November is the month dedicated to the dead. You gave a talk last week in Attard in which you answered questions about existence after death. What views did you express about heaven and hell?

Heaven is being in a position where you can regard human existence, within the world of which we have experience, as a joke or, more precisely, as a laughing matter.

I am assuming that Aristotle was correct in making two assertions about laughter. First, it is a capacity which distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Secondly, it ensues when a human being realises that a mistake has been made but that it will not have disastrous consequence. So you laugh if you see a pompous gentleman slip on a banana skin, but not if he breaks his back.

You are in heaven, to use a figure of speech, when a number of non-evident facts taken together make you laugh and could be in any one of the four main kinds of laughter, ranging from the noiseless smile to the guffaw Homer associated with the gods.

The first of these facts is that a human being always dies because of mistakes that have been committed at and since the origin of the human species. The second is that death is not a total disaster if you believe with St Paul that love is more powerful than death and you can rise again with Jesus Christ.

This last point requires faith but, apart from it, philosophy is enough for any human being to enjoy the totality of our perishable and perishing world as sublimely funny.

Hell is a shorthand term to indicate a condition in which one desires extinction - fading into nothingness like the snuffing out of a candle - without being able to obtain it.

Freud famously concluded that there were two basic desires innate in human beings. The first was Eros, or the love that yearns and strives for the enhancement of existence. The second was Thanatos, or the death wish that makes one aggressive against others or against oneself, in any case seeking to wreak destruction. Actually, it can easily be seen that these are not two different instincts, but that Thanatos is just the negation of Eros.

Allowing the death wish to overcome love is the victory of evil over goodness. Hell is to die in this condition. Since death is not the total extinction of a human being, given that the energy expressed in life is indestructible, the desire for total snuffing out will go on in eternal frustration. Consequently, it can be seen that hell is man-made, the negative result of persistently refusing divine gifts.

Your almost purely philosophic account does not sound very much like Dante's. How do Dante's and yours compare with that of biblical theology?

The structure of Dante's account is built on the analogy of light in Thomas Aquinas. Hell is to be in a fog, murky and dark. Its inhabitants are typically depicted peering at things with difficulty, like a tailor straining to pass a thread through the eye of a needle. It is not only the light of the senses that is dim, but also what Thomas Aquinas calls "intellectual light". For instance: Dante, who is, as it were, infected by the environment, is taken in when told that if you lovingly understand even an evil action, you will totally forgive. It is only in heaven that he realises the falsity of the claim.

The ascent through purgatory is a process of clarification of his vision. The experience is most significantly compared to that of the sculptor or artist who removes cumbersome matter in order to reveal the true forms of things as purely as possible. Aquinas described this process as the working of the "Light of Grace", to be understood as a superior form of physical light and of the light of the mind.

Paradise is a vision of everything in the "Light of Glory". Christ appeared clothed in this light at the Transfiguration, His revelation in Beauty. The shifting in the quality of light corresponds to four steps up the ladder of Knowledge.

My philosophic account is quite compatible with the undoubtedly more appropriate poetic language of Dante. In a thesis, Mary Cassar showed that as Dante rises from sphere to sphere in paradise, at each passage upwards he makes his guide Beatrice smile because each time he makes some mistake due to his still pre-death bodily condition. The correlative of knowing earthly matters in the heavenly perspective of divine glory is incessant laughter.

Death is the inevitable consequence of darkness, since life appears when matter acquires the capacity for photosynthesis, the absorption of light. Hence, my philosophic account of hell as an unrealisable death wish fits in well with Dante's picture of it as an environment approximating to total darkness, without ever quite reaching it.

Does Alfred Sant's recently published collection of short stories that you helped to launch yesterday have any connection with today's November theme?

The sub-title of Pupu fil-Baħar classifies the stories as entertainment (divertimenti) but the laughter they are most liable to provoke is ironic and bitter. Most of the characters, I suppose, if they were to die suddenly and find themselves in hell, would hardly notice that their environment had changed.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.