Hey, what’s up chat? So, listen. You’re, uh… dead.
And I’m the Devil’s Advocate. Welcome to Hell, baby! The forecast: six thousand degrees.
The agenda, packed! You gotta get dragged over hot coals, swim in a river of fire, there’s gonna be a lunch of lava soup… Also, I’ve been working on this PowerPoint presentation of every cringe thing you ever said. And there were so many of them!
Everybody you knew remembered them. In fact, they helped me make the presentation! [JOHN GREEN] Um, what are you doing here?
[DEVIL’S ADVOCATE] Oh, Jaime gave me a key. [JOHN GREEN] I don’t believe you. Get – get out!
[DEVIL’S ADVOCATE] I think I’m going to go ahead and disappear now. [explosion] [JOHN GREEN] Okay. Oh God, my back.
Ugh. Bet Devil’s Advocate doesn’t have to deal with that back. Alright, Stan, fix the lighting for me.
Thank you. Great. Hi, I’m John Green.
This is not Hell; it’s an office building in Indiana. I know, close resemblance, obvious joke. This is Crash Course Religions.
Today we’ll be talking about the most terrifying, and yet mundane mystery of them all: What happens when we die? [THEME MUSIC] Death may have been a mistake. According to a story told by the Maasai people of East Africa, a man named Leeyio misspoke one day while disposing of a corpse.
Instead of saying “Man dies and comes back again,” Leeyio said, “Moon dies and comes back again, man dies and stays away. ” Death has been life’s irreversible finale ever since. Which sure makes my screw-ups seem small.
Or perhaps death takes us to a dark realm that’s decidedly not as good as living. The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia described the afterlife as a “dark house [. .
. ] where those who stay are deprived of light, where dust is their food, and clay is their bread. ” Or what if death is more like a transition, closing one life and beginning the next?
Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Hinduism propose variations on the concept of reincarnation, describing a cycle of life, death, and rebirth known as Saṃsāra. Then there’s the big one, at least for many folks: death as a fork in the road, bringing us either to Heaven: the good place, the one where all the dogs go, or Hell: the bad place, the one where that one dog went once, but only in a movie, and he made it out in the end. Heaven and Hell are powerful ideas in Western culture.
Nearly three-quarters of U. S. adults say they believe in Heaven, and about sixty-one percent say there’s also a Hell, perhaps because they’ve seen that one sign between Cincinnati and Columbus.
But where did these ideas come from? To understand how we got to this Christian version of heaven and hell, we have to go way, way back to the ancient Israelites —the early Jewish people— who thought of the world like a three-level building —gods up top, humans in the middle, and the dead in a dark cave called Sheol. Sheol wasn’t scorching hot or torturous —just a quiet, shadowy place.
And it was thought to be permeable; ghosts could slip back to the human world and hang out. The living would call the dead up by leaving offerings on tombs or literally pouring one out for them, if you ever wondered where that expression comes from. But around the 8th century BCE, the Israelites were in crisis.
They were under the oppressive rule of the Assyrian Empire, and it didn’t seem like any mortal intervention could free them. So, they turned to the divine and a prophetic message began circulating: abandon all gods except one, Yahweh, and he’ll improve the situation for his followers. This “Yahweh-alone movement” was born.
Eventually, leaders of this movement rose to power and started discouraging speculation about the afterlife. In fact, in 623 BCE, when King Josiah made Yahweh the national god, he outlawed rituals venerating the dead. The two-way line to Sheol was officially closed.
One-way tickets only. But then in 586 BCE, the Babylonian army overthrew Judah, kicking off a whole new crisis. Again people were left wondering: how could such a terrible thing happen?
Which laid the groundwork for a new message, one that could help reconcile the loss. Perhaps God’s promise was actually to resurrect the destroyed nation—in a way, to raise it from the dead. Over time, this idea extended not just to a fallen nation, but to individual people.
So we started seeing some people predicting an impending Judgment Day where God would physically bring his people back to life. And a carpenter named Jesus inherited that view. Now it’s hard to prove exactly what Jesus thought about the afterlife.
Although god knows, plenty have tried. But from archaeological and textual evidence, most scholars think that Jesus held an apocalyptic view —one that attributed suffering to evil forces controlling the world, and predicted a future reckoning where God would take power back and bring justice to the underdogs. And this was all supposed to happen soon, like within a generation.
Those who believed in God would enjoy utopia. Those who didn’t would be banished to a place called Gehenna, a forsaken valley outside Jerusalem that was just about the most horrible place the average Israelite could think of. It’d be like getting exiled to the town dump – or the highway between Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio.
And before you Ohioans get mad at me, let me remind you there is a literal town called Gahanna, Ohio. Now, the word “Gehenna” sometimes gets translated as “Hell,” but that’s not quite what Jesus was describing— at least, not the eternal torment stuff. Getting thrown into Gehenna implied total annihilation of the body and soul.
It meant distance from God. Missing out on utopia. Again, it meant Ohio.
Listen, I went to college in Ohio. I grew up in Florida, which many have described as the “Ohio of the South”. But, but… you know.
Right? Like, we all know. It’s not just us that live in Indiana that know.
At any rate, for people living in that time and place, this was a pretty compelling vision of divine justice. But over time, Christians continued building on this concept of Hell, adding visions of eternal torture in art, literature, and theology. As the writer Alice K.
Turner puts it, “Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history. ” Take Medieval European mystery plays. Communities acted out stories from the Bible that included lively visions of Hell.
Stage directions called for chains, and smoke, and boiling cauldrons. People literally wielded fire. And they built elaborate “jaws of hell” out of wood, and papier-mâché, and fabric thrown over trapdoors, bursting with smoke and stench… and probably accompanied by fart jokes.
Because you can always count on pre-modern theater to have some fart jokes thrown in alongside all that theologizing. But perhaps the most influential ideas about Hell came from Dante’s “Inferno,” part of the 14th-century epic poem “The Divine Comedy. ” Dante took many creative licenses, mixing Greek and Roman myths with ideas from the Bible’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation.
And he described Hell as nine concentric circles, each one occupied by increasingly bad sinners punished in increasingly gruesome ways. The first circle? The unbaptized.
Then we’ve got the lustful, tossed around by a violent storm; the gluttonous, eaten by a three-headed dog; the greedy, pushing boulders forever; the wrathful, throwing hands in a swampy river; heretics burning in fiery graves; the violent, dunked in a river of boiling blood; liars and hypocrites, whipped by demons; and of course, the traitors! Chew-toys for Satan, who sits in ice up to his waist – because it turns out Hell can freeze over. I’m sorry for that joke, that was stupid.
Point is, Dante’s “Inferno” did a lot for Hell’s image. Renaissance thinkers took up “infernal cartography,” working out the exact dimensions of Hell as Dante described it —which, by the mathematician Antonio Manetti’s calculation, was eighty-seven and a half miles wide. Galileo agreed—maybe jokingly– that those numbers were spot-on.
Artists also brought Dante’s vision to life, like Sandro Botticelli with his “Map of Hell” in the 15th century. And Hieronymous Bosch, with his highly meme-able “Garden of Earthly Delights,” featuring punishments like this one which I can only assume is “doomed to play butt-music forever. ” Basically, Dante’s “Inferno” sparked creative ways of thinking about Hell.
And the concept of eternal torment became a collective worldbuilding exercise. Of course, not every Christian believes in this idea of Hell as a separate place where sinners are sent. Many Orthodox Christians, for instance, believe that Heaven and Hell are the same thing, not a place but an experience.
In their view, the second coming of Jesus will be either a paradise or a punishment depending on how you live your life. And speaking of, it wasn’t just the fiery pits of Hell that got extensively imagined. Heaven has also been a creative project for the Western imagination.
Each generation has dreamed up its own take on utopia, but scholars like Colleen McDannell and Barnhard Lang argue that there have been essentially two main perspectives throughout the history of Christianity. The theocentric view—that is, the God-centered one —frames Heaven as a place to be with God for all of eternity alone. Just you and the big guy, one-on-one, for the rest of time.
You better hope you like each other’s company. Good news, he’s supposed to be great. This idea was popular with Medieval scholars, who imagined Heaven as a transcendent realm surrounding the universe.
And with Medieval mystics, who believed God would literally embrace the soul and know it. And I mean really know it, in the Biblical sense. Although Protestant reformers thought this sounded like unBiblical fanfiction, they agreed that God was the most important thing in life and the afterlife.
And to this day, a lot of Christian theology takes this view of Heaven: all God, all the time, while human concerns fade away. But if you’re thinking a one-on-one hangout sesh with God for all time sounds… not that fun… so have many other people throughout history. And so Heaven has also been framed in an anthropocentric, or human-centered, way: like, maybe it also has stuff you care about in actual life.
Like living in a town identical to Indianapolis with all the people you’ve ever loved except magically it’s also in London so you can go to AFC Wimbledon games every Saturday. In second-century France, the bishop Irenaeus imagined Heaven as a utopia that would begin with a one-thousand-year launch party — where the righteous could enjoy life and have lots of kids on a planet free of haters. It’s a rough paraphrase of the original.
Others have thought of Heaven as a place where you reunite with family and friends. That idea gained popularity in the West during the Renaissance, and again during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And it’s popular to this day.
About two-thirds of U. S. adults believe they’ll meet their loved ones again in Heaven.
Like any belief about the afterlife though, this idea is shaped by cultural forces, reflecting the time and place we live in. But I suppose it also reflects a kind of timeless hope. None of us gets to keep our lives.
But maybe, even in death, we get to keep the people who matter to us. Death might be our one, universal truth. Not only will you die; everyone you love will die, and in time the Earth itself will die, as will the galaxy and eventually the universe.
There used to be two inevitabilities–death and taxes, but it turns out that the Sun doesn’t have to pay taxes but will, inevitably, die. That’s a hard thing to reconcile ourselves to, especially as creatures that live in a finite universe but can conceive of infinity. So speculation about what comes after death has been ongoing, well, since pretty much the beginning of our history.
But our concepts of Heaven and Hell aren’t static, even though of course they can feel that way. They’ve changed over time, reflecting cultural values, political circumstances, and common threads of human experience — like a desire for justice, or the hope of staying connected to people we love. Let’s just say I’m hoping for the best.
In our next episode, we’ll explore the world of the paranormal and the ways it intersects with faith. I’ll see you there. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all of these nice people.
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