The conception of hell as a frozen wasteland may seem surprising to people, as the general assumed temperature of hell is to be extremely hot. This basis is in fact proven in the Bible in several sections. In Revelations, hell is described as a “lake of fire.
”There is also the geographical reasoning that states since Christianity originated from the Middle East and Africa, which are considered arid tropical climates, the idea that hell could be freezing cold, just like how their climate could ever be the same kind of cold, seems implausible.
The New Testament also refers to hell as “Gehenna,” a term used by Bernard himself, which was historically a place outside of Jerusalem where waste was burned. In short, there is enough evidence to make the phrase “it’s hot as hell right now” make total and complete sense.
However, the fact that Bernard uses the term Gehenna to describe his vision of hell and yet still connotes it to being cold is interesting. How could this be possible? And the fact that the phrase “it’s cold as hell” exists and is used colloquially adds nuance to this idea.
Syntactically and semantically, the phrase makes sense: it is an extreme feeling of one of the two ends of the temperature spectrum. However, cold and hell are two words that are oxymorons and are unable to work together in a sentence and yet,
they do. Furthermore, there are many more interpretations of hell (or at least the further down in hell you go) the colder it gets. So, with all of these conditions, why do authors go against popular belief and create a cold hell? And why has a conception of a hot hell been more readily accepted than a cold one?
