The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.