The Devil's Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching

Author:Edward Brooke-Hitching [Brooke-Hitching, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2021-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Christ in Limbo, c.1575, by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch.

From the 1st century AD, Christian writers interpreted this ‘bosom of Abraham’ as being the temporary place for souls awaiting their initiation into heaven, an interpretation followed by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church (though, again, there is no use of the word ‘limbo’). It was only fair that there should be a place of waiting for those who died before the time of Christ, reasoned writers such as Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215): ‘It is not right that these should be condemned without trial, and that those alone who lived after the coming (of Christ) should have the advantage of the divine righteousness.’

In his Inferno, Dante maps limbo as the first circle of hell, though very different to the others, without the violent and frightful scenes of the ensuing layers. Here resides Dante’s afterworld guide, Virgil, in a beautiful and bright castle surrounded by seven high walls and a moat and overlooking an ‘emerald green’ meadow of fresh grass. This he shares with other virtuous pre-Christian figures of antiquity including Hector, Julius Caesar, Virgil, Electra and Orpheus, and the Muslims Saladin and Averroes. Dante’s limbo is a gloomy, wooded plain, ‘dark and deep and foggy’, with a valley filled with what he initially takes to be cries of anguish but which he then realises are deeply sorrowful sighs of ‘crowds, multitudinous and vast, of babies and of women and of men’. The sadness of the place soaks into him: ‘Deep sorrow crushed my heart when I heard him, because both men and women of great worth I knew to be suspended here in limbo.’

One of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. Plate XI: Canto IV: The Virtuous Pagans: ‘Lost are we and only so far punished, / That without hope we live on in desire.’

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