Question:
Answer:
I don’t understand what is meant by “best account,” but perhaps the most recognized account of hell is contained in the first part of the “secret” of Fatima where Sister Lucia described what she saw in a vision given to her and the other two children by Our Lady.
The first part is the vision of hell.
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.
We then looked up at Our Lady, who said to us so kindly and so sadly:
“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. “
Some dismiss this account as pure medieval fantasy straight from the pages of Dante’s Inferno, when in fact it is anything but. In his theological commentary on Fatima, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger explains that the images and forms seen by the children in the vision are not of “normal exterior perception of the senses” and are not “located spatially” (like a tree or a house) but by means of the “interior senses.” How this interior perception becomes visible to the visionary is further explained in the commentary.
Here’s an excerpt:
Interior vision does not mean fantasy, which would be no more than an expression of the subjective imagination. It means rather that the soul is touched by something real, even if beyond the senses. It is rendered capable of seeing that which is beyond the senses, that which cannot be seen—seeing by means of the “interior senses.”. . . The person is led beyond pure exteriority and is touched by deeper dimensions of reality, which become visible to him. Perhaps this explains why children tend to be the ones to receive these apparitions: their souls are as yet little disturbed, their interior powers of perception are still not impaired.
He [the visionary] sees insofar as he is able, in the modes of representation and consciousness available to him. . . . He can arrive at the image only within the bounds of his capacities and possibilities. Such visions therefore are never simple “photographs” of the other world but are influenced by the potentialities and limitations of the perceiving subject.
Rather the images are, in a manner of speaking, a synthesis of the impulse coming from on high and the capacity to receive this impulse in the visionaries, that is, the children. For this reason, the figurative language of the visions is symbolic.
Full text is here.