Hell
Heaven will never be more enticing than hell is terrifying. I have striven from my adolescence to embrace that ideal love of God, both the concept of the deity anthropomorphized as the Son of Man, and also that perfect emanation of Goodness which is the very fulfillment of my being-of all being. In the transports of this love, I was to rise above a vile fear of infernal, eternal punishment. Jansenism (at least as a Jesuit tells of it) would damn me for my imperfect contrition. Trent, however begrudgingly, allows such a poor sinner be saved.
The orthodox understanding of hell flies in the face of everything reasonable about Christianity. It really does. We, we Christians are commanded to forgive our fellow man seven times seventy in one day; we are forbidden to approach the altar of God if we have aught in our heart against our brother; we are to love our enemies, and to be kind to them. Yet God, God the infinitely good and merciful; God who is called Our Father; who knows how to give good things to his children; who has numbered the hairs on our heads; God who is Love-this same One metes out eternal punishments for temporal crimes. Oh, yes, yes, yes-I have heard it all before: God makes man free. In giving him the power to choose either life or death, he exalts man. If man did not have this faculty, he would not be man. I heard these very words last Sunday at the homily.
Most Catholics skirt the topic of predestination, and many pious but ignorant lay persons will take on the same Pelagianism of Arminians and Wesleyans. God is incapable of forcing man to choose his own salvation: no one exactly says this, but it is implied. I can hardly blame them. John Calvin’s God is hard to sell. He is unworthy of the tender epithets of the Gospels. All the same, many passages of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers affirm a doctrine of predestination (if not a Calvinist one). Even if they were silent, logic would necessitate that God, whom we call Almighty, would either damn men positively, or at least negatively (by permitting them to be damned).
God is omnipotent, is He not? He could choose to save all men, could he not? Or do Christians have the Norns or the Parcae looming in the background, clasping their inexpungeable scrolls? If a man is damned by his own volition, is not God, therefore at fault? We men, whose ways are far beneath those of God, say that a parent is culpably negligent who leaves a firearm or a blade within the reach of a child. If babbling baby were to take up a loaded, unlocked handgun and shoot himself, would we consider the child to have merited death? No, you may say, but the light of truth “which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world” is ample admonition to justice. Foolishness! We creatures live a brief span, bound up in bodies of clay that sway to impulses of acquisition, copulation, domination: out of this triple fountain of sin, jets the water of life. Man acquires to feed and clothe himself; he couples to reproduce himself; he establishes dominion to provide for his progeny. Sins are but an overflowing of these streams of self-preservation. Therefore, therefore, man’s evil inclinations are inextricably linked to his good ones.
How did the serpent tempt Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? He promised her discernment, that man would be as gods, knowing right from wrong. We have somehow inherited culpability of this knowledge, yet not the knowledge itself.
One can read the Torah’s narrative of the Fall as an allegory (although Rome has placed certain limits on that allegory). Nevertheless, that benevolent Creator put the tree, the vessel of destruction, right in the reach of His creation.
The orthodox Christian consents: God permitted the Fall for the glory of the Redemption. (I will leave the Dispensationalists aside, as their position is logically untenable for other reasons.) The glory of the elect is greater than the ignominy of the damned, supposedly.
If God is such a Good Shepherd, going out seeking wayward sheep; if the Angels rejoice over one sinner converted-why then does He permit evil? What sensible parent allows a child to harm himself? What father is so offended by the misbehavior of his child that he slay him? God is capable of forgiving all manner of offenses, but demands that the offender be aware of the offense; cognitively recognize it as offensive; and personally ask for pardon. Is God thus a Christian? What would my confessor say if I retained my anger against a mortal with such conditions? Cannot God overlook man’s ignorances?
All these questions are the fruit of my reason. When I try to balance this equation, it never comes out right. It doesn’t make any sense, hell. This dogma, more than any other, can be deconstructed into absurdity.
All these questions are the fruit of my reason, which has never had any real bearing on my faith. Non-quantifiable realities do not yield to the same laws as the world of sensible experience. Thus my fear of hell is just as potent now as it was when I was four years old.
Heaven will never be more enticing than hell is terrifying. Why would it be otherwise? We men learn early on-or maybe we have the instinct-to fear an unknown harm more than a known one. Knowing exactly what torments lie ahead of you, condemned to the scaffold, you can proceed sang froid to your demise. But when consequences are entirely unknown, except that they could be very bad, the imagination runs wild. Consider it-which possibility, now considered, inspires a stronger reaction from you: finding a diamond in the mud, or stepping upon an asp in a meadow?
Every year that I age, my mind creates a worse hell. Nightmares I have had over the past few years picture an isolation, a tight-packed solitude. I the dreamer find myself in a dark depth, compressed, far removed from the community of sensible beings who can empathize with my distress, or even remark it. In the darkness, I cannot see-there is nothing to see. I cannot move-there is nowhere to move. I cannot breathe. This is horribly frightening to me. If consciousness persists after the organs of sense are destroyed, how can we presume that it will be aware of anything other than itself? We are so used to community, even community with our enemies. Contemplate eternal deprivation of interaction: being, but not sensing, not experiencing.
I must pause as I write this, and words on a page cannot communicate how these ideas draw my breath and rattle my heart. Oh, horror! To be ever in some deaf darkness, aware of being but nothing else. Mediaeval murals of sinners gnawed on by demons; Dante’s awful descriptions of the lower circles of the underworld; the visions of mystics-as terrible as all these monsters are, at least they posit some mutual awareness.
Now you know why I put my money on Pascal’s wager. Even though I must nod to the eloquent and logical heterodoxies of many a non-believer or doubter (such as our own Mark Twain), I am still bound by fear of that darkness which threatens to swallow me up.
You may not believe this, but since I was thirteen or fourteen, I have had a queer admiration for atheists or agnostics. Strange is the admiration, because it is mingled with a reflexive disgust. You know, reader, that I enjoyed thoroughly teaching Lucretius for two years. There is, too, the famous poem of William Ernest Haley, Invictus (still popular among rebellious teenagers, and among the last utterances of the infamous Timothy McVeigh)-I wrote it out in my best hand on a blank leaf of a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I didn’t have a printed copy. I wanted the poem on my shelf, to open at will.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
I am simultaneously drawn to and repulsed from such audacity. Such thoughts are marvelous but threatening, like a lightning strike. No, I am not “the master of my fate.” No, I am not “the captain of my soul.” I make these denials from fear, as I have already confessed. I deny these statements, too, because they do not square with experience. In sooth, no man is the master of his fate. If not of God, man is the pawn of Chance-a name we give to a nonentity. Dooms either fall by divine design, or with no cause at all. Man does not choose the estate wherein he is born, nor the natural virtues of his body and mind. He does not choose his contemporaries nor his native land. An Almighty is in control or there is no one at the helm.
So thus I reason, but I fear more than I reason.
My faith is my only hope.
Jesus I have known since my infancy. He is so beautiful to a fearful soul. He is kind. On His Cross, or exposing His ardent Heart, He seems to be in love with me. Granted, I believe He loves everyone else too, but still He seems to love me singularly. Little children, kneeling by their bedside are taught to pray with the confidence that God, who has known all of humankind since the dawn of time, and knows of all of humankind hence to come, still hears the tiny prayer of this short-lived being. Beside Jesus, add His Mother. She is the evocation of motherhood in our hearts. All the warmth, the protection remembered from the hours of swaddling lend an accessibility to this otherwise fierce Lord of Hosts who visits the sins of the fathers to the seventh generation. God has a Mother, just as we.
It is this same Jesus who in the Gospels tells His listeners to be “as little children.” Little children usually receive simplified explanations, just the minimum, adequate to secure their obedience. Don’t think, don’t ask about the seeming unkindness of God to benighted sinners. Don’t think, don’t ask how one who so loves you could just as easily consign you to the bowels of hell if you misstep a moment before your death. Patiently bear up, persevere until the end. In heaven-we hope you come thither-all will be understood, or merely forgotten, since God “shall wipe away every tear.”
Jesus is the first I knew. Maybe my parents implanted Him so deeply in my heart that He cannot be eradicated utterly.
You, reader-believer or not-might be rolling your eyes now. Profound doubt here is neither answered to rational satisfaction, nor carried to its logical conclusion. The writer, you may think, has fallen into sentimentalism. Perhaps I have.
Reader, I don’t trust my intellect. My senses can be easily deceived. Facile opinions waver, taking up evidence as sterling one day, discarding it as worthless the next.
Tartarus and Erebus set me to flight; it was not that Elysium was beckoning. I run after the light, maybe sometimes it is dim, maybe sometimes I do not see it at all, but it is the only hope I have.
All my going-on-what a mess! What a nasty, tangled, disordered mess of a mind. If I eschew the details of theology and philosophy as much as I claim, you might ask one more question:
Why Rome? Why cling I to Rome if so many basic uncertainties vex me?
Because Rome alone dares to assert her authority; she speaks confidently. She knows my fears and offers me a way out. Other vendors peddle like wares, but none guarantees their worth so loudly as Rome.
There you have it, reader. Now, if after my death any ever wish to raise my name to the glories of the altar, I have left for the devil’s advocate a confounding testament.
The orthodox understanding of hell flies in the face of everything reasonable about Christianity. It really does. We, we Christians are commanded to forgive our fellow man seven times seventy in one day; we are forbidden to approach the altar of God if we have aught in our heart against our brother; we are to love our enemies, and to be kind to them. Yet God, God the infinitely good and merciful; God who is called Our Father; who knows how to give good things to his children; who has numbered the hairs on our heads; God who is Love-this same One metes out eternal punishments for temporal crimes. Oh, yes, yes, yes-I have heard it all before: God makes man free. In giving him the power to choose either life or death, he exalts man. If man did not have this faculty, he would not be man. I heard these very words last Sunday at the homily.
Most Catholics skirt the topic of predestination, and many pious but ignorant lay persons will take on the same Pelagianism of Arminians and Wesleyans. God is incapable of forcing man to choose his own salvation: no one exactly says this, but it is implied. I can hardly blame them. John Calvin’s God is hard to sell. He is unworthy of the tender epithets of the Gospels. All the same, many passages of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers affirm a doctrine of predestination (if not a Calvinist one). Even if they were silent, logic would necessitate that God, whom we call Almighty, would either damn men positively, or at least negatively (by permitting them to be damned).
God is omnipotent, is He not? He could choose to save all men, could he not? Or do Christians have the Norns or the Parcae looming in the background, clasping their inexpungeable scrolls? If a man is damned by his own volition, is not God, therefore at fault? We men, whose ways are far beneath those of God, say that a parent is culpably negligent who leaves a firearm or a blade within the reach of a child. If babbling baby were to take up a loaded, unlocked handgun and shoot himself, would we consider the child to have merited death? No, you may say, but the light of truth “which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world” is ample admonition to justice. Foolishness! We creatures live a brief span, bound up in bodies of clay that sway to impulses of acquisition, copulation, domination: out of this triple fountain of sin, jets the water of life. Man acquires to feed and clothe himself; he couples to reproduce himself; he establishes dominion to provide for his progeny. Sins are but an overflowing of these streams of self-preservation. Therefore, therefore, man’s evil inclinations are inextricably linked to his good ones.
How did the serpent tempt Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? He promised her discernment, that man would be as gods, knowing right from wrong. We have somehow inherited culpability of this knowledge, yet not the knowledge itself.
One can read the Torah’s narrative of the Fall as an allegory (although Rome has placed certain limits on that allegory). Nevertheless, that benevolent Creator put the tree, the vessel of destruction, right in the reach of His creation.
The orthodox Christian consents: God permitted the Fall for the glory of the Redemption. (I will leave the Dispensationalists aside, as their position is logically untenable for other reasons.) The glory of the elect is greater than the ignominy of the damned, supposedly.
If God is such a Good Shepherd, going out seeking wayward sheep; if the Angels rejoice over one sinner converted-why then does He permit evil? What sensible parent allows a child to harm himself? What father is so offended by the misbehavior of his child that he slay him? God is capable of forgiving all manner of offenses, but demands that the offender be aware of the offense; cognitively recognize it as offensive; and personally ask for pardon. Is God thus a Christian? What would my confessor say if I retained my anger against a mortal with such conditions? Cannot God overlook man’s ignorances?
All these questions are the fruit of my reason. When I try to balance this equation, it never comes out right. It doesn’t make any sense, hell. This dogma, more than any other, can be deconstructed into absurdity.
All these questions are the fruit of my reason, which has never had any real bearing on my faith. Non-quantifiable realities do not yield to the same laws as the world of sensible experience. Thus my fear of hell is just as potent now as it was when I was four years old.
Heaven will never be more enticing than hell is terrifying. Why would it be otherwise? We men learn early on-or maybe we have the instinct-to fear an unknown harm more than a known one. Knowing exactly what torments lie ahead of you, condemned to the scaffold, you can proceed sang froid to your demise. But when consequences are entirely unknown, except that they could be very bad, the imagination runs wild. Consider it-which possibility, now considered, inspires a stronger reaction from you: finding a diamond in the mud, or stepping upon an asp in a meadow?
Every year that I age, my mind creates a worse hell. Nightmares I have had over the past few years picture an isolation, a tight-packed solitude. I the dreamer find myself in a dark depth, compressed, far removed from the community of sensible beings who can empathize with my distress, or even remark it. In the darkness, I cannot see-there is nothing to see. I cannot move-there is nowhere to move. I cannot breathe. This is horribly frightening to me. If consciousness persists after the organs of sense are destroyed, how can we presume that it will be aware of anything other than itself? We are so used to community, even community with our enemies. Contemplate eternal deprivation of interaction: being, but not sensing, not experiencing.
I must pause as I write this, and words on a page cannot communicate how these ideas draw my breath and rattle my heart. Oh, horror! To be ever in some deaf darkness, aware of being but nothing else. Mediaeval murals of sinners gnawed on by demons; Dante’s awful descriptions of the lower circles of the underworld; the visions of mystics-as terrible as all these monsters are, at least they posit some mutual awareness.
Now you know why I put my money on Pascal’s wager. Even though I must nod to the eloquent and logical heterodoxies of many a non-believer or doubter (such as our own Mark Twain), I am still bound by fear of that darkness which threatens to swallow me up.
You may not believe this, but since I was thirteen or fourteen, I have had a queer admiration for atheists or agnostics. Strange is the admiration, because it is mingled with a reflexive disgust. You know, reader, that I enjoyed thoroughly teaching Lucretius for two years. There is, too, the famous poem of William Ernest Haley, Invictus (still popular among rebellious teenagers, and among the last utterances of the infamous Timothy McVeigh)-I wrote it out in my best hand on a blank leaf of a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I didn’t have a printed copy. I wanted the poem on my shelf, to open at will.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
I am simultaneously drawn to and repulsed from such audacity. Such thoughts are marvelous but threatening, like a lightning strike. No, I am not “the master of my fate.” No, I am not “the captain of my soul.” I make these denials from fear, as I have already confessed. I deny these statements, too, because they do not square with experience. In sooth, no man is the master of his fate. If not of God, man is the pawn of Chance-a name we give to a nonentity. Dooms either fall by divine design, or with no cause at all. Man does not choose the estate wherein he is born, nor the natural virtues of his body and mind. He does not choose his contemporaries nor his native land. An Almighty is in control or there is no one at the helm.
So thus I reason, but I fear more than I reason.
My faith is my only hope.
Jesus I have known since my infancy. He is so beautiful to a fearful soul. He is kind. On His Cross, or exposing His ardent Heart, He seems to be in love with me. Granted, I believe He loves everyone else too, but still He seems to love me singularly. Little children, kneeling by their bedside are taught to pray with the confidence that God, who has known all of humankind since the dawn of time, and knows of all of humankind hence to come, still hears the tiny prayer of this short-lived being. Beside Jesus, add His Mother. She is the evocation of motherhood in our hearts. All the warmth, the protection remembered from the hours of swaddling lend an accessibility to this otherwise fierce Lord of Hosts who visits the sins of the fathers to the seventh generation. God has a Mother, just as we.
It is this same Jesus who in the Gospels tells His listeners to be “as little children.” Little children usually receive simplified explanations, just the minimum, adequate to secure their obedience. Don’t think, don’t ask about the seeming unkindness of God to benighted sinners. Don’t think, don’t ask how one who so loves you could just as easily consign you to the bowels of hell if you misstep a moment before your death. Patiently bear up, persevere until the end. In heaven-we hope you come thither-all will be understood, or merely forgotten, since God “shall wipe away every tear.”
Jesus is the first I knew. Maybe my parents implanted Him so deeply in my heart that He cannot be eradicated utterly.
You, reader-believer or not-might be rolling your eyes now. Profound doubt here is neither answered to rational satisfaction, nor carried to its logical conclusion. The writer, you may think, has fallen into sentimentalism. Perhaps I have.
Reader, I don’t trust my intellect. My senses can be easily deceived. Facile opinions waver, taking up evidence as sterling one day, discarding it as worthless the next.
Tartarus and Erebus set me to flight; it was not that Elysium was beckoning. I run after the light, maybe sometimes it is dim, maybe sometimes I do not see it at all, but it is the only hope I have.
All my going-on-what a mess! What a nasty, tangled, disordered mess of a mind. If I eschew the details of theology and philosophy as much as I claim, you might ask one more question:
Why Rome? Why cling I to Rome if so many basic uncertainties vex me?
Because Rome alone dares to assert her authority; she speaks confidently. She knows my fears and offers me a way out. Other vendors peddle like wares, but none guarantees their worth so loudly as Rome.
There you have it, reader. Now, if after my death any ever wish to raise my name to the glories of the altar, I have left for the devil’s advocate a confounding testament.