Fear of Hell

by Piero Camporesi

The Fear of Hell is a provocative study of two of the most powerful images in Christianity—hell and the eucharist. Drawing upon the writings of Italian preachers and theologians of the Counter-Reformation, Piero Camporesi demonstrates the extraordinary power of the Baroque imagination to conjure up punishments, tortures, and the rewards of sin. In the first part of the book, Camporesi argues that hell was a very real part of everyday life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Preachers portrayed hell in images typical of common experience, comparing it to a great city, a hospital, a prison, a natural disaster, a rioting mob, or a feuding family. The horror lay in the extremes to which these familiar images could be taken. The city of hell was not an ordinary city, but a filthy, stinking, and overcrowded place, an underworld "sewer" overflowing with the refuse of decaying flesh and excrement—shocking but not beyond human imagination. What was most disturbing about this grotesque imagery was the realization by the people of the day that the punishment of afterlife was an extension of their daily experience in a fallen world. Thus, according to Camporesi, the fear of hell had many manifestations over the centuries, aided by such powerful promoters as Gregory the Great and Dante, but ironically it was during the Counter-Reformation that hell's tie with the physical world became irrevocable, making its secularization during the Enlightenment ultimately easier. The eucharist, or host, the subject of the second part of the book, represented corporeal salvation for early modern Christians and was therefore closely linked with the imagery of hell, the place of perpetual corporeal destruction. As the bread of life, the host possessed many miraculous powers of healing and sustenance, which made it precious to those in need. In fact, it was seen to be so precious to some that Camporesi suggests that there was a "clandestine consumption of the sacred unleavened bread, a network of dealers and sellers" and a "market of consumers." But to those who ate the host unworthily was the prospect of swift retribution. One wicked priest continued to celebrate the mass despite his sin, and as a result, "his tongue and half of his face became rotten, thus demonstrating, unwillingly, by the stench of his decaying face, how much the pestiferous smell of his contaminated heart was abominable to God." When received properly, however, the host was a source of health and life both in this world and in the world to come. Written with style and imagination, The Fear of Hell offers a vivid and scholarly examination of themes central to Christian culture, whose influence can still be found in our beliefs and customs today.

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Piero Camporesi was an Italian historian of literature and an anthropologist. He was a Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this isn't quite as insane as Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, since in that book camporesi suggests that early modern peasants were almost constantly hallucinating, but it does offer some lurid details about how depictions of hell changed over time in relation to the prevailing social conditions and the ideology of the church. some of the descriptions of how hell was depicted are wonderfully grotesque and baroque, which could be a deliberate stylistic choice given that he's mostly dealing with the era of the baroque. the second part of the book shifts focus to the magical properties of communion wafers, which wasn't as interesting to me although there are some cool passages about god descending into the stomach and transforming the body.

"The bodies were pressed, stuffed into one another, stretched until they interpenetrated and permeated one another in a superfluous, gigantic poultice of mixed, dirty, infected and foul flesh, amalgamated in a sordid mustard of excrement. All the roads of which Dionigi the Carthusian still spoke in the Quattrocento had been closed off; there was now not enough air and the smell provoked fainting-fits, hysteria, contractions and spasms. Promiscuity reached monstrous levels: the sodomite clasped the man of arms, the executioner was stuck into the nun, the virgin with impure thoughts was penetrated by the leper, the nobleman was touched up by the vagabond, the clergyman was violated by the merchant, the reader of prohibited books was seduced by the bestial rapist of animals, the notary was crumpled by the shepherd, the mouth of the intemperate widow was wet by the slobber of a convict rotten with syphilis. The pneumatic hell, the Avernus of shadows (‘the empty realms’), breaths, winds and smoke, of which some trace survives in the Celtic underworlds with their large spaces which were blown here and there by the north winds, was progressively transformed into a closed space with well-defined compartments on different floors and divisions, encased in circles, subdivided into pits, within a contained, encircled and measured space. The wide and windy plains imagined by the island people were relegated by an urban intellect, such as the Florentine, either to the entrance (the ‘grim terrain’, III, 130) or to the periphery of the city of Dis (the ‘great terrain’, IX, 110). The heart of hell, the ‘Malebolge’, was not affected. The Celtic inheritance, like the famous storm in Dante’s Canto V, did not penetrate to the depths, but was relegated to the uncertain morphology of the first inferno."

"Dante’s ‘sad hole’, which gave off a ‘sad breath’, the ‘corpulent swamp’, the ‘swamp from which emanated a great stench’ became essentially a hell of the sense of smell in Dionigi the Carthusian’s (1402-71) explorations of its sewer-like caves. It was a ‘stinking sewer’ in which ‘the dirt of vices, the fetor of the wicked, and the decay of the impious’ were amassed.” This machine which devoured, this mouth which swallowed and sucked, this horrible, swollen and labyrinthine intestine, this amoebean space, like a gut in perpetual peristaltic motion, ‘the most rapacious and insatiable place’, absorbed and destroyed this repellent human fauna with its diseased and putrefying adiposity. At the Last Judgement, the bodies of the damned will be fashioned and remodelled using the despicable model of the fat of the poorest quality rejected by the honest tables of the elect: ‘The bodies of the unrighteous shall be disgusting, liable to suffering, gross and slow, heavy, foul and smelly. This was the hell of the fat, the slow, the obese, those with ponderous step, the semi-putrified (‘passibilia’) and, above all, the fetid. ‘Fat and despairing’, masse de péché, like the hedonists of Emilia who were seen and condemned by the archepiscopal see of Bologna in terms which seem to describe the stereotypes of the joyful fifteenth-century reprobates in a singular iconological analogy: ‘the passibility, the weakness and softness of the human flesh’."

"In the seventeenth century the warehouse of the damned ‘containing millions and millions of rotten bodies’, the ‘unhappy and stinking Arabia’,’ the ‘land of misery’ whose air was ‘heavy, rotten and putrid’, definitively became a separate place, a sealed ghetto, as far removed as possible from the other house, the eternal house, and as remote as possible from the country of the righteous. The separation was total and irremediable. The thought of people walking calmly in hell, like the priest who, in the Vision of Tugdal, was seen ‘joyfully crossing the bridge with a palm branch in his hand’, became absolutely inconceivable. It was also impossible to imagine the spectacle of the blessed being led to visit the “dregs of the abyss’, or to imagine the damned being brought for a reciprocal exchange visit, to walk in the land of the blessed."

"Nevertheless, the abuses and superstitions concerning the host were widely diffused well before the golden age of witches and inquisitors, well before the dramatic tensions of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Often the first to unduly misuse its powers were the ecclesiastics themselves; in particular, they used it in ‘love potions’. In Dialogus miraculorum the thirteenth-century author, Caesar of Heisterbach, described the story of ‘some priestly voluptuary’ who tried to seduce a woman; but being unable to overcome her resistance, one day, having said mass, he kept ‘the most pure body of the Lord?’ in his mouth in the hope that should he kiss her with the host on his tongue he would oblige her to fulfil his wishes with the help of the sacred body and the sacraments. This blasphemous and vain belief lasted for centuries and underwent many variations. The most common practice, which was often used in divination and love potions, decreed that the powder of a host which, having been previously decorated with mottoes and scrolls written in blood, had been secretly consecrated (hidden under the linen altarcloths) at one or more masses should be added to the food, either soup or drink, of the person to be bewitched. At other times, the ‘most villainous’ celebrant himself, wishing to be loved, and having uttered ‘foul and abominable words’, swallowed only half of the host, taking care that the other half, having been reduced to powder, was eaten or drunk by the woman he hoped to
seduce."

[Bruno Racca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Come per gli altri testi dell'autore la lettura non è agevole: citazioni in italiano del tempo, in latino costellano il testo. Questo denota l'enorme base letteraria su cui si svolgono gli argomenti trattati, un lavoro che riassume e pubblica un vasto sapere altrimenti di difficile accesso. Complesso da leggere.