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In those days — I am speaking of the 1930s — many strict Catholics, and a few Anglicans in the Tractarian tradition, would not permit themselves butter in Lent. No butter had been the mediaeval rule. But it was broken, or rather circumvented, by rich people who got a dispensation by contributing to church-building funds, rather as millionaires now buy themselves knighthoods and peerages by making donations or loans to New Labour. In the 14th and 15th centuries, these ‘butter permissions’ were so common, especially in France — well, you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? — that some cathedrals sported new Butter Towers, built from permitted sin.
We children gave up sweets, not just on weekdays as some children did, but for the whole 40 days, from Ash Wednesday to noon on Holy Saturday. As the clock came up to 12 on Saturday morning we would wait with our mouths open, a bag of sweets handy, ready to pop in a dolly mixture the moment noon struck. At my boarding school, Lent was a most sombre business. All the vestments were purple. All the statues throughout the enormous school, and its various chapels and scores of altars, were covered up in purple cloth. We had an extra sermon on Wednesday evening. The last four Wednesday sermons in Lent were the eschatological quartet: that is, they dealt with Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven. They were always preached by a priest from the Redemptorist order, which undertook the very necessary duty of terrifying sinners with the fear of hell. The order was founded by St Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787), who spent much of his long life trying to imagine what hell was actually like, and conveying his views in sermons. Here is an extract from one of them:
The unhappy wretch in Hell will be surrounded by fire like wood in a furnace. He will find an abyss of fire below, an abyss above, and an abyss on every side. If he touches, if he sees, if he breathes; he touches, he sees, he breathes only fire. He will be in fire like a fish in water. The fire will not only surround the damned, but it will enter into his bowels to torment him. His body will become all fire, so that the bowels within him will burn, his heart will burn in his bosom, his brains in his head, his blood in his veins, even the marrow in his bones: each reprobate will in himself become a furnace of fire.
The Jesuits who ran my school rather looked down their sophisticated noses at this kind of theology. That is why they called in the Redemptorists to do it. Personally, I rather relished scorching sermons on Hell, admiring their artistry, and looking round at the faces of the other boys to see how they were taking it. Some got very frightened indeed, and after the Hell sermon on the evening of the penultimate Wednesday in Lent they queued up for the confessionals — kept specially open — terrified that if they died in the night unshriven, they would go straight to Hell for all eternity. There is a powerful glimpse of all this eschatological terror in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I never found the fire image particularly frightening — funny, rather. I share Ernst Gombrich’s view that Hieronymus Bosch’s hell-fire paintings, though no doubt scary to the peasants privileged to look at them, were actually painted to intrigue and amuse the educated upper classes who bought them.
What I find alarming is the opinion of Cardinal Newman. He thought that at the Last Judgment each of us would have all our nasty deeds, thoughts and lustful or envious wishes slowly paraded in all their horrible detail in front of an enormous crowd of people, friends, relations, enemies and critics, who would be encouraged by attendant angels to comment as, one by one, our lifetime secrets were publicly laid bare. We would be standing by, with a ghostly spotlight on us, as successive waves of shame and remorse swept over our features.
However, Newman’s torment is a once-and-for-all experience. And, as I think he pointed out, after you had been through this psychological going-over, you could relax and enjoy other fellows enduring it. (I think Newman, given his views on women, probably imagined that there would be segregation of the sexes at the Last Trump, and indeed in Hell itself, though there is no scriptural warrant for such an opinion.) The trouble with visions of Hell, as I recall pointing out to the Redemptorist preacher when I was 16, is the eternal element. Human beings are so constituted that they get used to anything in time, and therefore the pains of Hell, whatever they are, tend to lose their impact after a bit. So all that imaginative business of Liguori’s about ubiquitous fire becomes in the end just — hot air. To which the answer is that time ceases when earthly life ends, and eternity is an endless instant. The pain of Hell never ends because it never begins, it just is, with an intensity we cannot conceive. But of course once you remove the dimension of time, the imagination ceases to work and the exercise becomes futile.
All the same, it is right to think eschatologically once a year in Lenten time. Nothing could be more unfashionable than Lenten observance these days, which is why I am writing about it. The last British politician to take Lent seriously was Harold Macmillan, who I think gave up cigars as well as his favourite Dom Perignon (or was it Perrier Jou
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