Hell "Wonderfully Concentrates The Mind"

A stark and literary reminder:

...Does anyone actually go to hell anymore? I mean, leaving aside the usual suspects—Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and (just as soon as we can conveniently dispatch him) Osama bin Laden—is there a sufficient number of reprobates around even to justify the existence of such a place? And, really, just how wicked does one have to be to qualify? Surely it is not even thinkable that good, respectable Catholics might take themselves there. What are we to make of hell? More to the point, what does the Church make of hell?

In contrast to the mincing multitude unwilling to countenance anyone going to hell, least of all regular churchgoers, the position of the Catholic Church is refreshingly emphatic: There is not anyone, be he the most exalted churchman anywhere in Christendom, who is not at liberty to take himself straight to hell. Where, for the sake of even one mortal sin committed against God, he shall languish forever in the most unimaginably hellish torment.

"Mortal sin," we are told, "is a radical possibility of human freedom. . . . If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices forever, with no turning back" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1861).

In every life, however brief its duration, the essential drama of human existence unfolds against an absolute horizon beckoning each of us to one or another eternal possibility. To be thus poised, moreover, between the hope of heaven and the fear of hell, terrifyingly free to choose one or the other, is a very good and salutary thing. As Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said about the prospect of being hanged, it wonderfully concentrates the mind....

He goes on to give a blaze of glory and hope. Well worth a full read.