Hell
The Fact of Hell
A ship is able to make port in darkest night because of the red and the green lights that mark the harbor entrance. So has God lit on the shore of eternity two beacon lights for the guidance of our soul: the red light of hell as a warning and a deterrent, and the green light, so to speak, of heaven, as a hope and an incentive. God made man for heaven, yet hell is a dread reality and remains for all of us a fearful possibility. In these spiritually anemic days hell is an unpopular topic. "Truths are decayed from among the children of men," the Psalmist said long ago (Ps. xi. 2). The existence of hell is openly denied by men who claim to be Christians or it is so explained as to lose its native horror. Yet, the Bible bristles with very plain and undiplomatic allusions to it. "God is good," men say. Yes, but He is likewise just. Even as His anger, unlike that of man, is not a momentary loss of control or like the whim of an Eastern potentate but an infinitely tranquil and serene adjudging of deserved punishment,1 so is His goodness not the spineless goodnaturedness of a feeble, benevolent sentimentalist who lacks the grit and moral strength to deal sternly, though justly, with wrong and wrongdoing. In the hour of our creation God bestowed on us the priceless gift of freedom of choice. He made us for happiness—for happiness with Him and in Him and through Him—forever in heaven. But He respects His own handiwork; He refuses to impose Himself, to force even His highest gifts upon our acceptance. He wishes us to choose—so that heaven itself and all that it implies may be a reward, due to our good works. In like manner, it is possible to reject God and His gifts. To turn our back on God, in this life, is mortal sin. Hell is simply the consequence, in another world, of this aversion or turning away from God in the present life.
Hell Exists
The existence of hell as a world of darkness, misery and despair is very frequently affirmed in Holy Writ, in the Old as well as in the New Testament. It will be sufficient to quote Our Lord Himself, who not only asserts the existence of hell but who likewise throws light upon this darksome mystery of woe. Hell is "a place of torments" (Luke, xvi. 28), and a world for ever and irremediably apart from God's world; for, according to the words which Our Lord puts in the mouth of Lazarus reclining in the bosom of Abraham, "between us and you there is fixed a great chaos, so that they who would pass from hence to you, cannot nor from thence come hither" (ibid., 26). No words could describe more plainly the absolute and irremediable finality, not of heaven only, signified by Abraham's bosom, but of hell likewise. Almost every time Our Lord speaks of hell, He describes it as a place of darkness, of torment, of anguish such as to cause its unhappy denizens to howl and gnash their teeth from sheer agony and despair. It is utterly hopeless to try and convince either oneself or anyone else that there is no hell; the words of Christ are too definite to allow of such facile but fallacious comfort.
What Is Hell?
In many ways we may apply to hell what is said of heaven, namely, that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor can the imagination visualize the horrors of that awful abode. Two details to which Our Lord alluded more than once when He spoke of the fate of the reprobate, deserve special attention. At the last, when men shall have their respective places definitely allocated to them, the Judge will thus address the reprobate: "Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire" (Matt., xxv. 41). And again : "The Son of man shall send His angels, and they shall gather. . .them that work iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire." Of the guest at the feast who had disdained or neglected to put on the wedding garment, and who represents those who lack the purity and holiness which are the only passport to heaven, Jesus says that he shall be cast "into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt., xxii. 13). Fire, yet darkness —and both inflicting such torment that the lost weep and gnash their teeth in their rage and pain!
Darkness of Hell
The darkness here spoken of is understood by theologians to refer to that which constitutes the very essence of hell, to wit, the loss of God. We are made by God and for God. He is our origin and our goal. God is simply beauty, goodness, joy, love, bliss, truth, life—an ocean of all that is worth desiring or enjoying. The yearning for happiness, which is the strongest impulse of our nature, is the instinctive longing and striving of the heart for God. We have an imperative need of God if our heart and our mind are ever to be at rest. Sanctifying grace alone enables a creature to reach out to God. God is so incomparably above and beyond us that we can only attain to Him if by grace we are transformed into His likeness and lifted up to His own level, to the sphere where He lives and moves. In this life our elemental hunger and thirst for God may be partially cheated by the miserable substitutes which the world of the senses offers. Not so, however, when the soul is stripped of the garment of mortal flesh. In the instant of its separation from the flesh the spirit becomes intensely aware of its own self and of its need of God. Now, if in that decisive moment a soul is deprived of sanctifying grace, it is outside the sphere of God—the weight of its sin drags it down into the dark abyss. Nor is this fall a mere sinking into dark unconsciousness; on the contrary, the soul is keenly conscious, it is infinitely aware, of its need of God, the highest truth and good that alone could satisfy its longings. But since it turned from Him in life, the soul, at its leaving this world, necessarily remains thus turned away; just as the other side of the moon is plunged in everlasting darkness and death, because it can never turn its surface towards the beneficent rays of the sun. Hell's darkness is a spiritual darkness even more than a material one. It is a limitation of knowledge and an irremediable incapacity of acquiring new information, or rather an impossibility of drinking in deep draughts from the only fountain that could slake its thirst. This terrible darkness and void of the spirit is wonderfully depicted in a famous line of Dante in which he speaks of the lost as those "accursed souls that have lost the good of the intellect" (viz., God),2 and with characteristic brutality by Thomas Carlyle who describes the fate of the damned soul as an eternal feeding upon itself "for lack of something else to hack and hew." The reprobate have turned from God to the creature; their misery is to have nothing better to feed their mind on.
We shall have a very true conception of hell if we think of it as a most appalling loneliness. For all eternity a spirit, free, active, ever striving and forever as it were straining at the leash that tethers it to its own self, is debarred from any intellectual food except such thoughts as it carried with it into the abyss. To be forever crammed, confined, cabined within the prison house of its own thoughts—such is the lot of those who have lost God.
This loss of God is the essence of hell. This is damnation—"the second death," in the words of Holy Scripture. For though the lost also rise on the Last Day and their bodies also are immortal, their lot is best described as a living death, for henceforth they can no longer take any part in the sweet activities that make life worthwhile. And their loss is a conscious loss. True, the damned cannot adequately gauge the enormity of their loss, for they never had experimental knowledge of what God is in Himself and what He might have been to them; nevertheless, they are keenly aware that He is the Supreme Good of all rational beings, and that they have lost Him through their own folly and wickedness. It is important, in view of modern sentimentality, ever to bear in mind this aspect of hell. God does not cast anyone into it; man goes thither of his own free will. By mortal sin which is, by definition, a free, deliberate act, man cuts himself adrift from the moorings that unite him to God. He plucks out, so to speak, the eyes with which he might have looked into the face of his Creator; he renders himself utterly unfit ever to enter into the world of God. The sinner would not feel at ease in this divine sphere; he would be too painfully aware of being out of place. The reprobate are like lamps whose light has gone out.
The Fire of Hell
Our Lord speaks of an everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his followers. It would be folly to take these terrible words as a mere metaphor. True, Satan and his angels do not suffer from fire as beings composed of spirit and matter may. Theologians tell us that the devils are tied down to fire. The fire is a chain, a prison, checking and confining spirits that by their very nature are free to roam wherever they list. As regards the damned, he would be more than rash who would deny that they suffer in their bodies from contact with this most searching of all the elements. Nevertheless, the bodies of the lost are immortal and indestructible; hence, though they suffer from the fire of hell, it does not produce on their bodies the effects produced by fire on our own mortal bodies. In other words, there is no alteration or destruction of tissue such as is the necessary and natural effect of fire.
Eternity of Hell
The punishment of hell is eternal. Our Lord's words on the subject are unmistakable. But it would be wrong to argue that hell is eternal because sin is an infinite offense against God, so that, since a creature is incapable of a punishment of infinite intensity, it must at least undergo a penalty of endless duration. As a matter of fact, reprobation is everlasting because of the obstination, as it is called, of the damned. The word obstination is here used in a very different sense from the one usually associated with it. It is a technical term used in Catholic theology to express the absolute, unalterable fixity of purpose of the will of the reprobate. This fixity is common to all spirits. What we are in death, we shall be eternally. Grace gives to the soul a Godward drift or bent; at death this drift goes on, so that, if the soul is perfectly pure, it is at once swept into the ocean of God's love. Sin is aversion, a turning away from God. It is like a dead weight, and by itself drags the soul into the great void, the awful darkness, the gloomy abyss into which those must sink in whose soul there is not the lifting power of sanctifying grace.
As far as God is concerned, His attitude towards the reprobate is unaltered. The life He gives is an act of love. It is their crowning misery that His very goodness tortures them—as the light, which is in itself beneficent, tortures diseased eyes.
There is justice even in hell. Not all suffer alike. Misery is in proportion to guilt. But the misery of one who has lost God is such that, even though there were no other pain or sorrow, this would suffice by itself to make of hell the fearsome thing it is.
Fruits of Meditation on Hell
The thought of hell chills the heart. But it does not numb the energies nor cow the spirit of a believer. It causes us to thrill with wholesome fear—that fear which is the beginning of wisdom. The best of us have need, at times, to lean over the edge of the abyss, to peer down into its depths. There are temptations in life—in the life even of those who have served God for a long time—when nothing but the fear of hell will keep a man on the straight road.
Justice demands that there should be a hell. The wicked often prosper; tyrants, extortioners, the oppressors of the poor, are not invariably punished in this world. There are men whose lives and characters are such that only a miracle, a creative act of God, would appear capable of altering them. During the French Revolution, at Lyons a priest was asked by one of the so-called judges: "Do you believe in hell?" "And how could I have any doubt about it," the priest replied, "when I see what goes on? If I had been an infidel, I would believe now, for there is no stronger proof of a future retribution than the impunity enjoyed by the wicked."3
Endnotes
1 Cfr. St. Augustine, Tract. in Joan. cxxiv, 5, circa fin.
2 Anime maledette che hanno perduto il ben' del intelletto (Inferno, I).
3 Duplessy, "Histoire de Catech.," I, p. 245.
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