HELL

During Advent I have been writing about The Four Last Things: the traditional subjects of the four Sundays in Advent – Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The fourth of the four last things is the theme of Hell. This is a subject rarely heard of today. Sermons tend to communicate the love of God, and how Christ can meet our needs for comfort and encouragement. Dorothy Sayers, the translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in an essay on the meaning of heaven and hell, begins with the words of Jesus in Mark 9:43-48.

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.’”

She wrote, “I have begun with this quotation because there seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from….The doctrine of Hell is not ‘mediaeval’: it is Christ’s. It is not a device of ‘mediaeval priestcraft’ for frightening people into giving money to the Church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from ‘mediaeval superstition’, but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. If we are Christians, very well; we dare not not take the doctrine of Hell seriously, we have it from Him whom we acknowledge as God and Truth incarnate. If we say that Christ was a great and good man, and that, ignoring His divine claims, we should yet stick to His teaching – very well; that is what Christ taught. It confronts us in the oldest and least ‘edited’ of the Gospels; it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching than one realizes, until one reads the Evangelists through instead of merely picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to Tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.

….There is no power in this world or the next that can keep a soul from God if God is what it really desires. But if, seeing God, the soul rejects Him in hatred and horror, then there is nothing more that God can do for it. God, who has toiled to win it for Himself, and borne for its sake to know death, and suffer the shame of sin, and set His feet in Hell, will nevertheless, if it insists, give it what it desires. The people who think that if God were truly nice and kind He would let us have everything we fancy, are really demanding that He should give us freehold of Hell. And if that is our deliberate and final choice, if with our whole selves we are determined to have nothing but self, He will, in the end, say, ‘Take it.’ He cannot, against our own free will, force us into Heaven, in the spirit of ‘I’ve brought you out to enjoy yourself and you gotter enjoy yourself’. Heaven would then be a greater agony than Hell – or rather, Hell is Heaven as seen by those who reject it; just as the agonies of the jealous are love, seen through the distorting illusion. We might adapt the definition of Boethius and say: ‘Hell is the perfect and simultaneous possession of one’s will for ever.’

‘Justice moved my high Creator: Divine Power, Supreme Wisdom, Primal Love made me.’ This is the inscription over Hell-Gate. Power, Wisdom and Love make Hell by merely existing. The self-centered soul, seeing the eternal Reality, sees it as cruel, meaningless and hateful, because it wills to see it so. We need not really be surprised at this: we are only too well accustomed to these distorted views. When we demand justice, it is always justice on our behalf against other people. Nobody, I imagine, would ever ask for justice to be done upon him for everything he ever did wrong. We do not want justice – we want revenge: and that is why, when justice is done upon us, we cry out that God is vindictive. Neither is it very certain that we shall welcome mercy or charity. …The damned cannot bear to stand in the light of God’s innocence, and ‘look upon Him whom they have pierced’. What they want is the old familiar sin. They are like confirmed drunkards; their sin makes them miserable, but they cannot live without it.

God puts nobody in Hell: the damned may wail and weep and curse their parents and the day they were born, blaming everything and everybody but themselves: nevertheless they go, like judas, ‘to their own place’, because it is the only place where they can bear to be.

Hell, in a manner, is Heaven in reverse; it is Reality seen as evil and seen so far more perfectly then it can ever be in this world. At the bottom of Hell is the Miserific Vision, as the Beatific Vision is at the height of Heaven: and as the Beatific Vision is the knowing of God in His Essence, so Hell is the knowing of Sin in its essence…The suffering of Hell is punishment only in the sense that a stomach-ache, and not a beating, is ‘punishment’ for greed. What has gone is the glamor; gluttony loses its accompaniments of the bright lights and holiday atmosphere and is known in its essence as a cold wallowing in dirt, a helpless prey to ravenous appetites. Covetousness and squandering are no longer dignified by name like ‘the economy of thrift and the economy of conspicuous waste’ – they are known as a meaningless squabble about a huge weight of nonsense; usury and sodomy – however we might like in this world to segregate them in the very different spheres of high finance and high aesthetics – are lumped together on the same scorched earth – sterility left to scratch in its own dust-bowl….It must be remembered about any poet who writes of Satan and Hell that he has a double task to perform: he must show sin as attractive and yet as damned. If sin were not attractive nobody would fall into it; and because pride is its very root, it will always present itself as an act of noble rebellion. It is only too easy to persuade one’s self that rebellion, as such, is magnanimous, that all control is tyranny, that the under-dog is right because he is vanquished, and that evil is to be pitied the moment it ceases to be successful. But it is not true. The poet’s business is to show both the brilliant façade of sin and the squalor hidden beneath it; his task is to persuade us to accept judgment.”

(Dorothy Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante: The Poet Alive in his Writings, Volume 1)

Perhaps we need more reminders, like Sayers, that Hell is real and that we choose it or Heaven.