On the Eternity of Hell and God's Love

Hell. How can you still be Catholic when you have to believe in hell?

How can you believe that a good and loving God could condemn anyone, no matter how bad, to an eternity of torment? How does that make sense?

It's a good question, and a long-standing one. I think the answer comes from the nature of humans and the nature of God.

You see, human beings are more than just animals, more than just haunted meatsacks, or whatever the dismissive term for us is these days. We're greater than we seem, greater than we often act. In fact, as C.S. Lewis pointed out masterfully in The Weight of Glory, human beings are potential gods or monsters, potential heavenly beings or potential monsters. We are matter and spirit, body and soul. We are persons who will live forever, no matter what, no matter who we are. Once created, always existing--why?

What makes human beings immortal?

Well, there have been a number of theories down through the ages, a number of different ways of addressing what happens to us after we die. I'm going to dismiss the atheist contention that it's night and silence for us upon death, the argument that once the biological machinery ceases ticking over, then it's curtains for the strange combination of electric impulses and chemical reactions that make me who I am. I'm going to dismiss that because it's such a minority view in terms of human history that it barely warrants a mention by the numbers. Across the ages and cultures, you have some notion of an afterlife, some notion of a part of us that endures beyond the grave--even if we may face dissolution and destruction at the hands of gods or devils past that point--that we really ought to be able to take the existence of some sort of soul as well established,

But what is it that makes us immortal?

Well, we are made in the image and likeness of God, originally. God breathed life into us, and with that breath of earthly life also came divine life, at the outset. Since that time, Adam and Eve took a bite out of a forbidden fruit, and so we lost that original inspiration, that original inbreathing of divine life, only to be regained through Baptism, Holy Communion, and retained through Confession and Anointing of the Sick. But we've never lost the image of God.

We are persons. And all persons are immortal.

All persons, divine, human, or angelic (including fallen angels) have spiritual souls. All persons, once created, will never pass out of existence again, though some will experience the "second death," whatever that will entail. The Last Judgment seems a dismal prospect for the goats; but as best we know, people who have once come into existence will never pass away fully and finally.

That means that beatitude for the blessed will last forever, and damnation for the damned will last forever.

But why must it be so?

Fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that God is not Harvey Weinstein. That is, God respects human free will. He is a gentleman, and will take no as the refusal for a relationship that it is. He comes to us, sacred Scripture tells us repeatedly, like a bridegroom seeking His bride; like a lover seeking His beloved. He comes to us, in other words, pursuing a love affair with the created order, a union that marriage only resembles in a shadowy, distant sort of way.

Marriage is the union of two lovers; the union God is pursuing with us is the union between Love Itself and--well, us.

But of course, true love seeks freely willed, freely chosen love. Love Itself must be met with love, or else it will go away. God created us free in order to allow our love to be free. So there is the option to say no to Him.

Now, during our lifetimes, we may be saying yes and no to Him at different points along the way; just as in an ordinary relationship, sometimes things can get rocky. Couples break up, get back together, and go through all sorts of ups and downs together. But with God, there comes the time of a definite choice, where all the lesser choices of a lifetime culminate, or are overcome by grace.

That is to say, one day we die.

There are a few options for last minute interventions, of course--Our Lady can step in, as St. Alphonsus Liguori details in story after story in The Glories of Mary. Jesus comes to the soul in its final moments three times, as St. Faustina details in her Diary (1496; see also 1698). But at a certain point, our destiny is fixed--for spirits, such choices are all or nothing affairs. Human spiritual souls will experience this, just as it was for the angels and the demons at the time of their testing.

And then--well, we remain in our choices forever after. We choose either the company of God, His angels and His saints, or we choose the company of those who cannot stand company, those for whom the existence of others is a burden and a bore, whose egos reign supreme, whose vices have overtaken them and swallowed any goodness in them. We choose God and an afterlife of radical self-giving and receiving love, or we choose ourselves and an afterlife of radical selfishness, of closed mindedness, closed heartedness, closed soul.

If we choose ourselves rather than loving ourselves and opening ourselves up to God and His beloved creation, we choose to become the Dead Sea, salt, stagnant, and blocked off, rather than the Sea of Galilee, receiving new water and giving out water. We choose to become misers, neither spending nor receiving, neither welcoming others nor seeking out the true good for ourselves. We choose hell--as C.S. Lewis pointed out, the gates of hell would of course be locked from the inside, would be furiously closed off against anything outside of hell's control, blocking out light, life, and the unwanted, intolerable intrusion of other people, other ways of being, other ways of living.

But must it be forever?

Yes--because God is love, and God is eternal. God creates and sustains all that is through His love. You exist right now because of God's love, because God knows and loves you, remembers you and pours out His heart to you, shares His being with you, and calls you good.

You exist from moment to moment because God chooses you. God loves you. God calls you worthy.

And God can never stop loving His creation. It's not in His nature. He is love, not hate; wisdom, not forgetfullness. God is eternal life and love, and so He holds His beloved fellow people in existence for all eternity.

As Diane Duane puts it so well in the Young Wizards Series, nothing that is loved is ever lost.

So even the devils in hell are loved by God. He must, or else they would cease to exist. He loves us so much that He sustains us even in our furious rejection of Him, even in our sins. He loves us and remembers us even as we lash out against Him, even as we doubt His existence, forget our obligations to Him, fail to show Him gratitude, and do evil against God and neighbor. God loves us so much that He lets us choose freely what to do. He loves us so much that there are consequences to our choices, even eternal consequences.

And He can never stop loving us, because that would demand that God ceases to be God.

That is to say, He can never stop sustaining us; He can never stop holding us in existence, even if we have rejected Him, even if we have chosen life without Love, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Being--life without God.

He can never stop loving us into existence, even if we have chosen hell.

That is how eternal damnation and divine love make sense in my head, at least.

Why? Suffering, Evil, and Death

From Michael O'Brien's Father Elijah: An Apocalypse. Excerpts:

"The enemy killed the Lamb."
"You know the rest of it."
"And the Lamb overcame death."
"Yes. But first He had to die."
"Why did He have to die? Why did my wife die? Why are you covered with bruises?"
"Because we are in a real war."
"It is not right!"
"You a priest for so many years and you say that? Of course it's not right. The Cross isn't right. But our Lord took it and turned it into the great sign that the devil hates above all other signs. Each time we accept to bear that cross and be nailed to it, believing against all believing--when it's impossible any longer to believe because of our pain--that's when we defeat him. By the blood of the Lamb."--page 107

The universe is designed to demand everything from us. Why? Because we are made to enter into communion with God and share his life, which consists of absolute self-gift, a self-gift to the point where we must give everything, even our lives, to keep up--and still it would not be enough without his grace.

The universe is designed to be the medium of the exchange, of the divine to the human and the human to the divine, designed to be sacramental, to accommodate God's gift of self and our gift of self.  There was a rupture when we fell, and now the world is often more dangerous, more deadly, than ever it was meant to be.  The world is on some levels disordered, and so humans fall ill, animal turns on animal, the world is often hostile and harsh.  Our intellects are darkened, our wills weakened, our passions disordered.  The devil prowls the world, the flesh rebels, the world allures.  And so there is often pain and suffering that God had never intended from the beginning, that strikes the innocent and leaves the wicked seemingly unscathed.

It's an answer easy to write.  It may not comfort or explain to someone in the depths of grief and suffering. And it would seem that God would rather hear us getting angry at him, believing he has the power to avert suffering, believing he is a good and loving God, and raging to him from the depths of our suffering because he stood by and permitted it to happen, than have us hear anodyne explanations and ponderous platitudes.  See the Book of Psalms for extensive kvetching to God.  He even speaks a curse against apologists in the Book of Job after Job cries out to God for an explanation, rejecting all the pieties of his friends:

After the LORD had spoken these words to Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, "My anger blazes against you and your two friends! You have not spoken rightly concerning me, as has my servant Job. So now take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves, and let my servant Job pray for you. To him I will show favor, and not punish your folly, for you have not spoken rightly concerning me, as has my servant Job."…Then all his brothers and sisters came to him, and all his former acquaintances, and they dined with him in his house. They consoled and comforted him for all the evil the LORD had brought upon him….—Job 42:7-8, 11

So take it or leave it. I thought the explanation might help some people. Whatever else you do, though, pray for the victims and the first responders and the whole country, for the society and an end to the culture of death and fear. Pray for the mentally ill and those who love them, who try to care for them.  Pray.

Judas, Betrayal, and Following Jesus

A fascinating point by Pope Benedict XVI.  Excerpts:

“Judas could have left as many disciples did,” the pontiff explained. “Indeed, he should have left had he been honest. Instead, he stayed with Jesus, not out faith, nor out of love, but with the secret desire of taking revenge against the Master. Why? Because Judas felt betrayed by Jesus, and decided in turn to betray him.

Christ Descended Into Hell

on Holy Saturday.  Excerpts:

What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Young Frankenstein

No, not the Mel Brooks movie--the real thing.  Warning: if you have a weak stomach, this piece from 2006 will be a little too much.  Excerpts:

It’s the hidden side of medical research. A massive industry harvesting pieces of dead children for experiments, or transplanting into animals. IAN WISHART discovers the University of Auckland has imported body parts from American babies for a research project, and asks some hard questions...