You find yourself facing the entrance to Hell.
Maybe it’s your classic Dante-inspired, heavy-metal looking doorway—the open mouth of a big pointy-toothed skull, perhaps, or a massive wrought-iron gate covered with spikes.
Or maybe your tastes run to the post-modern, and the portal is something a bit more tongue-in-cheek. Like a spooky elevator in an infinitely large office building.
Maybe it’s just a metaphor—an opportunity to embark on a uniquely stupid, painful enterprise that will suck up years of your life and leave you feeling hollowed out and pointless.
Whatever form it takes, the facts are obvious to you. This is Hell—the worst possible thing that can happen to a person in or out of this cosmos. You’re not being dragged into it, or anything cheesy like that. It’s just there, indifferent to you, waiting to see what you’ll do next.
If you have a lick of sense, you’ll turn around, march straight back the way you came, and lead a plain, decent life from here on out.
If you’re a mystic, on the other hand, you might find yourself idiotically plunging forward into the dark of your own free will.
Divine Spelunking
At first glance, the idea of Hell seems pretty straightforward. Hell is the worst thing you can think of, multiplied by infinity, enduring forever. In the popular imagination that means fire, pitchforks, pointy-tailed devils. More technical understandings, like the Catholic Catechism’s “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God,” emphasize what Hell lacks, namely the presence of God. Hell, by this definition, is simply that location where God and God’s attributes—Beauty, Truth, and so on—are absent. Hell is where/what/when God is not.
In other words, a place you’d want to avoid.
So far so good. But if it is indeed the case that we shouldn’t be able to find God in Hell—if God’s absence is the very thing that makes Hell such a terrible place—then why do God and godly people regularly make themselves such a theological nuisance by treating it like a tourist destination?
Why, in the holy texts and stories of certain faiths, do we find God, saints, and mystics effectively doing cannonballs into the lake of fire?
The most straightforward example is Jesus of Nazareth, the “Son of God” who, according to some Christian traditions, descended into Hell (or at least “the land of the dead”) during the time between his death and resurrection, in an event commonly referred to as “The Harrowing of Hell.” Meanwhile, from the Buddhist tradition, we have monk and scholar Shantideva, who claims that the bodhisattvas, enlightened saints, “plunge down into the Avici hell5 as geese into a cluster of lotus blossoms.”6
The stated reasons for both trips are similar. In Jesus’ case, we are told in First Peter that Jesus went to the land of the dead to preach the gospel there—to save those who had died without hearing his message on Earth. Similarly, according to Shantideva, the hell-trotting bodhisattva is one “to whom the suffering of others is as important as the things they themselves hold dear.” In other words, a being so compassionate that they will endure the most horrible things in existence to help the ignorant damned.
In both instances, we find a certain selflessness—a willingness to go boldly into the places that common sense would have us avoid, for the sake of helping others. It follows that those of us who claim to follow the Christ, or who took the Bodhisattva Vow at that weekend Zen retreat, are in some sense called to do the same.7
“A Thousand Years of Horror”
Again and again in the writings of accomplished mystics, contemplatives, and religious thinkers, we find an attitude to Hell very different from what you’ll hear in a typical fire-and-brimstone sermon.
In the latter, Hell is absolutely repugnant, terrible, final—a fate to be avoided at literally any cost. In the former, Hell strangely becomes something willingly endured for the sake of the highest good, whether that be God, the enlightenment of all sentient beings, or something else.
Meister Eckhart, for instance, tells a parable about a certain beggar who is so confident in his relationship with God that he seems to have no fear of Hell at all. When asked what he would do if, for some arbitrary reason, God were to cast him into Hell, the beggar replies:
“Cast me into hell? His goodness forbids! But if he did cast me into hell […] I should so embrace Him that he would have to go to hell with me. And I would rather be in hell and have God, than in heaven and not have God.”8
Even Sarah Edwards—wife of Jonathan Edwards, the Hell-happy author of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—recalls a similar feeling in her own conversion narrative, claiming that she is ready to “live a thousand years in horror, if it be most for the glory of God: yea, I am willing to live a thousand years an hell upon earth, if it be most for the honour of God.”
Likewise, in his journals, Methodist revivalist John Nelson describes a moment of crisis when, overwhelmed by a sense of his own sin, he feels compelled to turn over the matter of his personal salvation to God, crying out: “Lord, thy will be done: damn or save!” In other words, Nelson gives up on trying to get into Heaven—he’ll willingly go wherever God sees fit to send him, even if that means Hell.
This trope—the readiness to give up Heaven and suffer Hell for the sake of something more important than either—has even started popping up in books, films, and TV shows in the last few decades.
More upbeat takes can be found in The Good Place and What Dreams May Come, both of which feature characters who are willing to join their loved ones in Hell, rather than spend eternity in Heaven without them. On a darker note, we have Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God,” in which a man undergoes a complete conversion in the final moments of his life, is sent to Hell anyway, and nevertheless spends eternity loving the God he can never have.
Letting Go of Heaven
So what do we make of all this? What does it mean that everyone from the most flea-bitten medieval beggar to the divine Logos Himself is lining up for the chance to check out the worst place in all the universes? Where does Hell fit into a mystical life?
If the wisdom of these spiritually accomplished people can be trusted—and there’s reason to doubt anything, but let’s put that aside for the sake of argument—then it seems that the deepest expression of religious practice involves a certain “holy indifference” to questions of reward or punishment. Put simply, an enlightened Mahayana Buddhist, or a fully realized Christian, is one who doesn’t care where they end up after they die, because their life has been completely re-oriented around a different, higher set of priorities.
These stories, in other words, suggest that the personal salvation of the individual is not the highest goal of religious practice, in spite of what billboards scattered around the Bible Belt will tell you. Instead, these pieces suggest that the true purpose of the human being is not merely to avoid Hell, like a kid who behaves well out of fear of a time out, but to find the Divine and bring it everywhere—even, and perhaps especially, into the places where it’s hardest to see.
Whether you understand Hell as a literal place, a spiritual state of being, or even just a frame of mind, mystical literature suggests that, at some point, any serious seeker will be called on to go there for a time. So, if you plan on pursuing mystical practices in any tradition, be sure to grab some tanning oil. It might come in handy when things get hot.
- The worst of the many Buddhist "hell realms."
- Śāntideva. (2008). The Bodhicaryāvatāra. Oxford University Press., p. 97
- With one BIG caveat: the willingness to endure suffering for others’ benefit or one’s own development is not to be confused with “idiot compassion,” a deadly spiritual mistake that will get its own treatment in a later post.
- Underhill, E. (2002). Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Dover Publications., p. 209
- The worst of the many Buddhist “hell realms.”
- Śāntideva. (2008). The Bodhicaryāvatāra. Oxford University Press., p. 97
- With one BIG caveat: the willingness to endure suffering for others’ benefit or one’s own development is not to be confused with “idiot compassion,” a deadly spiritual mistake that will get its own treatment in a later post.
- Underhill, E. (2002). Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Dover Publications., p. 209
