4. Heaven, Hell and Purgatory
In mediaeval cosmology ideas of heaven, hell, and purgatory, as more or less definitely located regions where the spirits of the dead were either rewarded or punished eternally, or were purged of their earthly sins in hope of future blessedness, play an important part. According to Dante’s poetic conception hell was a conical shaped pit whose apex reached to the center of the earth, purgatory was a mountain on the earth’s surface on the summit of which was located the garden of Eden or the earthly paradise, and heaven was a motionless region beyond space and time, the motionless sphere outside of the primum mobile, called the Empyrean.
Chaucer’s allusions to heaven, hell and purgatory are frequent but chiefly incidental and give no such definite idea of their location as we find in the Divine Comedy. The nearest Chaucer comes to indicating the place of heaven is in The Parlement of Foules, 55-6, where Africanus speaks of heaven and then points to the galaxy:
“And rightful folk shal go, after they dye,
To heven; and shewed him the galaxye.”
Chaucer describes heaven as “swift and round and burning”, thus to some extent departing from the conception of it usually held in his time:
“And right so as thise philosophres wryte
That heven is swift and round and eek brenninge,
Right so was fayre Cecilie the whyte.”[24]
In using the terms “swift and round” Chaucer must have been thinking of the primum mobile which, as we have seen, was thought to have a swift diurnal motion from east to west. His use of the epithet “burning” is in conformity with the mediaeval conception of the Empyrean, or heaven of pure light as it is described by Dante.
Chaucer does not describe the form and location of hell as definitely as does Dante, but the idea which he presents of it by incidental allusions, whether or not this was the view of it he himself held, is practically the one commonly held in his day. That hell is located somewhere within the depths of the earth is suggested in the Knightes Tale;[25]—
“His felawe wente and soghte him down in helle;”
and in the Man of Lawes Tale;[26]