Zocalo program with the Getty's "Heaven & Hell and Dying Well"

The evening program in the Williams auditorium was moderated by Jody Hassett Sanchez, producer and documentary filmmaker.  The panel was comprised of Buddhism expert Robert Buswell from UCLA, Peter Nabokov, UCLA anthropologist and expert on the Pueblo Indian society, Jeffrey Burton Russell, UC Santa Barbara religion historian and Martin Schwarz, the curator of the Getty exhibit.

Below are pictures of items in the exhibit.



As the above caption says, hope mingled with fear about death the the afterlife provided stirring subjects for manuscripts.  Arts filled in the gaps of knowledge with innovative visions of heaven and hell.



The Feast of Dives:  The Soul of Lazarus Being Carried to Abraham, about 1510.



The Crucifixion, Rome 1484 by Giuliano Amadei.  "Christ hangs pitifully from the cross, blood spurting from his wounds with the figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John with Mary Magdalene on her knees in grief.  Christ's sacrifice was the defining moment of Christianity, making eternal life a possibility for believers."



Dante imagined a very detail picture of hell.



The sorrowful followers and the evil prosecutors react to Christ's death.

Where's heaven?  What's it like? Who gets in?  What about hell? These were some of the questions discussed by the panelists and audience.  Robert Buswell, the Buddha expert said "There are many different heavens in the Buddhist system, as many as 27.  They don't have a geography...the heavens are a level of rebirth...in fact heaven is a "kind of consolation prize".  The real goal is to experience nirvana, which can't be located, measured, desired, or experienced.

Curator Martin Schwarz said that while hell is usually depicted with a lot of detail in medieval art, heaven is shown with much less detail. 

According to Peter Nabokov, Native American tribes of the West, heaven was something very literal.  A picture of heaven he found contains a certain number of trees, a pile of dead rabbits...for a feast...as well as corn being harvested with your ancestors waiting for you.  In Pueblo Indian society, there is no sin, so everyone gets into heaven.  He went on to say that Hell for Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples everywhere on the planet was when White Europeans arrived and killed their people and destroyed their land.

"Heaven is where God is" said Burton Russell..beyond space and time and Up...Christians believed that you traveled up to heaven - via a ladder or stairs as in Dante's Davine Comedy.  Schwarz said that said that a quick death was the worst thing because you couldn't prepare for the afterlife.  However, Burton Russell said that in Christian tradition if you're a sinner and you repent - even at the moment of death - it is enough to get you into heaven.

Schwarz said that people paid a lot of money in the middle ages to commission books full of beautiful but terrifying paintings of hell...to keep people under control.  The Zocolo summarizer concluded "Overall, though, heaven and hell have a disappointing record when it comes to discouraging vice. Or, to put it another way, heaven and hell have been more successful in inspiring good art than in inspiring good behavior." 

Thanks to Zocolo staff members who arrange these wonderful programs and write about it so beautifully. I borrowed liberally from them.