Hell and Salvation

Note: My use of the word continuum in this context is intended to mean gradual variation from one end of the scale to the other as opposed to discrete and abrupt changes or differences. It is a concept used in mathematics and the branch of philosophy called cosmology. It is not intended to mean or imply the Continuing Anglican movement. In relation to the present subject matter, it can only be used as an analogy to describe realities that cannot be empirically measured and which are mysteries beyond our sensual experience.

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Would you bother with church if it wasn’t all about getting you “out of jail” after you die? We enter a very big subject, and I find my own thought colluding with many theologians and thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, we tend to discover that one of the greatest causes of intolerance and abuse of power (of those who have it) in the Church are due to the doctrine of endless hell.

Over the past hundred years or more, we have two extreme positions, each claiming the authority of the Scriptures, the Fathers and Tradition: “fewness of the saved” rigorism and universalism. Either tends to annihilate human freedom, whether through Augustinian predestination or through the idea that you can commit any amount of evil and you won’t be accountable.

Christianity traditionally teaches that there are three possibilities for the future of a soul after bodily death: the Beatific Vision in heaven or punishment in purgatory with the assurance and hope of finishing up in heaven. For those who died in mortal sin, there is hell which consists of being in some kin of state where one’s punishment and separation from God will be definitive, endless and without any hope. This little article does not pretend to be an academic study of hell, but a brief reflection based on a few interesting studies I have read.

I have become concerned about this doctrine through its being the cause of bigotry, intolerance, cruelty and barbarity. It leads to churches trying to begin the process of sorting and “ethnic cleansing” in this life to distinguish those who were worthy of life and happiness from those who were counted as already damned. This idea is surely implicit in the Augustinian (Jansenist and Calvinist) notions of predestination according to which the majority of mankind was created in view to its damnation. A turtle lays a thousand eggs and only two or three turtles will arrive at adulthood. The Nazis copied this schema on the basis of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Ubermensch and Darwin’s survival of the fittest by applying eugenics and an extermination programme. They also took ideas from the Church! Unfortunately, the Nazis were not alone in this idea of “sorting” humanity for the purpose of improving it. If the life of each human being, even of the most sick or handicapped or deformed, is precious in the sight of God, we are called to love and care for all with compassion and empathy.

Is God a sadistic psychopath or the loving God we believe him to be?

Everlasting hell has been a tenet of orthodox Christianity for centuries. Being damned (presumably on account of dying in mortal sin) would mean being sent to hell, and being in hell was to exist in unspeakable torments which would never come to an end. Is this doctrine taught explicitly by Christ or the Scriptures? If so, the notion of salvation (σωτηρία) takes on a narrow meaning and shapes the entire spiritual life of Christians in a negative way.

Would there be any point to Christianity if there were not this idea of endless and hopeless punishment after death? Would anyone bother with the discipline of a religious life? I think some would on the basis of their faith being about love of God, other humans and all creation rather than “getting out of what we deserve” and getting our ticket out of jail – and literally to hell with everyone else.

The notion of eternal or endless hell, and the notion of salvation it spawns, is largely responsible for creating the prejudice many people have against Christianity. It licences those who believe themselves to be the just and the owners of truth to do the sorting and the judging. Which souls are lost and which ones are the “saved”? We all tend to assume we belong to the latter category, as nasty things “only happen to other people”.

Now, I think most of us have observed terrible things in this life, and especially when we are confronted sometimes with very evil people. For example, we occasionally see documentaries about serial child rapist / killers and hear them from behind a thick glass window in the death row visiting area. We see the image of the evil psychopath, a ruined and empty soul, a mystery of “there but for the grace of God go I”. How does a parent deal with a child who has ruined his life with drugs? What happens when some of us make wrong choices, and are stuck with them all our lives? Are some people intended to be wasted, and to what end? Will they be dissipated like the souls of millions of slaughtered pigs into non-existence? Can God recycle the waste? The only answer is that we don’t know.

It seems obvious that we reap what we sow, and that those who are evil will not be rewarded. I accord credibility to attempts to understand things in a wider way than the vision of conservative Christianity. Namely, the eastern religions have a notion of karma, reaping what we sow. There seems to be a relationship of cause and effect. Outside of Christian churches, there are testimonies of near-death experiences, experiences of mediums and persons with special psychic gifts, apparitions of spirits including those recognised by the Church to be saints, various means of communicating with the dead and channelling. The messages essentially relate a number of constants.

The first is that we all survive physical death. The body dies, but we are still aware and are capable of experience. This is the belief of every culture and religious belief. Over the past hundred years, men of science have sought to provide us with empirical evidence of our personalities surviving physical death. Many such sources seem to be highly credible, even to the open-minded sceptic. Their discoveries often concord with what various religions including Christianity teach. The most impressive testimonies come from direct voice mediums: during a séance, with precautions taken against fraud, ectoplasm emerges from some part of the medium’s body, often with an appearance of cheesecloth. If what happens is truly above suspicion of fraud, in theory, a spirit uses the ectoplasm as a kind of “interface” to make speech possible. Some manifestations of this kind are obviously fake (what looks like cheesecloth is cheesecloth), but others escape such hasty judgement.

I will not go any further into the technical questions of eliminating fraud, but will rather refer the reader to Victor Zammit’s Afterlife Evidence. My concern here is to ascertain what is generally believed about what happens when we die. The general consensus is that a wider vision of the afterlife emerges than what is taught by churches, an incredibly beautiful picture of the afterlife and higher dimensions of life.

What emerges is that our survival of death does not depend on our beliefs or assent to particular teachings. The body dies and decomposes, unless it is destroyed in some other way, and we go with our mind, our experience of life, our personality and an etheric body that emerged from the physical body. Our experience after death will be just as “real” as what we experience now.

Quantum physics have gone some way towards rationalising it for us, comparing spheres and planes of existence to different radio frequencies or multiverses. Like the radio waves, these levels vibrate at different frequencies. Our life after death would be lived at the same frequency as during our present life. Most ordinary and decent people would go to a “summerland”, a “third” sphere. The higher spheres are too beautiful even to imagine. The lower spheres are described as dark and foul places. There is a continuum of light and darkness as the vibrations are higher or lower.

The lower spheres have a considerable amount in common with the idea of hell, except that no soul is without hope. A soul may leave those spheres through learning kindness and unselfishness. Our transition may be lived very differently according to whether we are healthy or sick, conscious or unconscious, burdened with closed-minded beliefs and ideologies or having gone through life with an open and positive mind. We are generally informed that we assume a form corresponding with our prime of life, early to mid twenties. We would be reunited with those we have loved, and even with our pet dogs and cats, any animal with which a human can have some kind of relationship.

According to the testimonies, being an atheist would make no difference to how one fares through death, nor would the fact of having been baptised or believed in the doctrines of Christianity. There is a notion of judgement and a review of life, like the popular idea of a drowning person seeing his whole life go by in an instant. We experience our thoughts and acts and the consequences they had on others. We are our own judges, and probably this judgement would be more severe and searching than any other. Guardian angels are often called guides, and not always spirits who never had a body but also those we have loved. Communication with people on earth is through telepathy and psychic medium gifts.

In the afterlife, we would not be limited by the constraints of our bodies. We would no longer suffer from sickness or accidents. We would travel without need of vehicles like trains, boats, cars and aircraft. We would think a thought, and we would be there in a flash. Some “get stuck” and refuse to believe they have died, and are afraid of going where they are called. They become ghosts in haunted places, poltergeists, lost souls in need of spiritual help. We would not need food.

Some testimonies speak of details like places, colours, scenery and even buildings. Such would be manifestations of our thoughts. Think of Michael Crichton’s Sphere. Some tell us that we would continue to be able to go sailing, playing a musical instrument, read or whatever we like. We would be taught to progress higher towards God and the Light, and experience greater beauty, and we would be able to teach and help others. We could even do rescue work, helping souls in their transitus and helping the “damned” to emerge from their horrible places to know something higher and better.

What we learn is less a revelation of Christianity but a consensus of the whole of humanity in our different cultures and beliefs, our personalities and degrees of empathy with others. Unconditional love is the universal condition. If we go down to the dark spheres, it would be on account of our low spiritual level here on earth. Evil attracts evil as effect follows cause. But, no soul is left entirely without hope.

We reap what we sow. According to the law of cause and effect, we don’t get away with anything bad we have done. God may be merciful, but the price of evil has to be paid to the last penny. The worst crimes, other than murder and what the Nazis did, for example, are abuse of power and oppression, organised crime and complete disregard of suffering one caused for profit. Obedience to evil orders would not reduce guilt. Any form of cruelty is karmic. Strong addiction to drugs, gambling, sex, etc. would trap souls in “intermediate places”.

What about deathbed conversions, or the serial killer about to hang for his atrocities thinking a last-moment confession will get him off scot-free, above all if the “repentance” is a mere “formality”? Much of what we hear and read is just about what we read in the Gospel, but also in other spiritual writings and revelations. Our will is free, and we are responsible for what we do and get for what we have done. No one is without hope. Someone like Hitler may be in dire straits for longer than we would want to imagine, but even the Devil himself would finally find redemption and the Light. That was the opinion of Origen in Contra Celsum 4.99 and Peri Archon 3.6.5. Gregory of Nyssa was bolder than Origen, saying that “the originator of evil himself will be healed” in Catechetical Orations 26.

What seems to be presented is not a simple three-way schema, but a continuum from the highest to the lowest spheres, and that those in the lowest spheres have hope of redemption and better things, but this hope would depend on their own will and changed intentions.

What is the most repulsive in some Christian traditions is the notion according to which hell is eternal, endless, absolutely hopeless and the lot of the majority of humans who ever lived. These doctrines of endless hell and predestination remain alive in spite of the Enlightenment and theological modernism. Many of us are to some extent influenced by this notion of a “Nazi” god and the ultimate concentration camp! The idea of gods as tormentors is very old. The doctrine of endless torment is held, not only by the Fundamentalists, but also by most of mainstream Christianity, even when the language is more measured.

The Church has gone to great pains to describe the “ultimate concentration camp”: dark and dank dungeons, torture chambers, fires, total isolation of souls in “solitary confinement”. The whole idea is modelled on what mankind does to mankind for punishment. We read about God’s vengeance having to be satisfied.

Over the past few centuries, the Roman Catholic Church has made efforts to temper the extreme opinions concerning the “fewness of the saved” and the rigorism of Jansenists and other Augustinian-influenced ideas. In spite of Fr Feeney in the twentieth century, the Church would seek to be optimistic about non-Christians and other unevangelised persons and peoples by notions of baptism of desire, baptism of blood and invincible ignorance. The rigorists would object to these “liberal” notions, and the results are seen in what some people write on blogs in the name of Christianity. Limbo was invented to soften the blow for unbaptised babies who died. Limbo is said to be a part of hell, but without the tortures! It would be a kind of “natural” existence separate from God. Pope Benedict XVI, an intellectual trying to be honest, quietly did away with it.

Another revolting idea we find here and there, including St Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian, is the Schadenfreude of the blessed on contemplating the damned. Tertullian joined a rigorist sect called the Montanists. It can be argued that people who lived in those days (second and thirteenth centuries) enjoyed watching executions and other atrocities, and that continued to the last public guillotining in France outside the prison of Versailles in 1939, attended by thousands of spectators to the scandal of modern public opinion. Do we find such inclinations in the Christ of the Gospels, or the Beatitutdes?

There are images of the lower realms from throughout history, which concord perfectly with more modern revelations, especially a notion of thick darkness and horror. Purgatory, which is little other than a “temporary hell” is defined as being near hell or a part of hell. There we find a notion of continuum. The middle-ages and modern times are full of recurring imagery, typically of medieval torture and human sadism. Saint Ignatius of Loyola asks us to imagine hell with the same imagery.

In more modern spiritual literature, we find an attempt to “spiritualise” hell to make it more credible as civil law had moved away from hanging drawing and quartering, boiling in oil and other such “delights” to mere imprisonment or “humane execution” for serious infringements of the law. The Council of Trent and more recent spiritual writers, including Newman, tried to bring out the idea that the worst thing about hell was the spiritual and mental pain of definitive separation from God. It was an improvement that would make the notion of “salvation” less materialistic than in the days when you could buy grace for money! In the end, material or spiritual, the bitterness of the idea of endless hell remained.

Was hell invented to keep people in obedient service of the Church? Was the Church made more meaningful as a means of helping souls to escape hell? The situation is quite confused and confusing. One of the greatest stumbling blocks is Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. I have already mentioned Feeney and his rigorism, the refusal of the “baptisms” of desire and blood. The universal spiritual tradition removes baptism as a condition for a happy afterlife. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus is the motivation for the missions, Christian imperialism and forced conversions of non-European and non-Jewish cultures. Making people become Christians becomes an imperative, the only way to save them from the “concentration camp”.

In the medieval west, the excommunicate shared the fate of the unbaptised. They were deprived of the Sacraments and buried like dogs when they died. When the French singer Edith Piaf died in the 1960’s, the Church refused her a Christian burial.

One of the most revolting ideas put about is the “fewness of the saved”. According to this idea, whatever you do, most of humanity is predestined for the torture chamber and the meat grinder. St Thomas Aquinas spoke of the saved as aliquos and the damned as plurimos. The French Jansenists were particularly notorious for this idea, but they weren’t the only ones.

Purgatory is an attempt to mitigate the hopelessness of hell, until it is seen that it is the lot of the few who “scrape through” leaving nearly all of humanity in the “endless” department. It gave uncertainty, and more power to the Church to offer “special deals” on certain conditions – usually money whilst avoiding the obvious trap of simony. Purgatory is a device to justify the idea according to which no conversion is possible after death. Mortal sin is extended to missing Mass on Sunday or eating meat on Fridays. Purgatory is only possible to deal with venial sins. The Tridentine Church saw purgatory very much in terms of penal justice and commerce, and other Churches would see a more medicinal analogy, purgatory as a hospital rather than a prison and whipping post.

The idea of endless hell after death would inevitably find its extension on earth and in the Church. The old method of putting people to death by burning at the stake is an obvious imitation of the hell image. Thus, force and persecution were used against heretics and schismatics. The persecution of the Albigenses in 1207 under Innocent III resulted in the deaths of as many as 20,000 men, women, and children. Their cities and homes were looted and burned. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people perished in this way. Torture was developed into a fine art by the Inquisition, imitated in the twentieth century by the Gestapo and the KGB. Torture was also an image of hell extended into the present life. It is interesting to learn that those most opposed to torture in Europe were the philosophers of the Enlightenment, not the Church.

Such a system of extending hell into this life would justify the worst cruelty and oppression. On a different scale, it exists on the internet, absolving some people from the usual courtesies of life to which they are bound. Cruelty becomes possible without offending against the rules of morality! It is the whole issue of vindictive punishment – the death penalty, torture and life imprisonment without parole, or in the Church, the notion of perpetual canonical irregularities. Get rid of hell, and especially hell being other people, and you get rid of these problems – provided you don’t replace one hell by another. There’s the rub…

It would only be a short step to clerics expecting salvation for themselves and hell for the rest – just as long as they have paid!!!

The antidote to hell is Universalism, hope for all. Modern man has seen through the agenda of endless hell – a tool of manipulation and cruelty masquerading as zeal and missionary virtue. Unlike enlightened souls of the nineteenth century, the grandparents of my generation lived as adults through World War II and the annihilation of much of Europe. Nazism was the reduction ad absurdam of what endless hell made of the Church. We have seen how far it can go! This is not an example of Godwin’s Law, my seeing an Obergruppenführer behind everything, but rather the fact that Nazism merely imitated a much greater pre-existing evil.

The question is always there – how can Christ be an example of gentleness and kindness and be the Son of someone who would inflict unspeakable tortures on the majority of humanity? How is such possible without a view to good, merely out of a motive of justice? There are many passages in the Gospel that seem to threaten eternal hell, but such is totally opposed to the message of the Beatitudes. Even the Old Testament seems to outbursts of Jewish apocalyptic poetry which can be criticised by those who are more versed in biblical studies than I am. Many people ask how the anomalies of a loving God committing atrocities can be understood.

Another reason for eternal punishment was to give the clergy unlimited power. The clergy claimed delegation from God, and even the power to correct the work of Christ in the words of the Great Inquisitor. Make the laity believe in excommunication and hell and your power over them is complete. The people become self-policing. Mankind’s freedom would only be saved by scepticism expressing itself in humour, parody and satire. It is not without accident that I have taken some inspiration from the Goliards.

Now, do we go to the other extreme and claim the absence of any moral imperative with the usual conservative parody of Universalism? The testimonies of near-death experiences and communications with the dead clearly manifest the truth of evil people not escaping the consequences of their acts. Surely, the SS man who put women and children in gas chambers and killed for pleasure, on the day he went to the gallows, could not expect to be enjoying the Beatific Vision with the Mother of God! On the other hand, the worst sinner can never be totally without any hope if repentance and empathy enter the picture, yes – a posthumous conversion.

I will not go into the vast subject of biblical studies of the notions of hell and salvation. In the history of the Church, Greek words have been badly translated into Latin. For example, μετανοεῖν has been translated as facere paenitentiam, to do penance. A more precise concept is thinking again, changing our mind, becoming something new. Something spiritual and constructive enters the picture. This is just a little example of modern biblical criticism, just by doing a proper job on the translation! Such an approach now casts ideas like damnation in a new light. I ask the reader to consult more specialised sources to go further into the question of biblical exegesis.

I should however stop a moment to discuss the notion of eternal, everlasting or endless hell. The Greek terms used in the Scriptures rather mean a long time, as in aeon, rather than truly without end. Notions of quantity in the Bible, even precise numbers, are symbolic, a figure of speech. It is argued that there is no Greek word to convey the notion of endlessness, but there are as used in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The subject is so vast, and is hardly uncharted territory. I can only recommend the work of the finest biblical scholars of the twentieth century, and certain certitudes may become a little more rounded out.

Christ himself used the analogy of medicine and the healing of the sick rather than the punishment of infringements. Goodness exists by its own merit and does not depend on punishment. We can see biblical texts that seem to threaten punishment as poetic apocalyptic language. Christ went about doing good. We suffer pain, but pain is not a punishment but a signal, nature’s way of educating us. If we are in pain, it means that we have a medical problem. The doctor’s first question is – Where does it hurt the most? That is his diagnostic tool. Pain is for our good, not to destroy us. What perversion to use pain as a punishment! Christ forgave sins and healed sicknesses. Christ taught us that sins are not dealt with by retribution. Such and such a sin costs such and such a punishment. Conversion is by change of mind and obtaining forgiveness. Never ever in the Gospel is there any sign of Jesus inflicting punishment. Sin can be put away only by love, as light dispels darkness.

These days, most Christians have evolved, unless they suffered from such blockage due to the question of endless punishment that their only option was to reject Christianity root and branch. Human suffering is something in which Christ shares and takes upon himself.

As earlier I mentioned an extension of the more revolting views of salvation and hell, I end this short article by a reflection of that small part of the ecclesiastical “elect”, the clergy. In most mainstream churches the priesthood is made up of a very small elite of men who are considered to be good enough to merit being financially supported by the laity. I have for a time thought in terms of the priesthood being open to the many rather than the few. Such an idea could go beyond limits that any of us could accept, and this is the difficulty. Maybe, there too, there is a continuum rather than an either/or choice between the ultra-elite priesthood as is developing again in the Roman Catholic Church like in the sixteenth century and the free-for-all open to the worst abuses.

In the question of the priesthood or the future of us all beyond death, there is one idea I would like to put out, that of an all-inclusive continuum of levels of spiritual development and love of God and neighbour. With such a consideration, I would consign hell to its own trash-can and offer Christ’s love and tenderness to draw all saints and sinners to his presence. Finally, what is the Church for, once hell is gone? From being one giant concentration camp of hatred she becomes the school of the Lord’s love and the hospital where we all go with our pain, our sins, our deformities, sickness and misery – for all to be transfigured by the love of Christ.

These are hard words, but they have to be said.

• For further reading, here is a list of articles – which I cannot endorse not having read them all, but they appear to be interesting.
• Here is also an extremely interesting pdf book by Percy Dearmer. I find the theological depth and biblical exegesis remarkable, though it all needs to be checked out.
• Also read The Astral Plane – The Dark Plane, which is really fascinating though a little New Age and cranky in places.
• Apocatastasis, reconstitution, restitution, or restoration to the original or primordial condition.
• I also give this link on Calvinist Predestination as an extreme interpretation of St Augustine’s theology as contrasted with Universalism.

I tend to be more sympathetic towards Universalism whilst being careful to express a belief that there is indeed something very nasty after death for evil people. No wicked deed or intention goes without its reward. Modern science tends to doubt the notion of time, and that we already experience what we believe to be time in a very subjective way. For example, ten minutes waiting in a queue goes much more slowly than when doing something enjoyable. A belief that all may go to God eventually, however “long” it takes, in no way incites us to the sin of presumption or indifference. Cause follows effect, and if we have been evil in this world, we will reap what we have sown, and the “place” will be just as nasty as any medieval torture chamber or horror we could imagine in the dark recesses of our minds.

We have all the more need of the prayers of the faithful and the love of God. I wept this morning as I celebrated Requiem Mass for the victims of the Occupation from 1940 to 1944, as I remembered a visit about fifteen years ago to Oradour sur Glane. You go there and you will feel it, even 68 years after the horror.

Even the distinction between time and eternity is unclear – The Illusion of Time – so the question of whether there is an end to hell or not is relative. So, I will ask that there be no “apologetics” comments beyond references to sites showing different perspectives on the question.