Are we living in heaven or hell?

It's a showdown between Elysium and Tartarus.

I’ve been writing back and forth with

Constantine Markides

, author of

Mostly Myth

, about whether we are living in heaven and hell. He’s a bit more of a pessimist, I’m a bit more of an optimist, but we debated and explored the merits of the Greek concepts of Elysium (which my newsletter is named after), and Tartarus (which he writes about in his newsletter), and how both concepts are relevant to the modern world.

Here is our discussion in full:

Constantine Markides

: Are we living in Hell? (And do we want to be?)

Imagine the most notorious criminals and rebels in history all rounded up, serving out life sentences of diabolically personalized torments in an immense subterranean dungeon that’s a cross between a supermax federal prison, a gulag, and a torture chamber. And keep in mind that in the afterlife, a life sentence means eternal damnation. That’s Tartarus in a flaming nutshell.

In the same way that Hades served as both god and place, Tartarus had dual roles as both a primordial deity and the deepest recess of the underworld. Lying beneath Hades, this realm of perpetual imprisonment and divine retribution was reserved for those who fell afoul of the gods. It may well be the remotest dungeon in history. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, it would take nine days for an anvil to fall from earth to Tartarus.

The parallels to the Christian notion of hell may seem obvious, but you don’t end up in Tartarus just for coveting thy neighbor’s wife or bearing false witness or even committing a humdrum murder. Tartarus was no small-time holding cell for ordinary lawbreakers and sinners. No, you go to Tartarus because—to take King Tantalus as an example—you stole ambrosia and nectar from the gods and then chopped up your son and served him for dinner to the gods as a gruesome test of their wits (alas for Tantalus, they passed).

Tartarus is where you find the heretics, the rulebreakers, the iconoclasts, and the tricksters (no surprise that Apollo threatened to exile the wily trickster god Hermes to Tartarus for stealing his sacred cattle). It’s where the establishment banishes and punishes its critics and adversaries. It’s home to the deplatformed, the dispossessed, and the defrocked.

Like the Christian concept of Hell, especially its fire-and-brimstone variants embraced by some evangelicals and fundamentalists, the threat of Tartarus aims to incentivize righteous behavior or, at least, deter misdeeds. But this “good behavior” differs from Christianity, which prescribes general moral codes. After all, few can surpass the Greek gods in murder, incest, deception, and other forms of wickedness. The threat of Tartarus is there to ensure obedience to power.

This explains why the ultimate offense was insulting or humiliating the gods. Tantalus was not chained up in Tartarus simply because he boiled up his son Pelops, which granted is not a good look, but because he dared to test the gods by serving the unlucky boy up to them in a stew. (The punishment was a loose improvisation on ingestion: he was tormented—or rather, tantalized—by water that forever receded when he bent to drink it and by a tree whose fruit retracted whenever he reached to pluck one.)

Likewise, it wasn’t because King Sisyphus killed visitors (again, not a great look) that he was cast into Tartarus, but because he betrayed one of Zeus’s secrets and twice cheated death. Hence the nature of his punishment for trying to outwit the authorities: the supremely witless task of forever pushing a boulder up the same hill.

We need not romanticize all the transgressors, but it’s worth exploring why they’re so reviled. Their condemnation reveals the character and priorities of those who rule from above.

How about Elysium? I confess I know little about it. I always found that, in say The Inferno or Paradise Lost, the most compelling characters are found not in heaven but in hell. Or as an Italian friend more succinctly put it, there’s a saying in Italy: the weather’s better in heaven but the company’s better in hell.

But maybe that’s a juvenile take. What draws you to Elysium (besides the sun)?

Elle Griffin

: Hell is not a punishment for our character, but oppression by the powerful

Constantine! This is a very interesting starting place, especially as my graduate studies were in Mariology (the study of the Virgin Mary) and I particularly loved studying the afterlife (and the idea of moral rewards and consequences)!

Interestingly, our interests in the Greek concepts of Tartarus and Elysium were both realms of Hades. As you mentioned, ancient Greeks believed Hades was a real place, the final destination for the souls of the dead, and there were three realms where one's soul could wind up depending on one's moral character:

• The Elysian Fields (Elysium): A peaceful and pleasant place where the virtuous souls rested.

• Tartarus: A deep, dark pit used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans.

• The Asphodel Meadows: A place for the ordinary souls who did not achieve great virtue but also did not commit major sins.

Eventually, these concepts became synonymous with Christian concepts of Hell & Heaven (and eventually purgatory). In fact, it's worth noting that every time the word "hell" is used in the New Testament, it was translated from one of three Greek words:

Gehenna (γέεννα): A literal place outside of Jerusalem where trash (and in some cases human bodies) were burned. To be "cast into Gehenna" meant to be relegated to the trash heap and burned in the fire. An outcast! Gehenna was used in each of these cases:

• Matthew 5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33

• Mark 9:43, 45, 47

• Luke 12:5

• James 3:6

Hades (ᾍδης): The Greek concept of an afterlife was used to describe the consequences of one's moral character in life. Hades was used in each of these cases:

• Matthew 11:23; 16:18

• Luke 10:15; 16:23

• Acts 2:27, 31

• Revelation 1:18; 6:8; 20:13, 14

Tartarus (ταρταρώσας): One time in the New Testament, Tartarus is called out specifically in verb form, referring to the bad part of Hades where fallen angels were punished.

• 2 Peter 2:4

The word "Gehenna" was the first to become "hell" in 10th and 14th century translations of the bible (an Old English translation and the Wycliffe bible), then "Hades" and "Tartarus" became "hell" with the King James Bible in the 17th century.

The Tartarus verse speaks specifically to your "heretics, rulebreakers, iconoclasts, and tricksters," calling out the punishment reserved for sinning against the gods. The Peter verse goes: "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them down to Tartarus and delivered them to pits of thick gloom to be reserved unto judgement..."

It's exactly as you said.

I am fascinated by your fascination with the "reviled" who wind up there. And especially your comment that, "their condemnation reveals the character and priorities of those who rule from above." It's true! We learn the same about who makes it into Elysium. It was heroes like Achilles, Menelaus and his wife Helen, Hercules, Orpheus and Persephone back then.

Homer wrote: "But as for thee, Menelaus, it is not ordained that thou shouldst die and meet thy fate in horse-pasturing Argos, but the immortals will convey thee to the Elysian Plain, and the world’s end, where is Rhadamanthus of the fair hair, where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor yet great storm, nor any rain; but always ocean sendeth forth the breeze of the shrill West to blow cool on men."

The very idea that one's moral character determines one's reward or punishment in the afterlife is an old one. How I would love if the morally virtuous were rewarded and the morally depraved brought to justice! But in reality, morality has nothing to do with it, and humans are imperfect in deciding it. We live in "heaven on earth" or "hell on earth" by an accident of our birth or luck, and rarely by some virtue. There is a whole world of Elysiums and Tartarus' that we arrive at by luck!

But we do have some agency in determining that luck. Elysium should be a beautiful place, not for just the virtuous, but for everyone. And there should be interesting characters here too! I suppose the question I have for you then is: what does morality have to do with our "deserving" of the good life or torture? Is there still a call to be virtuous?! Is there still a deterrent for the depraved? Are these concepts relevant to life today? How do you think about Tartarus within the concept of modern life?

Thank you for discoursing with me!

Constantine Markides

: But the evil are convinced they are moral

Mariology! Fascinating. Not something you encounter every day. I studied philosophy but as a pre-teen did a stint as a Greek Orthodox altar boy so I’ve done some time with ecclesiastical icons too.

I enjoyed your geological and etymological deep dive into Hades and Gehenna. I remember my surprise on first reading that the coveted Elysian Fields lay in Hades. The Christian assimilation of paganism that you outlined is probably responsible for our instinctive association of Hades with the Biblical concept of Hell.

Just to geek out a little more on etymology, even though Gehenna comes from a Hebrew word, it also sounds a lot like the Greek word for birth, which is γέννα, pronounced genna (hence our words genesis, genetics, genealogy, etc). A coincidence, as far as I can tell, but a telling one, because it equates birth to hell, which miracles of life aside, most pregnant women in the throes of advanced labor would probably not dispute.

You raised the question of morality. Setting aside whether morality is subjective or objective—one of the most trodden topics in philosophy—it seems to me inevitable that when authorities dictate ethics, their primary allegiance lies not with virtue but with consolidating their power.

You see this playing out today most explicitly in debates around free speech. When governments have the power to determine truth and criminalize “disinformation,” to use the current term in vogue, the result will be a more powerful state and less freedom. Proponents of this strong government view will say it leads to a safer society, even a more virtuous society. But, of course, this only holds so long as your team is in power. Everyone has different ideas on who should be the philosopher kings determining truth and punishing transgressors.

That’s the sticky thing with morality: it varies by the eye of the beholder. My virtue may be your vice. My good, your evil. Take Julian Assange. To some he’s the most important journalist of our generation, a martyr of free speech who intrepidly exposed the crimes of the state. To others, he’s a reckless firebrand, a seditious traitor deserving of life imprisonment or execution (disclaimer: I equated him to Prometheus in a recent post so you know where I lie on this debate). This subjectivity complicates the goal that you mentioned of rewarding the virtuous and bringing to justice the depraved.

You ask if there’s still a call to be virtuous. Hell, yes! But I think of virtue in a personal way, akin to Joseph Campbell’s advice on following one’s bliss. The yardstick by which we judge and act should come from within. It’s the main theme of Sophocles’ Antigone, the foundational text of civil disobedience: do I obey the state or my conscience?

The problem of course, with my definition, is what if, say, a mass murderer claims to be following his conscience or bliss. That’s a thorny moral complication. I’d contend that, despite his claim, he’s just obeying a distortion or addiction, and not his true bliss. But no doubt, believers in absolute moral standards are in a better position to respond to this.

As for deterrents for the depraved, I think we’ve always had and always will have our punishments, whether they be the rack, excommunication, or cancel culture. The tricky question is what exactly is depravity and who gets to define it?

I guess I fall back on the old cliché that, to quote Belinda Carlisle, “heaven is a place on earth.” Nothing like pop lyrics to ground us. Heaven and hell—and Elysium and Tartarus—are metaphors for places on earth. Tartarus can represent both our internal anguish for betraying our ideals and convictions—in which case, by the definition I gave, we lack virtue—and persecution in the public sphere, which often has more to do with power than virtue. But for me the most profound version of Tartarus is always the personal one: the private hell of living falsely and poorly.

I sense that you hold more objective, universal standards of virtue and depravity. You spoke of Achilles and Hercules as inductees into Elysium, but what about today? Any examples from our age of those who are Elysium- or Tartarus-worthy? And what does a living reward / punishment look like?

Elle Griffin

: Humanity continues to fight evil

Wow, I've never thought about the etymological coincidence regarding the word "Gehenna." Interesting connection!

As for your fraught examination of morality, I sympathize with the dilemma. On a granular level, morality often feels like a moving target depending on who wields it. But on a higher level, I actually think there is significant moral overlap.

For example, you're right: Some are pro-free speech, others are against. Some see Julian Assange as a hero, others as a traitor. Some see abortion as a sin, and some see it as a right. Some see prison as the best way to safeguard our communities; others see it as inhumane. When we are focused on the minutiae, we can find many examples where one person's moral right is another person's moral wrong.

But it's also true that there are several places where our moralities overlap. That every country on earth agrees that we need to reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere and has signed the Paris Agreement is an incredible win. That every country on earth signed The Geneva Conventions and agrees to the rules of war is insane. When a natural disaster strikes, many countries work together to provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief—there is this tacit agreement that no one should suffer in that way. No country allows murder or theft.

Human rights are even more universal: Slavery was a moral right until Britain declared that it was a moral wrong, then countries around the world got on board. The rights of disabled persons were nonexistent until one country added it, then many more agreed that was a good idea. Women didn't have the right to do anything, then places around the world all thought they should. Working conditions were abysmal until everyone agreed it shouldn't be like that. Homosexuality was on the wrong side of morality, then country by country we declared that it wasn't.

Morality spreads when it comes to human rights. Over and over again we see moral convergence—where we agree that people should not be treated badly and in fact, that it's a bad look to do so. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights even made that law, signed by 48 countries that agreed that there is a standard benchmark for ethical human treatment. And we are adding to that list all the time: With the gradual betterment of prison conditions, the gradual acceptance of trans persons, the continuing need for a fair trial, for clean water, for better public health.

This is why I am a humanist. The idea that we should help one another is universal, spanning religions and countries and continents. Rebecca Solnit has long documented these effects: Come hurricane or highwater, we will help each other pack sandbags against each other’s houses regardless of political affiliation or religion. You are right that there are so many places where, as individuals, we morally disagree, but where it’s important we stand up for each other. There is some standard of morality, even as there are variances within it.

Philosophers would have us debate the edge cases, and there we will disagree. Should we kill this person on the train tracks or that person on the train tracks? etc. etc. But that is to ignore the fact that every one of us thinks there should not be a person on the train tracks. If we saw someone about to get run over, we would intervene. We are fundamentally pro-human, even if there are edge cases that are not. And we fight against those edge cases with everything we have!

Even in complicated disagreements like the situation in Israel, I believe there is more moral convergence than the media lets on. We are trying to paint this picture as black and white, but if we really break it down into parts I think most people agree that what Hamas did was bad, but that the Palestinians are good and do not deserve retribution. Jewish people and Israeli people are good, but that doesn't stop the fact that what Netanyahu and the Israeli government is doing is bad. Whether we are pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, I think most people are still anti-violence and war. Maybe that's a hopeful perspective, but I don't believe people want to see others suffer. Countries around the world are uniting to provide aid!

We will nitpick the details. But we agree on the fundamentals.

Now locally, "do I obey the state or my conscience?" That's a good question. I do think the state has been and continues to be used for the greatest possible and widest possible human good. There’s a reason we don’t leave slavery up to the states, but up to the highest level of federal governance. But countries have also used the state to oppress women and forbid their schooling. What I think is powerful is that, in both cases, humans fight for the greatest possible human good: for the end of slavery and the end of female oppression. That we continue to fight for human good regardless of the state’s actions is proof of moral overlap.

But I tend to agree with you that heaven and hell are a place on earth. Whether a person is in Tartarus or Elysium is equal parts whether a good life is provided to us, and whether we choose to recognize that it's a good life!

Constantine Markides

: But there are still Hitler-types convinced they are good…

I think I just see things, in predictable Tartarean fashion, through a glass more darkly. I agree that when taking a bird’s eye historic view, we do seem to make moral progress as you’ve defined it: slavery–bad, murdering civilians–bad, keeping planet habitable–good.

But how often is this rhetoric reality? It may be that no nation permits murder in its borders, but how many export mass violence to other countries, and dressed up, no less, in righteous and humanitarian language? I don’t think you can find a war waged in the last few hundred years, including every Nazi invasion, that wasn’t portrayed by the invading force as an act of self-defense or liberation.

And despite the increasing moral overlap that you’ve described, have we not, in some cases, gone backwards in practice? For example, there have always been individuals and religions advocating compassion toward animals, but the formal recognition and advocacy for animal rights only emerged over the last few hundred years. And yet one need not be a militant vegan to agree that the rise of industrial factory farming has, during this same period, led to forms of animal slavery, torture, and mass slaughter unparalleled in human history. The conditions are too gruesome and numerous to list here, but it’s clear we’ve strayed from even the most barebones ideals of animal husbandry when the farm workers require treatment for PTSD. We all know it's happening, but we turn a blind eye because it’s too disturbing to contemplate.

So while I agree that there are shared moral standards that are legally defined and signed onto by states, I’d qualify by saying that much of this is, at best, well-intentioned but ineffective, and at worst, rhetorical posturing. The noblest facades often house the most spectacular hypocrisies. What’s always running the show, always running in the background, are the twin forces of power and profit. And they’re always amoral.

This may all sound rather bleak, but I’m defending the clout of Tartarus, so it seems a fitting way to close here. That said, I’m also a closeted optimist. Yes, for me the world, at least on the macro political level, reflects Tartarus more than Elysium. But while I may be more pessimistic, even cynical, in my view of institutions, especially the largest ones, whether they be multinationals or states, I do think that the types of Elysian transformations that you describe occur due to humanist impulses expressed through collective pressure. Activism and protest movements after all are what led to desegregation, suffrage, decolonization, marriage equality, and environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act or Endangered Species Act, to name just a few things. The top may enact the legislation, but the instigating pressure comes from the bottom.

And even when widespread change feels futile, individuals at least possess the power and spirit to reject their fire and chains, to resist the life-denying dictates of Tartarus, and to instead obey their consciences (a.k.a. aspire to Elysium). There is beauty in the world and what’s the point if not to strive for it?

So I raise a chalice and drink to you, Elle, in your quest for Elysium. If I can bring anything to that endeavor, it’s to guard against a saboteur from Tartarus spiking the ambrosia with hemlock.

Elle Griffin

: And yet we continue to rebel against the Hitler-types

Well yes, it is true that we haven't yet reached world peace, but I am not letting war be proof that humanity doesn't get along or that we aren't progressing. And even making moral progress!

I have no doubt that the problem you mention now, our meat industry, will eventually be eradicated too. We are already actively working on meatless options (Beyond Meat, Impossible, etc.), we are even creating animal-free meat, and when there are more options so that more people can still get their protein and iron requirements to healthfully live without meat, I feel strongly that industry will gradually subside. Not just for ethical reasons, but also for land use reasons and climate reasons (see my article “We could return three continents of land to the wild” and "We'll have to eat less meat in the future"). It would have been very difficult to completely move away from meat as a food source in the past, it provides a lot of essential nutrients humans need and plays a big role in regulating our blood sugar, but we are finally starting to come up with competitors and I think this will change.

The fact that we are even talking about animal welfare right now rather than human welfare is evidence of just how far we've come. To say that we still have far to go, well yes of course that's true. That will always be true. But you can't look at war and say "people are still killing each other and thinking they are right to do so," and leave that as evidence that people are not progressing, especially when we can also say, "ok but we have nearly eradicated slavery worldwide," and "people have better work conditions than ever before" and "more access to clean water," etc. The basic foundations of our everyday lives are improving even if we still sometimes have war because of our geopolitics.

For the record, I don't know how to solve the geopolitics thing despite wracking my brain about it. It's true that we have used violence for bad reasons all around the world and dressed them up as good reasons. Countries are still doing that and I don't know how to stop them. But despite there being bad things happening around the world we continue to fight against them. Sometimes from the top down (with institutions and governments and companies) and sometimes from the bottom up (with activism and movements and social pressure and threats of revolution).

That brings me to your assertion that power and profit are always amoral—there I agree. People do not become powerful because they are more virtuous—if only! Instead, people become powerful through money, wealth, politics, political maneuvering.

That doesn’t stop us from using power and profit for good. The pursuit of profit has been far better for humanity than any other economic system we've tried. The places in the world that have pursued profit have made the biggest strides in eradicating extreme poverty within their borders and have made huge strides against poverty in general. The parts of the world that are still impoverished are that way because they do not have access to economic systems and thus profit. Profit has bettered nearly every humanitarian right: the places with more money have cleaner water, better healthcare, more equality. We need more profit in the world, not less of it.

What we can still improve is not limiting profit and power to a few people, but instead making both of those things available to larger communities of people. We've done that by spreading democracy worldwide and opening economic trade within those areas. But we could continue to do more of that going forward, by making companies more democratic, by making countries more democratic, and by working toward wealth equity. That's how we make the world better from here. Maybe if we have more profitable communities, that are more democratic (or otherwise run by its people), we won't have to have all of these wars with these power-hungry totalitarian types.

In other words: Power and profit may be amoral, but we can make both work for more people. It can and should be our goal to spread power and profit throughout the world, making them available to more people rather than less!

If I must cede to your Tartarian pessimism, it would be around rising autocracy and wealth inequality around the world. Some people should not make 1000x more than others and then use that wealth to control our governments and companies and everything else. I worry, like many others, that we might cement autocratic totalitarian states into place that become massively difficult to remove once installed.

But I remain optimistic that it is during periods of chaos and instability that we work hard to overcome those forces. It took the Revolution before we got the American Democracy (and look what that started in the rest of Europe!). It took the Civil War for us to end slavery. It took the Great Depression before we got the Labor Act. During key moments of inflection, when we enter periods of chaos and instability, we tend to take advantage of that “anything goes” mentality and work hard to repel the forces that are against humanity to achieve something for humanity.

We see that happening already!

It is my hope that when the next American leader enters a vacuum where most of our government has been destroyed, we have an opportunity to build it into something much better, and that countries around the world will take similar advantage. We will soon enter a time when some of our most powerful autocratic leaders die—what happens next? A lot of democracies were created simply from the old totalitarian dictators dying, and moves to fill those vacuums. We may be experiencing periods of upheaval now, but we’ve come out of similar periods reinvented.

We can do that again if we gather the philosopher-builders and start building what comes next.

Constantine Markides

: We live in both worlds

I appreciate your optimism that institutional power and the pursuit of profit do more to uplift than oppress. And I hear you: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

We may not even disagree here. Your belief that wealth concentration is problematic seems to me a recognition that markets aren’t self-regulating moral agents.

That said—sure, being a diehard Tartarian, I do lean more toward the “power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely” view of things. But like any good skeptic, I’m no absolutist. I won’t a priori rule out the possibility of the humanist plutocrat or the benevolent dictator. The technofeudalists of Peter Thiel and the philosopher kings of Plato have their places at the table too, I suppose.

And who knows, maybe in the end we’re in the same place, just facing different directions. Maybe the shadows are growing longer only because the world is tilting toward light.

Thanks for the Elysian breeze.

From Tartarus with warmth (too much warmth),

Constantine Markides