Or is it the place of hell, as Virgil in his Aeneid, Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others describe it in their imaginative writings, and as many of our theologians think? In all seriousness, Antonio Rusca, a member of the Ambrosian College in Milan, firmly maintains this position in book 1, chapter 47 of his great volume On Hell. The fire is physical too, as he argues there in book 2, chapter 5.

“Whatever philosophers may write,” says Surius, “there are certain mouths of hell and places appointed for the punishment of human souls, as at Hekla in Iceland, where the ghosts of the dead are often seen and sometimes speak with the living. God wished there to be such visible places so that mortals could know for certain that such punishments exist after death, and learn from this to fear God.”

Krantz, in book 2, chapter 24 of his History of Denmark, subscribes to Surius’s opinion, as does Colerus in chapter 12 of his book On the Immortality of the Soul. Presumably they rely on St Gregory, Durandus, and the other Schoolmen, who draw the same conclusion from Etna in Sicily, Lipari, Hiera, and those sulphurous volcanic islands. They make Tierra del Fuego, the many volcanoes of America described by Acosta in book 3, chapter 24, and that dreadful mountain Heckleberg in Norway a special argument for their case:

“There pitiful shrieks and howls are continually heard, striking terror into the hearers; fiery chariots are often seen bringing in human souls in the shape of crows, and devils regularly go in and out.”

Another such proof, offered to confirm both this belief and the resurrection, is the place near the pyramids in Egypt, close to Cairo, mentioned by Kornmann in book 1, chapter 38 of The Wonders of the Dead, by Camerarius in chapter 37 of his Spare-time Works, by Breydenbach in his Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and by others. There, once a year around March, dead bodies rise and walk, then after a while hide themselves again; thousands of people come every year to see them.

But others reject these and similar testimonies as fables or deceptions by spirits. They will allow no such known, physically situated place, any more than the Styx or Phlegethon, Pluto’s court, or that poets’ underworld where Homer’s soul was seen hanging from a tree, and so on. People crossed to it in Charon’s boat, or went down at Hermione in Greece, “by a short route to the dead”—which is the shortest way—“because at that place they demand no ferry fare from the dead,” as Gerbelius says; and besides, there were no fees to pay.

Well then, is it hell, or purgatory, as Bellarmine would have it; or the limbo of the fathers, as Gallucius and Rusca maintain—for they have made maps of it—or Ignatius’s parlour?

Virgil, formerly bishop of Salzburg, was called to account by Boniface, bishop of Mainz, as Aventinus relates under the year 745, because he maintained that there were people at the antipodes—people for whom, they doubted, Christ had died. By doing so, he removed the site of hell, or narrowed it so much that it could bear no proportion to heaven. He also contradicted the view of Augustine, Basil, and Lactantius that the earth was round like a plate, but not like a ball—a view that Acosta and ordinary experience refute more fully.

They put Jerusalem, where Christ died, at its centre; or Delos, as the fable-loving Greeks imagined, because when Jupiter released two eagles to fly from the eastern and western ends of the world, they met at Delos.

But our more recent theologians have entirely removed Boniface’s difficulty. Francisco Ribera, commenting on chapter 14 of Revelation, makes hell a physical fire located at the centre of the earth, two hundred Italian miles in diameter: he determines this from the words, “Blood came out of the earth—for one thousand six hundred stadia,” and so on.

But Lessius, in book 13, chapter 24 of On the Divine Attributes, makes this physically situated hell far smaller: one Dutch mile in diameter, filled with fire and brimstone. For, as he demonstrates there, that distance cubed will produce a sphere capable of holding eight hundred thousand million damned bodies, allowing each body six feet square; and that will be more than enough. “For it is certain,” he says, “when the calculation is made, that there will not be a hundred thousand million people to be damned.”

But if it is not a material fire—as Scotus, Thomas, Bonaventure, Soncinas, Voscius, and others argue may be the case—whether there or elsewhere, as Keckermann discusses in his System of Theology, then surely it is somewhere: “It certainly exists somewhere, even though no definite region is assigned to it.”

I will end the controversy in Augustine’s words: “Better to remain in doubt about hidden things than to argue over uncertainties: where Abraham’s bosom is, and hellfire.” “It is scarcely found by the gentle, and never by the contentious”; scarcely will the meek find it, and those who quarrel never will.

If it is solid earth, it is the source of metals and waters: by its inherent constitution it turns air into water, which springs up through various fissures to moisten the earth’s surface, and does so in a tenfold proportion, as Aristotle holds. Or else these springs come directly from the sea through secret passages and become fresh again by running through the bowels of the earth. They are thick or thin, hot or cold, according to the matter or minerals they pass through.