Review: Hell — In Search of a Christian Ecology by Timothy Morton
I will be frank with you, this is a difficult book. That doesn’t mean it is a bad, dull, or poorly written book. Quite the contrary, it is absorbing and interesting. It’s just that I would frequently put the book down and think, what have I just read?
This is a chaotic book, in the way that nature is chaotic. Things happen, things go away. Joy and suffering are both present, sometimes at the same time. Colours, emotions and concepts swirl around leaving you breathless. Flowers, trees and birdsong enthral you. Have you ever been in a real, untouched thriving forest and been overwhelmed by the life? This is where we are going in this book.
Oddly, the origin of this book is a darker place. Morton tells us that the idea for the book came from his daughter. She had seen footage of a school shooting in the USA, turned to her father and said “We’re living in hell, aren’t we”? That is a horrible thing for a parent to hear and Morton thought deeply about the statement. He realised that he agreed with her, yes, we are living in Hell.
This is a radical idea. In pretty much all traditions that acknowledge Hell, it is a place where we spend the afterlife. It is not a place for the living, it is a concealed place, the underworld. This also means that its existence is a matter of faith and by implication, so are our afterlives. So we look to the gatekeepers of that faith to help us to a satisfactory afterlife. Stating that Hell is here and now, that we can touch, taste, see and hear it, that we can analyse it, puts us into an entirely different relationship with Hell. It is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of experience.
If Hell can be investigated, we can also try to understand it. We are not beholden to priests and holy men. We can ask ourselves; what does it mean to be in Hell and, since it isn’t a good place, how can we get out?
Morton’s concept of hell is a much more complex set of ideas than a place of fire and brimstone. Morton’s daughter recognised the hellishness of a school shooting. That’s vile and should never happen, but it does, again and again. Morton opens the book with a lengthy account of his own early life. He suffered greatly at the hands of an abusive father, to the extent that he spent many years in therapy trying to undo the damage. Hell can be personal, overwhelming and destructive. There is no suggestion that hell is a simile for challenging times. We are talking about bottomless despair with no apparent way out. About relentless violence, damage and the hopelessness created by those destructive acts.
Hell doesn’t just happen, it is built, bit by bit. The individual bricks (lies, acts of treachery, violence, gas-lighting) represent bad days in themselves but laid one upon another they create a huge structure in whose shadow we live. Early in the introduction, or Exordium as Morton styles it, he discusses his relationship with William Blake, especially his poem, Jerusalem. This poem is a call to revolution, an appeal to overthrow the owners of the dark satanic mills and establish God’s kingdom of beauty and brotherhood in the land which is our common heritage. But at his school, the poem was stripped of its original meaning and sung every morning to Parry’s stirring music as a hymn to the British Empire. Blake’s battle cry is gutted and becomes an advertising jingle for the Lake District. Imperial gaslighting. One little misdirection, one disappointment? Yes, but one amongst many and that’s the point. Hell is built one disappointment, lie, theft, or act of violence at a time. It becomes its own ecosystem, the points of darkness feed each other and starve you, the one who experiences all this.
The basis of hell is established in Genesis. We are talking about a Christian ecology after all. The world is already there when humans take their first steps. Whether God or billions of years of evolution put everything in place is not the question at this point. Complex systems and chaotic movements combine into an incredibly complex ecosystem that just works. It’s beautiful and oddly predictable. “Don’t mess it up” says God, “don’t pretend you know more than you do” and guess what happens next? Adam and Eve realise they are naked and within a short time, the British are rampaging around the world stealing anything they can put on a ship heading back home. That’s our original sin; to disregard that which gives us life. To think that we are more important than anything else. To separate ourselves from the heavenly Eden and try and build ourselves an inferior copy. Hell is here and now and the consequences of our choices, the choices of our ancestors and the choices of the people to whom we listen.
Christian Century says of this book “Hell (the book) cultivates an experience more than it lays out an argument”. This is true. As Hell (itself) is an experience, why not address it as an experience? There is no measurement of hellishness, no hell-o-meter, no swab test. It is experienced as Morton and his daughter did. As the fighters and victims of war discover. As those people in anguish at what we have done to the world know only too well.
Morton writes about telos a lot. Telos is the goal or aim of something and it’s not the positive you might think. He writes about “a weaponised directionality”. Adam and Eve disobeyed God because they wanted something. European settlers expanded across America because they wanted the land and the native Americans they slaughtered were just in the way. The salaries in many jobs are pitiful because the owner wants to make a profit for themselves rather than feed their workers. Telos can kill. By contrast, Morton reminds us that “to be a lifeform is to create and inhabit worlds that cannot and do not will not have an end, a purpose, an arrow, a weaponised directionality. The biosphere is quite literally a world without ends”. The biosphere just is. The biosphere is just life. The biosphere is also Eden, the paradise where we couldn’t observe one simple rule.
If Hell is our own pomposity, the belief that we know and can order everything, Heaven is the opposite. Heaven is just life. Being in heaven is just living, just being in the flow. We know the flow. We find it through meditation, when a sentence comes together beautifully, when everything aligns. How do we escape Hell? We dance. We let sounds and beats and moods and words flow through us into movement.
This book is an experience, not an argument. It’s a vibe, not a theory. But it’s about life, so how could it be any other way?
