After One-Hundred-and-Twenty by Halkin Hillel

Author:Halkin, Hillel [Halkin, Hillel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691149745
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2016-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Rats are the one animal I loathe. They get into the attic next to my study by climbing trees and crawling under the eaves of the roof, and they run around there and make a racket, sometimes erupting in a frenzy as if playing tag along the roof beams. It’s worse when one escapes into the house. I’ve killed dozens of them—poisoned them, trapped and drowned them, bludgeoned them to death, once dispatched one in the kitchen sink. The poisoned ones go off to die in some dark corner, swelling and stinking until they pop open with a foul burst. The drowned ones I carry by the long strings of their tails and fling into bushes far from the house. The black beads of their eyes bulge as though still struggling to breathe under water.

I too think I might prefer hell to being a rat, even if hell were as horrid a place as the Middle Ages pictured it. Its torments far surpassed those of the hell of early Christianity, for the medieval world had a morbid preoccupation with sin and its punishment. One reason it did was that, as Christianity and Islam evolved into ruling religions with vast domains populated by their adherents, hell became a destination less for infidels than for the millions of believers who failed to live by their professed beliefs: the weak-willed, the deceivers, the fraudulent espousers of the faith. “The hypocrites are surely in the lowest depths of the fire,” says the Koran about Jahannam, the Muslim Gehenna, and paying lip service to the truth while flouting it is clearly a more heinous offense than failing to recognize it in the first place. If Dante’s Inferno, the most celebrated description of hell in world literature, concentrates disproportionately on its author’s fellow Italian Catholics, this is not just because Dante was using the poem to settle scores with people he knew or had firsthand knowledge of. It is also because Italy, as the home of the papacy, was medieval Christianity’s citadel, and no sin is greater than that of the guardian of the citadel who betrays it.

This is why the Inferno ends at the bottom of hell’s ninth and nethermost circle with five traitors: the Pisan nobleman Ugolino della Gherardesca, who deserted the Guelphs, Dante’s political party, for its rivals, the Ghibellines, and ate his children in prison to keep from starving; Dante’s contemporary Fra Alberigo, a friar who murdered his kinsmen while they were guests in his home; Judas Iscariot, who informed on Jesus to the Romans; and the assassins of Caesar, his friends Brutus and Cassius. Dante gives each his fitting deserts. Ugolino is condemned to chew on the head of his equally duplicitous jailor, the Pisan archbishop Ruggiero degli Ubaldino, with unsated hunger. Alberigo is frozen in ice that cakes his eyes, forcing his penitent tears excruciatingly back into them. Judas, Brutus, and Cassius are themselves chewed on by the arch-traitor Satan, their heads in his mouth and their legs flailing in agony.

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