Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless. There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do. Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared. Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.
Enter hell. The solution was simple. If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying. Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.
And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him. For now, Christians again lived in fear. And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.
The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom. This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason. But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.
Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now. Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now? Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?
But not so fast. For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it. Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them. Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal. Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.
Hell is decidedly political.