Explore "The Duration of Hell" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Hell-a speculation that has become weary with the years. Preachers themselves ignore it, perhaps because they've been abandoned by the poor, but serviceable, human allusion that the ecclesiastical fires of the Holy Office had in this world: a temporal torment no doubt, but not unworthy within terrestrial limitations of being a metaphor for an immortal, perfect pain without destruction, which the heirs of the divine wrath will know forever. Whether this hypothesis is satisfactory or not, it is unarguable that there is a general lassitude in the propaganda of this institution. (Let no one jump to conclusions: the term propaganda is not of commercial origin, but catholic; it is a meeting of cardinals.) In the second century, the Carthaginian Tertullian could imagine Hell and foresee its operation in this discourse:
"Do spectacles please you? then expect a greater one, the Final Judgment. What wonder will I experience, what laughter, what celebration, what joy, when I see so many arrogant kings and lying gods agonizing in the very lowest prison of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord, melting in fires more fierce than the ones they ever incinerated for Christians; so many grave philosophers shaming themselves in the red flames with their illusory auditors; so many acclaimed poets trembling not before the tribunal of Midas, but of Christ; so many actors of tragedy more eloquent now in the manifestation of so genuine a torment. " (De spectaculis, 30; citation and version from Gibbon.)