Sunday, 23 October 2011
Hell and the Victorians
As promised, another blog entry about the material that I need to read for my tutorial. The subject of this post is Geoffrey Rowell's book Hell and the Victorians and will deal with the different views on hell as well as eschatology in the Victorian era.
In his Hell and the Victorians Geoffrey Rowell
provides a really wonderful summary of the Victorian debate on hell, as well as
eschatology in the more general sense. Rowell introduces in every chapter a
different religious view on hell and eschatology, thus creating a very
systematic overview for his readers. However, by discussing the most
influential authors per religion Rowell shows that the divisions between the
different religions are not always clear cut and that the opinions held by
authors who belonged to the same religion did not always coincide. Be this as
it may, Rowell has enabled me to make an actual schema of the different
religious views on afterlife. However, although I realize that the schema (see attachment
1) necessarily generalizes the situation quite a bit, making it has helped me
to come to terms with my subject.
(click the picture to enlarge)
Perhaps the most interesting feature of this
overview is that it shows the great difference of what determines if one is
saved or not per religion. Even Protestants greatly differed on this subject as
the Calvinists believed in Predestination (those who are predestined to be
saved will be saved the others are doomed), the Arminians believed that
salvation was offered to all, but had to be accepted by the individual and the
Lutherans believed that only those who had faith would be saved.
What I found rather confusing whilst making
this schema was that Rowell actually stated that the ‘adherents of
systematic conditionalism [i.e. the saved will go to heave and the doomed will
be annihilated] were almost entirely to be found in the Augustian Calvinist
tradition’, even though he had placed conditionalism under Unitarianism in an
earlier chapter (205). The same happened with regard to universalism; Rowell
first identified it with Unitarianism and later stated that the most advent
supporters of this religious view were the Evangelists. But maybe this illustrates
just how how thin the lines between the different religions actually were.
Something which greatly surprised me was that
the Roman Catholics were the only ones who did not believe in a literal resurrection
of the body during the Last Day (i.e. the apocalypse). I had expected that scientific
developments would have led people to interpret the resurrection of the body in
a more spiritual sense, as I found it hard to believe that people who knew of
bodily decomposition actually believed that such a body could magically be made
whole again by Jesus.
Although I really thought this book extremely
useful I could not help but find fault with it sometimes. Especially in his chapter on
“The Bounds of the Purgatory” Rowell is rather inconsistent with the
distinction between hell and the purgatory, which makes it rather confusing at
times. He, for example, uses the following quote to describe St. Catherine’s
ideas on the purgatory:
‘The sweet goodness of God sheds the rays of His mercy even in hell. A man who has died in mortal sin deserves a punishment infinite in pain and infinite in duration, but God and His mercy has made it infinite only in duration, and has limited the amount of pain; He might justly have inflicted a far greater punishment than He has’ (as qtd. in Wheeler 164).
This passage, however, is clearly about hell and not
about the purgatory. As a result, the references to this doctrine throughout
the chapter lead to confusion, especially when it is compared to other
theological views on the purgatory. Other than the slight inconsistency in his
use of terms, however, Rowell has succeeded in creating a systematic and
accessible overview of Victorian debate on hell.
Well that's it for now. If you have any questions about the schema or would like to have something explained, let me know in a comment and I will explain it to you as well as I can! ^^
Love,
Blacky
Well that's it for now. If you have any questions about the schema or would like to have something explained, let me know in a comment and I will explain it to you as well as I can! ^^
Love,
Blacky
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