HELL BOUND ON A SHIP OF FOOLS

Hell, the devils and the torments of the damned. From fire and brimstone Christianity, to the murky byways of Judaism’s deepest recesses, the horrifying separation of moral wheat from the chaff and the swift descent into hell have always been artistically captivating because of the varities of tortures; infinite in ingenuity, infinite in pain, and infinite in time.

Pieter Bruegel. Mad Maggie

Gustave Dore and other artists like him conceived the devils as angels, fallen and comparatively modern in face and figure. Antatomically, they are men, with noble and strong torsos and limbs. Only the addition of big bat wings and long snaky tails, together with a savage, rather Mongolian expression, confirms that they are demons of the pit. But, evil ought to be more repulsive and more terrifying. A separate category that is not good misplaced and misapplied, but the very reverse of good. Something unrecognizable even as virtue perverted.

Pieter Bruegel and his influence, Hieronymus Bosch have done portrayals of hell and devils, that are highly satisfactory in this regard and likely to receive the approbation of  Dante himself. The two Flemish artists lived and worked between 1460 and 1570; they did not know each other, but Bruegel got much of his training from copying the brilliant paintings and engravings of Bosch and adapted many of Bosch’s mysterious ideas.

Gustave Dore, Paradise Lost Satan

Both Bruegel and Bosch have several pictures showing hell or the activities of the fiends. Devils tempt St. Anthony, haunt the bedside of a dying miser, or carouse in a mindless hell of lust and vapidity. But the strangest of all their infernal pictures is a surrealist masterpiece by Bruegel. It is a mystical painting, by a mystical artist. It is called ”Dulle Griet” which means Mad Maggie. It is a big picture; five feet by four feet, painted on a wooden panel, not in oil, but with mineral colors mixed with egg.

The picture likely takes its name from the central figure of a slender woman in her middle forties. Over her ordinary clothes she is wearing some of a soldier’s armour. There is a steel breastplate, one huge metal gauntlet, a metal helmet and in her right hand she carries a strong sword. Her eyes are wide open, staring in some excited intensity; her face is thin and haggard, with a pointed nose and wrinkles of tension around her toothless mouth and on her drawn jaw and neck. Her lips are parted, either in eagerness or in the beginning of a shriek. She is a woman who has turned into a soldier. Not only that, but a conquering soldier, for she is loaded down with loot and plunder. Wherever she has been on her expedition, she has done well.

Goethe, Faust

The question is about time; where she has been and where she is at present. Astonished bewilderment aside, its not initially apparent before the context begins to develop. The point of departure is realizing that this is not a landscape on this earth. The sky is not blue or white, but red and black, and lit by lurid fires and striped by pillars of smoke. There are a few strangely shaped trees, but no fields or signs of regular human life. A river runs across the front of the picture, but it is not a normal river. It has been made into a moat for a strange fortification. The building on the right is more or less normal, but that on the left, leaves question as to whether it is a building or monster. Its mouth, where the water pours in, or out, is ringed with fierce teeth. One of its round windows has become a huge round glaring eye. The thing is both a house and a head; it even has a nose with a ring through it.

With Maggie, we are not sure if she is still on the warpath or with her sword, armor and loot or whether she has finished her work for the time being and wants to take her haul to a place of safety. Besides her, there is only one group of normal human beings in the picture. They are all women, dressed in workaday clothes; but instead of doing workaday chores and activities, they are engaged in a battle that looks like a hideous nightmare. They are fighting and beating a group of monsters. Toadlike, apelike, swollen and twisted into shapes like distorted embryos, the monsters in vain struggle against the women, who slap them and buffet them and thrust them aside and trample them underfoot. The women have broken down the doors of the fortress, they have crowded their way inside, and they are coming out laden with booty, like Mad Maggie herself.

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Saint Augustine and the Devil, Michael Pacher

The women emerge in triumph, while more monsters vainly attempt to rally the forces of whatever obscene power inhabits those grim walls. At the other side of the picture, within the house which is a huge face, other monsters are retreating in wild confusion, as though terror stricken by the ferocity of Maggie and her minions. The place with the fortifications around it is hell. Far in the distance, we can see the smoke of the torment which they inhabit forever. The women are creatures of this earth; the monsters are not, and they do not live in the world we know.

The inhabitants of this fortress are devils and not the suave, energetic fiends of the comparatively modern romantic age, nor the swaggering almost human demons who mingle with mankind as Mephistopheles did. These are devils who stand for the reversal of everything that is reasonable, logical and comprhensible and the opposites of grace both human and divine, dignity and nobility. Scattered here and there are random groups of sufferers, or maniacs, wild dancers and gruesome musicians. Here there is no order, no peace, no loveliness possible.

Paul Chenavard ( 1807-1895 ), Dante's Inferno

Bruegel conceived hell  not as like a torture chamber on this earth, but rather as the interior of the mind of a raving lunatic. As in Dante’s Inferno, the fortifications are absurd, broken and capricious, since the devils, being opposed to reason and the law, cannot organize themselves. Their forces are contemptible, although terrifying and random and ridiculous, although superhuman.The central figure of this infernal kingdom, the devil himself, is in a position in the picture that is central, but somehow escapes the eye.

Francisco Goya, Witch's Sabbat, 1798

Because Satan is fallen, he is absurd and obscene. Because he is destined to be overthrown, he is all but helpless. And there he sits, right in the corner of the picture of Mad Maggie; he is grotesquely thin and grotesquely tall, hunched on the top of his palace, with his back turned to the spectator, his head sunk beneath a glass bubble enclosing the Ship of Fools, which symbolizes all earthly folly, and from his other end, which is not a body but a broken eggshell, voiding a stream of money, useless and excremental.

It is a mad painting, so disqueting that some people will not look at it after the first glance since it is so incomprehensible. The women are showing a wholesome energy in carrying out an admirable, almost saintly aim. They have at least temporarily conquered hell and humiliated the devils who tried to defend it. It is both funny and encouraging to see their snout muscular arms thrashing the wriggling fiends and tying them up helplessly.

The picture may symbolize the nobility and courage of the women of the Low Countries, whom Bruegel saw resisting so much cruelty and oppression almost all through his lifetime. The plain central figure represents the virtues of ordinary wives and mothers, who, when enraged, will outface the devil himself. Bruegel was a man of the Middle Ages, though he lived in the sixteenth century; his symbols were either medieval or drawn from the world he saw around him, its proverbs and its jokes, its superstitions and its human characteristics. Instead of Rude’s figure of the Marseillaise, or immortal Greek goddesses, he showed the dauntless courage of womanhood in the figure of someone who is coming back to live and work in this world.

Felix Nussbaum

A living ”hell” of modern times, though for which there are many examples, does not preclude  the scientific refinement of Hell known as the holocaust,the death camps, a realization of the annhilation of the human capacity for spontaneity in thought and action as well as a destruction of morality by rendering the individual conscience impotent.

”Both Hitler and Stalin discovered in the camps the means to realize their belief in total power, a belief that meant not only that “everything is permitted” but implied the far more radical proposition that “everything is possible.” The camps were designed as “laboratories” in which “experiments” were conducted to test that proposition, and what those experiments demonstrated was that “the omnipotence of man” is bought at the price “of the superfluity of men.” (see “Ideology and Propaganda”) In the camps all men were remade into one man, all human beings into one utterly predictable “living corpse,” a body permanently in “the process of dying.” Human beings were reduced “to the lowest common denominator of organic life,” (see “The Image of Hell”) rendered “equal” in the sense of being interchangeable which, it should be noted, is exactly the opposite of political equality.

Felix Nussbaum, Self Portrait with Key, 1941

Human existence, according to Arendt, is in part conditioned and in part free, but the terror induced in the concentration camps corrodes from within the part that is free. Unlike fear that is intelligible in its relation to an object in the world, or to the objectivity of a threatening world, terror conditions human beings in much the same way that the behavior of animals is conditioned by such means as electric shock. Pavlov’s dog, which Arendt called a “perverted” animal, was conditioned to salivate not when it was hungry but when a bell was rung, and systematically starved men and women were likewise conditioned to behave inhumanly in the hope of being fed.In the contrived world of the camps the categories of right and wrong, virtue and vice, individual innocence or guilt, and almost everything else that since time immemorial has been associated with the specific nature of human beings ceased to make sense. ….Next, the ability to make a conscientious choice is negated. Prisoners are made to choose not between good and evil but between evil and evil. When a mother is forced to choose one of her children to be murdered in order to save the life (or postpone the death) of another, she is implicated in the crime committed against her. Martyrdom was not possible since the camps were what Arendt called “holes of oblivion,” places completely cut off from the outside world in which a martyr’s story might be told, remembered, and become an example for others. The dead are immediately forgotten “as if they had never existed,” their deaths as superfluous as their lives had been. Finally, the concentration of human beings, massing them together and binding them in terror’s “band of iron,” destroys every relation to and distinction from one another, obliterating not only their individual place in the world but their individuality itself.” ( Jerome Kohn, director, Hannah Arendt Center )

A strong argument could be made against Arendt’s thesis of evil being ”banal” in favor of a hell inhabited by the radical. Those, like Eichmann and Heidegger, who embraced evil and justified it to the world, and gladly participated in its crimes are the tormenting devils in the stench and fire of the totalitarian hell, despite being described as ”dull little people”.  To find banality in such horror requires somewhat of a flexible and distorted moral sensibility.So the phrase ”banal” was likely wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally; certainly paradoxical and self-contradictory,and at some level  linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically.Generally,  one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special, exception to the rule,enlightened subcategory of evil. If one doesn’t know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is a rare commodity.. Theodor Adorno stated in his Minima Moralia:

”Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before. Sociability itself is a participant in injustice, insofar as it pretends we can still talk with each other in a frozen world, and the flippant, chummy word contributes to the perpetuation of silence, insofar as the concessions to those being addressed debase the latter once more as speakers. The evil principle which has always lurked in affability develops, in the egalitarian Spirit [Geist], into its full bestiality. Condescension and making oneself out as no better are the same. By adapting to the weaknesses of the oppressed, one confirms in such weaknesses the prerequisite of domination, and develops in oneself the measure of barbarity, thickheadedness and capacity to inflict violence required to exercise domination. If, in the latest era, the gesture of condescension is dispensed with, and solely adaptation becomes visible, then it is precisely in such a perfect screening of power that the class-relationship, however denied, breaks through all the more irreconcilably. For intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.”