HELL - THEOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
I. The pain of loss;
(1) Its nature;
(2) Its inequalities.
II. The pain of sense;
(1) What the fire of Hell is;
(2) How it acts,
(a) upon the soul,
(b) upon the body.
The certitude produced in the human mind by the acceptance of dogmatic and theological truths, cannot satisfy its insatiable curiosity, always searching for the ultimate reasons of things. Upon the many obscure problems involved in the dogma of Hell our reason can throw some degree of light; but in these matters, which areinteresting and intriguing, we are in the sphere of speculation and freedom of opinion.
We have now, therefore, to expound what seem to be the best theological explanations, firstly of the pain of loss, secondly, of the pain of sense.
I. THE PAIN OF LOSS
We have to try to solve two questions:
- first, we have to explain the exact nature of the pain of loss;
- secondly, we have to show how its intensity can vary in different individuals.
(1) What the pain of loss is
It is easy to assert, and it is constantly being reiterated, that the pain of loss is the most terrible of Hell’s torments, not only because it is, by the nature of things,eternal, but also because, considered in itself, it causes the most intolerable and inexpressible of sufferings.
But it is by no means so easy to prove this assertion.
1. St. Thomas Aquinas, our guide, often explains how the natural love of God as the supreme Good, persists, both in the demons and the lost. (cfr. Sum. Theol. I, q. 64, and Compend. Theol. cap. 174.)
As we have already seen, in the introductory chapter, discarnate spirits, who know and love themselves with a knowledge and love that are spontaneous and ever actual, have likewise an always actual knowledge and love of God. And since they know God as the Supreme Good, they love Him even more than they can love themselves.
But this spontaneous and natural impulse of love is an undeliberate act of the will. The reason of this spontaneous desire of God lies in the fact that pure spirits and disembodied souls apprehend the Supreme Good, not by way of abstraction as we do now, but as it were, in the concrete. So, just as we, while on earth, cannot love or desire anything except in so far as it is seen to be good, the object of all love and desire, the will of the discarnate spirit is impelled, by psychological necessity, towards the actual, concrete Supreme Good.
In a word, the love of God, author and source of all good, is the first and necessary principle of all love and desire in the next world. This natural and necessary love is not extinguished in the lost, but persists as the spontaneous action of their spiritual nature; it is the ever active motive force of their whole psychological life in all that concerns willing and desiring.
Hence there arises in the lost soul a conflict of opposite forces.
On the one hand the soul is irresistibly impelled, by its natural inclinations, towards happiness, and so by its spontaneous, undeliberate act, loves God as its highest good; on the other hand, its free and deliberate obduracy in evil, chosen as its last end, forces it to turn its back on God, the only source of happiness, and the only satisfaction of its intense desire of happiness. It must not be forgotten that pure spirits, such as disembodied souls, have direct cognition of themselves by an act of perfect intuition.
Owing to this perfect and direct self-cognition they comprehend in one single glance all their needs, their aspirations, their destiny, the true object of their beatitude, and also the insurmountable obstacles set up by themselves, which prevent them from satisfying their hunger for happiness and from attaining to true felicity.
Since the disembodied soul sees itself directly in its own essence, it knows and experiences all these things with an intimacy that goes to the centre of its being, and hence the pain of loss produces in the lost souls an interior contradiction that tortures and rends asunder their inmost life; they are impelled towards God and are kept far from Him; they yearn for God and yet repel Him.
No more terrible anguish can be imagined than that the soul should be at war with itself in the very act that should bring it happiness; it is a rending of the soul, of which even the tearing of the body, limb from limb, is but a faint and feeble image.
2. It is clear that this explanation presupposes that the damned have definite knowledge of the happiness that would have been theirs from the possession of God as their supernatural end.
St. Thomas (De Malo, q. 5, art. 3), makes the same presupposition when he proves that the loss of the beatific vision of God will cause no suffering to children who die unbaptised:
“The souls of these children are not lacking in such natural knowledge as is due to separated souls according to their nature, but they do not possess supernatural knowledge, which comes from faith. . . By its natural knowledge the soul knows that it is created for happiness, and that this lies in the possession of the supreme good; but that this perfect good, for which man is made, is the glory of the saints, is something that cannot be known naturally. . . . Hence the souls of these infants will not know that they are deprived of so great a good, and consequently will not suffer from the deprivation.”
The damned, then (apart from infants) will have supernatural knowledge of what ought to be, and what otherwise would have been their true happiness.
Faith, therefore, intervenes and completes the natural, spontaneous movement of the will towards God actually envisaged as the supreme good. But, as we shall see, the action of faith is in the speculative order only, while in the practical order, the will persists in its adherence to an end contrary to its true last end. The illumination of faith is the result of grace received during this life, which to some is given more abundantly, to others less copiously; moreover it is not impossible that, at the very moment of death, God may specially enlighten the soul as to its true happiness. Hence it comes about that they who, in this world, were the more highly favoured by God’s mercy, will, in the next, be more deserving of reprobation, and, as a consequence of their higher degree of knowledge, will have to endure a more terrible anguish of soul.
3. Here the question arises, how is it that the lost soul, borne down by so great a weight of suffering and torment, does not retrace its steps and choose anew its last end, in accordance with the perfect knowledge of it which it has now gained?
The fundamental reason we have given already; the choice of their last end by discarnate spirits is definitive and irrevocable. It proceeds, not from a conjectural, but a certain knowledge, certain and comprehensive in what regards itself and its own nature, and, because of divine revelation, certain with regard to supernatural beatitude.
So, once the lost soul has made its choice, it cannot turn round and choose the opposite. For the rejection of its supernatural end by the lost soul results, not from any defective knowledge of the supernatural as true, but from a defective consideration of it under the aspect of the “good.”
Now if it were possible for the supernatural to move the will to make a fresh choice, it would be because it could attract it as its supreme good; but it is precisely under this aspect that the lost soul shut its eyes upon its true supernatural end, and chose to look only upon its own native excellence; knowing the supreme good, it voluntarily blinded itself to its supreme desirability, and refused at all costs to follow after it:
“averterunt voluntarie suum intellectum, non a consideratione veri, sed ab inspectione boni in quantum est bonum, quia nolunt illud sequi.” (St. Thomas,Comment. in Tract. de Nominibus Divinis. bk. IV, lect. 19).
Hence throughout eternity the lost soul’s moral life is governed by this act whereby it rejected the sovereign good as its last end. And we must remember also that this act, proceeding from the soul’s certain, intuitive and comprehensive knowledge of itself, admits of no succession of phases, but is always indivisible and self-identical, and consequently unalterable.
Plunged in the torments of Hell the lost souls are condemned to undergo a suffering that, probably, had never suggested itself to them before their damnation; even natural happiness is denied them. They had hoped at least to find some satisfaction in their own natural powers and qualities, but the cruel and bitter reality teaches them that this is impossible.
But their misery cannot produce in them a change of will. Their wills being always under the sway of the practical judgment they, had formed of their own self-sufficiency, to the exclusion of supernatural beatitude, they must for ever will, even in their sufferings, what they willed from the first moment of their revolt against God.
To give us some idea of how this can be, St. Thomas uses the illustration of a criminal intent upon murder, who is forcibly prevented from committing it. He is tortured by his powerlessness, yet persists in his criminal desire. So also with the damned; they see now that their act of proud independence has brought them misery instead of happiness; yet they cling to their pride and independence, which they value above all. Their only regret is not to have found therein the happiness they had looked to find; their misery goads them to despair. But they do not feel sorrow for the moral evil of their sins, which would be the beginning of repentance. They feel the misery of their sufferings and remorse for their sins as the cause of torments so terrible. Their wills still cling to the moral evil, and the only effect of their punishment is the anguish of soul that it produces, their only repentance that of the slave under the lash.
(2) Different degrees in the pain of loss.
According to the Thomistic theology the reason for inequalities of suffering is to be found in the cause of the suffering, that is in the greater or lesser gravity of the sins for which the suffering is incurred.
He who has more grievously sinned against God will incur a greater penalty, and the pain of loss will weigh upon him more heavily.
But how explain that there can be degrees in the pain of loss? In so far as it is the deprivation of the sight of God it admits of no degrees, but is absolute and invariable; but the intensity of the suffering it causes is, in itself and intrinsically, variable according to the gravity of the sins committed; the more heinous the sins, the more intense the suffering.
But to say this is merely to skim the surface of the difficulty; we must go deeper.
We cannot do better than quote from the well-known Cursus Theologicus by the Carmelites of Salamanca:
“We can understand that the pain of loss is increased in proportion to its cause, that is the sins committed; the more numerous and grievous are the sins, the more grievous and more intolerable will be the deprivation of the beatific vision, and vice versa.
Nevertheless we do not assert that the greater malice of the sins is the formal reason of the greater degree of suffering, for strictly speaking the punishment is not increased just because it is inflicted for more grievous sins.
But we say that the greater gravity of the sins and the increased degree of the punishment are so correlated that the deprivation of the vision of God becomes of itself the true and intrinsic cause of the greater suffering.
How is this to be explained? How, indeed, is it possible, since we are dealing with a privation which, by its very nature, implies the total loss of the contrary perfection?
To get some idea, it must first be noted that he who is deprived of some perfection is thereby removed and sundered from the state of perfection which otherwise he would have attained.
So it may be said that a privation is greater according as there results from it a greater distance from the opposite state of perfection.
Now this distance increases according to the increasing difficulty which, owing to the nature and number of intervening obstacles, attends the attainment of the contrary perfection.
But it is precisely their sins that are the impediments and obstacles preventing the damned from attaining to the beatific vision.
Hence, the greater the number and gravity of the sins, the greater is the distance separating the damned from God, and the greater the loss of the vision of God.
Some analogy may be found in the privations which afflict us in this life, for example, in exile from home and country.
For though banishment must necessarily, and in every case, shut a man out altogether from life in his own country, yet the more distant his place of banishment is, the harder to bear does his exile become, because his return home is made more difficult.
Similarly, blindness, however it may arise, is the total deprivation of sight . . . and yet it becomes a much more grievous affliction when there is no hope at all of a cure . . . And so it is that the loss of Heaven is a greater punishment and a greater misery for the sinner who is deprived of eternal happiness because of many and very great sins, than it is for him who is damned for but a few and less grievous sins.” (De Virtus et Peccatis, disp. XVIII, dub. 1).
II. THE PAIN OF SENSE
The two points to be here considered are:
- the nature of the fire of Hell, and
- its mode of action.
(1) Nature of Hell-fire
As we have said, the reality of Hell-fire cannot be denied without offence to the faith.
But to say that it is real is altogether different from saying that it is of the same nature as the material fire of earth.
The scholastic theologians and some moderns think that there is no essential difference between the two kinds of fire, and their opinion is by no means without foundation.
M. Brassac writes:
“It has not been defined that the fire of Hell is material. . . Yet it must not be forgotten that the word fire, or flame, is used to designate it at least eight times in the Gospels, and thirty times in the New Testament as a whole. This would not be understandable unless the torment of fire, the most terrible we know, had a close connection with the torment of Hell, and were the best fitted to give us an idea of its severity” (Manuel Biblique, 1908, t. III, p. 590).
While granting this notion of a close connection, we may add that earthly fire ought not, it seems, to be taken as a complete representation of Hell-fire. For, according to Scripture itself, there are striking differences between the two:
- the fire of earth is produced by chemical action, the fire of Hell is kindled by the anger of God;
- the one cannot touch the soul except by acting upon and through the body, the other attacks the soul directly and immediately;
- the one may be quenched, the other can never be;
- the one gives light, the other gloom and darkness;
- the one burns and consumes, the other burns but destroys not its victims.
We think, therefore, that both reason and revelation are better served by not asserting that the two fires have the same specific nature.
Provided that we safeguard the reality of Hell-fire, there is no reason why we should not take even its nature as being simply analogous with that of earthly fire, and this opinion seems likely to become more and more common among theologians.
It is not a new opinion; it was propounded explicitly by Lactantius and St. John of Damascus.
St. Thomas, defending the latter, says:
“He does not altogether deny that the fire of Hell is material; he says it is not material in the same way as our fire is” (Suppl. q. 97, a.3).
The Dominican, Père Hugon, uses almost the same words:
“This fire is not metaphorical; it is real, but this is not to say material like our fire” (Réponses théologiques, p. 205).
Similarly Passaglia:
“In affirming the reality of Hell-fire, we do not say that it is the same as the fire of earth.”
We agree then fully with Fr. Hurter (Theol. dogmat. t. III, no. 799) when he says that the fire of Hell differs from that of earth both in its nature and in itsproperties, natura et indole.
(2) The mode of action of Hell-fire
We shall consider:
- firstly, how Hell-fire acts upon pure spirits and disembodied souls;
- secondly, how it will act upon the bodies of the damned after the resurrection.
(a) Pure spirits and disembodied souls.
On this point two principal currents of opinion divide the theological world:
1. the one, going back to St. Augustine, holds that the fire of Hell exerts only a subjective or moral action upon the soul;
2. the second adopted by St. Thomas, maintains that its action is physically effective.
1. The former opinion, then, denies that there is any real contact between the fire and the soul. The fire is there but does not act directly upon the soul. Yet it causes the soul to suffer, either:
- because the soul is aware of its presence and its injurious qualities (Albertus Magnus);
- or because it fears its attacks (St. Bonaventure);
- or because its mere proximity to the soul is distasteful (Egidius Romanus);
- or again because the soul’s attention is so wholly concentrated upon the fire that its liberty of thought is fettered and its intellectual freedom shackled, thus causing it acutest misery, and this either:
o because such concentration of the attention is natural (Richard of Middleton, Biel, Ockham),
o or because God by some special intervention imposes this torturing immobility of thought upon the soul (Scotus).
2. St. Thomas rejects all these explanations.
He writes:
“Others say that, although corporeal fire cannot burn the soul, yet the soul apprehends it as injurious and hence is afflicted with pain and fear.. . but in that case the soul would not suffer from the fire in reality, but only in its subjective apprehension, and although a false imagination may cause real suffering, as St. Augustine points out, yet it cannot be said that the suffering is caused by the thing imagined, but by its image. Besides, this sort of suffering would be more unlike real suffering than that caused by an imaginary vision, because the latter is inspired by true concepts within the soul, and the former by false ideas produced by the soul in error. Lastly it is not probable that disembodied souls or demons, whose acuteness of intellect is great, would think that corporeal fire could really harm them, if it were, in fact, incapable of doing so” (Suppl. q. 70, art. 3).
We must, therefore, allow that the soul, even when separated from the body, is attacked directly and physically by the fire of Hell. If the fire, as the instrument of divine justice, acts by the power of God, and can act upon the soul, in the same way as the sacraments produce the effect of sanctification in the soul, then it must also have its own proper and natural effect upon the soul. For every instrument performs a twofold action:
- first, its own natural action of which it is the principal cause, and
- secondly, its instrumental action, of which the proper action is, as it were, the preparation.
Thus in baptism the water must first wash the body before cleansing the soul. But a material thing cannot act upon a spirit, or injure it, or afflict it in any way, unless the spirit be in some way united with it.
Now, there are two ways in which spirit may be joined with matter:
- First, as its substantial principle, so as to form one substance, as the human soul does with the body; but of course, there can be no such union between a lost soul and the fire of Hell.
- The second way is by the application of power, as when a spirit exerts its power to move some particular material thing and no other; it is then united with the thing moved by it.
But though it is naturally possible for a body to be the recipient of the power put forth by a spiritual agent, it is not naturally possible for it to hold fast this power to itself, for the spiritual agent is always naturally free to withdraw it from one thing and apply it to another.
Hell-fire, then, besides its own natural power of being the recipient of the force exerted by the spirits in Hell, has, as the instrument of divine vengeance, been endowed with another power, that of holding fast and gripping the spirit’s energy, of forcing it to act, and, as it were, chaining it down to this one work. In this way the fire becomes a torment to the soul, making impossible the exercise of its freedom, preventing it from acting where and as it wills.
This theory allows room for that intellectual torture which is the central point of Scotus’s solution, but it is more complete than his theory in so far as it offers as the psychological reason for the sufferings of the lost, the hypothesis of the physical captivity— alligatio—of the soul by the fire.
It must be noted that we are not speaking simply of the imprisonment of the soul in one locality, which would be something intrinsic to the soul’s action, and which is allowed by all theologians; St. Thomas’s teaching goes deeper than that, it involves the fettering of the lost soul’s faculties by a power which grips them at the centre and paralyses their activity at the heart.
Mysterious indeed is this fire of Hell which thus enfolds, penetrates and torments even the spiritual powers of the lost. This is something very different from simple imprisonment, which is but an external affliction, for by the fire of Hell the damned are tortured in the very heart and centre of their vital powers.
Hence the devils, even when outside of Hell itself, carry with them the pain of fire and suffer as truly as when imprisoned in its depths.
(b) Action upon the bodies of the damned.
The action of Hell-fire upon the bodies of the damned, after the resurrection, is, perhaps, still more of a mystery.
1. On the one hand we have to admit that the fire burns the body without consuming it.
2. On the other, we have to explain the incorruptibility both of the fire and the body.
1. As regards the first point: the scholastic theologians give no satisfactory explanation. Some moderns try to solve the difficulty by excluding all chemical alteration from the action of the fire of Hell and limiting it to merely physico-mechanical movement. We refer the reader to Fr. Tournebize’s monograph Opinions du jour sur les peines d’outre-tombe wherein this hypothesis is given favourable consideration. We shall content ourselves with observing that Hell-fire is the instrument of God’s power, and that its nature and qualities must naturally correspond with the high office for which it is made. Its incorruptibility is a good reason for not thinking of it as just the same as the fire of this world.
2. As for the second point, St. Thomas says that God will use the fire of Hell to produce upon the bodies of the lost, not material, but quasi-spiritual impressions— passiones animae. Moreover, after the resurrection, the body will possess an intrinsic principle of incorruptibility. Hence St. Thomas’s suggestion might be completed by the modern scientific hypothesis of a fire acting solely by physico-mechanical motion, without any chemical combinations whence could arise alteration and corruption. In this way the bodies of the damned, kept in unceasing movement under the fire’s action, suffer a sensation akin to that of burning, and yet are not consumed.
Whatever solution we adopt, we must always make allowance for God’s intervention, the nature of which eludes us; and even if the scientific explanation of the action of Hell-fire is beyond our reach, that is no reason for denying the possibility and the reality of this action, of which divine revelation is the witness.
