Certain features of our author’s description of Paradise represent the final stage in the before-mentioned process of refining upon that conception of the happy Otherworld as a Land of Cockayne, which is the most conspicuous feature in the primitive Elysium of every race. In the fragrance of the heavenly land, upon which the blessed sate themselves while hearkening to the music, and in the sweet savour of the candles which illumine the city—the candles themselves being angels in that guise—the old materialistic idea appears to be refined and spiritualised almost beyond recognition; nevertheless every degree in the descent—or ascent—from the pigs and apple-trees and ale-vat of the Dagda can be distinctly traced.[166]
The present condition of the blessed, as manifested to the Seer, is intended, it is said, to last until the Day of Judgment only, when, and not before, their state will attain to its utmost perfection (ch. 6). Of like duration is the ‘restless and unstable habitation,’ ‘on hill-tops and in marshy places,’ which is allotted, in ch. 14, to those who find no place in the City, ‘after the words of Doom.’ By these, apparently, the damned are not intended, or else the present passage would be in contradiction with the following chapters, which detail their progress to, and the manner of, their final doom, while the abyss to which they are consigned answers neither in kind nor in situation to the description of a wild and desolate region adjoining the celestial city; neither can we suppose that the reprobate, in their final abode, would continue to receive the ministrations of their guardian spirits, as do the denizens of the region in question.[167] It would rather seem that they are the mixed characters upon whom, at the individual judgment immediately following death, no final sentence has been passed. The reservation of a temporary abode for suchlike occurs in the Avestan books, in certain Hebrew speculations—as shown by the reference in the Book of Enoch to the mountain Sheol in the west, and by the writings of several Rabbis—and in early Christian tradition. Several instances occur in the Irish legends already reported: e.g. in the islands where hermits, in company with the flocks of bird-souls, await the coming of Judgment, and the similar island inhabited by the men of Ross, who had been banished for justifiable homicide. The passage affords some confirmation of the view that the second part of the work is an interpolation, for in that part the sinners who are capable of redemption are dealt with in a different manner.
The veil of fire and the veil of ice, which separate this desolate region from the City, resemble the flame which surrounds the crystal mansion in the Book of Enoch, and is there said to be as hot as fire and as cold as ice.[168] The clashing together of these veils in the doorway which separates the two regions bears the appearance of a remnant of some Symplegades myth, but I am not aware that any myth of the kind exists in a form which could account for the image in question. The anguish with which the guilty are filled by the din of their collision is in keeping with that extreme susceptibility to musical sounds which is everywhere apparent. The effect of pleasure to the good and pain to the wicked proceeding from the same cause recurs in many subsequent passages.
In chs. 15-19 is traced the course along which the soul proceeds on its way from death to Judgment. The several stages of this journey are made to correspond with the seven Heavens through which the soul would naturally have to pass, each of those stages being attended with some kind of punishment or suffering, which causes intense pain to the wicked, while the good pass through it unharmed.
The theory of the Purgatorial fires, founded on 2 Peter iii. 7-13,[169] was held by the early fathers, though, at first, without defining the place or manner in which the purgation was effected. St. Augustine was the first to establish Purgatory in the intermediate state, and the doctrine was further developed by St. Gregory. The early fathers held that the good and bad alike must pass through this stage, and herein our author agrees with them; his theory, moreover, whencesoever derived, agrees closely with that held by certain of the Jewish Rabbis, who held that all, good and bad alike, must pass through the seven lodges of Hell—at least as appropriate a term as that of the seven Heavens, which our author applies to them, though the latter is better suited to cosmological requirements—with the concomitants of fire, scourging, hail-showers, the extremes of heat and cold, etc., through all of which the righteous passed unharmed;[170] all of which is reproduced in the present work. It is remarkable how little advance upon the early Chaldæan myth of the Otherworld is displayed by this part of the subject, so far as regards the machinery or material framework, so to speak, although, of course, the ideas of sin and redemption which lie at the root of the Jewish and Christian doctrines alike, constitute a fundamental difference between the two stages of thought. The resemblance between the Irish and Chaldæan narratives extends even to the porter who sat at each of the seven doors of the Chaldæan Hades, where the passenger had to leave some part of his earthly raiment; in the Fis his counterpart exists in the person of the angel who sits at the gate of each of the seven Heavens,[171] and chastises the souls as they enter.
The second of these Heavens is the only one which appears to be endowed with distinctly purgatorial functions: here the angel Abersetus ‘purges the souls of the righteous, and washes them in the [fiery river], according to the amount of guilt that cleaves to them.’ Such, in substance, had been the teaching of the Church for some ages prior to Adamnán’s day, and such, too, the teaching of some of the Rabbinical Schools—that of Shammai, for instance, which held that those in whom good and evil were mingled were cleansed by purgatorial pains; in like manner, the author of the Book of Enoch describes a fire wherein they who are capable of redemption are cleansed of their carnal lusts.[172]
The flowery spring in which the purified souls of the righteous are bathed for their solace, is a prototype, in some measure, of the flowery stream of Lethe, in which, according to Dante, the spirits whose purgation was accomplished were immersed in like manner.
Most of the trials endured in the first five Heavens have their counterparts in the general literature of the Otherworld, down to and including the Commedia.
The fiery river or moat before the gateways resembles the river of fire which encircles Heaven in the Book of Enoch, and the similar river about the infernal city in Æneid vi. 549-50.
The fiery wall, of which many parallels have already been cited, again appears in this place, where it may be compared, more aptly, with the City of Dis, its iron walls and towers glowing red-hot, in c. viii. of the Inferno. The fiery arch also recurs, the passage through which, and through the fiery wall, is analogous to the similar trial for the purgation of fleshly lusts in c. xxvii. of the Purgatorio. The scourging of the spirits by the angelic warders is like the punishment inflicted—though there by demons—in Inf. xviii.