In a previous article I attempted to
examine the Scriptural, patristic, and canonical evidence for a belief in
Universalism, the belief that eventually all will be saved (including, according
to many universalists, Satan and the demons).
I concluded that the evidence all went the other way, and I reaffirmed
the traditional teaching that the punishments of Gehenna will be eternal. I acknowledged in passing the legitimacy and
even the necessity of trying to explain how a belief in the eternity of Gehenna
can be combined with a belief in the love of God. I will attempt to do that now. But I stress that my aim is limited to trying
to understand how a belief in Gehenna can be moral—making it palatable is beyond
my power or intention. My goal in
discussing hell is the same as C.S. Lewis’ goal when he discussed it, for, as
he said (in his chapter on Hell in his
The Problem of Pain), “I am not going to try to prove the doctrine [of
hell] tolerable. Let us make no mistake;
it is not tolerable. But I think the doctrine can be shown to be
moral”.
Orthodox
writers can collect a number of voices who agree with Lewis that hell is not
tolerable, and Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) has gathered a few of them in his
essay “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” in the anthology The Inner Kingdom. There we learn of St. Silouan of Mount Athos
gently rebuking a hermit who delighted in the damnation of atheists. Silouan responded that one in paradise
looking down on the suffering of another in hell-fire should pray for the
salvation of that one, for “love could not bear this”. Whether St. Silouan meant that one should
pray for those in Hades awaiting the
final judgment or that one should pray for those damned after the final judgment is not entirely certain, but his main point
stands: a tender heart would grieve over
the salvation of the damned and should not delight in it. (Tertullian apparently and famously thought
otherwise, but a tender heart should also consider his historical context. It’s easier to feel compassion for one’s
persecutors if one hasn’t suffered under them.)
We
begin by examining the arguments of those impugning the traditional doctrine of
Gehenna as eternal.
One
objection to this doctrine revolves around the incommensurability between the
sin and its punishment. One feels it
would be monstrously unfair of God to punish a few years of sin and rebellion
with an eternity of suffering. If “an
eye for an eye” is the classic expression of justice, how could an eternal hell
be just?
This
objection assumes that time and eternity are both linear, and that seventy
years in this life and age equal an approximate number of years in the next
life and the age to come. But there is
no reason to think that eternity is as linear as time, or that it is like time
as we experience it, continued after the Last Judgment. Rather, time and eternity are related to one
another as the foundation is to the house built upon it. If the foundation is laid wrongly and askew, the
house will be even more askew, and the higher the house is built, the more
askew it will become. We see this even
in the drawing of lines. Say I draw a
line as a base and then draw another line, intending to draw the second line at
a 90 degree angle from the first, but instead drawing it at an 80 degree
angle. Obviously the further the second
line extends, the further it will go from its intended 90 degree place. At few feet from the base, it will be a
certain distance “off”, but at a few miles from the base it will be even
further off. Increasing the amount of
distance from the base will do nothing to correct it.
This forms a
kind of analogy between the relation between time and eternity. During this life, within time, a person makes
decisions which effect his heart and his life and even his ability to make
future decisions. (We see this last in
the case of drug addiction: an addict is
not free to choose not to use the drug, because his previous choice to use the
drug has resulted in impaired ability to freely choose.) If in this life one chooses darkness over
light and continues along that path so that darkness becomes second-nature,
then this darkness and rebellion becomes the foundation upon which eternity
must be built. One thereby sets oneself
up for darkness and misery in the age to come.
Thus hell is not
a matter of God choosing to torture a sinner for an eternity because the sinner
sinned for seventy years. Eternity will
last forever no matter what (that is what “eternity” means)—the only question
is: on what foundation will one’s
experience of eternity be built? If for
seventy years the sinner has laid a foundation of rebellion and destroyed his
ability to repent and be nourished by joy, then the eternity built upon it will
be one of misery—not because God chooses the amount of punishment deserved, but
because of the nature of time as foundational to eternity.
Another
objection to the traditional doctrine of hell is the assertion that it somehow
makes God into implacable tyrant. Surely,
says the objector, faced with the pain and suffering of hell, anyone would
repent! This being so, how could a
loving God not forgive the now-penitent sinner and rescue him from his
punishment? The objector paints a
picture of God petulantly saying, “No, sorry, you had your chance, now it is
too late!” (We do find this portrayal of
hell in some primitive versions of it.
See, for example, the Qur’an: “The
dwellers of hell will say to its keepers: ‘Implore your Lord to relieve our
torment for one day!’…But vain shall be the cries of the unbelievers”, Surah
40:49-50.)
Smuggled
unnoticed into this picture of the penitent person in hell crying for mercy is
the unexamined assumption that the people in hell remain more or less as we
knew them in this life. (This was also assumed
in the example brought to St. Silouan by his hermit friend.) We think of people we have known who were not
really religious, but who were not openly evil either. We remember their good points, their virtues,
perhaps their sense of humour. We
remember their smiles as well as their frowns, and above all the times that
they were good, and the times they admitted that they were wrong. It is this person, intact, as remembered,
that we imagine enduring the pains of hell, and it is this which tears at our
heart. Certainly love could not bear
that. But I would suggest alternative
picture of the lost.
We
see this alternative described by C.S. Lewis in his chapter on Hell already
mentioned, and portrayed dramatically in his book The Great Divorce. There
those in hell were literally shadows of their former selves. All that identified them as the persons that
others knew or even as human had been burned away by the sin lurking and
growing inside them. Or, to vary the
metaphor, the cancer of sin and self-will had eaten away all their humanity,
including their free will. All that was
left was sin—the hideous lust, the unrelenting rage, the suicidal
self-pity. If we could look down from
paradise into the place of punishment (as in St. Silouan’s scenario) we would
not see a human being, much less the human being we knew (such as the atheist
imagined by St. Silouan’s hermit friend).
All the created humanity of the person with its potential for love,
knowledge, self-transcendence, joy, and especially repentance, had long since
eroded away to nothing.
In
The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis offers
us as an example of this horrible transmutation in an old lady, soaked in
self-pity, perpetually grumbling and whining.
Her damnation consisted of the fact that she was no longer simply a
grumbler, but only a grumble. As Lewis’
guide and theologian puts it:
“The whole
difficult of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly
Nothing. But ye’ll have had
experiences…It begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from
it: perhaps criticising it. And
yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that
no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even
to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”
The besetting
sin or the interior spiritual cancer may not be grumbling or self-pity. It may be lust or anger or pride or a thousand
other sins which smother the soul and erode its capacity for joy and repentance. But the final result is the same. Sin ultimately destroys the human soul, as
fire destroys wood and reduces it to ashes.
Looking at the pile of ash after a conflagration, one would never guess
that it had once been a beautiful wooden statue. It is the same with the damned: to quote Lewis again (from his The Problem of Pain), “What is cast into
hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’.”
This view of the
damned may help us in dealing with several objections. It may help us to see how “love could bear
this”, because what would be borne and witnessed from paradise would not the
torment of a human being, but the inevitable end of a process of
self-destruction. The sting to the
tender heart comes from the thought that “the torments of hell are going on
now, and people are suffering”. But in
one sense the people we knew or anything recognizable as a human being no
longer exist.
Hell and heaven therefore are in no sense
parallel to each other, as the objection presupposes. They are not two different compartments of
reality, with heaven on the top-floor penthouse and hell in the basement. The
saved in the final Kingdom of God will not stop and reflect on the disturbing
thought, “Somewhere people are suffering in hell”, as we may now stop in our
peaceful and affluent neighbourhoods and think, “Somewhere in the world wars
are going on and people are dying”. To
quote Lewis again, “The thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing”. The “remains” of human beings that
constitute hell, the pile of ash—the lust, and rage, and self-pity, the psychic
flickerings of rebellion and determined withdrawal into self that are all that remain
out of what was once a person—these scarcely constitute reality. The Biblical picture of the end is one in
which “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of
the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). In that new heavens and new earth,
righteousness will dwell (2 Peter 3:13).
This is the vision which St. Paul described as God being “all in all” (1
Corinthians 15:28), and this vision is true.
Hell forms no part of this world, or of this reality. The entire cosmos will be lit up with the
light of God. The lost will not dwell in
this world; they will inhabit no corner of the cosmos. They are to be banished from it altogether,
cast into “the outer darkness” (Matthew 22:13) beyond the rim of reality “where
being fades away into nonentity” (Lewis, in The
Problem of Pain).
Another objection centers upon
the supposed immorality of mere retribution.
The objector asks, “What is the point of punishment?” Some punishment
can be therapeutic, leading to the reform of the person punished. Some punishment can be a deterrent, warning
others not to sin as the person being punished has sinned. But hell, the objector points out, fulfills
neither of these two functions.
According to the traditional understanding of an eternal Gehenna, hell’s
pains will not produce repentance in the damned, so they cannot be
therapeutic. And there will be no one
left not already saved to profit by the example of their suffering, so hell
cannot function as a deterrent either.
Surely then the only point of their suffering is simple revenge—which
everyone admits is unworthy of a loving God.
The
objection requires us to look carefully at what is involved in damnation and
what are the causes of hell’s sufferings.
Once again the objection presupposes a psychologically intact person in
hell, a human being as we experience human beings, persons capable of
repentance. It presupposes a picture of
God standing outside the prisoner’s cell, ordering external punishments, and
that those punishments are the cause of the suffering. But what if the suffering is not solely (or
even principally) the result of external divine orders, but the result of the
self-chosen constitution of the damned themselves? If joy and life come only through
self-denial, self-transcendence, and communion with God, what would be the
result for someone who has destroyed all capacity for these things? God cannot give joy to someone lacking the
capacity to receive it, any more than the sun and rain could nourish a flower
which has plucked itself up by its own roots.
The damned have chosen not to be open to the light, and so must ever be
in darkness. If the damned refuse to eat
the only food the cosmos provides (which is self-transcendent communion with
God) they must go forever hungry. As is often
said, the doors of hell are thus locked from
the inside. The damned are locked
within themselves, smothered by their own adamant choice, their capacity for
self-transcendence eroded to nothing, and therefore are doomed to eternal
hunger and misery. Like men who have
torn off their ears in a fury of self-mutilation, they have become deaf to the
sound of joy and incapable of receiving it.
Their suffering does not find its ultimate root in divine retribution,
but in their own eternally-fixed rebellion.
Yet
another objection comes with an assertion that human will ultimately will
choose light and joy by virtue of it having been created by God. Defenders of the Church’s traditional
understanding of hell as eternal have always had recourse to the dignity and
freedom of the human will. Briefly put,
people are free to choose or reject God, and God will not violate their freedom
by forcing them to choose Him. They have
the freedom to reject Him, thereby destroying their own capacity for love, joy,
and self-transcendence if they insist upon doing so.
For
some objectors, like Dr. David Bentley Hart, recourse to the sovereignty of the
human will is futile. In his essay God, Creation, and Evil, he asserts that
“there could scarcely be a poorer argument”.
He explains thus:
“Free will is
a power inherently purposive, teleological, primordially oriented toward the
good, and shaped by that transcendental appetite to the degree that a soul can
recognize the good for what it is. No one can freely will
the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good, but that does not alter
the prior transcendental orientation that wakens all desire. To see the good
truly is to desire it insatiably”.
In a later note, he elaborates by saying
that one cannot choose or not choose God the way you
would a cup of coffee.
One desires and chooses anything, he says, because one has an original
intellectual appetite for God. He
reminds his readers of what St. Maximus the Confessor teaches—that the natural
will can will only God.
Here
the philosopher smacks up against the exegete.
Philosophical arguments about what the human will is or is not capable
of are interesting, but must take an epistemological backseat to the teaching
of Scripture—and the Fathers would agree.
And, as we have seen, the Scriptures are fairly clear that Gehenna’s suffering
is eternal. But we must still interact
with Hart’s assertions about the human will.
I would respond that Dr. Hart simply underestimates the power of
evil.
It is true that the natural will can will
only God, but no one apart from Christ has such a free and untainted natural
will. To quote Dr. John Meyendorff: “For Maximus, when man follows his natural
will, which presupposes life in God…he is truly free. But man also possess another potential,
determined not by his nature, but by each human person, the freedom of choice,
of revolt, of movement against nature, and therefore of self-destruction…this
is the gnomic will, a function of the personal life, not of nature” (from his Byzantine Theology).
The sad truth is that the human person is
quite capable of misusing the inherently purposive, teleological, primordially
oriented toward the good power of the will and perverting it into something
entirely different. Dr. Hart might reply
that such a thing could not be described as “free will”. I would not quibble about the term. But the fact is that a human being can reach
such a depth that he does indeed will evil as evil, deliberately choosing to
cut his own nose to spite his own face. Hart
may reply that such a “deliberate” choice is not a “free” choice, but this
doesn’t change the fact human beings are nonetheless capable of such
self-destruction. Though lamentable, it
is clearly observable that to see the good is not necessarily to desire it insatiably. Some people become capable of perverse rejection
of the light, simply because they want to. Why did you do that terrible thing? “Because.”
No appeal to reason or to joy can penetrate such self-chosen perversity. All such appeals founder on the terrible fact
of the swollen and insane will.
Here we come to impenetrable mystery of
evil. If Hell is “so nearly Nothing”,
then evil also partakes of perverse unreason.
And to see evil in its essence, we must turn from debating about men and
look for a moment at the devil. It is
true that universalists assert the eventual salvation of the devil, or at least
(like Origen) allow for its possibility.
But as the devil now is, we see in him the very form of evil. At the risk of overdosing the reader on C.S.
Lewis, I would refer to his portrayal of the devil-possessed figure of Weston,
the “Un-man” in his Perelandra. In this figure, we see unmasked the inner
nature of evil as “a union of malice with something nearly childish...Deep
within when every veil had been pierced [there was] nothing but a black puerility,
an aimless empty spitefulness”. In the
devil we find an abyss of unreason, a perverse fixity and commitment to
rebellion, even when it is known to be futile and self-defeating and leads to
damnation. It is this evil, this
disease, which swallows up and consumes the human will. If Christ possessed an unfallen natural will,
and all men now possess a gnomic will, another term must be found for this
damned will, which chooses puerile spitefulness in the face of joy. Such a will currently exists in the
devil. How could one deny that it could
not also come to exist in men in the next life?
This is especially so since after human
beings leave this world through death, they will share with the devil one
thing: a direct vision of God. At one time, our tradition asserts, the devil
was an unfallen angel, and like all angels enjoyed the direct vision of
God. Hart might insist that to see the
good truly is to desire it insatiably, but the devil once saw the good truly
and he did not desire it insatiably. Instead, he rejected it absolutely, with the
result that his will was transformed into what it now is—not a gnomic will like
ours, capable of deliberation and choice, but one fixed in hopeless rebellion
and futile spite. It seems that there is
something in the combination of the direct vision of God and definitive choice
that fixes the human will into its final choice. Those oriented towards the light see God
after this life, and the choice for God fixes them into a place of joy,
bringing healing and true eternal freedom, restoring their natural wills. Those oriented towards the darkness see God
and their rejection of Him fixes them into a place of eternal ruin, as their
humanity and capacity for joy and repentance utterly break apart. Their gnomic wills become transformed to a
will like the devil, their souls decaying and collapsing into ash and phantom
nonentity. That is why Christ condemns
them into a place prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41),
because they have now become petrified ruins, devoid of hope, like the devil
and his angels. It is not true that the
will ultimately will choose the good because the will was created by God. The devil’s will was once also created by
God, but the Scripture is clear that he will be “tormented day and night
forever and ever”, as one who has forever rejected the good (Revelation 20:10).
Finally, we examine the objection that the
eternity of hell involves the defeat of God’s will. God wills that all men be saved (1 Timothy
2:4), and God sent His Son to save the whole world (John 3:17). How could it be that God’s will suffer
defeat, and that love could not finally win?
Our reply brings us to the final mystery, as well as to the necessity of
asking ourselves about the nature of God’s final victory.
Much of the pang and disquiet one feels about
asserting that God’s will shall not be finally done comes from the fact that
this flies in the face of our desire for a happy ending. By using the term “a happy ending” I do not
mean to denigrate. For me scarcely
anything is more important than a happy ending; the desire for one is built
into our spiritual DNA, and is almost indistinguishable from the virtue of
hope. Animals take things as they come;
human beings hope for happy endings. A
desire for a happy ending is part of what it means to be made in the image of
God.
That is why the Scripture asserts
emphatically that history will indeed culminate in one, in what Tolkien
famously called “a eucatastrophe”.
Julian of Norwich declared that at the end, “all manner of thing will be
well”, echoing St. Paul’s declaration that at the end God would be all in all. We have suggested above that this will be so,
in that all the cosmos will be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters
cover the sea. All that is, all that exists, will then be filled
with light and joy. The lost have no
place there, for they will have declined into mere phantoms, fading into
nonentity, as creatures who no longer are. This fact may be mourned, but it cannot stand
in the way of joy. Otherwise the lost would
possess a kind of veto over the saved, and their misery possess a veto power over
joy.
Here is the final and all but impenetrable
mystery—that joy will triumph in spite of those who would wish otherwise, and
the world will not eternally be held captive to wills that refuse it. God’s victory and our triumph and joy do not
forever hang upon the devilish dog in the manger and the black puerility that
would destroy it. Mere and sterile
philosophizing might declare that the loss of the single soul means the
overthrow of God’s will and the defeat of love’s sovereignty. It is not so.
A glance at the final verses of the Apocalypse (Revelation 22:14-15) reveals
that it is not so. In that apostolic and
apocalyptic picture, outside the city are the dogs and murderers and idolaters
and everyone who loves lying. They have
chosen their own cramped and airless souls instead of joy, and have been pushed
outside the city, into the outer darkness, beyond the rim of the world. Inside the city, God is all in all, and every
manner of thing is well. Everyone in the
world is blessed, for they have washed their robes and have the right to the
tree of life. Love’s victory does not
depend upon us, and cannot be thwarted by anyone, including the churlish
impenitence of the lost.
The doctrine of hell is not tolerable. But it is consistent with morality and with a
belief in the love and final victory of God.
Its presence in the Scriptures does not indicate an inconsistency there,
but simply that reality and the depths of the human response to God are more
varied and complex than philosophers might first imagine.
