Lots of good conversation here lately on the topics of Hell and damnation thereto. Allow me to sidestep almost all of it.
All the controversions I have seen to the traditional doctrine of Hell suppose that moral reality could be other than it ineluctably, eternally is, and could not logically otherwise be. They suppose that God could, say, give a little (the quality of mercy is not strained, etc.) on whether this or that wickedness is really, when push comes to shove, after all wicked.
Think about that for a moment. It suggests that the Eternal One admits from time to time that x is not x. It’s nuts, right?
Sorry, no. What is wicked is wicked, period full stop, and at all peril. Saint Thomas More, help us. Or else, all would be in play, with no up or down anywhere to be ascertained by any being. All would then be lost. All would be more or less wicked. There would then be no righteousness, no safe harbor of any sort. All would then be a moral chaos, and a senseless nightmare.
God could not thus give any such little wiggle room to what is right, and to chaos. and still be God.
Moral reality is, eternally, and it cannot be other than it is. So, not even God can grant an exception thereto, anymore than he could grant an exception to the Law of Noncontradiction. Or, as we could equally say, God cannot declare that he is not God.
No creature – no mayfly – has any such power; no such power of self-annihilation can be quite conceived.
Excursus: Thordaddy, you rule here! Faithful readers here over the last 20 years will get that. Thordaddy, please add what you would, my old friend. To you newbies: Thordaddy has long here (and for all I know, elsewhere) harped on the notion that sin is annihilation of the sinner. He has had lots more to say on that topic. Thordaddy, props to you!
Thus if a radically free creature of the only sort that God could logically have created in the first place were to decide on his own partiscient recognizance (the natural and incorrigible condition of all creatures) to damn himself to Hell forever, well then, by God – i.e., by the power of being and action given to him by God as and at the very seed of him, and by nobody else – he is by and in virtue only of himself evermore damned.
If he should change his mind about that decision of his own, why then logically, if he did, he’d no longer be damned.
Had he done so even at the last moment of the final definition of his character, why then – per the orthodox traditional doctrine of the Church, which is the body of Jesus – he’d be saved. He would (after a suitable and altogether appropriate time of purgation) enter Heaven. No problem, right?
But if he had not, why then he’d have decided for Hell.
Here’s the thing, when push comes to shove: if you choose Hell, why then you get Hell. If you choose Heaven, you get Heaven.
I confess that I feel confused about what in that is confusing, or ugly.
The Orthosphere 
Don’t they say God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, we send ourselves there when we reject Him? Alternatively, you might say that Heaven is an opt-in destination so you must want to go there and behave accordingly. This would mean that anything that was not Heaven could then be seen as a form of Hell. Perhaps the mistake the universalists make is to see Hell as necessarily a place of eternal torment. That may exist but it may not be the default option for those who reject God. Hell may have many mansions too and many of these may be not too different to how this world is, all reflecting the varying degrees of God rejection and self- assertion to be found in human souls. But they are not Heaven.
William, I have often thought very much the same thing. Indeed, I posted something here a few years ago suggesting that this world we now live in is one of those mansions of Hell. I console myself with that notion. Say that one of my sons opted out of Heaven, whereas I did not. How could I be happy in Heaven, knowing that my son was in Hell? Well, if my son had been resurrected to life everlasting in something like this world as we now suffer it, I could feel pretty OK about the situation. Sure, he’d have to keep dealing with bureaucrats and insurance and taxes and stuff, and the occasional invasion of barbarians, but – in principle, up to him – he’d be able to cadge together (again & again, forever – there’s the rub, the torment, of sempiternality in a world such as ours) a life that was pretty OK. A life that he could feel pretty OK about, as including hikes in the desert, sunsets, beer, and such.
Dante was getting at the same thing.
Compared to the Beatific Vision, this world massively sucks; is a total nightmare. But, compared only to itself, it looks like it could be pretty great.
God can’t make anything utterly bad (albeit that creatures can do so for themselves). So, maybe, yeah.
“I confess that I feel confused about what in that is confusing, or ugly.”
The fact that your fate is of concern to others. Your suffering would cause them to suffer — and yet, heaven is a place of no suffering. Read the previous thread.
“Think about that for a moment. It suggests that the Eternal One admits from time to time that x is not x. It’s nuts, right?“
No, it suggests that the Eternal One DEFINES x to begin with. x is what the Eternal One says it is, not what any human being says it is or thinks it should be. That’s true whether x=justice, x=mercy, x=sin, x=wickedness, or x=anything else.
“God could not thus give any such little wiggle room to what is right, and to chaos. and still be God.”
This would get the same smackdown delivered to Job. God can do absolutely anything God pleases and still be God. We do not define and cannot limit God. God created the universe and every concept it contains, as well as all the creatures who hold those concepts within their limited understandings, which are infinitesimal compared to God’s. Good, evil, mercy, justice, right, wrong, sin, wickedness, “moral reality” — all such ideas are God’s creations. It was God who planted the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil before people had any such knowledge, and who warned his human creations that eating of the tree — choosing to traffic in moral concepts — would be attempting to be Godlike themselves and would not put them in a happy place. God permits us to understand moral concepts insofar as it pleases him to do so, and if, like Job, you hit a wall in trying to achieve that understanding, that’s your problem, not God’s. Again, as he said to Job: “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?” He makes very clear that we have no business doing that and really no capacity for it.
I would make these same comments to someone who said that God is too punitive and God’s justice is too harsh. But at least I would understand that objection. What I have trouble understanding is this fear that maybe God is too merciful and generous, that he pours out too much grace upon us. Of all the challenges and struggles we face as sinful creatures within this often baffling cosmos, “too much mercy” seems like about the last thing any of us should be worrying about.
The God you describe seems to be closer to Allah than to God the Father. St. John tells us that God is love, not God is volition (i.e. “God can do absolutely anything God pleases and still be God”). If God can do absolutely anything God pleases, I cannot possibly order my life in the hope that my life will be pleasing to God. Your whimsical God strikes me as an intolerable tyrant, or perhaps I should say Our (drunken and abusive) Father Who Art in Heaven. If he is really this capricious, I might as well do as I please and hope for the best.
You may remember the footrace in Alice in Wonderland, in which the contestants start and stop when they please and there are prizes for everyone. This “caucus race” is, of course, an unsatisfactory and meaningless footrace. Or, shifting to an academic analogy, we may compare abundant mercy to rampant grade inflation. As a professor, I’m sure you understand that mercy for middling students requires injustice for excellent students because the excellence of those excellent students is not recognized. I say this shamefacedly, since I finally caved on the tremendous pressure to reward middling students by inflating grades.
“I’m sure you understand that mercy for middling students requires injustice for excellent students because the excellence of those excellent students is not recognized.”
Well, we have the same problem with the Christian doctrinaire view of Heaven: the homicidal pervert who gets Unction on his death bed slips in after a life of depravity while the upright Muslim practicing the faith of his fathers does not.
I think this is one reason Jesus taught with parables. When we attempt to think too clearly about these matters, our thinking gets muddled. We trust that the Judge will send no good men to Hell, and will send no rascals to Heaven. We do not need to understand anything more.
Yes. That is Aristotle’s injunction not to expect more clarity from a topic than it is capable of delivering. I have a student who has used either AI or some other source to write half her assignment for the second time – bearing in mind that there are 27 assignments. I had stated that if she did it again I would fail her for the class. This was on about the second to last assignment. I thought I might fail her just for the assignment again. She wrote two emails begging me not to do even that while not claiming she was innocent. When she found out I had reported her, she claimed she was innocent and had a witness to prove it (somehow) to the student affairs person – except I still had her emails where she wrote things like “I’ve been overwhelmed this semester. Some of these assignments are really hard. My English isn’t that good, etc. Given her belligerent lack of remorse and lying I am considering failing her for the course. I’m still trying to decide what to do.
I sympathize with your predicament. I want to give students second chances and benefits of the doubt, but I also know they are constantly lying to me. I also know that second chances and benefits of the doubt encourage the liars to go on lying. This is one of many things I will be glad to put behind me when I retire next year.
From what you say of this woman, we may surmise that she is lazy, unintelligent, dishonest, and emotionally manipulative. She may be kind to animals or a good singer, but the evidence for the four defects is pretty strong. I don’t expect you to show any more spine in this matter than I have shown in many similar matters over the years, but I think we softies need to be honest with ourselves. It is possible, although perhaps not probable, that flunking this woman would make her reconsider her life-strategy of sloth, stupidity, lying, and crocodile tears. Whereas giving her what she wants reinforces that life-strategy.
In honest moments, I also admit to myself that, when I give a passing grade to an ignorant and dishonest sluggard, I do not expect that ignorant and dishonest sluggard to blight my life. I expect them to go away and blight someone else’s life with their sloth, stupidity, lying, and crocodile tears. This reflection does not make me proud.
@ Professor JA Smith:
Nah. Heaven is a place of no suffering because it is the place in which all may see the perfect justice of what has transpired (indeed, this justice cannot but be apparent even in Hell). The emotional valence of tragic drama here below is a foretaste of that final recognition. We feel sorrow and pity for Oedipus, but NB: he does not feel sorry for himself. Nor then we may suppose shall the denizens of Hell.
Whether they shall suffer regret is another question.
Well, sure. Of course. The Eternal One defines each such x as a character of, and in the enaction of, his own act of being. That does not render any such x subject to a later adventitious modification – for, the Eternal One cannot as a matter of mere logic effect any such adventition (for, to do so would be to contradict his eternity and his necessity; would, i.e., be for him to repudiate his own existence). As eternal, God cannot (this is obvious even to such paltry partiscience as ours) be now this, now that other, in respect to any x whatsoever. He *must* be changeless, and eternal, or he cannot be relied upon at all. The voluntarist God of al Ghazali cannot be relied upon. He can be feared, to be sure; but he cannot even be obeyed.
Put it this way: if God were to change the rules of the game of being midstream, he could not be God, properly so called. He would in that case be no more than a bureaucrat.
Sure. But God cannot do anything that is other than what God by his own definition of himself in his act of being (and, therefore, of mere logic) is, and so does, and still be God. God cannot say, e.g., “I am evil.” Nor, a fortiori, can he carry evil into practice. For God to do evil would be for God to delete God, who by definition of that than which no greater can be conceived, cannot be deleted; so that “I am (or do) evil” is for God an obvious impossibility, on logic alone.
God’s omnipotence is constrained by his own nature – obviously, he cannot be both what he is and also something else – which is the basis and origin of our apprehensions of his character. God can’t make a stone that he cannot lift, for the very notion of such a stone is incoherent – this, in virtue of the very laws of logic that are aboriginal in God, as aspects of his eternal character. Likewise, God can’t will evil (no matter how good the outcome he then arranges therefrom).
God can’t will what he cannot by his eternal nature will.
The idea that God could will evil is like the idea that he could create a stone he could not lift. To think such things is to undertake, and so ascribe, to logical madness. It is to depart from reason.
Nah. Heaven is a place of no suffering because it is the place in which all may see the perfect justice of what has transpired (indeed, this justice cannot but be apparent even in Hell).
People are aggrieved when they see their loved ones suffering, even if — perhaps especially if — they can also see very well that the suffering is partly due to the sufferer’s own willed actions, and so to that degree is not “unjust.” So what you posit here negates one of the conditions of heaven as traditionally taught, i.e. that it’s a place that “we” can go to. The beings you’re imagining who would find the suffering of loved ones satisfactory due to “perfect justice” would not be “us” anymore. They would be apparitions or avatars of some kind, no longer having enough continuity with the selves they were on earth to make it meaningful to speak a sentence like “Mother Teresa went to heaven.” The actual Mother Teresa, who sorrowed over suffering because it was suffering, would not meaningfully “be” that Mother Teresa avatar in heaven, but would simply have evaporated and been replaced. That would solve one problem with traditional concepts of hell, but at the cost of raising a big new problem about traditional understandings of heaven.
The idea that God could will evil is like the idea that he could create a stone he could not lift. To think such things is to undertake and so ascribe to logical madness.
Perhaps so, but I don’t need to reach that question because I’m not suggesting that God wills evil or would want to. What I’ve said is that God can will good, mercy and grace in measures that surpass human understanding. If that’s not a core feature of the Christian message, then there is no Christian message, just a lot of human moralizing projected onto a construct called “God” an an attempt to claim unwarranted authority.
@Kristor –
“It suggests that the Eternal One admits from time to time that x is not x. It’s nuts, right? Sorry, no. What is wicked is wicked, period full stop, and at all peril.”
I don’t disagree with your main point; but I think the problem (for some people, anyway) concerns what kind of a thing “x” is. Is it a general law or rule that applies to general categories in all instances; is it class of behaviours; is it an inner motivation that may or may not lead to kinds of behaviour?
This kind of uncertainty about the reality and nature of goodness, and whether goodness (and evil) actually is captured by sets of statements (such as the Ten Commandments, or particular Gospel or Epistle verses, for example); is a genuine problem among honest Christians.
Such statements are no longer clear and obvious to people; and the link between a finite number of statements and the multitude of specific situations of real life, is now unclear.
Some of this unclarity is due to evil propaganda etc; but not all of it IMO. Fundamentally, these matters have become unclear because the modern mind (modern consciousness) is different from the medieval or ancient consciousness; when all this kind of thing was not just obvious, but spontaneous, natural, all-but universal.
Some evil is due to people seeking wiggle room to do stuff that is hostile to the nature of divine creation – but the problem remains that ancient ways of stating *and explaining* moral requirements now just don’t work, and indeed cannot work – so that almost everybody disagrees about almost everything (often vehemently) – including (especially!) those who try their hardest to be orthodox and traditional!
You know, it seems to me that the latter day disarray about such things is due to simple more or less wonted confusion on the part of sinners – abetted by a tendentious and so bad faith interest in getting oneself off any hooks, that is at every turn reinforced and rewarded by the popular culture. Let x be as specific as you like: adultery, masturbation, drunkenness, false witness, impiety, and so forth; refer for further guidance to the Ten Commandments, and to Romans 1.
Doesn’t matter, to the modern, because reasons.
@Kristor
Well, if you don’t perceive the problem, then you don’t.
*
“Doesn’t matter, to the modern, because reasons.”
Yes, but why? What changed from ancient times, and why did it change (and could it have been otherwise – and if so then how)?
To me, these seem to be essential questions. If people are the same now as always, then why are they now so very different!- Why so often inverted in their values (officially and among the masses)!
What happened?
The usual answer is “society” happened to individual people – but then why does society change in the way it does (and couldn’t God have done anything to shape or ameliorate it)?
It seems to me that something very profound must have happened through modernity (however defined), and (pretty much) all over the world – and this something must have an ultimate cause – and ultimate causes are God’s doing, part of God’s creational intent.
And this is what we need to know.
That’s how it seems to me.
Oh, I perceive the problem, alright. People are indeed confused about whether x is wrong, and often about what x exactly is, or means. Indeed, reading over again your first comment and my response thereto, it seems to me that I basically agreed with you.
I think you are correct that something has changed since the end of the High Middle Age, that has muddled moral wits all over the world, more and more. The confusion compounds. So far gone are we that thousands of people are honestly confused – so they say (I feel pretty sure that most of them are dishonestly confused) – about whether or how men and women are different, how to tell the differences, and so forth. Wits are muddled, and minds stultified.
If you ask me, the root of the change is nominalism, which really took off at the end of the Medieval climax; which may have ended that climax.
But then, your question would still beg: say it was indeed nominalism; OK, why did nominalism take off just then?
My first response to that question – I wrote this at VFR about 15 years ago – is that nominalism is demonic. At the time I first wrote that, all I meant was that it is very bad. But more and more I think it is *literally* demonic: that nominalism is a long term project of our demonic adversaries.
OK, sure, but your question still begs: why has that demonic project been succeeding? How does that demonic success fit into God’s Providential Plan of Salvation?
Beats me. But I notice lately that lots of people who from childhood never took the demonic – or the angelic – seriously are beginning to suspect it is for real. Naomi Wolf the other day told Tucker Carlson that the lockstep government response to Covid *everywhere but Sweden* just could not have been the work of any merely human cabal. She’s undergone a religious conversion. Tucker agreed with her. They both talked about how they are reading the Bible seriously – studying it – for the first time.
Maybe that’s the plan. Maybe Zippy’s Hegelian Mambo is set to leap from the Modern antithesis of the Ancient thesis to some new synthesis. Maybe that’s ultimately what the Ukraine war is about.
Let a man examine himself and his attachment to sin, even a little, and he will find at its root a wish that logos was not-logos – that the moral order, that Reality, took on a shape more pleasant to himself.
All sinners wish to deface God.
And a little examination of the justice due to sinners shows that it is nothing more or less than mercy itself. What we on earth call justice, the fires of everlasting damnation, is nothing more than the light of Truth shining on the wretchedness of a soul, revealing to himself and all the wickedness and corruption rotting himself from within.
The very thing that distinguishes the fires of hell from the flames of purgation is nothing more or less than the soul himself – does he run away, does he scream in pain and rejection, does he hate the Truth for being Truth? Or does he embrace the light and the pain with tears of joy?
Beautifully said.
I attempted to post the following but was forced to reset my WordPress password and the comment disappeared. In the event that it is awaiting moderation rather than evaporated into wherever lost comments go when something like this happens you can delate the other one or merely leave it in limbo.
The reason it is confusing for many is because the choice for Hell is not as open as the choice for Heaven. When someone chooses Heaven, he knows he is choosing Heaven. Since man is fallen, Heaven cannot be chosen simply by choosing what to man appears to be good or right. Heaven can only be chosen by choosing the salvation God has provided in Jesus Christ. The choice for Hell, however, comes hidden in the choice for sin, which is itself not openly a choice for sin qua sin, at least not under ordinary circumstances, but a choice for sin disguised as what seems good to the one tempted. Think of how the serpent tempted Eve in the Garden and how Genesis describes her response. Genesis 3:6 specifically: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” Of course the choice for Hell does not come in the choice for any one sin, or even in the choice for all the sins of one’s lifetime accumulated. What one is choosing in these choices is death which includes Hell in one sense of the word but not in the sense of eternal suffering. That is chosen in the choice to be sinful forever, a choice hidden in the choice to reject the cure for sin offered by God, which choice, however, does not have to be made as openly as the choice to accept salvation does because the rejection of salvation can be hidden in neglect or procrastination.
The issue isn’t whether God changes his mind about what is wrong, or whether he changes moral reality, but whether there is an end to repentance, atonement, and forgiveness; there being nothing that can separate us from the love of God, including death. It would be most strange if we can forgive, but God cannot.
God’s forgiveness and welcome are boundless. Which is obvious, right? I mean, he’s *God.* But until the Prodigal Son decides to return home in abject humility, God’s forgiveness and welcome can’t get started. God can’t save the Prodigal Son who has as yet rejected salvation.
Yes. I’m completely fine with that.
>I confess that I feel confused about what in that is confusing, or ugly.
I can easily see how the concept of Hell could be disturbing to one who hasn’t correctly understood all these points. The most basic answer, prior to getting into the weeds of free will and the fixation of the will at death and etc., is to have faith that God knows what he’s doing, that He has spoken truthfully to us, and that his words aren’t in need of idiosyncratic interpretation. What’s needed is intellectual humility, not thinking that the truth of revelation is dependent on one’s own personal ability to understand it.
God is omnipotent, according to the Protestant tradition I know best, and apparently Catholic doctrine agrees:
268 “Of all the divine attributes, only God’s omnipotence is named in the Creed: to confess this power has great bearing on our lives. We believe that his might is universal, for God who created everything also rules everything and can do everything.” [Catechism of the Catholic Church]
“Can do everything,” not “almost” everything. God created the universe by fiat, and therefore could uncreate it and, in a moment, create a new one that operated in some entirely different way. Probably won’t, but could. (The promise to Noah suggests not, but that was a promise freely undertaken, not a statement that God lacks the power to do it.)
Now, maybe Orthodoxy hedges on this and treats God as more limited, I don’t know. But then we have the very clear message of the Gospels that God is not bound by human intuitions of what’s fair. In the Kingdom of God, the Prodigal Son gets a feast and the Dutiful Son does not. The laborers who worked for only an hour in the late afternoon get paid the same as those who worked all day. Clearly unfair, as both the Dutiful Son and the early-day laborers recognize; the stories record their complaints, which means Christ understood such objections perfectly well. Yet he still puts the stories right up in our face. He describes, through analogies, a God who is so beneficent and so profuse in pouring out rewards that some people get them “undeservedly,” as far as humans can see.
If transposed to college courses, those stories are pro-grade-inflation (or at least, very tolerant of it). If applied to footraces, they suggest that “the last shall be first, and the first last” — the concluding verse of the Vineyard Parable. Yes, it’s a radical and in its way disturbing message, but there it is. Fairness as we understand it is not God’s priority; God’s priority is grace. As to making God “an intolerable tyrant,” that seems like an unusual way of describing a being of inordinate grace and mercy.
God can do everything, or rather, every thing. God cannot do nothing, because there is nothing to do.
It’s like a game of sums. When you say, God could arbitrarily act like not-God – that is, God is not God – you are saying 1 = 0. You are saying Nothing, however much that Nothing might be made to appear to be Something by covering it up with many fancy words.
A God delivering inordinate grace and mercy is by no means acting like “not-God.” Very much to the contrary.
I don’t have the answer to that. I wish I did. There are moods in which I think it very likely that almost everyone is forgiven by unmerited grace. There are moods in which I think it very likely that almost everyone is damned, because of final obstanancy.
But these are moods.
The one thing we can say for sure is that the unbroken Tradition emphasizes the constant danger of damnation, such that even the best man cannot be assured of his salvation; but also the constant reassurance that, if only he repents, even the worst sinner can be saved.
I’m not smart enough to solve this problem, and I’m not stupid or arrogant enough to think I have the ability to speak the final word on this mystery. The only thing I can say for sure, is that the uncertainty, the mystery, is willed by God – probably as the best tactic to save as many souls in as perfect a state as they can be.
God bless.
@ Professor JA Smith: God can do everything *that is out there in the first place that can possibly be done.* He can’t enact a contradiction, because contradictions are not actualizable possibilities in the first place; they cannot be enacted, because they are *nothing.* “X & ¬ x” is a sentence, but it is not meaningful, for it is incoherent; as incoherent, it refers to no possible state of affairs, in any cosmos. It is *totally noise.*
So, contradiction – contradiction of himself, that is to say – is not on the list of things that God might possibly do … because contradictions can’t be done, by any agent whatever.
This is all just logic. It is all, i.e., just the nature of God. It is the nature of all possible worlds. Reality – cosmic coherence – cannot admit of a jot of actual contradiction.
So, God cannot make a thing that is both x & ¬ x (in the same manner at the same moment, &c.).
One of the things therefore that God can’t possibly do – because, being incoherent, it isn’t out there as a possibility in the first place – is override a free actual creature’s free act of rejection of salvation; for, this would be for God to make a free & unfree actual inactuality. To be actual – to be, i.e., substantial beings – creatures *must* be potent to act, and this they cannot be if they are not free to choose from among an array of options of various moral and aesthetic characteristics.
What is not free is not actual.
To clarify terms: the carpenter and his dog are actual, but his hammers and nails – while real – are not.
So, a sinner who chooses definitively to reject salvation *cannot* be saved, unless he repents of that rejection. The reason that damnation is permanent then is not that God is a big meanie, unwilling to forgive a sinner, but rather that the convicted sinner is a little meanie, unwilling to accept God’s love. Beyond a certain threshold of corruption, the intellect and will of the convicted sinner are so ruined and deformed that the sinner can no longer discern or desire the good of God, because he cannot conceive of it as good in the first place. He *prefers* alienation from God – i.e., damnation – to the joys of intimacy with God – i.e., salvation to heavenly life.
This is all baked into the logic of things. It is, in other words, baked into God’s nature from before all worlds.
The only way to try to avoid that logic – that Lógos – is to suppose that God is not logical; is not just, always, consistently himself. But that move entails a rejection of the Law of Noncontradiction. I.e., it entails illogic. The move cannot be logically taken.
And that means it cannot actually be taken. The attempted supposition that God is not logical, thus perfectly consistent, necessarily fails right at the starting gate.