural enhanced the role of the demonic, as well as the divine, in early modern European minds, causing even such astute students of Amerindian civilizations as Jose de Acosta to interpret all non-Christian religious activities and beliefs as manifestations of Christ's supernatural challenger.

From an anthropological perspective, one of the most interesting parts of Cervantes's book is his description of the native reaction to this demonization. The gods of the Aztecs, Mayans, and other native peoples were powers capable of both good and evil, rather than absolute principles of light and darkness. So the Amerindians, even when they continued pre-Christian religious practices, often tended to accept the identification of the old deities with the Satanic, seeing Satan simply as a spiritual alternative. Filtering all religious acts through the liturgical vocabulary of the new faith, however, tended ultimately to lead to a new, Christianized unity of beliefs.

In the end, according to Cervantes, early modern diabolism was undermined by its own presuppositions about the relationship of creator and creation. Seeing the devil in every strange act seemed to vulgarize the supernatural power. Cervantes shows, through citing colorful cases of alleged possession, how inquisitors became increasingly suspicious of charges of demonic activity.

This interpretation of early modern demonology is intriguing, but suggesting that changes in worldview may result from changes in theology seems to reverse the logical order of influence. Cervantes makes a good case for seeing demonology as related to the tendency to separate mind from nature. But both of these phenomena stem from the broader social and historical patterns that shape human interpretations of the natural and supernatural.

Bernstein and Cervantes have produced fascinating and insightful books, well worth the time of any serious reader, but ultimately they suffer from a common weakness of intellectual historians. They tend to treat ideas as independent of the societies that produce them, so that history becomes a set of disembodied intellectual formulations. These formulations may be shown as influencing human behavior, by leading perhaps to intolerance for schismatic views on damnation or to rises and declines in exorcism, but they are rarely understood as interpretive reactions to social environments. These books have made progress in drawing the shifting historical picture of evil, but many vital features have yet to be filled in, and some of the lines may need to be redrawn.