Hell, and Related Matters

It’s a perennial topic. The Church teaches and has always taught the possibility of Hell for any of us.

The moods of humanity being forever mercurial, our race’s relationship with this teaching has been more varied over the centuries than a man with restless leg syndrome trying to find a comfy position to sleep. Currently, it is mostly out of fashion and many Christians imagine David Bentley Hart and similar universalists have put it to bed forever. In other periods, Hell and, what is more, a densely populated Hell, have been taken for granted. Much depends on who you think will (or has) gone there and why and our species is all over the map when it comes to the thought of damnation. The same Christians I know who reject the idea of Hell as the Church teaches it often find themselves struggling with, for instance, the idea that a swine can live his life in comfort and die in his bed and never experience any consequences for a life of brutality and cruelty. At least one person I know, who is emphatically not a right wing Fundamentalist hellfire Baptist or Traddy Catholic but very much a liberal Catholic, passionately hopes for the damnation of Trump and his allies. But on the whole, most people I know either firmly reject Hell as a possibility or at least hope nobody will choose that definitive act of self-exclusion from the society of God and the Blessed.

Me: I take the Church’s warning–and the various implications of what she both does and doesn’t say about Hell–very seriously. I think, with all due to respect to Hart, that Hell is a possibility for anybody, especially me, if I reject obedience to Christ definitively. I note that the main thing we as Christians are to remember about everything written in the New Testament is that it is written first and foremost for us Christians, not for Those Unbelievers Over There. And that includes, most especially, the warnings. People who know nothing about Christ will be judged by their own lights as Paul says in Romans 2. But we who have heard Christ and, what is more, claim to follow him? How should we expect to fare on That Day if we throw away what he has freely handed us and not obey him?

That said, we are also to remember that Christ’s entire goal is to save, not damn. Insofar as it lies with him, he has made clear that nothing, not even crucifixion, will deter him from reaching that goal. So we should reject the notion of a God breathing down our neck, waiting for us to screw up. We should rather hope that he means to do us good and wills our happiness.

The real question is whether we will our happiness, or rather “Do we will our happiness in the right way?” For, of course, we can will our happiness in a million wrong ways, as every heroin addict, masochist, tyrant trapped in a besieged bunker, and wifebeater who is now doing 20 years can attest. The ability of our species to seek happiness in stupid and evil ways is what history is largely about. That’s why a reader astutely observed: “Trump is the only person I’ve ever encountered whom I think would be completely unhappy in heaven. If I ever doubted hell, Trump convinced me that there needs to be a place for those who are incapable of eternal happiness with God.”

I would only add that that place is Heaven and that those who have freely killed their capacity for enjoying the society of God and the Blessed can only experience that eternal gladness as eternal suffering. I have heard (and agree) with theologians that Hell is simply the way those who utterly reject God experience the same immersion in the life of the Blessed Trinity the Blessed receive. The misery of Hell is not something God does to the damned. It is something they do to themselves. God and the Blessed just be who they are and experience the bliss of it. The damned (assuming anybody really winds up making that irrevocable choice) are those who have chosen to react to a universe of perfect love, joy, and beauty with revulsion. No wonder Pride is the sin that made the devil the devil. Heaven is Hell for those egoists finally and eternally confronted with a universe that is never going to be All About Them.

Neither I nor my reader are saying Trump or those like him will be damned. Nobody knows what the inmost thoughts of a person will be at the hour of their death. But given that we are commanded to judge a tree by its fruits, we can make certain assessments and extrapolate certain spiritual principles from them. Very simply: Can anybody imagine a personality immersed and committed in self-indulgence, vengefulness, cruelty, hatred, greed, sociopathy, egoism and vanity being happy in world where love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control will forever be the universal norm of every single person forever and ever? What else could such a world engender in such a person but misery, rage, consuming self-pity and, above all, everlasting frustration since such a person will have forever lost the power to dominate and hurt others as he had once been able to do? I see no way to describe the experience of such an evil selfish person–completely bricked into the furnace of his Self by his own refusal of the bliss that everywhere surrounds him–as anything but Hell.

I do not know if anybody will make that irrevocable choice. But I see nothing in human behavior to make me think that such a cosmically stupid, eternal, and evil choice is impossible. And I think it horrifyingly dangerous to try to find out.

So I hope for the salvation of all. But I do not claim to know it is a certainty. Given that we are commanded to live in hope and neither despair nor certitude, that seems wise to me.

Of which more on Monday.