AJR Conversations | Hell Hath No Fury

AJR continues its conversations series with an exchange between Meghan Henning and John Penniman on Henning’s latest book, Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

Below is the transcript.

JP: For the past decade, following two books and numerous articles, you’ve established yourself as the world’s leading expert on hell in the field of New Testament and Early Christian Studies.[1] Before we get into your most recent book, I’m wondering how you chart the origin and development of your interest in what is a rather morbid subject? Did you fall backwards into hell or have you always been interested in the history of a punitive afterlife?

MH: Wow, that is very generous; thank you, John. And I get this question a lot, though I plan on stealing “fall backwards into hell,” which is probably the most accurate characterization of what happened.

I didn’t start out specifically interested in hell. It all began when I was 14, and my family experienced a lot of traumatic events in rapid succession. My Grandpa was dying of lung cancer, and my Grandma was in a horrific car accident. As a result of that car accident my Grandma was in a coma and acquired multiple permanent disabilities. A few months after my Grandpa died and my Grandma woke up from her coma, my Dad lost his job. As I clung to my faith and study of the Bible through all this I noticed that some people could read the Bible in ways that were helpful to my family, and others could interpret Scripture in ways that were incredibly hurtful (even as they thought they were helping). I wanted to know how this was possible when they were reading the same texts, and what could be done to help people read the Bible without doing violence to others, to help instead of harm.

My earliest interests as best I could articulate them at the time were around suffering, bodies, and biblical interpretation. But at that point I had not encountered Disability studies, or studied the history of interpretation of the New Testament. It was in further study of reception history during my doctoral program that I fell backwards into hell. I distinctly remember reading Bultmann’s New Testament Theology for grad seminar, and being disappointed with his explanation that hell was part of the cultural milieu of the early church but not part of the essential message of the gospel. It just seemed a little too easy, like wouldn’t it be great if the violent parts of the New Testament were just not in any way traceable to Jesus or his core message? And isn’t this a little unbelievable when by all accounts he and his followers were profoundly influenced by apocalyptic thought and an extremely violent Hellenic world? I realized that hell was overtly violent but that many of the scholarly explanations didn’t really address that violence.

And so that’s how I got into hell, and as I tell my students, it’s unlikely I’ll ever get out.

JP: I find this aspect of your work on hell extremely compelling: i.e. that when the earliest Christians imagined systems of rewards and punishments in the afterlife, they were responding to their own palpable experiences of vulnerability and trauma. We’ll return in a minute to the legacies of this, which you allude to in your own family history. But if I hear you correctly, you’re not just saying that Bultmann erases something that was likely central to the Christian story when he tries to distance Jesus from teachings on hell. You’re also saying that, through this erasure, we lose out on crucial information about the role hell played in communicating Christian ideas specifically about violence and the body from the earliest followers of Jesus?

MH: Yes, exactly. When we just quickly push it to the side, we lose interpretive evidence and we “change the subject,” so to speak. Much of the scholarship of the last hundred years followed Bultmann in seeking to distance Jesus from the violence of hell through an explanation of its origins, but not really telling us why hell needed this treatment. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that hell was bad, but no one would say why. The reason that people are still asking “does hell really exist?” is not because they don’t know where it comes from. And even if we had a satisfactory answer, it wouldn’t stop the cycle of violence. I think people ask this question because hell has been used to harm people again and again. And so that is why I started to ask questions about what hell does, what people were doing when they made hell in antiquity, and what we are doing when we make and interpret hells today. To be sure, “where does hell come from?” is part of the answer to those questions, but it isn’t the whole story.

Instead of changing the subject, I think it is important to look directly at the earliest hell texts, and to ask questions that are appropriate for their historical context. The ancient audience isn’t going to ask “does hell really exist?” because that is a post-enlightenment question. Ancient audiences would want to know who is there and what is happening to them. And so that is where rhetoric comes in. Thinking about these texts aimed at persuasion allows us to analyze the ways that ancient authors used the afterlife to impact audiences, predominantly to tug at their emotions and to prod them to behave in particular ways. Rhetoric helps us set our expectations for what a text might be doing, and in the case of hell, it offers explanations for why gory images of torture are in scripture and other influential early Christian texts.

JP: Your first book grappled with the persuasive force of hell, which you were just describing. There, you demonstrate that a system and location of eternal punishment provided the scaffolding for Christian moral education in antiquity. I’m wondering what drew you back to hell for this second book. It seems to me that this new project is perhaps thinking through the consequences of the first: i.e. if hell is used as a technique of moral formation, what do the “morally malformed” bodies of hell look like? How do you see these two books in conversation with one another?

MH: Yes that’s exactly it. I realized at the end of the first project that hell’s rhetorical power is why it persists. Our contemporary imaginary is far more focused on the rhetorical forms (the imagery that tugs at the emotions) than on the ethical message. So I realized that if I truly wanted to understand the way that hell was working as rhetoric in antiquity and its impact on the present, then I needed to interrogate those images and the cultural antecedents that made them emotionally persuasive, namely disabled bodies, effeminate bodies, and enslaved bodies. And if I wanted to think about the legacy that hell has on our thinking in the present day, then I also needed to think about the ancient ideologies of the body and justice that are embedded in those images but are sometimes presumed to be normative in all times and places. In essence, hell wasn’t done with me yet because our culture doesn’t seem to be done with hell.

JP: You are clear from the outset of Hell Hath No Fury that theologies of impairment are dominant features of apocalyptic texts that imagine hell. The book convincingly shows how moral impairment results in a damnation expressed through impaired bodies — and that these bodies reflect ancient cultural assumptions about bodily normativity and health. Can you say a little more about some of the specific ways that this shapes Christian thinking around gender and disability? How do we get this linking of deviant/feminized bodies within ancient hellscapes and what are the consequences of this linking?

MH: Yes, so I am building upon decades of work from scholars on gender and disability and the body in antiquity, late antiquity and early Christianity, so in that sense I am not saying anything radically new here: early Christians used ideas about the body from the cultures they inhabited. What is new is that these understudied texts reveal the ways in which Christian rhetoric around the body treated many bodies as suffering objects. I begin the first chapter with Clement of Alexandria who says that women are passive, “assigned to suffering” simply because of the nature of their bodies: they are weak, leaky, porous, smooth, cold. Clement’s description reflects the ancient medical literature, texts in which women’s bodies or womanly bodies are sick bodies. To put it bluntly, early Christians are operating in a world where women’s bodies are disabled bodies, and those bodies are frequently (but of course not always) assigned pejorative value. In this context many of hell’s punishments depict disabled, womanly bodies as the eternal consequence for sins. For instance, some of hell’s inhabitants are blind, intensifying the links that ancient thinkers like Plato (in Timeaus 45, for example) made between vision, light, cognition, and the soul. Whereas Greek and Roman tours of Hades use metaphorical blindness to talk about the education of the soul in the underworld, early Christian hells fused metaphorical and punitive blindness so that physical disability is the consequence of sin. The blind, afterall, are not alone in the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul: they dwell alongside those with lacerated lips and tongues that impair speech, and amputated hands and feet. In early Christian hell the damned body is disabled, and the disabled body is damned.

JP: In the epilogue, you push your analysis of the damned or “punitive” body into a contemporary frame with reference to the television series Orange is the New Black. Throughout the book, you are drawing connections between bodies in hell and imprisoned bodies, but here we confront the lasting legacies of damnation and incarceration. One of the things that’s always struck me in teaching the history of hell to undergraduates is that this is essentially also the history of incarceration. Or perhaps better: in studying the history of hell we also encounter the mythic origins of incarceration? How do you think about this relationship? And how does an understanding of early Christian hellscapes provide insight into, for example, mass incarceration in America?

MH: Yes, I agree that the story of hell is the story of modern notions of justice and their rootedness in ancient carceral projects. I think there are a number of possible connections to contemporary life because this material has had a profound impact on culture, particularly in the United States. So first I want to say that the Epilogue is meant to be suggestive of possible directions, but of course not exhaustive in any way. And I relied the best that I could upon scholarship from sociology, critical race theory and US history to make the connections in that chapter, but I am sure it is flawed in many respects because I have switched modes of analysis. But I didn’t want to write about the violence in these texts and the impact that it had on ancient bodies in a way that allowed us to absolve ourselves of this history and the impact that these punitive logics have today.

The obvious connection for folks who haven’t read the book would be the principle of lex talionis (the law of retaliation), which makes its way into North American notions of criminal justice. But what I have noticed is that it goes far deeper than simply the idea that punishments should fit crimes in measure and intensity–the early Christian hells are modeled after Roman punishments in the mines, a sentence that was reserved for the enslaved and other non-elites. These punishments not only give us hells dark, dank, subterranean spaces that are filled with excrement and noxious gasses, they lower the status of the elites who find themselves in those spaces. As early Christian authors continued to build upon and intensify Roman carceral spaces they imagined a system of divine justice in which ever increasing forms of violence are sanctioned by God to elicit proper behavior. In the Theodosian code that system of divine justice is brought back to earth and Christian law codes serve up the violent punishments of hell. In addition to the punishments themselves and ancient Roman carceral logics, I think hell’s method of defining “sin” or “crime” is also something that we see throughout modern history and today. I only had time and space to sketch this in a few U.S. contexts, but I think we see this in the U.S. prison system, in the medical experiences of minoritized people, in the experiences of the disability community during a global pandemic, and as I type, in bills that are being passed all over the country to deny gender affirming medical care to Trans young people. Time and again, the bodily standards of a given society are used as a weapon against the people who inhabit that society.

JP: So what’s next in the history of hell? Where do you see the future of scholarship heading in analyzing the punitive afterlife? Or, what interventions and new directions are you hoping for as you move to new projects?

MH: Well, I hope that I have started the conversation in terms of the material interconnections between punitive afterlives and the lived realities of carceral and medical systems, then and now. If my argument is correct, then I think we need to rethink the details around distinct portraits of hell, carceral spaces, and images of the disabled body in ancient literature. So my hope is that others will join me in re-examining the relationships between specific texts and material contexts so that we can better understand the precise ways in which punitive projects and marginalization were related to one another in different historical moments.

My next projects are still to some extent part of that project, as much as I joke that I am trying to get out of hell. I want to think about mental disability and its relationship to ancient Christian spirituality, specifically prayer. As much as this might seem like a departure from the projects I just described, I think that ancient ideals of the normative mind provided the psycho-social scaffolding for hell’s rhetoric of fear, and early Christian spirituality is then to some extent bound up in and reinforcing those bodymind norms.

JP: Thanks so much for this wonderful conversation. Thanks, also, for your fascinating and urgently needed work on early Christian hells and their afterlives. I have learned so much and am always grateful to have your research at the ready in my own teaching of the subject.

[1] See especially Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell: “Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth” as Paideia in Matthew and the Early Church (Mohr Siebeck, 2014) and Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (Yale, 2021).

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

John Penniman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Bucknell University. He is a historian of Christianity in Late Antiquity, with particular interest in the relationship between early Christianity and ancient medicine. His first book, Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is currently working on a book that re-reads the history of early Christian ritual in light of ancient pharmacology. It is tentatively titled The Hands of God: Drugs and Medicine in Early Christian Practice. At Bucknell, he is the project director of a 3 year NEH grant to create an academic program in the health & medical humanities.