The punishments described contain many striking points of similarity to Dante, both in their kind, and in the vivid manner in which they are portrayed. Of such are the icy cowls in chapter 26, which recall the leaden copes worn by the hypocrites in Inf. xxiii. 61 sqq. The sinners stand in black mire, like the beletta negra where stand the gloomy-minded in Inf. vii. 124.[176] The scourging by demons occurs alike in the Fis Adamnáin(chapter 26), and in the Inferno (xviii. 35). A cold wind from the north blows upon the foreheads of the damned, as in the frozen regions of Dante’s Tolommea.[177] The fiery rain, and the unavailing efforts of the sufferers to ward it off, anticipate Dante’s vivid picture.[178] With the throngs of demons in chapter 28, who assail the heresiarchs with flights of arrows, we may compare the Centaurs in Inf. xii. 56.
The pictures of the sinners fettered to fiery columns by means of fiery chains in the form of vipers (chapter 25), and of those clad in fiery mantles, are entirely Dantesque in spirit. In the punishment of those who are alternately borne up to Heaven, and then dashed down again to the depth of Hell, our author appears to typify the tumultuous distress and horrible restlessness which accompany hopeless suffering.
Two classes of sinners remain, who are dealt with in a manner wholly alien from Dante’s scheme, though in accord with the earlier teaching of the Church. Reference has been made already to those in whom good and evil bear divided sway, and who, as in the Avesta, are reserved in a place apart until the Day of Doom, when ‘judgment shall be passed between them, and their good shall quench their evil on that day, and then shall they be set in the Heaven of Life, in God’s own presence, through ages everlasting.’ This merciful solution of their case affords a strong contrast to the loathsome doom to which Dante consigns these Laodiceans.[179] One passage Dante himself might have been willing to own, had it not been so discordant with his doctrine: the picture of those charitable, but sensual, persons who are set upon islands—an echo of the Imrama—in the midst of a fiery sea, but protected from its waves by a silver bulwark, built of their own almsgiving, until Judgment, when they shall be delivered.
These two conceptions, though not peculiar to the Irish Church, having been often promulgated, in various forms, by Jewish and Christian doctors alike, are characteristic of that leaning towards mercy, which, in one form or other, often appears in Irish ecclesiastical legends.[180]
Our author declares that the state of the blest and of the reprobate alike, as revealed to him, is provisional only, and that after the Last Judgment the happiness of the righteous will be infinitely augmented, and the sufferings of the evil intensified in proportion,[181] when they shall be consigned to the fiery wall, which until then is inhabited by the demons only.[182]
Chapter 30 gives a vivid representation of the mental sufferings of the lost in their mournful habitation, their own sufferings being augmented by the company of others in like case, and by a restless longing for the coming of Doom to end their suspense. Herein the author recognises a truth, the opposite of that truth contained in Hamlet’s dictum, though not less true; for often it is less tolerable to ‘bear the ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of,’ even though the change may surely be for the worse.[183]
Then follows a short description of the dolorous country, which is depicted as a waste and desolate region of the kind traversed by Cuchulainn on his journey to the realm of Scathach, and by Árt on his way to the Tír na n-Óg. The general character of this description is rather Miltonic than Dantesque.[184] Many instances appear to indicate that, to the northern spirit, the extreme of terror is suggested rather by the hauntings of wide and desolate spaces, than by the more realistic—we might almost say materialistic—imagination apparent in the intensive presentation of specific and concrete sufferings, which Dante was led to adopt, alike by his racial and personal temperament, and by his theory of the Otherworld.
Precedents for the Devil’s abode in the depths of the infernal seas are furnished alike by the Scriptural Leviathan, and by the Piast, which haunts almost every Irish loch of any depth, as also by the lake of fire and brimstone in Rev. xx. 10, into which Satan is to be cast at the end of the world.
The four rivers of Hell, which likewise occur in the Voyage of the Ui Corra and in several Continental visions, have been supposed by some authorities to be intended as a counterpart to the four rivers of Paradise in Genesis ii. 10 sqq.; this, however, seems doubtful, having regard to the absence of any mention of the suggested prototype, neither does it appear that the Scriptural Paradise was present to the author’s mind. It seems more probable that the number has reference to the fourfold division of the upper world; indeed, in some later mediæval visions, these rivers are placed in accordance with the cardinal points. They may possibly be due to a reminiscence of the classical Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Phlegethon, as in Milton (P. L. ii. 575 sqq.), and Dante (Inf. xiv. 115 sqq.).