A Lecture delivered at Theology on Tap, Bridgeport, Ct., May 2003; at
Wyoming School of Theology, August, 2003.
James V. Schall, S. J.
Georgetown University, DC, 20057-1200
THE HELL, IT IS!
“After
they have been carried along to the Acherusian lake, they cry out and shout,
some for those they have killed, others for those they have maltreated, and
calling them they then pray to them and beg them to allow them to step out into
the lake and to receive them. If
they persuade them, they do step out and their punishment comes to an end; if
they do not, they are taken back into Tartarus and from there into the rivers,
and this does not stop until they have persuaded them they have wronged, for
this is the punishment which the judges imposed on them.”
–
Plato, The Phaedo, 114a-b.
“...
Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam aeternum, qui vero mala, in ignem
aeternum.... Haec est fides
catholica, quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non
poterit.
–
Symbolum ‘Quicunque’ {quod vocatur
‘Athanasianum,)’ 400 A. D., Denziger, #40.1
“Between
us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the
world.”
–
Pascal, Pensées, #213.
I.
The
doctrine of hell scandalizes the modern world, and not a few in the
contemporary Church. It is
modernity’s most neglected doctrine.
I have often wondered why.
After all, it is an ancient teaching found in Plato, found in Scripture,
found in many religious and philosophical sources. It has its own iron logic, the denial of which leads
to very unpleasant consequences for human worth. Pascal tells us that between heaven or hell stands only
“life,” the “frailest” of things.
Evidently, Pascal thought that after even our frailness is destroyed,
our sole alternative is either heaven or hell.
This
passage in Pascal echos that found in the Gospel of Matthew, wherein, in the
final Judgment, all are pictured as being inevitably separated into those who
are saved and those who are finally lost.
“Next he will say to those on his left hand, ‘go away from me, with your
curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’”
(Matthew, 25:41-42). Augustine made this same distinction
between the City of God and the City of Man, to neither of which city can any
one belong involuntarily.
And
John Adams, the second American president, held that hell is the Christian
doctrine most necessary to politics, for without it, the state would conceive
as its own mission fittingly the duty of punishing all vices, secret and
public. But to do that would
require a divine mind and a totalitarian state apparatus. Therefore, Adams implied, politics is
limited, as St. Thomas also said, to the external forum, to dealing with the
most public and dangerous crimes.
In any state, many crimes will go unpunished. This is why, even from Plato, the doctrine of hell has also
a political origin, for the human mind cannot accept the idea that ultimately
terrible and numerous crimes will go unpunished.
Following
Plato’s theological imagery in The Phaedo, however, we like to think that, no matter what we do, there is always
a second or third or one hundredth chance. No decision about hell, we like to think, can really be
“final,” except perhaps the desperate, though not totally heretical, wish that
no one in fact is in it. Sooner or
latter, we like to think, someone will come to our rescue to declare that what
we did was not wrong after all. Or
that we need not acknowledge its heinousness. Or again someone will forgive us, either in this world or
the next, without our having to do anything. Some re-incarnation theories, besides being intimations of a
desire of resurrection of the body, as opposed to theories of immortality of
the soul, are designed so that we do not have to face squarely the doctrine of
the eternity of hell. They
postulate an unending series of re-incarnations, even into animals, of new
choices, until we finally get it right, presumably somewhere down the ages. Thus, eventually, no one is lost.
This
thesis apparently saves God from the presumably unwanted necessity of carrying
out His own stern rules. A God who
cannot or will not by His wisdom or power save everyone, no matter what, is
said to be an inferior, a less than all-powerful, an insensitive, God. Yet, such theories, when spelled out,
deny us the reality and finality of our choices and hence the drama on which
our dignity is based. They propose
a semi-eternity of choosing not to choose our final fate in which we rest in
either a paradise or a hell. Yet,
it is the purpose of human life to make this very choice.
Salvation
does not depend only or wholly on ourselves, of course. Any honest self-reflection reveals that
we are each finite, limited beings.
We did not give ourselves either being or life, nor did we give
ourselves what-it-is-to-be-ourselves, the kinds of being we find ourselves to
be. We are at bottom receivers,
even of ourselves. What causes us
to be human beings and not turtles, if you will, our natures, are likewise not
products of our own willing. This
does not deny the fact that we can will to reject even what we are.
Divine
omnipotence, it is sometimes maintained, can always change its mind about our
troubled record, or even about its own eternal intentions. In pure voluntarist theories of the
Godhead, God is pure will. Thus,
He is said not to be limited by His own rules or even by the principle of
contradiction, the first law of being. God is absolute freedom, limited by nothing even by
the distinction of right and wrong.
Even the famous French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, speculated that
maybe God could or would reduce Lucifer’s eternal punishment. But if Lucifer’s final status could be
changed, how much more human conditions?
Eternity, on this hypothesis, turns out to be rather more changeable
than we at first been led to believe.
These
are what I call “sympathetic theories” about hell. They look on hell from the hypothetical viewpoint of the one
said to be simmering there because of God’s rigid judgment. The contemplation of pain often dulls
the sense of justice. Suffering,
even just suffering as punishment for terrible deeds, causes compassion. A God “inventing” or “willing” a hell
appears to be a harsh God. We say
something like, “if I were God, I would not make any one so suffer no matter
what he did.” The implied
conclusion to this line of reasoning is, thus, “if I would not do something,
neither would God.” God ends up
looking remarkably like ourselves, that is, rather arbitrary and
wishy-washy. We do not conform to
God’s world, but He to ours. If we
insist on looking on hell from the point of view of the condemned qua sufferers
and not qua guilty, I suspect, we
will never understand the depths of this most interesting and perplexing of
doctrines and what is the logic behind it
– and there is a “logic” behind it. It is to that logic that we address ourselves here. If we smugly declare our superiority to
God by claiming that we would not do what He did, we can suspect that we did
nor really understand the implications of the divine purposes for the world in
the first place.
II.
Plato
had it right, of course. Our sins
could be forgiven, though only if we acknowledged them. But also, in Plato, the victim who
suffered from them specifically had to forgive us. Our deeds still mattered. Plato implicitly emphasized this latter point in his
picturing the damned pleading from the river with those whom they injured or
killed. Thus, he seems to have
understood that salvation does not primarily depend on us, even when it also
does depend on us, on our pleading for forgiveness.
The
Christian gloss on this Platonic position is that sin not only harms both
ourselves and usually someone else, but it “harms” God in harming one of His
creatures. Sin is not just between
myself and the one I offend. Thus,
forgiveness takes on a divine dimension.
God in loving us can, as it were, “feel” the harm that others do to us
or we to them. This is part of the
dynamic of love that ends eventually in the Crucifixion of the God-man, in what
is called the Atonement.
Ultimately, by ourselves, we cannot escape our own sins. For this, we depend on the love and
sacrifice of another. We must, in
other words, acknowledge our own inability to stop all the evils we let loose
in the world. Sin has a contagion
to it in its influence on the wills of others, though out of it can come both
good and evil. Because I sin, it
does not follow that you must sin;
because you do good, it does not follow that I cannot do evil in return, such
is our freedom.
Plato’s
notion of punishment, moreover, connected as it is with the question of
forgiveness, is that we should want to be punished for our sins and crimes
precisely to restore the order we violated in committing them, an order whose validity
we now acknowledge by our repentance.
Plato, explaining the
extremes of vindictiveness in the Gorgias, stated that the worst punishment we could inflict on someone with a
serious crime on his soul was not
to punish him. Thus, he would
remain eternally unrepentant. He
would be stuck in his soul’s permanent disorder and punishment, condemned to a
place called Tartarus, or Hades, or hell.
Hell
is never to repent, never to choose what is not ourselves. This was a theme found also in Hamlet, the waiting to kill a man precisely when he was in
the act of seriously sinning,
deliberately giving him no time for repentance. To follow this vindictive course was itself, of course, a
grave sin, the extreme of the refusal to love our enemies, who in turn refused
in his deeds to love God. In this
sense, the eternity or even the punishment of hell has nothing to do with hell,
but with the will of the person who decides to go there by his refusal to
acknowledge that what is right is, after all, right..
In
Scripture, the principal occupant of hell, as we have intimated, seems to be a
fallen angel by the name of Satan or Lucifer. We should not miss the symbolism of his name, Lucifer, the
“light bearer.” He was among the
most intelligent of the angels. He
remains an angel even in hell.
This fact alone should alert us to reflect that the connection between
spirit and evil may be much closer than the connection of body and evil, as we
are more likely to think. The
whole history of the heresy known as Gnosticism, the idea of self-salvation by
our own knowledge, with its Manichean codicil that marriage is evil, is a proof
of this point. Satan, moreover,
has tended to steal every show or play in which he appears, most famously in
Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Why is this?” we might wonder. Ever since Sisyphus there has been a
kind of romance in the defiance of the gods, something easily projected onto
Lucifer himself. “True or
atheistic humanism” is said to be found in the “rebel” who, in the name of his
own unlimited freedom, rejects the natural law of what it is to be a human
being.
Christ
once suggested that the Devil’s kingdom is not divided against itself. While that diabolic unity does not
necessarily make satanic organizations ideal places in which to work, it does
make them uncommonly dangerous. At
a minimum, this diabolical harmony means that such a kingdom is stronger in
pursuing its dire purposes than it would be by individual disorder, a point
also made by Plato in book one of The Republic when talking about the tyrant. The children of darkness are often more
enterprising than the children of light.
Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities
and powers. And what is the
purpose of this kingdom “not divided against itself?” Evidently, its principal endeavor is to entice, cajole, or
persuade rational creatures freely to cast themselves into that “eternal fire,”
of which the Athanasian Creed spoke, following Matthew. No doubt the most bemused account of
this process is found in C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.
Generally
speaking, it has been my experience that, when everyone is pretty much agreed
that this or that Christian doctrine is untenable or wrong, then it is the
precise time when such a denied doctrine is most relevant and, more than that,
most intelligible and most needed.
It is my view that the best case to be made for the reality of hell is
to examine the views that maintain that it does not and cannot exist. Even though the universe is full of
flaming infernos of various types, no space craft has reported siting precisely
hell. We are probably, even on
theological grounds, not too surprised by the failure of spacecraft to spot the
“eternal flames.” For if there
existed a hell, it could, at the present moment, be occupied only by fallen
angels or human damned souls, neither of which is corporeal.
This
information may not be particularly consoling, however, since there is such a
thing as spiritual suffering, what is called sometimes “the pain of loss,” the
knowing that we are missing that for which we exist. Likewise, Scripture tells of the resurrection of the body,
giving no hint that this resurrection will not also include the bodies of the
damned, whoever they might be. The
alternative is either that everyone is resurrected, saved and damned, or no one
is. The denial of the resurrection
of the body is often an attempt to cut off at the pass any worry about actual
and eternal punishment for the particular kind of beings we are – persons composed of bodies and
souls. But Plato had already
prevented this avenue by proving precisely that the immortality of the soul was
designed not to destroy the soul but to keep it so that, if needs be, it could
be punished, or rewarded.
But
someone might say, “come now, level with us, surely this doctrine of hell is a
gigantic myth, a hoax, an analogy, a scare-tactic.” I am going to approach this issue from perhaps a different
angle. Catholicism is an
intellectual religion. If it holds
something to be true, it has reasons for this claim. Faith is directed to reason and does not contradict it. Indeed, it improves it. This intellectual consistency
means that a doctrine of revelation will find at least indirect confirmation in
reason and will. When wrestling to
figure what a give doctrine means, the very effort will generally cause reason
to become more itself, more reason.
I
am going to suggest that if we think correctly about hell, it will not seem
like such an outlandish teaching as it is often pictured to be. Someone may still want to reject
it. I have no problem with that
provided I can examine the grounds of the rejection. But I think, on analysis, that the basis for the rejection
will usually be more in the order of sentiment or compassion than hard thought. Moreover, I will suggest,
paradoxically, that the doctrine of hell has something rather consoling, even
ennobling, about it. We are not
really prepared for what we must give up if this doctrine is not true. Reflection on this teaching,
furthermore, will assist in putting together a number of other things for which
we sometimes see no purpose.
III.
Let
me begin by observing that the doctrine of hell is both a philosophical
position and a teaching of revelation.
This double source itself has some significance, namely, why do both
sources agree? Do they both have a
common origin? The doctrine of
hell, in its complete understanding, requires that we maintain that the world,
including the human world, has an order.
It is not a chaos, the opposite of order. Indeed, we affirm with Genesis that the world and all in it
are created to be good. Neither
material nor human things are, as such, evil. Within that order an effort must be made to account for
reality as it actually is. The
doctrine of hell, on reflection, is not absurd or unintelligible.
To
see this fact more clearly, I will begin with an observation made by the
Anglican philosopher, Eric Mascall:
The doctrine of the absurdity of
existence is the natural climax of the process of secularization which has
increasingly characterised the thought and activity of the modern world. That is to say, if you try to find the
ultimate meaning of the world simply within it you will fail, and then, if you
refuse to look for it anywhere else, you will say that the world does not make
sense. If you develop a neurosis
as a result, this will be the effect of your conclusion rather than its cause.2
Existence is not absurd. The doctrine of hell, furthermore, is not an argument that
would imply that it is, just the opposite, in fact. But if we try to find the ultimate meaning of the world
wholly within it, we will indeed “fail.”
If we refuse to look to the whole body of information available to us,
probably the world will not “make sense.”
If we become “neurotic” because we cannot deal with hell, the cause is
probably due to our own choices rather than some proper account of the order of
things. An absurd world causes
neurosis. The doctrine of hell is
not absurd. It stands at the other
side of free will. But if free
will is indeed absurd, then it really does not make any difference whether we
believe in hell or not, for in a determined world, we can only believe what we
must, even if we believe in hell.
Let
me state too, that when we maintain that we can understand any Christian dogma,
including hell, we do not mean that we can totally or completely fathom its
depths. But this does not mean
that we know nothing, nor does it mean that what we do know is not true. Christianity does not relate to what it
does state and formulate as if its defined understanding totally exhausts the
subject matter. On the other hand,
just because, with the power of the human mind alone, it does not fathom the
depths of reality, it does not follow that what it does know is therefore
false. Christianity retains the
Socratic wisdom that says that its wisdom is to know what it does not know. George MacDonald, the Scottish theologian,
put it well, “The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light
knows itself and the darkness also.
None but God hates evil and understands it”3 We might likewise state that no one but
God knows hell and understands it.
MacDonald
will also give us our first formal statement about hell: “The one principle of hell is – ‘I am my own.’”4 This statement is important because it
shifts our attention away from the “eternal fires” or sufferings said to be in
hell to the more central issue of the reason why anyone might be in hell. These reasons have something to do with
the order of things. We have
perhaps heard Sartre’s famous quip that “hell is the other.” This position, like MacDonald’s
statement, implies that the self is sufficient, that nothing but the self can
enter into our calculations, certainly no dependency on anything but
ourselves. Note too that it is the
direct opposite of the classical definition of love – to will the good of another for the sake of the
other.
Since
there is no error that does not contain some truth, we can see that what lies
behind the statements of MacDonald and Sartre is the affirmation of the
centrality and existence of a self or a person. What is rejected is anything that makes demands on the self,
any rules or laws that the self did not make. This is a world of what appears to be infinite loneliness,
of the view that others are threats or mere tools to be used for
ourselves. There is no room for
any love or generosity that would imply a good or delight in anything other
than the self. It is a formula for
isolation. Indeed, one of the
classic definitions of hell is that it is the choice to be oneself forever,
almost as if one were a god. This
is generally how the vice of pride has been described in Greek and Christian
literature. The self has no
relation to another except in terms of itself. The legitimate endeavor to recognize that the human being is
something of great worth ends up with the affirmation that it is the only
worth.
Perhaps
we can gain further light from the structure of Plato’s Republic which ends, significantly, with a consideration of
hell that arises out of precisely the failure of any existing polity to
establish true justice. One of the
main driving forces behind Plato’s Republic was the realization that the virtue of justice, in
its highest form, could not be found in any existing city. Cities were established to render each
his due, to render justice. The
need for justice meant that injustice existed on a widespread scale. But even when the civic regimes were
established, injustices remained in spite of the judicial and penal systems,
something that would surprise no one familiar with the doctrine of original
sin. What Plato realized is that
the human mind cannot remain content with the notion that injustices are not,
eventually, punished. For if
injustice is not punished and if virtue is not properly rewarded in these same
cities, it must mean either they are requited someplace else or that the
universe, from a moral standpoint, is “in vain,” to use Aristotle’s term. In other words, there is really no
order in the highest things.
The
Republic of Plato thus postulated the
existence of rewards and punishments for what actually took place in the world
to lie outside of the world, in the hands of God. It is quite clear that in any historically existing polity,
all the vices are not punished, even when some are, nor are all the virtuous
deeds rewarded, even if some are.
When contemplating this perplexing situation, the human mind is deeply
restless. It is tempted to think
that there is something enormously wrong with the world. As Adeimantus said in the second book
of The Republic, the poets picture
the tyrants to be happy and the good appear to be punished, just the opposite
order from what it should be.
Surely, if this be true, something is terribly wrong with the
world.
The
answer to this situation is that the human soul is immortal. Nothing can destroy it, as Plato takes
pains to show in the Phaedo and in
The Republic. The logic behind this position is that
we bear our crimes with us so that we are judged not according to our own
self-made or our city’s standards but by the standards of justice itself. Hell, in this sense, is the result of
the incomprehensible idea that injustice is ultimately not punished. In other words, when we get rid of the
reality of hell, we implicitly agree that injustice succeeds. That is, we accept the idea that the
order of the world itself is not well-made, that it does not originate in the
good.
IV.
Yet
another way to approach the notion that there might be something to be said for
hell is from the practical consequences of its denial. For the sake of argument, let us grant
that there is no hell, no ultimate consequences of our ill deeds. Whether we are virtuous or vicious, we
all end up in the same place.
Presumably we are all saved, even without formal repentance. Repentance is designed to limit the
consequences of our evil actions by ourselves acknowledging that they are
indeed evil. As I hinted earlier,
there is something romantic about even hell. It makes our lives dramatic, full of consequences.
To
be sure, this is a paradox. But
let me see it I can explain what I mean.
Human lives are full of daily deeds of many sorts, some usual, some
unusual, some clearly noble, some clearly vicious. This situation carries on throughout our lives, however long
we live. If we are sure that there
are no ultimate consequences to any act of ours, no matter what we do, we are
left with a certain liberty to do evil with impunity, whatever theory we might
use to explain it. If each human
life is, in fact, a drama, as I like to think that it is, this drama only has
meaning if what we in fact do makes a difference. If it makes no real difference whether we be virtuous or
vicious, in whatever category we chose to discuss, then our encounters with
others are really of no importance.
Perhaps this is what MacDonald and Sartre were getting at.
But
if the doctrine of hell is true, that it is a real possibility, it means that
our ordinary affairs are shot through with unimaginable significance. At any time of any day of our lives, we
can do something of ultimate reward or damnation. Our deeds are not mere blips on the screen of eternity. They are acts that demand
judgment. Human lives are of
ultimate importance, not because they made themselves so, but because of what
they are, something that they did not themselves establish by their own choices
or powers. To be sure modern
voluntarism from Nietzsche and rationalism from Descartes and Kant, postulate
an absolute independence or autonomy of the self. But whatever the human being is, it is not something of its
own creation, though its final personal destiny is something of its own choice.
What
the doctrine of hell does, then, is to guarantee that our lives are not merely
things of a moment. Rather they
are things full of instances. At
each one of them, we could chose salvation or damnation. This is so because what we are is
rooted in a love that we did not give ourselves. I mentioned earlier that we could, in a way, “wound” God,
just as we can wound our parents or spouses by doing an act that harms someone
we love. Looked at from this point
of view, I think, the doctrine of hell stands at the basis of romanticism – that is, our loves do make a
difference. Love is not just any
old emotion or pleasure but it is choosing and willing the good of another, for
that person’s own sake. This means
that our lives, our pedestrian lives, are charged with significance. It also means that whether we are
rich or poor, great or small, we are all involved in the same drama involving
those among whom are given to live.
Thus,
to return to the title of these reflections – “The Hell, It Is
– I would suggest that, on
examination, it is not such an outlandish teaching as we might at first
think. It undergirds the very
significance of our daily actions.
It reinforces our sense that the world contains an intelligible order. The only way to eliminate the doctrine
of hell would, I think, be to eliminate the doctrine of the freedom of the
will. But if we eliminate that
doctrine, we cease to be finite, rational beings responsible for our own
destiny and our own understanding of the worth of others.
Hell,
moreover, does not exist apart from a doctrine of forgiveness. This has something to do with St.
Thomas’s position that the world was created in mercy, not in justice. That is, the Platonic worry that
justice is not requited is modified by the Platonic and Christian notion of
forgiveness. But the one thing
that God cannot do is to create a free being and not allow him to be free. This is why hell has long been
associated with the notion of self-enclosure. Hell is an eternity of ourselves. Hardly any punishment seems more severe than this, than the
rejecting of all else but ourselves.
The only thing we encounter in such a world is, alas, ourselves, whom we
know, as Lucifer knew, that we did not make ourselves to be or to be what we
are in the first place. Hell is
not the other. Hell is ourselves
with the realization that this narrow “good” is what we chose and with the
added realization that we alone have refused to be open to any alternative.
1“And those who do good, they will go to
eternal life; to those who do evil, however, to eternal fire. This is the Catholic faith, which,
unless someone firmly and faithfully believes it, he cannot be saved.”