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‘For the Muses’ sake, Virgil what’s wrong with you?’ snapped Homer. ‘Ever since you met that living man a few years ago, you’ve been depressed about being dead, as if it had suddenly come as a shock! We knew we were mortal even while we were alive – that’s why we wrote the kind of poems we did. Well, if men since our time have found a way to become immortal, that’s all very well for them, but it doesn’t change anything for us, does it?
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m not jealous.’ But Homer had guessed my thoughts with the wisdom of Minerva. Being dead had seemed different since I’d been asked to look after the living poet, a young man who might well have gone down to the Underworld and become a ghost like us. I had done everything I could to save his life, first by showing him what could happen to him if he died and went to Hell, and then, when I was allowed a few days out on bail, by climbing with him on the mountain path that souls going to Heaven take. I’d spent most of my time either answering his questions or explaining to everyone we met that yes, my friend was still alive and breathing and had a shadow, and yes, I was one of the damned and wasn’t usually allowed outside Hell, but we’d been given special permission to climb Mount Purgatory.
For the first time in thirteen hundred years, I had been allowed out into daylight for a few days, and had felt almost as though I were still alive and breathing. My friend had been startled at first by the way we saw the sun rise on the ‘wrong’ side, and saw different stars at night: the Southern Cross and the Southern Triangle instead of the Great and Lesser Bears, and mirror-images of the other familiar constellations. I explained how we had emerged on the far side of the Earth, which was why things looked upside down, but I didn’t point out how amazing I found it to see the sun or the stars at all after so long. For the first time in thirteen centuries, I was dealing with practical matters: having to make sure we kept walking while it was daylight, find people to ask for directions whenever we got lost, stop my friend from stumbling off the ledge when he was ambling along in a complete daydream, and find somewhere to sleep when it started to grow dark.
We were allowed out at the request of a lady in Heaven, called Beatrice, who was to meet my friend at the summit. From there, she would guide him through the realms of Paradise, showing him things I would never see and teaching him things I would never understand, before he returned to Earth to live the rest of his life with better wisdom and hope.
Meanwhile, I had returned to Limbo, which is one of the better districts of Hell, but still, when you come down to it, a place for dead people who had grown used to being dead. Still, I had achieved the greatest accomplishment of my death, if I had been able to help even a little to save my friend’s life. I’m not convinced I achieved all that much in my lifetime. I’d written some quite good poems, but I knew I was never going to be in the same league as Homer or Hesiod. We Romans aren’t really cut out for being great artists or philosophers. What we were supposed to be good at was ruling the nations justly, imposing the custom of peace, being gentle with the humble but subduing the proud. But it turned out that, at the crucial moment, we had failed catastrophically at that, as well.
I remember once, about fifty years after I died, when there were rumours that a young man claiming to be a god, or the son of a god, or something like that, had come down to Hell. Apparently, he was convinced that he was only temporarily dead in order to come and preach to dead people, and would shortly be returning to his divine father, bringing with him anyone who wanted to escape.
My friends and I, who were mostly dead poets or philosophers, wondered whether to go and see what he had to say, but we decided that he was probably mad and not worth listening to. And, after all, the Roman Empire had crucified him, and I was sure we wouldn’t have done that unless he was doing something wrong. I felt sorry for him, the same way I felt sorry for Queen Dido in my poem, who had loved Aeneas before he left her to go and found Rome, and drove her to kill herself. But the Roman Empire was more important than Dido, and it must be more important than this man’s life, either.
The only one of my friends who wanted to go and listen was Socrates. I suppose, considering that Socrates himself had been executed for heresy and corrupting young people, he knew how this newcomer felt, but there was more to it than that. He thought that this story of a god coming down into the Underworld sounded like something out of a poem: like the section in my Aeneid where Aeneas goes on a pilgrimage into the Underworld and learns his destiny in founding Rome, or the story of how Orpheus went down there to try to rescue his wife Eurydice.
But from there we got into an argument about the role of poetry in society, which, like most conversations that included Socrates, wandered all over the place and frequently round and round in circles, and so we forgot all about going to question this newcomer. I had wondered whether, if he was a good man, he would be allowed to stay in Limbo with us, but he was gone by the next day, and so were all the children who had been in Limbo at that time. We adults could never quite decide whether that meant he had restored them to life or not, but, at any rate, we had missed our chance to meet him.
That had been about the last time anything interesting happened down below, until, many centuries later, a living man had descended into Hell, and I had been given the job of guiding him through it and back out, and, for that short time, we had become friends. He called me ‘Master’ and ‘Father’, which was embarrassing under the circumstances – he was alive and I was a ghost; he still had the chance of freedom, when I had missed mine – but he was so perplexed and frightened that I didn’t have the heart to tell him not to. I did what any parent does: protected him, answered his questions to the best of my ability, helped him to realise that I didn’t have all the answers and that he needed to ask someone wiser than I was, and, when the time came, let him go his own way.
When I returned, I had tried to tell people what I had witnessed up above. Socrates was fascinated by it, but not many other people bothered to listen, and, after a while, even Socrates had said gently to me, ‘If we had breath, I’d say you might as well save yours. People who are still staring at shadow-pictures on the cave wall are never going to listen to someone who’s been outside the cave. And I’m a fine one to talk!’ he added, shaking his head. ‘I used to think I was the least stupid person I knew, because if I wasn’t very wise, at least I knew I wasn’t wise, and I knew I wanted to find wisdom. I spent all my life longing to know more about the Unknown God, the one of whom Zeus and Athene and the Sky-Father were only faint shadows. And then when someone actually did come from the Unknown God, I was so busy arguing that I forgot to go and listen to him! Now, was that not-very-wise, or was it downright stupid?’
‘You’re still the least stupid person I know,’ I said. But we both knew that we weren’t as bright as we had been when we were alive. Our brains were growing dull with monotony and hopelessness, and, when we had been offered the chance to escape, we hadn’t even noticed. Even I was starting to wonder whether I’d imagined the whole episode. There is a gate of ivory through which true visions are seen, and a gate of horn through which lying visions are seen, and when Aeneas saw his vision of the future of Rome, he couldn’t be sure which gate he had passed through. I hadn’t been sure myself, when I wrote that episode. And in the same way, I couldn’t prove that I had really seen what the future holds for people who are somehow saved from damnation.
My friend had been hoping to write a poem about his travels when he returned to Earth. Once, when he had been lost in thought for so long that I had been wondering whether to prod him to check that he was still awake, he had suddenly said, ‘“The love that moves the sun and other stars.” I think that’s going to be the last line of my poem – now I just need to work out what leads up to it.’ I wondered whether he had had a chance to complete his poem, and whether he had ever been allowed to return to his home town, and where he was now: still on Earth, or struggling up Mount Purgatory again, this time as a patient rather than a tourist, or ascended into Heaven for good.
I wondered whether he had managed to remember the names of all the people we’d met when we visited Purgatory before who had asked him to pray for them. Homer might have remembered a list that long, but I’m sure I couldn’t. If I’d realised how much Christians pray for each other, I’d have suggested taking a pen and paper to keep track of them.
Once, my friend had asked me why people kept asking him to pray for them; after all, hadn’t I written that prayers couldn’t change what happened? I wasn’t sure, but gave the best answer I could think of at the time, which was that prayers had been ineffective when I was alive, but that everything had changed since then. My friend had seemed satisfied enough with this explanation, but, on reflection, it hadn’t been quite true. There were plenty of people down here who had been killed because their army had been defeated because somebody had prayed to his god, or because, although someone had asked his god to spare their city if there were as many as ten good people in it, it turned out that there weren’t even that many. I hadn’t been born in the wrong century, only in the wrong country with the wrong religion, where we hadn’t known which god we needed to pray to. At any rate, my friend must know by now that there was no use in his praying for me, and I couldn’t pray for him.
‘Virgil?’ said a voice behind me.
I spun round. ‘Dante?!’ I don’t think I’d have known him if he hadn’t spoken. His face was so bright with joy and peace that I could barely recognise the despairing exile I had once met. But if I looked closely, I could still see, very faintly, the seven healed P-shaped scars on his forehead, showing where seven sins had been purged away from his soul. I remembered his astonished expression the first time he raised a finger to his forehead to discover that, one by one, his wounds were healing.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, seized with a sudden horror. ‘How did you wind up in this place after all? I thought you were saved!’ What if I had somehow caused him to fail, perhaps because of something I hadn’t explained properly or somewhere I had omitted to show him? Or supposing prayers were more effective than I thought – not spoken, conscious prayers, but the wishes in people’s hearts – and I had accidentally willed him back just by thinking about him too much? Of course I missed him – but that wasn’t the same as wishing his soul in Hell just so that I could see him again!
‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been thrown out of Heaven!’ said Dante, laughing. ‘I’ve been living there for several hundred years now, and I suppose, now that I’m a native of Heaven, people don’t mind my asking the sorts of questions that they didn’t have time to answer before, when I was just visiting: questions about God’s justice, and about free will.’
‘I did tell you Beatrice could explain those better than I could,’ I reminded him.
‘Well, she could, but sometimes she just had to say it was too much for me to understand at the moment. When I was travelling through the stars, I kept asking everyone I met – Beatrice, and the Eagle – well, it’s a sort of eagle-shaped constellation of the starry souls of all the just rulers who ever lived, speaking in unison, and some of them were people who weren’t Christians, like the Emperor Trajan – I asked everyone why you were stuck down here, but all they said was that I shouldn’t doubt God’s justice.’
‘And they were quite right!’ I said. ‘That journey was for your education, remember? If you’d wasted all your time worrying about me, nobody would have been able to explain anything to you, any more than I could have taught you anything if you were busy feeling sorry for all the people being punished in Hell. You always were too soft-hearted for your own good.’
‘Possibly not,’ said a man who had appeared next to Dante without my noticing his approach. ‘The merciful are shown mercy.’
‘Be careful! He’ll dazzle you!’ said Dante, but the bearded man only said to him: ‘Don’t worry; I do know how to look like a normal person. Even my three best friends only once saw me as I really am, for a few minutes on the mountain-top.’
‘But who are you?’ I asked.
The other man stretched out his hands, showing the scars through his wrists. ‘“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” The name they gave me on Earth is Jesus of Nazareth.’
I didn’t know what to say. Of course the ‘you’ was plural; I, Publius Vergilius Maro, hadn’t personally murdered Jesus, but my nation had, ruled by the imperial family I supported. What would be the use of pleading for forgiveness? He had no more reason to forgive me than Dido had for forgiving Aeneas for driving her to commit suicide.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Jesus said. ‘My blood is on you and on your children, as it is on my own countrymen and their children, and on the whole human race. Where I come from, we sprinkle blood on things and people to purify them, to atone for sin, and to protect them.’
‘Do – do you mean you forgive me?’ I asked.
‘A thousand times over! You should have come to me when I came down here before, all those centuries ago. But then, while you were relying on the Roman Empire to sort out the world’s problems, you weren’t likely to believe that a Jew who had been crucified for seditious teaching was the saviour you were longing to see, were you?’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t,’ I admitted.
‘No; my own people didn’t, either. The priests thought I was a heretic because I wasn’t too fussy about Sabbath regulations; the Zealots couldn’t understand why I wasn’t rushing around smiting you Romans; the people who followed me as long as I was handing out sardine sandwiches didn’t understand me when I said they had to eat my flesh and drink my blood; my brothers thought I was insane; my disciples ran away; and even my cousin John, who proclaimed that I was the Lamb of God even before I knew that was what I was, sent messengers to ask me if I was really the Messiah. So how were you supposed to know any better than they did?’
‘Socrates wanted to go and listen to you,’ I said. ‘He had a lot of questions he meant to ask you.’
‘Socrates always wanted to ask everyone a lot of questions,’ said Jesus. ‘The problem was that I couldn’t stay dead more than three days – in fact, it was nearer a day and a half – and Socrates would have taken longer than that just to debate the question: “What do you mean by ‘dead’?”
‘I had a lot more response on the lower levels, where people’s needs were simpler,’ Jesus continued. ‘The ones who were still rational enough to know they had done terrible things, were desperate for forgiveness; and the ones who were hurting so much that they didn’t know anything except that they were hurting, knew that they needed me to heal them. But Limbo is full of some of the most intelligent people who ever lived, who aren’t necessarily the most sensible.’
‘But all the children from Limbo followed you,’ I pointed out.
‘Children always did. And everyone from Sheol came, of course – but then, they’d been expecting me for hundreds of years. So their only question was, “What the hell took you so long?”’
‘What’s Sheol?’ asked Dante.
‘Didn’t you show him that?’ said Jesus.
‘I wasn’t sure what there was to show him,’ I said. ‘It’s just an empty room.’
‘Exactly!’ said Jesus. ‘Satan wants permission to fill it with the overflow of sinners from the other levels, but I’ve forced him to leave it the way it’s been since 33AD. It’s an empty room, with the walls covered in poems and prayers and Bible verses that the faithful wrote out, so that they didn’t forget that the Messiah was coming to resurrect them. The Holocaust Museum stands on Earth as a reminder of human evil, but the Sheol Museum stands in Hell as a reminder of human hope.’
‘But what was Sheol?’ repeated Dante.
‘It used to be the Jewish quarter of Limbo,’ explained Jesus. ‘The difference was that the Jews knew they were only waiting until I came to set them free.’
‘I can remember hearing people praying and singing in Hebrew, when I first came here,’ I added. ‘Some of the songs sounded deeply mournful, but at least they were singing, not sighing like us, or screaming like the people on the floors below.’
‘Weren’t some of the songs more hopeful?’ asked Jesus. ‘Like this one, for instance?’ He sang a few verses in Hebrew, of a song that had always reminded me of shepherds and springtime.
‘I always loved that one,’ I said. ‘Theocritus and I agreed that if either of us had written pastoral poetry that good in our lifetimes, we’d have become gods.’
‘Well, David didn’t write that one in his lifetime, either,’ said Jesus. ‘It’s not one of the psalms that Dante and I grew up reading in the Bible and singing in the church or the synagogue, because David didn’t write it until after he was dead. He needed to remind himself what springtime and being alive felt like.’
‘You’re joking!’ exclaimed Dante.
‘Not at all. When he was alive, whenever he was in danger, he used to pray to me, “Please save me so that I can go on glorifying you – after all, how can I praise you when I’m dead?” But by the time he actually did die, he was so used to praying in desperate situations that he just went on praising me from the grave, and praying that I’d come soon to resurrect him.’
‘So does that mean prayers were effective, even in those days?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course. I’ve always been listening.’
‘But prayers from people like me, who didn’t believe in the God of the Jews, couldn’t do any good,’ I reminded Dante. ‘But I did have a chance to be freed, and I wasted it. So, now that you understand why I’m here, can you go back in peace?’
‘Yes, of course – but do you want to come with us?’ asked Dante eagerly.
‘Do I still have a choice?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Jesus. ‘There’s always a choice – though I can usually do some good with whatever decisions people make. After all, if you’d escaped all those centuries ago, you wouldn’t have been here to look after Dante when he needed you, would you? But, as it is, do you want to be freed now?’
‘You know I do,’ I said, ‘but doesn’t that defeat justice, if I no longer suffer the consequences of the decision I made then? I don’t deserve a second chance.’
‘Yes – that’s why you’re getting one,’ said Jesus. ‘Nobody has ever deserved salvation: not the greatest saints, not my mother or my cousin John – not even Beatrice, though I know you think she’s just about perfect!’ he added to Dante with a smile. ‘Anyone who was perfect enough to deserve to be in Heaven wouldn’t need me to save them. That’s why it took so long before I could answer your question: because you had to understand that the question wasn’t, “Why does a good person like Virgil deserve to be exiled from Heaven?” but, “Given that you love Virgil even though he isn’t perfect, how can we make him understand that you love him?”’
‘I’ve never been clear about what it means to say that the gods, or God, could love anyone,’ I admitted. ‘I know that it is natural for both the Creator and Creation to love, but saying that you love me personally makes it sound as though you’re a mythological god who is swayed by passion and goes around having affairs with humans, and I can’t believe in gods behaving like that in real life.’
‘Are you worried that if I can love passionately, I might be too easily swayed from a higher purpose, and likely to do rash things?’ asked Jesus. ‘More like Dido than like Aeneas?’
‘I suppose that is what I think.’
‘When you parted from Dante, you assumed he’d have to leave you behind forever, just as Aeneas left Dido, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. That was why I disappeared without saying goodbye, to make it easier.’
‘So you didn’t react the same way as Dido, did you? You didn’t call down vengeance on Dante for going on without you. You didn’t feel angry or jealous that he was being offered something you weren’t, or want to stop him.’
‘Of course not! How could I be angry or jealous of my friend? I love him!’
‘Exactly. You love Dante, because you’ve protected him and cared for him in the short time that the two of you were travelling together. How much more do you think I love you, when I’ve known you since before the universe was created?
‘You know a lot more of love than you think you do,’ he continued, ‘but don’t worry about understanding everything, for now. This isn’t a philosophy exam – or not until “philosophy” turns from meaning “the love of wisdom” into “the wisdom of love”, because from now on, everything is turned around. You guided Dante as far as you could; now, will you trust Dante and me to guide you?’
‘Yes, please,’ I began, but then a thought struck me. ‘If you’re not in a great hurry,’ I said, ‘can I go and see if Socrates wants to come with us?’
‘Yes, please do that!’ said Jesus. ‘We’ll wait for you.’