Hell Hath No Fury: A Response

It goes without saying that I could talk for hours about any one of the questions that has been posed in this forum, but I will just share a few initial thoughts in response to each of the panelists.

In his contribution, Ben Dunning noted that I am “relentlessly deidealizing the tradition” and that this raises a particular question about whether maleness is impossible to punish in this theological system. I think this is the case, that in both Roman and then in Christian laws and punishment, masculinity has a kind of punitive impermeability. And yet even though masculinity has this kind of protective shell, it is also impossibly hard to attain and maintain. In a sense it seems to me that this is how masculinity works, it is so fragile and elusive that those who chase it are doomed to the fate of Tantalus, always reaching never grasping.

Dunning’s question about Laqueur and his critics is one that I wrestled with a great deal as I was writing: “in what sense exactly is a two-sex model of the body actually operative here?” It’s possible here that in aiming for nuance I have said almost nothing. My own thinking has shifted while writing, first prompted by Bert Harrill, who posed this question at a Disability and Healthcare SBL session many years ago now. As I began to move away from Laqueur’s model on historical grounds I also discovered that the one-sex model contains a kind of hopefulness that the two-sex model does not. The two-sex model does not eliminate the precarity or possibility of slippage but is more damning for those who slide. The work of Helen King on transgender individuals in antiquity illuminates this point well.[1]

I really appreciate the way Dunning has framed the “unsettling” nature of the book’s final exhortation, and the somewhat overwhelming task of responding to a violent logic that is not only in the world around us but in the “theological logics” of the tradition. The Kadji Amin quote, in particular, is something that I try very hard to embody for my own students. While it doesn’t offer the false sense of security of propositional knowledge, “inhabiting unease” does offer a different kind of hope—perhaps not surprisingly, given the source, an eschatological kind. While it is devastating to see the legacy of these ancient traditions around hell, I have never been able to look away, largely because I refuse to let the human capacity to imagine evil and violence overtake the tradition or continue to harm others. If we have the capacity to imagine hell, I have to believe we also have the capacity to re-imagine those theological logics.

To Dunning’s question about “racial formations in the plural” and the way that the evidence here contributes to understanding race and ethnicity in early Christianity, I credit the wonderful scholarship which informed the book, namely the writings of Gaye Byron, Vincent Wimbush, Eric Barreto, Denise Kimber Buell, David Brakke.[2] As I read these sources, I wanted to respect the fact that I am encountering “racial formations” that exist in their own ancient context. Early Christians are drawing on established traditions when a particular ethnic identity or skin color is equated with the demonic or moralized by assigning dark skin as a punishment in hell. These pejorative and violent formulations would have been culturally recognizable, but early Christians certainly amplified them when they drew them into hell. In the book I am trying to carefully contextualize the texts at hand and the visual imagery they use from the ancient context, but I think the historical project is never just about respecting historical distance, we also must note the proximal. These texts have had a profound influence on so many aspects of modern culture, and so “racial formations in the plural” needs to include those of the present day in which blackness and darkness get leveraged to refer to spiritual deficiency (here I am most grateful to the work of Wil Gafney, who first drew my attention to this). My hope is that any historicizing of hell also attends also to reception history, to the legacy of these concepts.

I think in a similar way about Dunning’s question as to how hell texts might contribute to the larger historical project around homoeroticism. I think the major contribution that the hell corpus makes is to help us trace the diachronic shifts in approaches to homoeroticism. Bernadette Brooten had already noted this in Love Between Women, and I built on that work by including more comparanda from the hell literature. What this analysis shows us is that New Testament and early Christian thought at every stage is reflective of broader social structures. Clear evidence of this are the depictions of hell that follow and then emend the household codes, reflecting shifting hierarchies and selective attentiveness to the demands of reproducing heirs in service of the polis. As we add more sources the picture seems to become more and more clear that homoerotic love was a mechanism for talking about other things, and so like the disabled body, the queer body was frequently the object and rarely the subject. As a result, I think we need further research on what the synchronic and diachronic historical lenses allow us to see and what they obscure regarding the different conversations that are had using homoeroticism.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mark Letteney’s argument that the carceral is not merely a stage and that influence absolutely goes back into the carceral practices themselves. There has been a tendency in previous scholarship on hell toward assigning origins, in part to absolve Christianity of such a devastatingly violent and problematic tradition. I am trying to show that what these Christian hell texts did was also creative and generative, pushing well past whatever they inherited from their milieu. This is most striking in the Theodosian code, and in the archeology of prisons. Letteney and Larson’s work here is to my mind extraordinarily important. I had my own suspicions while I was researching, but then started to find this evidence at a late stage of the writing. Finding that Christians codified this into their laws not only confirmed my suspicions about late antiquity and medieval Christianity, but it also but also means that the multi-directional influence that we see in our contemporary world is not coincidental. When we see startlingly familiar punitive systems today, we cannot blithely assume that they are simply the fallout of uncritically importing ancient value systems into our world. This evidence suggests that something much more sinister is happening, that new abuses of power that “fit” all too well in our temporal fabric are a boldfaced refusal to learn from our past.

As Letteney points out, the influence is multi-directional, moving back and forth between the social and material and the literary as demonstrated in sources from the Theodosian Age. When Nicene Christians find themselves in a position of power, they replicate (at least in part) an infernal justice system that has imperial Rome’s fingerprints all over it. And this is dramatically visible in the 409 law Letteney cited and its relationship to the cycle of poverty and incarceration. He stated this very well, especially with respect to the double bind that criminalized poverty in the past as well as the present. Matthew 25 articulated the need for the visitation of those in prison, and many of the earliest Christian visions of hell were focused on inculcating the virtues of the Sermon on the Mount, especially the care for the poor. Yet those ethical imperatives that were once conveyed through hell’s rhetoric are in later periods violated by the very act of generating new hells and new carceral spaces. What we see in hell’s history is that the institutionalization of Christianity does not lead to the codification of Jesus’s teachings, but a theologizing of Roman social and moral codes.

Candida Moss’s suggestion that we consider Lazarus’s sores as signs of shackling and the poverty-imprisonment pipeline is a fascinating reading, and one that I had not thought of. Luke 16 is explicitly about economic inequality, juxtaposing poverty and wealth, and the other passage you mention, in Acts 3 is just following the statement that all believers held their possessions in common at the end of Acts 2. I wonder too, how many more of our ancient disability texts are the artifacts of ancient carceral technologies that preyed upon the impoverished in a highly stratified economy. Moss’s provocative hypothesis here drives home the point that we need to think more carefully about the intersection between socio-economic status and disability, not just in hell or in carceral spaces on earth, but in all the texts and contexts we study. I have thought about this a bit with respect to the material and literary evidence of the ancient Asclepeia, but I think there is so much more to do here.

It is hard to say whether early Christians were trying to “flip the script” on incarceration, or whether these texts were written for elites who wanted to flex their “philanthropic muscles” in a system of their own making. We certainly have evidence for both. In Luke 16, or Lucian’s Mennipus 21 where the rich are sentenced in Hades to become donkeys who carry the poor, the underworld is an explicitly carceral space that offers a social critique of income inequality. But I also think there is mixed evidence for whether hellscapes were written for elite audiences. I have argued in a couple forthcoming essays that the second century Apocalypse of Peter seems to reflect an elite audience’s concerns. The Apocalypse of Peter includes punishments for braided hair and punishments that single out disobedient enslaved persons but exclude their enslavers. Those punishments lead me to imagine an elite audience for the Apocalypse of Peter. Matthew 25, the Marian apocalypses, and the Apocalypse of Paul all punish those who do not care for the poor. This seems to assume that at least part of their audience was in an economic position to provide economic aid to others. But the Latin Vision of Ezra, a medieval text, contains reciprocal punishments in which unethical enslavers are punished alongside enslaved persons who sin—there are still elites in this audience, but the script of violent hierarchies is not flipped, it’s merely been given ethical trappings. At the very least, some of our texts seem to be written with elites in mind, and perhaps in some readings, were offering penitential band-aids to systemic sins they could never cover over.

Menéndez-Antuña’s work on demonic and psychic harm, which Moss cites, has been an inspiration to me as well. This invites thought regarding the carceral and the mental disabilities that the carceral experience creates, and Moss’s work on the way that enslavement manufactures disability has profoundly influenced my thinking on this. In the hellscapes, the first thing that springs to mind is the weeping and begging of the damned who cry out “we didn’t know we would come into this torment.” Of course, this vignette is a trope that is repeated throughout the literature, but it is a trope that has important cultural referents that allow it to elicit the audience’s emotive response. As Blake Leyerle has demonstrated in her work on emotions in Chrysostom, uncontrolled tears were associated both with mental disability and with grief as a healing catharsis. The damned in hell play the part of the ancient tropes around intellectual disability or foolishness (concepts that were linked in the minds of some ancient authors). The implication in more than one of our hell texts is that these “sinners” are Christians who knew or were taught but didn’t complete their catechesis or possibly had forgotten it because of the carceral conditions of hell.

I am most excited about Moss’s final question regarding hypervigilance and perpetual agitation in the reading and reception of the hell texts. My next project is about the bodymind and ancient prayer and spirituality. I am thinking specifically about mental disability in ancient Christian texts, hoping to push past the exorcism texts as the predominant texts for thinking about this. Here again, Moss is pointing us to think about socio-economic stratification.[3] Moss’s work on the hegemony of time keeping has made me think seriously about all of the passages that deal with worry, anxiety, and emotion in the New Testament.

I am especially grateful for Lynn Huber’s intervention and for the provocation to think more explicitly about the book’s feminist commitments. Lynn is correct in pointing out that I don’t articulate an explicitly feminist perspective. This does indeed raise the question about what is gained or lost by not articulating one’s commitments as a scholar. I think there are several reasons for this in my own work. First, in revisiting the work of Judith Perkins for this project, and being keenly aware of the way that these hell texts pull readers back into object status, I was trying to avoid inhabiting the object status myself. In experiences in the academy, as both student and then scholar for the last twenty years, I have been noticing who reads and cites whom. It is not uncommon to see serious scholarship dismissed as uncritical due to its overt political leanings. In this project, my aim was to demonstrate that disability history is history, that gender history is history. I imagine that most of the people reading AJR would say that in 2023 this probably shouldn’t need to be said, that a person like me should be able to say who I am and have the work be taken seriously. Perhaps I am too pessimistic about the number of readers who would continue to dismiss these approaches as niche. But it was my goal to write in a way that might capture the widest possible readership into the necessity of gender and disability history within the study of hell. For a lot of my students, the historical approach to Disability and the Bible is a way into thinking more carefully about the experiences of all marginalized people in their midst today. The pedagogical orientation of the book is to start with the history and theory around gender, disability and race, and then, once the analysis is done, to suggest possible connections to our world today in the Epilogue.

For some readers, even the Epilogue is too much. It represents a compromise to my historical posture. For others, it won’t have gone far enough. I wanted to gesture to the conversations that need to be had around how the logic of damnation continues to shape the social and material world today. As this forum has demonstrated, there are still a number of exciting and urgent ways to take this work further. This remains one of my hopes for the project—that it might disrupt the reach of ancient bodily norms and carceral technologies.

Lynn’s Queer tour of hell, especially the way that she framed it around Munyos’ conception of disidentification or reclaiming the abject, is an especially generative re-reading of this tradition in light of contemporary politics. Lynn asked, do we make hell on earth to critique it? My answer is yes! I think the tours of hell absolutely can be disrupted today, and I think that we have seen that recently at the 2023 Grammy performance of “Unholy” by Sam Smith and Kim Petras. I think that they may also have been disruptive in antiquity too. In Chapter 4 of the book, I look at the way that Mary queers the descensus tradition, offering her own body as an effective substitute for the damned, a feat that is both an imitation of Christ and the male apostles, but also totally unique within this textual tradition. Mary is able to free the damned, not in spite of her effeminate body, but because of it, weeping Motherly tears that persuade her Son to release hell’s captives. The release of the damned is one of Augustine’s stated reasons for discounting the apocalyptic tours of hell, and that would certainly fit with a “hell as resistance” reading of these texts. Augustine is pushing back against a text that performs punitive logic only to undermine it (at least in some form), one he fears that would be dangerous in the hands of the so called “compassionate Christians.” And so there seems to be a long tradition for hell as a site of creative resistance.

[1] Helen King, “Between Male and Female in Ancient Medicine,” in Bodies in Transition: Dissolving the Boundaries of Embodied Knowledge, ed. Dietrich Boschung, Alan Shapiro, and Frank Waschek (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 249–64.

[2] After the book had already been through copy edits Candace Buckner’s excellent study also appeared: Candace Buckner, “Made in an Imperfect Image: Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Infirmity in the Life of Aphou,” JAAR 87.2, 483–511.

[3] Candida R. Moss, “Between the Lines: Looking for the Contributions of Enslaved Literate Laborers in a Second- Century Text (P. Berol. 11632) SLA 5.3 (2021), 432-52; ibid. “The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of Early Christian Literature,” JTS 20.20 (2023), 1-37.

Meghan R. Henning is Associate Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Dayton.