Whether Hell is a fact of natural religion, or only of revealed religion, I find no other theological assumption as fascinating or as powerful. I am not referring to the simplistic mythology of manure, roasting spits, fires, and tongs, which have gone on proliferating in the depths, and which all writers have repeated, to the dishonor of their imaginations and their decency. I am speaking of the strict notion - a place of eternal punishment for the wicked - constituted by the dogma with no other obligation than placing it in loco real, in a precise spot, and a beatorum sede distincto, different from the place of the chosen. To imagine anything else would be sinister. In the 50th chapter of his History, Gibbon tries to diminish Hell’s wonders and writes that the two populist ingredients of fire and darkness are enough to create a sensation of pain, which can then be infinitely aggravated by the idea of endless duration. This disgruntled objection proves perhaps that it is easy to design Hell, but it does not mitigate the admirable terror of its invention. The attribute of eternity is what is horrible. The continuity - the fact that divine persecution knows no pause, that there is no sleep in Hell - is unimaginable. The eternity of that pain, however, is debatable. - Jorge Luis Borges