Hell Bound Bodies No More: Unhoused, Disabled, and Incarcerated Bodies in the Ancient Imagination

Rather that provide a traditional review, I intend to treat Henning’s work as a jumping off point for a conversation about where to go next. I do this because, as even a glance at the acknowledgements in any of our books will reveal, Henning and I are good friends. It would be disingenuous of me to pretend to review a book I read at many points along the way. I, thus, take it as a given that Hell Hath No Fury is an important book with which we should all engage and from which we should all learn. In her work Henning proves herself to be the first real textual archaeologist of hell: she plumbs depths and asks questions that, with few exceptions, previous scholars did not. If earlier generations of academic spelunkers asked ‘why are these caves here and of what is the rock made?’ Henning wants to root around for evidence of human remains.

The result is a rich intersectional study of hellish bodies that has relevance for the study of braided issues like gender, sexual identity, social status, carcerality, and affect. I would like to talk about them all, but I will focus my comments here on the topic of disability.

One of central threads of Hell Hath No Fury is the way “disability… is leveraged as a punishment in the apocalypses” (p. 90). The deprivation of the sinner’s faculties of vision and speech, to give two examples from the Apocalypse of Paul, center disability in ways that we do not normally see. Whereas, as Mitchell and Snyder have argued, disability is usually erased by narrative or pushed into the margins of the plot, in the “ancient punitive context of hell the spectacle of bodily deviance is the whole show” (p. 149).[1] I’d like to pause briefly to say how important just this insight is for pushing back against some of the assumptions of disability studies about the development of the medical gaze during the Enlightenment. Before bodies were medicalized in the theaters of European medical schools, argues Henning, they were on display in tours of hell and Galen’s testosterone fueled medical contests.

Henning’s central point, however, is not just that eternal convicts were reshaped and disabled by the structures of hell. Rather it is to show the ways in which the representations of damned bodies had real world effects on those whose bodies were similarly feminized, queered, leaky, and impaired. Just as they continue to have effects today. As she puts it in her conclusion: “The blind, speechless, or out-of-control bodies of those who have committed a wide range of sins intensify and codify the view that a nonnormative body was a punishment for sin” (p. 150).

I’d like to suggest three avenues for further development with respect to the specific category of disability. The first is the Henning’s interest in relating eternal imprisonment to the lived experiences of ancient prisoners. As Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen argue in their forthcoming book Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration and in some already published pieces, people were regularly released from prisons—be those ergastula, subterranean civic prisons, or mines.[2] But survivable and thrive-able are different things. And, thanks to Letteney and Larsen, we have some archeological and literary evidence about what the conditions of imprisonment did to prisoners.

As Mark Letteney explores in his own response to Henning, the low light and darkness of prison life could damage the eyes. The fetters used to secure prisoners in prisons could cut into and permanently scar the feet and ankles. From 4 CE, when the lex Aelia Sentia was passed, shackling could have socially disabling effects as well. Anyone who had been whipped or shackled (experiences that could only be confirmed by scars) could no longer be manumitted to citizenship but instead shared the status of defeated foreigners and were in some modified way permanently criminalized. These are marks that counted.

A recent study of human remains in Britain revealed one example of a crucified man whose feet had been deformed by shackling. Food was scarce and prisoners often found themselves physically weakened and starving. We should assume that prisons were vectors of disease, but the constant presence of human excrement and the subsistence level amounts of food consumed by prisoners only amplified the damage done to the overall health of the incarcerated. This is in what we might call “regular” prisons—that is, civic and municipal spaces—rather than mines. The mines referenced by Letteney in his response were not only incubators for toxic fumes, but they also sprayed prisoner’s lungs with fine marble dust that caused lifelong lung disease.

My point in all of this is to say that the emaciated, deformed, and scarred carceral body was legible in antiquity. It was not sequestered from the public eye. Moreover, it intersected with other kinds of bodies: those of unhoused people and trafficked captives of just about every period. Just as today the shocking effects of incarceration harm prisoners once they are released, we should assume that the cumulative effects of damage to vision, the use of hands and feet, and other bodily problems would have affected people’s overall health, ability to work, and social relationships. The similarity between the bodies of the formerly incarcerated and those of the unhoused might prompt a rereading of, for example, the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. The story contrasts the eschatological fate of a wealthy man with the poor Lazarus. A long line of tradition reads Lazarus’s sores as a sign of leprosy but what if they were not, what if these ankle sores were caused by shackling and what if Lazarus was caught in a cycle in which imprisonment for debts drove him into greater poverty? How would we read the contrasting fates of these figures differently if Lazarus had been subjected to a form of premortem incarceration? Similarly, what of the man with weak ankles in Acts 3:6? The tendency among New Testament scholars is to pathologize but what if we read these conditions as the results of shackling?

The reason that we don’t think about these intersections is because, as Henning shows, these texts are notably sympathetic to the poor. They are blessed and heirs of the kingdom, those in the eternal prison are not. But in the real world, many who were incarcerated had merely fallen into debt or were imprisoned for small offenses like stealing food. They were then swept into a prison system that debilitated them and, perhaps, rendered them incapable of working. Perhaps some of these texts offer a revisionist theory of incarceration that flips the script on the deeply hierarchical models of incarceration in antiquity? Or perhaps wealthier late antique Christians liked the opportunity to exercise their philanthropic muscles towards the “needy” even if it was their own juridical structures that had harmed people.

Regardless, Henning’s work can speak back to the archeological evidence that pertains to incarceration and burial. In a recent find from great Casterton, Rutland, that dated to between 226 and 427 CE an adult male was buried with iron fetters. Chinnock and Marshall, the authors of the study suggest that the subject had been enslaved and hint that the shackles are a reminder of that status.[3] Henning’s work might cause us to think about how the development of Christian ideas about hell reshaped burial customs themselves.

Second, I want to ask how contemporary studies of the effects of incarceration on inmates might be relevant to our work. In her epilogue Henning touches upon the legacy that the racializing and feminizing of hellish bodies has had in spaces like the industrial-prison complex and women’s access to healthcare. Because of this I feel confident that she is interested in the long afterlives of the texts that we study and will forgive me if I stray into the realm of modern incarceration.

Recent studies of the effects of solitary confinement have shed light on the psychological damage that incarceration does to prisoners. Former prisoners describe the experience of radical separation from sociality as “choking” them and trying to “squeeze sanity” from their mind. Documented effects of solitary confinement include auditory and visual hallucinations, paranoia, PTSD, uncontrollable rage, self-harm and mutilation, diminished impulse control, and distortions of time and perception. These effects are particularly pronounced in those with preexisting mental illness and juveniles. Dehumanizing treatment like this—which, we should note, is disproportionally inflicted upon men of color— has been described by the UN and Amnesty International as torture. In her important work, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis called solitary confinement “the worst form of punishment imaginable” apart from death. Following this vein of thinking, Luis Menendez-Antuna has already done splendid work reconsidering the shackling and mistreatment of the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospels.[4] But I wonder both where else in tours of hell and ancient conversation about punishment, we might find evidence of similar kinds of psychic harm.

Finally, I wonder about the effects of these texts. Scholarship on disability has tended to gravitate towards the showier examples of what is broadly termed “mental illness” by which they normally mean demonic possession. But I wonder about subtler forms of mental injury. The homilies of John Chrysostom about hell, as Chris De Wet and Blake Leyerle have explored so beautifully, are intended to inculcate fear and hypervigilance in the Christian subject.[5] Hell is a pedagogical tool but the emotion that it elicits is fear. Chrysostom hopes that fear will cause “perpetual agitation” in his Christian subjects (Hom. Act. 12.4). The posture is definitely “slavish,” but it is also destructive. Like a nightwatchman, “while fear possesses our mind, none of the servile passions will easily attack us.” I could continue, but Henning, De Wet, and Leyerle have done it better. I ask instead, what do we make of this hypervigilance and perpetual agitation? Some early Christian texts seem to suggest that Christians should no longer worry about the future. But Chrysostom seems to supply an alternative target for anxiety. Given that Aristotle argued that these rhetorical strategies are only effective at conditioning people of lower social status we might wonder if hell as a concept was strategically deployed to disable and condition a particular kind of Christian auditor?

Henning’s book ends with reflections on the effects of incarceration and the creation of a gendered, disabled, sexed, criminal body on our contemporary world. In our contemporary penitentiary system, our most harmful punishment—that is solitary confinement—is disproportionately visited upon people of color (Black men in particular), trans people, and those with previously diagnosed medical conditions. Ironically, solitary confinement was the brainchild of well-intentioned Quakers who thought it afforded prisoners a period of quiet contemplation that would lead them to repentance and God.[6] I began by describing Henning as the first textual archaeologist of hell. Perhaps we should consider just how expansive and violent the ideological prison complex she has described is.

[1] See David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (University of Michigan Press, 2001).

[2] Matthew Larsen and Mark Letteney, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming); Matthew D. C. Larsen, “Carceral Practices and Geographies in Roman North Africa.” SLA 3 (2019): 547–80; Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen, “A Roman Military Prison at Lambaesis,” SLA 5 (2021): 65–102.

[3] Chris Chinnock and Michael Marshall, “An Unusual Roman Fettered Burial from Great Casterton, Rutland,” Britannia 52 (2021): 175-206.

[4] Luis Menéndez-Antuña, “Of Social Death and Solitary Confinement: The Political Life of a Gerasene (Luke 8:26-39),” JBL 138 (2019): 643-64.

[5] Chris De Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 170-219 and Blake Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 112-49.

[6] Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 157-78. 

Candida Moss is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, UK and an award-winning author of five books, including Bible-Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby. She is also a frequent news commentator for CBS and CNN. Follow her on Twitter.