Recently someone sent out a tweet after reading a newspaper article that upset them. The article in question speculated that, despite a “very high Covid-19 vaccine uptake”, new restrictions might be imposed on Ireland over the winter. This prospect had clearly pushed the Twitter user (tweeter?) to her wit’s end.
Ffs I can’t cope with much more of this. It’s not living it’s hell so much for the so called magic vaccine.1
The tweet is by no means unique. Over the last few months I have seen others in a similar vein. They reflect a growing feeling that what we once knew as “living” is now being turned into a “hell” by the official response to Covid-19.
In a previous post I referred to:
the would-be tyrants and despots who, but for the lack of means, would have long ago transformed our already bleak world into another hell.2
Is this what we see happening around us? Is our world being transformed ‘into another hell’? Or is it more accurate to describe what is happening as a veil being lifted to reveal what was there all along, i.e. that hell is not some half-forgotten fantasy used to frighten us, but a terrible reality slowly becoming apparent here and now, like a monstrous, previously invisible, hulk looming out of the fog?
This is not quite the image of hell presented by orthodox religion. The Roman Catholic position is encapsulated in the catechism authorised in 2005 by Pope Benedict XVI.
In what does hell consist?
Hell consists in the eternal damnation of those who die in mortal sin through their own free choice.3
While this brief definition contains several interesting features, one in particular is worth noting: hell relates to the next life, i.e. after we die. The same emphasis can be seen in this extract from the pre-Vatican Council catechism I used in school.
What is hell?
Hell is a place or state of punishment in the next life, where the wicked undergo everlasting suffering with the Devil and his angels.4
The language may be different but the doctrine is the same. Hell exists alright – but the prospect arises following our physical death here on Earth.
Those who reject the idea of God or an afterlife can easily ignore the concept of hell completely. Even those who believe may be tempted to put hell on the long finger and concentrate on the here and now of this world. That is perhaps easier today than in, say, James Joyce’s time when, as he described in his writings, Catholics were reminded regularly in the confession box or by a preacher in the pulpit of what awaited them after death if they did not mend their ways.5
So is hell really nothing to worry about, for now anyway?
In late-1992 I spent a short time working in the city of Lublin in eastern Poland. With a few hours to kill one day I decided to visit the site of a nearby Nazi concentration camp called Majdanek. It was a cold and gloomy November afternoon when the taxi dropped me at the entrance.
The camp had been preserved by the Soviets when the War ended. I could see lots of small wooden huts behind the tall barbed wire fence that marked the lengthy perimeter. It was not difficult to imagine how this place must have looked a half-century earlier. Majdanek was set up in 1941 to hold prisoners-of-war, mainly Russians. Later on the camp was expanded to imprison Jews from Poland and other Nazi-occupied territories. It is estimated that about 80,000 inmates lost their lives in Majdanek.6
No one else was around on the day of my visit. A light snow began to fall as I walked towards a stone building with a tall chimney I could see in the distance. When I arrived I found the door unlocked. As I went in, my legs suddenly went from under me and I fell down. It was as if some invisible force had compelled me to drop to the floor. When I got back to my feet and continued inside I realised I was in the crematorium. Here were the ovens used to burn the bodies of the dead. I also saw a dissection table and a huge heap of shoes and other personal paraphernalia. It was a ghastly place.
Those who worked in this hideous camp, the soldiers, the guards, the orderlies, could hardly have been oblivious to the evil system around them, a system to which they were contributing passively if not actively.7 It was not only the prospect of beating or execution the prisoners had to worry about. Surviving on the meagre rations of watery soup and bread was a daily struggle. One inmate, Józef Szczygiel, recalled that:
The chunk of bread to last us the whole day could not have been more than 200 grams. Cut into two, it gave two quite thin slices.8
Majdanek was not a nice place to find yourself in. But what about somewhere less obviously inhuman, like a hospital where the staff are supposed to help those in their care?
In an essay entitled, “How the Poor Die”, George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, related his experience of being a patient in a French hospital. He set the scene in his first sentence:
In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris.9
Orwell described the sights, sounds, and smells he observed around him during his time in a large public ward. There, he and the other patients were prodded, jabbed, and manhandled as if they were inanimate slabs of meat rather than sentient human beings. He wrote of one unfortunate in the next bed who had just died. His “eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony”. He also described how the staff wrapped up the body before it was taken away like a “disgusting piece of refuse”.10
It was not that the doctors and nurses were psychopaths who delighted in tormenting their patients. But whatever it was about the culture in which they lived and worked, the staff did not regard those in their care as people like them deserving of love and respect. Orwell felt “humiliated, disgusted and frightened” by the treatment he received there.11
Could there be two better examples than these of “hell on earth”? Of course. They are only examples after all. There are countless others throughout history, such as Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s, or the 18th- and 19th-century slave plantations in the southern United States, or the Jonestown settlement in Guyana where almost 1,000 cult members killed themselves and their children in 1978.
What all of these have in common is their existence in this world, this life – not the next.
But terrible as they were, are these not extreme cases concentrated in specific places at specific times? Can they be compared to the present crisis overtaking the whole world?
Yes, if we take them as evidence of our propensity as humans to create our own hell - as we are seeing right now. Except that our present plight is not centred in one place, it is everywhere - right across our entire planet Earth.
So are we actually in hell? Is that the reality gradually unfolding before our eyes?
Or is it closer to the truth to suggest that hell is in us?
My old catechism defined hell as “a place or state”. A state of mind perhaps?
I will examine this question further in Part 2.
Erin Stephanie, Twitter post, 5:33 PM · 14 Sep. 2021.
J. P. Bruce, ‘The ruler of this world’, 4 Apr. 2021.
Catechism of the Catholic Church [https://www.vatican.va/archive/ compendium_ccc/documents/archive_2005_compendium-ccc_en.html], 2 Sep 2021.
A Catechism of Catholic doctrine (Dublin, 1951), p. 47.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Ware, 1992), pp. 97-103.
State Museum at Majdanek [http://www.majdanek.eu/en/history/general_information/1], 20 Sep 2021.
After the war, more than 130 “functionaries” of Majdanek were prosecuted by the Allies. A few were executed, others received lengthy prison sentences. (see Czeslaw Rajca & Anna Wusniewska, tr. Anna Zagorska, Majdanek Concentration Camp (Lublin 1983), pp. 37-9.)
Rajca & Wusniewska, Majdanek, pp. 61-2.
George Orwell, Selected Essays (Oxford, 2021), p. 250.
Ibid., p. 254.
Ibid., p. 251.