Creation of the World and Expulsion from Paradise – Is Hell Empty?
The structure of human imagination is atomic. It resembles an endlessly growing collection of places where we imagine what we want. It is very difficult to organise such a collection, depending on individual preferences. Books do it for us, like pandemics or war?
Jan Słomka writes about Hans Urs von Balthasar's last book in Tygodnik Powszechny:
“We can hope that Balthasar's thoughts will become an inspiration that will contribute to the renewal of preaching, preaching about the ultimate things. Undoubtedly, lately there has been little on the subject of hell in sermons and homilies. Perhaps this is because the tradition that the Swiss thinker treated so critically, i.e. the tradition of objectivized talking about hell and spreading the hellish flours that await sinners in the sermons, actually no longer has enough vitality to inspire priests preaching Sunday homilies. So many avoid this topic.” Like fire or war.
In every collection of fantasies, you can point to extremes: the worst and best imagined place. Let's forget the worst, the same books, the pandemic and the last war do it for us again. It's a waste of imagination. The most pleasant place in the history of ideas is described as Locus amoenus. Ernst Robert Curtius aptly translates this as: Place of pleasures. It's a fantasy about a place we always want to be and never leave. In myths, he is satisfied with the idea of Paradise. Descriptions of similar places can be found in the Homeric imagination (Odyssey, Rev. VII. 114-129).
W Metamorphoses Ovid, what is natural and civilized begins to penetrate and confront in such places, but it is still a garden or a pastoral idyll. Has the pandemic changed anything in the preferences of our imagination? No (Paradise Garden We still think it is a safe place, optimal for life). But Russia attacking Ukraine is already changing everything. Why do we still build such radically different sets of everyday life?
Obraz Giovanni di Paolo, Creation of the World and expulsion from Paradise, 1445, 46.4 x 52.1 cm.