Belief: A Memoir
by N. John Hall
Summary
N. John Hall is considered the world’s leading authority on Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm. His books include Trollope: A Biography and Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. He twice has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. Since 1967 he has lived in Greenwich Village.
Excerpt
I was fifteen when I underwent the religious experience that put my life on a course that would carry it in one direction for the next eighteen years. Catholic high schools like the one I attended held annual three-day retreats. A visiting priest, the retreat master, who was always a Jesuit, gave a series of talks to the student body assembled in the church. Classes were suspended, strict silence was observed, and we were urged to curtail all worldly activities after school for these three days. The students’ cooperation was really quite remarkable. The retreat master, following in outline The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, held most of us spellbound. There was no hollering or shouting on his part, nothing at all of the noisy revival spirit. The talks were meditative and quietly mesmerizing. Many people have read a version of the Spiritual Exercises in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These retreat talks in all their incarnations revolve around the four last things: death, judgment, hell—along with its cause, sin, which in Joyce’s days and those of my own youth meant sexual sin—and heaven. Here, surprisingly little different from what I heard in 1948, are some morsels from Joyce:
Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. …[The souls of the damned] lie in exterior darkness. For remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light…while retaining the intensity of its heat, [it] burns eternally in darkness. It is a neverending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air.
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer…Imagine this sickening stench multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus.
But the flames of hell are worse than the stench. Human torturers and tyrants use fire to subject their fellow creatures, but their efforts are no match for God’s:
The sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury…Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; the lake of hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless…And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike.
And this physical torment is only prelude to the spiritual pain, the loss of divine light and of God. Moreover, all this misery and suffering are eternal….
Reviews
"John Hall’s story of irresistible self-realization is beautifully rendered, quite original, and unforgettable."—Shirley Hazzard, author of The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire
"A riveting memoir…Not to be missed."—Victoria Glendinning, award-winning biographer of Trollope, Vita Sackville-West, and Leonard Woolf
“[A]n absorbing personal story and a vivid evocation of an American Catholicism which…was triumphalist, patriarchal, anti-intellectual, and obsessed with sexual sin.”—David Lodge, author of Small World and Nice Work
Author's Biography
N. John Hall is considered the world’s leading authority on Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm. His books include Trollope: A Biography and Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. He twice has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. Since 1967 he has lived in Greenwich Village.