From childhood through my teenage years and into college, whenever the topic of hell arose in conversation or whenever I was presented with some depiction of hellish torments, I would feel my heart descend into my gut–sometimes gently and noticeably only a little, at other times with the momentous speed of a great plunge. I would on occasion awaken, heart pounding, from nightmares of demons and devils and their hunger for my soul. Satan and his minions were very real to me and very active in my imagination. To keep them at bay, I wore a scapular and held on to other pious arms.
These terrors have long since passed. I no longer live in fear of hell, a state that, for me, is somewhat irrational. As someone who does not rule out the existence of such a place or the possibility that I may find my flesh eternally cooked to well done (unwell done?), I really should still respond to these prospects with at least a little fear and trembling. Such would be the appropriate responses, no?
That I don’t fear eternal tortures suggests perhaps that I presumptuously believe myself to be safely among the elect or perhaps that I really, deep down in unexplored pits, disbelieve in the existence of hell. After all, if I were captured by terrorists and threatened with torture, no doubt I’d be a nervous wreck, unable to eat or relax or function in a dignified manner. I face the possibility of eternal torture, and yet my bowels work just fine. I don’t lose sleep. I don’t worry. I don’t think about hellfire when diving headfirst into some delicious sin or even afterwards when I feel guilty for having done wrong. I make no efforts to feel the appropriate fear that the prospect of hell should elicit. I’m troubled only be the hurts I cause this side of eternity.
If I wanted to be optimistic, I would say that I am not afraid because I recognize that God, who loves me and died for me, is perfectly trustworthy. I can trust him and be not afraid. This is the reasoning of apologist Mark Shea, who argues that hell should not keep believers forever in a state of servile fear because God wants everyone to be not afraid and to be rather in happy, loving communion with him. Speaking to the overly scrupulous, Shea remarks:
Hell is not a threat by God. It’s a diagnosis of the stakes for which we play and the consequences of being the sort of fallen creatures we are in the sort of universe this is with the sort of God who made it. When the doc says “If you persist in your behavior without change you will get liver cancer and you will die” he’s not threatening you. He’s stating a fact. The cancer is not being sent by the doc to kill you. It’s the fruit of the stuff you are doing. The doc is there to heal you. But the healing requires the diagnosis.This sounds awfully nice, but the comparison here doesn’t really work. God doesn’t just diagnose the sickness of sin and promise healing; God created a universe in which horrific eternal suffering is a consequence for not living according to the moral rules of the universe–rules everyone, everywhere breaks. Rules that are almost always difficult and impossible to follow all of the time. Hell may not be a threat from God, as Shea says, but if it’s part of the universe and might be the whole of your future, then it’s rationally something to fear. Like, a lot. Any religion that preaches the possibility that you will go to hell preaches the message, “Be afraid.” That God has also said “Be not afraid” doesn’t cast the reasonableness of fear into the outer darkness.
Jesus’ diagnosis is that our race is sick with sin. Hell is the fruition of a life obstinately ordered toward sinful selfishness. The endstage of sin is hell just as the endstage of cancer is death. It’s not an extra added punishment for sin. It’s just what sin fully is. So it’s not something God does to us. It’s something we do to ourselves.
Let me start with Kyle's claim that the existence of hell is a message of "Be afraid!" from God to us. What do we mean when we say that we fear something? I think in this context, we are afraid of things that we consider bad which might happen to us against our will.
But in Shea's description of sin and hell which Kyle is responding to, damnation is not something that happens to us against our will, it is something that happens to us because of our will. If we utterly reject God and refuse to be with Him for eternity, God will grant our wish. Having endowed us with the dignity of free will, it would be inconsistent with God's nature for Him to do otherwise.
Kyle doesn't attack this conception of sin and hell, but some of his statements seem to suggest disagreement with it. For instance, he says, "God created a universe in which horrific eternal suffering is a consequence for not living according to the moral rules of the universe–rules everyone, everywhere breaks. Rules that are almost always difficult and impossible to follow all of the time." The implication seems to be that the unfortunate sinner could want very much to be happy with God for eternity in heaven, but without thinking much about it he committed some little sin that everyone does all the time -- that it's almost impossible to avoid -- and now, against his will, he finds himself in the fires of hell.
However, what Shea is saying (and what I think is indeed the correct way to understand sin and hell) is that sin is not just the performance of some action which God arbitrarily imposes heavy penalties upon. Sin is the rejection of God. Sin is putting oneself in God's place and following our will rather than his, consciously and deliberately.
This necessarily means that our damnation can never happen against our will. We can't reject God without rejecting God. I could perform some action which, if I fully understood its meaning and gravity, would constitute a rejection of God, but if I did so without fully understanding the action's meaning and import I would not incur the full effect. My action might have the same destructive effects on the temporal lives of myself and others that it would have if I had committed it in full knowledge and culpability, but it would not have the full effect on my relationship with God (of which my eventual salvation or damnation is the culminating expression) if I performed the act without full knowledge and intent.
Now, there is a sense in which we should be afraid of hell, but it's a different kind of "be afraid". We should regard our relationship with God with gravity, and make an effort to think seriously about how our actions affect that relationship -- just as we would with any other relationship that we treasure.
Take, for instance, your relationship with your spouse. It doesn't make sense to be afraid that you will somehow end your marriage and leave your spouse without meaning to. However, it does make sense for you to examine your actions in terms of how they affect your marriage. After all, if continuing your relationship with your spouse is important to you, it would make sense to examine your actions in terms of whether they bring you closer to or further from your spouse.
Sure, no one can be a perfect spouse. Just as Kyle says that it's well neigh impossible for us fallen creatures to do God's will every single time, we none of us are perfect spouses. We do things that are selfish or short sighted. In our human relationships, this means that it's at times even possible for us to hurt another so badly, without meaning to make a definitive break, that we find ourselves with an irreparably ruptured relationship before we realize what we're doing.
With God, however, we have a relationship with One who is both all knowing and all merciful. There is no point when God is going to say to us, "I just can't trust you anymore and I need to cut myself off from you lest you hurt me again." We can't, after all, hurt God. And He knows what goes on in the depth of our hearts better than we do ourselves. Thus, the only rupture that can occur between us and God is the one we make. We are only cut off from his mercy and forgiveness if we refuse to accept it.
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I would be an in odd sort of marriage if my wife, no matter the state of our marriage, regularly reminded me that if I choose to sin against her, our relationship will be harmed and possibly come to an end. "The door to our continued marriage is narrow, my dear." We would not have a healthy relationship, I would think. It would be marked more by fear than by love. And yet the reminder of hell is very much a regular part of my relationship with God in the church. I am a sinner who's told that I deserve hell (the wages of sin is death), but can hope for (but not presume) salvation because God is merciful.
If, because I fail to act as a good husband should, my marriage comes to an end, I'm not destined to fall into the proverbial fire. I might be miserable, but I might not be. There's no escaping the misery and suffering of hell, however. I can't make the most of it.
It all depends on which line you want to quote, doesn't it. Scripture also gives us God telling us that we'll be welcomed back with feasting and rejoicing even if we've abandoned the relationship and gone off to some faraway city and blown all our money on wine and loose women -- something I think precious few wives would do (nor should they.)
As for whether there's a "make the best of it" if one is eternally separated from God -- it sounds like a lot of the issue here is that particularly in this day and age we're not well set up to think about a relationship in which both members do have real free will, and yet the members are also profoundly unequal.
We're not God's sock puppets, he can't make us not reject him. And yet, God is our creator and separation from him is described as "darkness" and "wailing and gnashing of teeth".
It's worth noting, though, that the traditional doctrine of limbo was precisely a 'make the best of it' option. The whole idea was that limbo was in hell because it was a lack of the Beatific Vision, without which there is no heaven, but that people in limbo (righteous patriarchs until Christ's descent into hell, unbaptized children, in Dante's version the noble and heroic of all nations) have no penalty beyond that -- the penalty of limbo is that we can never be happier than we can be on earth, not that we are miserable. That is to say, the traditional Catholic interpretation of the hell passages does not imply that hell is automatically suffering and misery; since heaven just is the beatific vision, hell just is the standing lack of it -- if we lived forever on earth, going about our lives, that's hell, permanently never having more than incomplete happiness. Of course, it was also the traditional view that limbo is quite difficult to reach; even incomplete happiness is hard work.
"It all depends on which line you want to quote, doesn't it."
No, it doesn't, not for the point I'm making, which is that Scripture and Tradition (and their incorporation into liturgy) give cause both to be not afraid and to be afraid.
I had taken your point to be that the Church's actual beliefs about hell are all on the side of "be afraid", but that you found it unhealthy at a human level to actually be afraid all the time so you just didn't think about it.
My contention is that whether one should "be afraid" entirely depends on what one means by "afraid". We should certainly take damnation seriously, and if we mean "afraid" in that sense then well and good. But we will never be damned against out will, so it doesn't make sense to "be afraid" in the sense one would worry about being killed by terrorists or worry about being caught in a tornado.
Yes, I think generally the church's beliefs about hell, namely that it exists and that I might go there), are cause for living in fear. The church says that hell is a choice, but this choice doesn't have to be direct, and I'm dubious that anyone in his right mind would choose the terrors of hell directly. Rather, one chooses hell whenever one commits a mortal sin. It's not unthinkable that I might be in a state of mortal sin when I think I am in a state of grace. I can't be presumptuous. I have to hope that I am in a state of grace. The state of my soul is not known to me. Hell may be my fate whether or not I will it in all its suffering.
Rather, one chooses hell whenever one commits a mortal sin. It's not unthinkable that I might be in a state of mortal sin when I think I am in a state of grace.
Consulting the CCC on mortal sin, we find:
1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."
...
1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God's law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.
It seems to me pretty clear that this indicates that you could not be in a state of mortal sin without knowing it. There's the issue of whether you are deluding yourself, which is certainly an area for examination, but if you honestly don't believe yourself to have committed a mortal sin, even if you have committed (unknowingly) a sin of sufficiently grave matter to have been mortal had you been in full knowledge and consent, the fact that you didn't know yourself to be committing a mortal sin means that you are not culpable for the full mortal extent of the sin.
Further, there's obviously one time when you can be certain of being in a state of full grace. If you go to confession and confess all of the sins which you are aware of having committed, then you are in a state of grace in that you obviously can't be mortally culpable for something you're not even aware of, and venial sins are forgiven whether they are confessed or not.
So I think you're clearly wrong to say, "Hell may be my fate whether or not I will it in all its suffering."
Since damnation requires dying in a state of mortal sin, and mortal sin requires knowledge and consent, you clearly cannot be damned without willing to be damned -- without yourself choosing through will and action to reject God.
Now, it seems to me that the sticking point is more this: " I'm dubious that anyone in his right mind would choose the terrors of hell directly."
If you're right that no one truly chooses evil over good, that no one would knowingly reject God, then it would seem one would have to conclude that either
a) Hell is empty or
b) Hell is not empty but is populated by people who were damned for reasons other than direct and conscious rejection of God.
However, I reject the premise itself. It seems to me clear that people do often choose evil even when it's clear that they will suffer as a result, that people do prefer to put themselves in God's place rather than conforming to God's will.
Now, I suppose at a simplistic Sunday school level, it's hard to picture someone being asked, "Would you rather boil in oil or not boil in oil?" and having the person reply, "Oh, boil please! I do so love to boil!"
But the artistic and literary images we have of hells torment are metaphorical. In the imagery of Dante (surely one of the best artistic representations of hell) the torments of the damned are simply a physicalization of the true nature of the sins to which they have attached themselves, the things they have chosen over God.
And the fact is that while if given the choice of "boiled or not boiled" clearly anyone would reply "not boiled", people do at times become very, very attached to their sins. They become so attached to their own pride and power that they are quite willing to suffer in order to avoid giving them up. And if they are willing to do so in this temporal world, I don't see why I should necessarily find it unbelievable that anyone would choose the same at the final judgment. Choose to rule their own personal hell rather than serve in heaven.
It seems to me pretty clear that this indicates that you could not be in a state of mortal sin without knowing it.
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Since damnation requires dying in a state of mortal sin, and mortal sin requires knowledge and consent, you clearly cannot be damned without willing to be damned -- without yourself choosing through will and action to reject God.
But it's not always clear what qualifies as knowledge. Let's say that that I know that the church teaches that X is grave matter, and I understanding its teachings, but I disagree with the church. I believe the church is wrong about X. So I, will full knowledge and full consent, commit X, believing that I am not doing evil in doing so. Have I committed a mortal sin? Possibly? Definitely so? Definitely not?
If you're right that no one truly chooses evil over good, that no one would knowingly reject God
This isn't my claim.
They become so attached to their own pride and power that they are quite willing to suffer in order to avoid giving them up.
Sure, but notice that they do so not for the suffering, but for the sake of the pleasure they get (or think they will get), pleasure for which they tolerate suffering. It's not really sin itself that's chosen, as if for its own sake, but for what the sin gives them. In hell, as I understand it, sin gets you nothing but misery, so the choice of hell really is, metaphorically, the choice to boil eternally. Who is their right mind would choose that?
My HTML use of italics in the comment above didn't seem to work. Sorry about that.
But it's not always clear what qualifies as knowledge. Let's say that that I know that the church teaches that X is grave matter, and I understanding its teachings, but I disagree with the church. I believe the church is wrong about X. So I, will full knowledge and full consent, commit X, believing that I am not doing evil in doing so. Have I committed a mortal sin? Possibly? Definitely so? Definitely not?
If you truly and honestly believe the action is not a sin, then it seems clear to me that you do not incur the culpability of having committed a mortal sin. After all, you have to both know that it is wrong and that it is in opposition to God's will. If you really think you're following God's will, then you're not fulfilling all the criteria for it to be a mortal sin.
Now, I think there could still be a danger in there, in that if I become more deeply attached to performing some action (which I believe to be good) than I am to God, and I later find out that it is in fact a sin, there's the question of whether I will choose my attachment to that sin over God. So honest dissent isn't risk free by any means. But I think we have to say that if someone really does honestly believe that what he's doing is right, he isn't culpable for it as a mortal sin.
Sure, but notice that they do so not for the suffering, but for the sake of the pleasure they get (or think they will get), pleasure for which they tolerate suffering. It's not really sin itself that's chosen, as if for its own sake, but for what the sin gives them.
I think often, though, we also sin out of self will or defiance. In that case, opposing the other person is one of the ends. I would say that in choosing hell, the end being chosen is not suffering per se, but putting oneself above God, opposing God, defying God.
In that sense, the distinction would be that in our temporal lives we sin after a fashion, in that we seek some end even at the cost of defying God. But if we choose the ultimate sin which is hell, we choose sin pure and simple, defiance of God for its own sake.
There's also the danger of culpability for being mistaken. I may on the surface truly and honestly believe that the church is wrong to condemn X as grave matter, but my conclusions on this may have come not so much from sincere inquiry (even if I thought I was being sincere), but from a deep-seated need to justify behavior I enjoyed. Self-delusion is not uncommon, but nor is it always innocent.
"I think often, though, we also sin out of self will or defiance. In that case, opposing the other person is one of the ends. I would say that in choosing hell, the end being chosen is not suffering per se, but putting oneself above God, opposing God, defying God."
But here too there's something that self will or defiance brings to the sinner. Maybe call it the satisfaction of self-aggrandizement. Besides, I can't think of anyone who actually fits this description. I know people who sin, of course, and do so knowing it's wrong, but none of them mean to put themselves above God or in opposition to him, as if that's their motivation. Either they justify it or presume God's mercy, in which case they would seem to have a lack of full knowledge, or they have fallen due in part to their weakness, which would suggest a lack of full consent. You're describing moral sin in such a way that very few people are really guilty of it. That sounds nice, but it doesn't sound like what the church says, certainly not the traditional idea that few will be saved and many will be damned.
There's also the danger of culpability for being mistaken. I may on the surface truly and honestly believe that the church is wrong to condemn X as grave matter, but my conclusions on this may have come not so much from sincere inquiry (even if I thought I was being sincere), but from a deep-seated need to justify behavior I enjoyed. Self-delusion is not uncommon, but nor is it always innocent.
Agreed. That's why I think it's advisable not to set oneself above the Church and decide that things she teaches are mortal sins probably aren't. If one believes, as I take it we both do, that the Church has been entrusted by God with preserving and teaching his message here on earth, and that the Holy Spirit guides it in this endeavor, I would have a hard time trusting myself that in knowingly defying the Church I was not choosing my own will above God's.
At the same time, however, I do accept the Church's account of mortal sin, and according to that in order to be completely alienated from God one must will to be completely alienated from God. So, obviously, I have to hold it as possible that someone does honestly understand the Church's claim that an action is a mortal sin, but honestly disagree with it and thus may commit such a sin without full culpability.
Obviously, for someone who does not believe the Catholic Church to be the holder of moral truth, mortal sin without culpability would be far more common.
But here too there's something that self will or defiance brings to the sinner. Maybe call it the satisfaction of self-aggrandizement. Besides, I can't think of anyone who actually fits this description. I know people who sin, of course, and do so knowing it's wrong, but none of them mean to put themselves above God or in opposition to him, as if that's their motivation. Either they justify it or presume God's mercy, in which case they would seem to have a lack of full knowledge, or they have fallen due in part to their weakness, which would suggest a lack of full consent. You're describing moral sin in such a way that very few people are really guilty of it. That sounds nice, but it doesn't sound like what the church says, certainly not the traditional idea that few will be saved and many will be damned.
So far as I can tell, what I'm saying about mortal sin is what the Church says. What I'm saying is based directly on the catechism and on what I've read and been taught about mortal sin from childhood.
It sounds like one clear area of disagreement between us is that you generally consider people to be better than I do. I think people do fairly often sin simply to hurt others or simply to follow their own will above that of others, and I find it quite believable that people would choose their own will above God's even if damnation depended on it. (Come to that, if we take him at his word, Desmond Tutu recently stated that himself, though obviously one hopes that he was either being unwisely hyperbolic or else will repent before the moment of judgement.)
Even among people you know, if you're going to apply the possibility of self delusion to say that people could be committing mortal sins without realizing it, you certainly need to apply the possibility of self delusion to consider that many people who tell themselves that they are either weak or else counting on God's mercy are actually simply people who far prefer their will to God's and who, if faced with it, would choose to separate themselves eternally from God rather than to utterly embrace his will eternally.
Personally, I have not commitments as to whether most people go to hell or most people go to heaven. I am, however, fairly sure that at least some people are in hell (though I do not know who), and quite definitely certain that those who are there are there only because they, like Lucifer himself, have chosen to be.
I have a tendency to assume that people have probably read all the same books that I have, but FWIW, if you haven't read it, I thought Lewis did a sympathetic yet incisive job in The Great Divorce at looking at the ways in which sin can be a complete closing off of self. As a novel, it has flaws (though given how short it is and how fast it was written, they're certainly forgivable) but as an imaginative exercise examining sin, I thought it was very, very good.
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