Tag: Christianity

Hell Is Purgatory Where You Don’t Let Go Of the Sins?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

In his excellent book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis depicts Hell and Purgatory as the same place, with the difference being whether people consent to leave or whether they decide to stay. Truth to tell, it’s a bit of timid description of purgatory because Lewis was trying to be non-denominational and so he was trying to avoid offending people who are rabidly anti-Catholic in their biases (possibly including himself—He was born in Belfast where anti-Catholicism was in the water). But it’s a very interesting idea which could really use a bit more development, especially with regard to the more fiery depictions of Hell and the more actively unpleasant depictions of Purgatory.

Purgatory is an oft-misunderstood doctrine, but its etymology is a good place to start understanding it. “Purgatory” comes from the same root as the word “purge,” as in “to clean” or “to make clean”. The doctrine of purgatory is a straightforward logical deduction from starting off sinful at death and being sinless in heaven. Something must happen between those two steps, and the thing that happens which cleanses people of their sins was called, very practically, “cleaning,” except it happened to come from the Latin rather than the German roots of English, and hence, “purge”→”Purgatory”.

If you consider how cleaning normally works, on physical objects, you do it by abrading the surface until all of the dirt is gone. If you want to do a thorough job, you often have to be rough with the thing being cleaned—which is why children do not like baths, especially baths which get them thoroughly clean, including, for example, under their fingernails. If we move from the physical to the spiritual, how much more invasive must the cleaning be which cleanses your soul from things like lust, greed, envy, hatred, etc?

From here, it’s a relatively short jump to the metaphor of using fire to purify metal. If you heat metal up roughly to its melting point, any organic contamination will burn away and you will be left with pure metal. (In practice, it will probably need a polishing afterwards, but this doesn’t matter to the metaphor.) And this metaphor for cleaning happens to work very well with the description of Hell as a burning grounds.

That Hell is a burning grounds with constant fire is taken to be metaphorical for the obvious reason that it can’t actually be completely literal. Quite apart from literal fire requiring the afterlife to be just more of the same, rather than different in important ways, if the fire consumes the damned, then they’re not there later be burnt anymore. If the fires don’t consume the damned, they’re not being burnt. It would be, at worst, like chili peppers—awful at first, but if you spend enough time with them you get used to them because you know the sensation doesn’t actually mean anything bad. Since orthodox Christians do not presume God to be incompetent, the fires must be, to some degree at least, metaphorical.

If you put these together, it produces an interesting version of C.S. Lewis’s presentation of Hell in The Great Divorce: if all of the souls go through something which is incompatible with sin, analogous to a bath or purifying metal with fire, and they let go of their sins, this is Purgatory, and they emerge from that process made fit for being perfectly happy being eternally in God’s presence. (Let me emphasize, due to the context of some odd heresies existing, that we are made clean entirely by God’s grace, and entirely by his power. This cleaning is purely receptive on our part and we merely cooperate with it.)

But if the person refuses to let go of their sin, this cleaning never finishes, and therefore becomes eternal—specifically, eternal punishment.

This actually goes quite well with the idea I saw somewhere (I think in G.K. Chesterton) that the fires of Hell are actually the burning love of God, rejected. Bishop Barron used the analogy of a person at a party who doesn’t want to be there, who hates everything that is making the people who do want to be there happy. But if we stick with the metaphor of fire, the light of God’s truth works quite well as a purifying fire that burns away all impurities, since all sin is some kind of lie, and light also heats. In the fullness of the light of God’s truth, unveiled, all lies will burn away, and if a person lets them go, they have been cleaned of the dirt of these lies. But if they will not let go, if they shield the dirt from the burning light of God with their own bodies, then they eternally are tormented by trying to do what they can’t—believe the lies.

This is all, of course, highly speculative metaphor. I’m not trying to say that this is exactly what will happen after we die. For one thing, I have no special revelation so I don’t know. For another, I doubt that any language we humans have on this side of death even contains the words needed to describe what actually happens after death. (The fact that our Lord never tried to tell us strongly suggests, to me, at least, that this is so.)

But I think that this does at least suggest an answer, or at least part of an answer, to the question of how eternal punishment can be just. The point isn’t really to identify the answer, though of course that would be nice. The point is to show that an answer is possible, and therefore any argument which relies on it being impossible is wrong.

The Parable of the Dishonest Steward

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized2 Comments

The parable of the dishonest steward appears in the Gospel of Luke, and is very interesting:

Then he also said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”

This is a perplexing parable because Jesus is drawing a lesson from a dishonest man, which presents the difficulty of figuring out which parts we’re supposed to copy and which parts we’re not. And other questions like, “why did the master praise the dishonest steward for giving away his property?” To figure this out, we need to look at what actually happened: yes, the dishonest steward gave away some of his master’s property by canceling some of the debt, but he didn’t give it all away. And he could have.

In modern times, when a person is fired, the usual procedure is to lock them out of all of the computer systems of a business before telling them that they’re fired, so they can’t do anything bad on their way out. But the master doesn’t do this with the dishonest Steward. Instead, he leaves him Steward until he has drawn up a full account of his stewardship. Why?

Because the master didn’t know what he had.

In order to know what was his, he needed the dishonest steward to tell him. The dishonest steward was thus in a position to give away everything. If he told his master, “I’m sorry, but you’re broke” the master did not know better.

Further, since he was still steward, he was within his rights to entirely cancel the debts of the people whose debts he partially forgave. It was not honest, but it was his right. So why didn’t he entirely cancel out the debt of those debtors?

We’re not told, of course, but there is a strong hint in the fact that he did not forgive the same amount to both debtors. He forgave one half his debt and the other a fifth of his debt. Since he was praised for being prudent, we must assume that he forgave different amounts because of reasons specific to each, that is, because it was prudent. Perhaps the one could only repay half anyway, and the other could repay four fifths. Perhaps the one who was forgiven half had done something for the master earlier while the one who was forgiven a fifth hadn’t. We don’t know, but we must presume that the actions made sense in context.

And what about this from the master’s perspective, when he hears about it? Had the Steward canceled the entire debt, he would be very angry at the dishonest steward. But he was left with two thirds of what he was owed, which was far better off than he might have been. It’s not optimal, but if the master was realistic—and he seems to have been realistic—he got rid of the steward far more cheaply than he might realistically have and better than many have. (Just look up the history of how many sports figures were left penniless by dishonest business managers.) Moreover, he might even have received some small benefits from the forgiveness of the debt in addition to the money he got back. If the one who was forgiven half of his debt had done something for the master, that debt is now paid. If the debtor was only able to pay half, he might now get the half promptly. If nothing else, in not making a fuss over the canceled portion of the debt, he might at least receive good will from the debtor in case the situation is ever reversed and the master is the one who owes. It’s possible that he got rid of the dishonest steward even more cheaply than we know.

This also shows a great deal of understanding of human nature on the part of the dishonest steward, because consider what happens next: he’s going to ask the people whose debts he reduced for a job. That’s a delicate thing to do when he was just fired for dishonesty. Sure, they have reason to like him, but at the same time a job for many years can easily cost a lot more than twenty kors of wheat, especially if the guy is dishonest. Critically, he shows that while he’s dishonest, he’s not too dishonest. If the debtors are at all reasonable, they know that it’s very hard to find a completely honest man—consider how long Diogenese looked without finding one—so one who is only a bit dishonest is a reasonable choice. And he proved himself to be only somewhat dishonest by his actions when the metaphorical fecal matter had hit the artificial wind generator, i.e. when he was deeply stressed and might have been desperate or resentful.

Putting this all together, we can see what Christ referred to when he said that the children of his world are more prudent in dealing with this generation. The dishonest steward knew how people thought and acted, and acted accordingly. In modern terms, his psychology was good, even if his morals were not. He knew how to effectively manipulate people; he manipulated them with the truth. The great advantage of manipulating people with the truth is that, when they find out, they are not angry with you.

And here we come to the part to imitate: the common name for manipulating a person to his own benefit is “supporting” him. We, each of us, have an influence on the people we meet in this life, and if we will their good, we should support them. To do that, we must be able to understand things from their perspective, and how we and they and the things under our control relate, and then use the truth to manipulate them to their benefit. That is, to effectively support them.

I think that this also sheds some light on what Jesus says after—to use dishonest wealth to make friends so we will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. All wealth—all possessions—always have some dishonesty about them because we never do a perfect job. Everything we make, or deliver, or do for another is always, because of our human weakness, at least slightly less than it should be. But this does not completely invalidate it; there is still good that we can do with it and if we use it well—that is, prudently—it can make people better off and it’s worth doing this. And it’s not easy to do this and it’s worth putting the effort into doing it well.

This stands against the mistake of being “so good that you’re good for nothing,” that is, so fixated on purity that you never accomplish anything good. That’s not to say that one should choose to be dishonest; heaven forbid. But it does mean that there are limits to how much one should allow the fear of what is technically called “remote material cooperation” to prevent one from ever doing anything.

World War 2 And the Religion of the State

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized6 Comments

I was recently reminded of how much of western culture, in the 1970s, was about World War 2. In that period, the second world war was only thirty years before and the people of responsible age (that is, those in their forties through their sixties) had spent many of their formative years in it. And World War 2, which was in many ways only the second great industrial war, had been a total war in a way the world had not really seen before. And I think that this total war had the effect, as few other things besides Communism have had, of turning the state into a religion. And I think that this may have had some strange effects afterwards.

When I say that the second World War turned the state into a religion, I mean that the war, and by extension the state, became the primary purpose of its citizens’ lives. (I’m going to confine my remarks to America, since I know its history best, but from what I’ve read this was largely true of many other countries as well.) This was not absolute, of course, and individuals might have maintained a better set of priorities. Still, the state tried very hard to make itself the purpose of its citizens lives. You can see this in the way that people were encouraged to do everything “for the war effort”. You can find all sorts of examples of magazine ads by companies who aren’t selling products because their factories are now making weapons, but that they will one day resume, so don’t forget them! There was also an enormous amount of propaganda produced, which covered almost everything, since the war touched on almost everything. There were ads which encouraged people to accept rationing of food. There were ads encouraging people to put all their spare money into government bonds rather than buy things for themselves. There were ads that encouraged young women to get a job in the war effort to help bring their sweethearts and husbands home sooner. And from what I recall talking to relatives to had lived through it, much of it worked. As much as people might grumble and there was a thriving black market, people did take up the spirit of the thing and often think about the war effort whose nearest land battles were many thousands of miles away.

And the thing is, while all this can be done as a matter of secondary loyalty, fallen human beings are weak and this kind of total subservience to the state had the effect, I am beginning to suspect, of supplanting God with the state in the hearts of many people. I’ve heard the explanation that many people fell away from Christianity after WW2 because Christian churches were too compliant with the governments that brought us to such an awful war. The horrors of World War 2 broke people. Christianity’s old tired answers were no longer good enough. I’ve heard many such things. And, truth be told, they’ve never sounded very convincing. Christianity made sense under the horrors of the Roman empire and Germanic barbarism but didn’t make sense after the horrors of World War 2? The secular governments of the world plunged people into war and starvation, and Christianity didn’t stand against them enough, so let’s abandon Christianity and become completely secular? These aren’t serious explanations.

The explanation that the people started worshiping an idol—the State—and as idol worship does, this caused the people to turn away from God? That does, at least, explain.

I don’t want to overstate this idea. I’m just beginning to turn it over in my mind. But it does explain a bunch of things which had always not-quite-fit.

Mary Harrington on Lily Phillips and Possession

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mary Harrington wrote about our modern day Messalina, Lily Phillips, who recently and famously fornicated with 100 men in a day as a PR stunt for her pornographic OnlyFans channel. This event would be fairly unremarkable, given what society is presently like, except that a documentary film was being made of it and her immediate reaction upon finishing was deep distress, which has spawned a great deal of commentary. In the face of most people arguing about individual responsibility vs. responsibility to others, Ms. Harrington’s piece suggests an unusual framing: that of possession. (Demonic if you are tough enough for solid food, symbolic if you haven’t yet been weaned, though of course she doesn’t put it that way and for all I know doesn’t think of it that way.) This is a very interesting framing, and I’d like to explore it a bit.

Before I get into the main part, I do want to make some notes about demons, possession, and demonic influence which I think will be helpful to ensure that we’re all on the same page because popular culture tends to depict demons in egregiously stupid ways.

The first thing that I want to note is that within Catholic philosophy, the symbolic interpretation of things like demonic possession is not exclusive of the literal interpretation of them. They can be both at the same time, just in the way that a father can feed his child when the child is hungry as a simple physical act but, at the same time, this also archetypally represents all manner of things from God’s act of creation to a teacher teaching a student. None of these is wrong or one real while the others are fake. They’re different, but all legitimate as themselves.

The second thing is that full-on possession2 is not the same thing as a person being influenced by a demon; demons are capable of subtlety. Demons are simply angels who reject the good; they are beings of pure spirit and greater intelligence than humans, so they’re capable of more subtlety and cunning than human beings are. They can make bad ideas seem good and let us do the rest. If you are taking the symbolic interpretation alone, the complexities of social interactions are more complex than an individual, and can mislead us without completely overwhelming us.

The third thing to note is that demonic possession is not necessarily adversarial with the person possessed. A human being is capable of cooperating with a demon, in whole or in part. Demons make promises, which are usually empty, and people may well cooperate with the demon because of them. In the purely symbolic interpretation, you can see this in something like a person who takes foolish risks or a reality show contestant.

The fourth and perhaps most important thing to note is that demonic possession is not exclusive of things like psychological or social pressures. A person can be possessed by a demon and also worry about what his neighbor will think of him and be anxious about how to pay his bills.

OK, so that common ground established, I’d like to consider Ms. Harrington’s framing of Lily Phillips’ stunt as possession, or the alternative phrase she offers, an “egregore”. (An egregore is “a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals”.) Put very abstractly, the question which arises when one hears of Lily Phillips’ stunt and how predictably bad she felt afterwards is: how could anyone choose to do something so foolish? And the answer of possession or an egregore is, basically, that she didn’t choose this, she is a slave to a wicked master, and that master chose it for her.

To modern ears this can sound like trying to shift blame. And indeed, some people are trying to do that; to some degree that’s what Louise Perry’s article, The Myth of Female Agency, is about (though it is more complex than that). Properly understood, though, demonic possession is not about shifting blame. It’s about understanding that we are not gods. We must serve something; the most important choice in our lives is who or what we will serve.

Ms. Harrington quotes the story from the gospel of Luke where Jesus asks a demon its name and it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” More illustrative is when Jesus describes what happens when an unclean spirit is driven out:

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it wept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, and so that person ends up worse off than before.

If you merely reject a spirit because you don’t like it—even if you just want to think of it as the zeitgeist or spirit of the age or an egregore—if you do not replace it with something, you will remain empty until it comes back. But nature abhors a vacuum, and your emptiness will pull in more than just what you drove off, because you will take in several things hoping they’ll fill the emptiness. You’ll probably think that you’re just trying them or considering them, but you’ll take them in.

On a technical level, this is because your life must have some kind of purpose for you to do anything at all. People who have merely absorbed their purpose from the zeitgeist will often doubt this because they’ve never paused to consider what the purpose of their life is and so can foolishly believe they don’t have a purpose, but they eventually tend to notice this as they get older and especially if they’re successful at the purpose they absorbed. “I’ve gone to school and gotten a job and paid for therapy so I can be better at my job so I can afford more therapy so I can be better at my job—but what’s it all for? Is this it?”

The only people who make their own purpose are madmen—this is necessarily so on the technical level since people who make their own purpose cannot work toward the same goals as others except accidentally and cannot be intelligible to others who do not share their purpose. Moreover, we find ourselves in a physical world we did not create with physical properties we did not create that requires us to do things we do not choose in order to stay alive. Whatever purpose we create for ourselves must necessarily include these things that we did not choose, which is a simple contradiction. You can’t create something you didn’t choose. If you are to survive, you must discover a purpose, not create it. And our purpose is just another way of saying who or what we serve. Which brings us back to Lily Phillips and possession.

Lily claimed, in the weeks leading up to her stunt, that she was serving herself. She wanted to bang 100 men in a day, was excited for it and looking forward to it, etc. etc. etc. Then when it happened, she was devastated. There’s a good reason why my favorite part of the Catholic baptismal promises are “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?” Lilly Phillips was not serving herself, since that’s not really possible, and, critically, she was not serving anyone she held to be worth serving. Feminism told women that it was there for them, that if they just gave it their souls, they would not die, but would be gods. It turns out that’s an old story. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun3.

So, ultimately, I think that Ms. Harrington is right to frame this in terms of possession, though it is important to understand that this is a voluntary possession. Lily became an OnlyFans prostitute because of the spirit of the age meeting her particular circumstances; she came up with this stunt for some reason then felt an obligation to her fans to go through with it and to not let them down—she served many masters, and none of them were good. And there is only one outcome to serving a bad master.

1 . Wife of Emperor Claudius, who famously held a contest with a prostitute to see who could copulate with the largest number of men in a day. (Messalina won.)

2. Technically, there is a form of possession where there is no cooperation and the demon literally possesses the body of the person against their will. Philosophically speaking, this is very akin to a viral infection and, from reports by exorcists, is incredibly rare and far more akin to the kind of thing you see in a movie like The Exorcist. An unfortunate person in this state may be confusable with someone in the throws of deep mental illness, but not with a normal person making bad choices, so this kind of thing is irrelevant. I will be using the term “possession” in the sense of persistent influence or cooperative possession, rather than this sense, because Ms. Harrington does and because this sense is so sui generis that no reasonable person will mistake the two.

3. Except Christianity. True or false, before Christianity no one had the idea of God taking on flesh and becoming his own creature in order to offer himself as an innocent blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of his creatures and so make them fit to become incorporated into the divine life.

Naturalistic Superstition

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there are four species of superstition:

  • improper worship of the true God (indebitus veri Dei cultus);
  • idolatry;
  • divination;
  • vain observances, which include magic and occult arts.

What most, or possibly all, of these have is the desire to control things beyond one’s power. Creating idols, for example, is the attempt to localize God (or some minor power) into a place where one can interact with it on one’s own terms, so one can convince it to do what one wants through worship. (Interestingly; this is the purpose of the golden calf—it is not supposed to be a strange god. Once it is cast the people said, “This is your God1, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt.” The whole point is that they want to be able to worship it directly, rather than having to wait for Moses to come back down from the mountain.)

I will not waste your time, dear reader, pointing out how divination and vain observances are attempts to go beyond one’s power.

The exact same thing—the vain attempt to go beyond one’s own power—can be done in entirely naturalistic ways. From my observations, it behaves in exactly the same ways superstition. But we don’t have a word for it.

I suspect that we’ve all seen this sort of thing. Vitamins and other supplements are a very common form of it. Vitamins are real, of course, as are all manner of nutrients. But people attribute all sorts of powers to these things which they have no reason to believe that the things have, and with no curiosity whatever to find out what their real powers are.

People go from the fact that vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases to holding that the vitamins have unlimited powers to confer their effects. They ignore that the vitamins work by doing something, and that the body does not need an unlimited amount of that thing. For example, vitamin C is used by the body in the process of making collagen (it’s just one of many things, but it’s noticeable here for our body not being able to make it). If you have no vitamin C, you stop being able to make collagen, and the parts of your body that need to make new collagen start to greatly suffer from not being able to make it. But contained in this is the natural limit to the effects of vitamin C: once your body has made all of the collagen it wants to make, more vitamin C does no good. (I’m oversimplifying, of course, because vitamin C is used elsewhere in the body, too, but to the best of human knowledge it’s the same story all over—once you have enough, your body can do what it needs to and more does nothing.) It’s like building a house. If you don’t have enough wood, you will build a rickety and drafty house. If you have twice as much wood as you need, you will have a well built house and a big pile of wood. If you have three times as much wood as you need, you will have an equally well built house and a pile of wood that’s twice as big.

Taking large amounts of vitamins as if their effect scales with their dose is directly analogous to superstition, especially to the improper worship of God (such as holding that if one says a prayer in a particular way it will automatically be granted exactly the way you ask for it). Then we come to other ways which are more analogous to divination and vain observances: attributing vague positive benefits to things.

Example of this sort of thing are saying that garlic is “anti-cancer” or that 5G makes chickens lay fewer eggs. Cancer isn’t even one thing, and there’s no reason to suppose that a somewhat improved packetization scheme for data in the radio transmissions used to transmit data to and from cellular phones could have any effect whatever on the way that chickens lay eggs. (I suspect that the fear of 5G was actually about millimeter-wave cell bands, but those are deployed in very few places because they’re so high frequency that they penetrate approximately nothing; on millimeter-wave bands standing in front of your cell phone is enough to have no reception. So far as I’m aware they’ve only been deployed in a few cities and in a few sports stadiums. Most phones don’t even bother incurring the expense of supporting millimeter-wave radio.)

The world is a strange place, we know very little about it, and all sorts of things have effects that we do not know that they have. The problem is not the supposition that effects we do not understand are occurring. The problem is the wild mismatch of certainty to evidence. This is selectively believing in our ignorance; it is believing in it only where one wants to. Is it possible that despite us having no idea how, garlic can cure all forms of cancer? Yes. But there’s just as much reason to believe that garlic causes cancer, or that garlic causes cancer if you take more than twice as much garlic as you eat olive oil, or that garlic causes strokes if you eat more of it than you eat oregano. Lots of things are possible. When one has moved from possible to probable or certain only out of the desire to achieve the effect, this is the naturalistic analog to superstition.

And I really wish we had a word for it.

1. Technically the Greek is plural and many English translations render it as “These are your gods,” but I suspect the translations which take this to be a plural of respect are the more likely to be correct. (An example of the plural of respect is a king saying “we” instead of “I”.) The Jews were certainly not monotheistic at this point, but it makes no sense for them to attribute the bringing them out of Egypt to multiple gods, and still less sense to call one calf multiple gods. No matter how you take it with respect to “theoi”, you certainly have the problem of the plural being used to refer to one thing in the calf.