ABSTRACT
In antiquity, as Christianity spread eastward in the post-apostolic age, as had Judaism before it, and especially in the development of Byzantine culture, the early Medieval doctrine of hell as a place of eternal punishment for the wicked also had a powerful influence on Islam, for the Quran is replete with vivid descriptions of hell as a place of perpetual suffering. Hell, as a place of eternal suffering and punishment, does not exist in the Hebrew Bible. The artistic and literary representations of purgatory and hell in the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods enhanced and gave suitable expression to a theology of the afterlife within Catholicism. In the deepest register, the lowest level of hell, Satan is seated upon a throne of beasts with a human antichrist. Other return to physical bodies and some, shrouded in burial cloths or as ghostly skeletons, sit between the forces of heaven and hell.
