4 Last Things: Hell

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

This is the fourth and final instalment of a four-part series on the four last things, which builds upon an episode of The Episcopal Podcast on the topic of eschatology, which was mentioned in a previous post.

In last week’s post, we were in Heaven. This week, we turn our attention to the place not so nice, Hell.

Or is it a place?

If we can understand Heaven better with reference to God’s love, we can similarly understand Hell better with reference to God’s love. More precisely, we can understand Hell with reference to our response to God’s love. Put simply, we can see Heaven as our acceptance of God’s love, while Hell is defined by a decisive rejection of God’s love.

What is more, God’s decision to send us to hell is even an act of Love. How can we make sense of this?

First, let us take a quick sidestep to look at the theme of virtue. In Aristotelian philosophy, and later Thomistic theology, the virtuous aim for a life of flourishing in communion with others. A life of virtue requires an awareness of and even a love for others over myself

By contrast, vice is the opposite of virtue, where I am driven by a love of myself over others. When I am stricken by vice, I aim for a life of flourishing only at an individual level. I am assuming that flourishing is a zero-sum game where life in communion with others can only reduce my individual flourishing. Thus, when I am acting viciously, I try to find ways to maximise my individual flourishing at the expense of others. I either ignore my brothers and sisters, exploit them for my own ends, or even impede their own progress so that I might get a one up on them.

In all this self-seeking and self-reliance, what I am also doing is rejecting the love of God who supplies his creatures out of his abundance. I reject this provision by God because the path to this provision is a life of self-denial, which I, stricken by vice and thus self-love, cannot abide by. When I am stricken by self-love, accepting God’s love is seen as a burden.

Hell then, is the decisive moment where my self-love and rejection of God’s love is final and absolute. God’s judgement then, is that He will not force His own love on me, and will instead put me in a state where I can entertain my love of self for all eternity, just the way I wanted. Thus, rather than communion with the saints as it is in Heaven, Hell can be understood as a place where people are together, but also alone in their self-love. 

To be sure, Hell might be the place that I would prefer, since it is the place where I can be removed from the love of God. Nevertheless, hell would still be a place of suffering, and it is a place of suffering because, according to the teaching on virtue, it is in my nature to be in communion with others and with God. Hell is by definition, an unnatural state to be in. Nevertheless, the torture and isolation of Hell is one that I have chosen for myself, just so I can indulge in my love of self, unnatural though it may be.

At this point, we may need to take a bit of a side step, because you might have noticed that I have not mentioned anything about fires, nor have I mentioned anything about purgatory. Given that this is a course on what the Catholic Church teaches, it would seem remiss of me to leave out this quintessential Catholic last thing, which is purgatory, and indeed, we can deal with the theme of purgatory together with the theme of fire. This is because understanding purgatory can only make sense when we speak about fire. 

Let us go back to an earlier point, that the way to understand heaven and hell is to have God’s love as a centrepiece. We need to couple this theme of God’s love with a biblical passage, which you can find expressed in various ways across books in the old and new testament. This is the line “God is a consuming fire” (Dt 4:24; Heb 12:29). The recurring theme of God as a consuming fire in the bible suggests that this is a very important characteristic of God’s nature, which is love. God burns out of love for us, and those that get close to God, will similarly burn out of divine love. 

A little fun fact. It is said that the creatures closest to God are the angels, and the angels closest to God are what are known as the Seraphim. These are the six winged angels that we read about in one of the visions of the Prophet Isaiah (Is 6:2). These are the angels that stand by the throne of God and praise him without ceasing. The fun fact here is that, because they are so close to God, they are given the Hebrew name Seraphim, which means, “the burning ones”. The closer to God we get, the more the fire of God’s love burns. Heaven then, is where the fires of God’s love burn intensely in each one of the communion of saints, who in turn burn for the love of God.

This then gives a whole new understanding of what purgatory is. To think about purgatory as a temporary Hell would be to miss the etymology of purgatory, which is derived from the word “purge”. Purgatory is not so much a hot waiting room, as a process of being purged by the love of God. The purging fires of God’s love remove that which prevents us from receiving and reciprocating perfect love. To reiterate, purgatory then is the removal by the fire of God’s love, and preparing us to better receive the love of God.

The fires of Hell, by contrast, are quite different.

In speaking of the last things, Thomas Aquinas acknowledges that there will be fires in Hell. But are they burning as punishment from God? In a way, they are…only not in the way that people usually understand it. 

Another way to understand the fires of Hell is by their peculiar relationship to the fires of God’s love. There are some theologians, such as St. Isaac the Syrian, that say that the fires of Hell are the fires of God’s love experienced differently by the damned. The damned stand before the fires of God’s love, but because the damned burn with self-love that rejects God’s love, the fires of God’s love are regarded as a torture.

There is also the torture of what we might call an internal fire, where the heart is also burning for the love of God, because that is in keeping with our nature. Only the damned, in wanting to hold onto their-self love, keep denying that nature. Hell then, is regarded as a self-inflicted state of eternal isolation.

By contrast, heaven is the state where we open ourselves to consuming fire of God’s love for us, so that we might burn in love with him and his creatures forevermore.

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