Tag: Hell

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.

You Can’t Get an Ought From an Is In Hell

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

One of the questions which comes up in discussions of morality is whether you can get an “ought” from an “is”. This is relevant primarily to discussions of atheism, since to the atheist everything is a brute fact, i.e. an “is” which is not directed towards anything, and therefore an atheist cannot get any “oughts” out of their description of what is. Or in simpler language, if God is dead then all things are permitted. (Note for the unpoetic: by “God is dead” we mean “there is no God”.)

There are two reasons why if God is dead all things are permitted:

  1. If God is dead, who is there to forbid anything?
  2. If God is dead, then there is no ultimate good because all is change and therefore nothing has any lasting reality.

If you argue this sort of stuff with atheists long enough, somewhere along the line while you’re explaining natural ends (telos) and natural morality, you may come by accident to a very interesting point which the atheist will bring up without realizing it. It often goes something like this:

OK, suppose that what God says is actually the only way to be eternally happy. Why should you be eternally happy? Why shouldn’t you do what you want even though it makes you unhappy?

This question sheds some very interesting light on hell, and consequently on what we mean by morality. Our understanding of morality tends to be like what Saint Augustine said of our understanding of time:

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

Somehow or other atheists tend to assume that ought means something that you have to do, regardless of what you want to do. It’s very tempting to assume that this is a holdover from childhood where ought meant that their parents would make them do it whether or not they wanted to. It’s tempting because it’s probably the case and because that’s not an adult understanding of ought. And it’s not because ultimately we can’t be forced to be good. (Or if this raises your hackles because I’m “placing limits on God”, then just take it as meaning that in any event we won’t be forced to be good.)

Hell is a real possibility. Or in other words, it is possible to see two options and knowingly pick the worse option.

What we actually mean by saying that we ought to do something is that the thing is directed towards the good. And we can clarify this if we bring in a bit of Thomistic moral philosophy: being is what is good. Or as the scholastic phrase goes, good is convertible with being. But being, within creation, is largely a composite entity. A statue is not just one thing, but many things (atoms, molecules, etc.) which, in being ordered toward the same end, are also one thing which is greater than their parts.

And you can see a symphony of ordering to a greater being, in a human being. Atoms are ordered into proteins (and many other things like lipids, etc), which are ordered into cells, which are ordered into organs, which are ordered into human beings. But human beings are not at the top of the hierarchy of being, for we are also ordered into community with other created things. (Please note: being part of a greater whole does not rob the individual of his inherent dignity; the infinite goodness of God means that creation is not a competition. Also note that God so exceeds all of creation that He is not in the hierarchy of being, but merely pointed to by it.)

And so we come to the real meaning of ought. To say that we ought to do something is to say that the thing is ordered towards the maximum being which is given to us. But we need not choose being; we can instead choose non-being. The great lie which the modern project (and, perhaps not coincidentally, Satan) tells us is that there is some other being available to us besides what was given to us by God. That we can make ourselves; that we can give ourselves what we haven’t got. And, not at all coincidentally, are the things which we ought not to do—that is, those things are not ordered toward being. They’re just what the atheist says that all of life is—stimulating nerve endings to fool ourselves that we’ve accomplished something.

And yet atheists complain when one says that, according to them, they’re in hell.

God, at least, has a sense of humor.

Thinking about Hell

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized3 Comments

One of the questions within Christian theology is how many people (i.e. human beings) will end up in hell? There is no definitive answer. While there are people the Church knows to be in heaven (canonized saints), there are no people which the church definitively knows to be in hell. As such, it’s theoretically possible that the answer to the question of how many people wind up in hell is zero.

Theoretically possible, but not very likely. A bit of experience with humanity suggests that the number is definitely higher than zero. And our Lord Himself spoke rather more often about the narrowness of the gate to heaven than about anything which can be taken to be about universal salvation. Which is why many pre-modern scholars such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine held that most people would be damned.

There’s a lot one can say on this subject, but it’s not really what I want to talk about now. Instead, the thing I want to talk about is how poorly suited to this subject human reason is. And the problem is that, as far as nature goes, we should all go to hell. That heaven is not devoid of human beings is super-natural. It is mercy surpassing justice.

And because it is not a natural state, but a super-natural state, which we are in, our intuition is pretty much useless on the subject.