Hell
What is Hell? In discussions on the nature of Hell and whether it is just or unjust, this is often the crux; a universalist is open to a conception of Hell that is “escapist,” while non-universalists are committed to a conception of Hell that implies a permanent, unescapable fate. Atheists and agnostics alike find the idea of Hell in conjunction with a God who is supposedly omnibenevolent repulsive and often make a point of it in polemics. I am of the view that the idea of Hell is in fact a profitable idea, that it helps to illumine the extent to which man truly has free will. I believe it is best to talk about Hell philosophically, for while Scripture is profitable, a literalist conception of Hell, while perhaps metaphorically accurate, as spoken about in Scripture doesn’t appear to offer a succinct definition and idea of Hell.
The first and most important thing to consider of Hell is that is not Heaven. According to Anselm, God is the maximally perfect being, and so if good comes from God (specifically His omnibenevolence), evil does not. Evil, since it doesn’t come from God, but exists, is that which is a corruption or privation of that which is good. Things that are evil can only exist where there is a good for it to corrupt. For instance, lying is the unjustified withholding of the truth, a distortion of reality. Truth on the other hand is simply that which corresponds to reality; truth is not a privation of falsity, but rather falsity a privation of truth. There is no original evil.
Thus, Hell can only be understood as an antithesis of Heaven. Since my idea in this essay is to present a rational understanding of Hell and its meaning, I will have to develop the idea of Heaven.
I am of the view that whatever exists positively (in an additive sense, not a good/evil sense) exists insofar as it compares to God, who is the fount of all that exists. Since God is absolutely logical, He could not create something in antithesis to Himself, so everything that He creates would be comparable to Him, there being nothing created that doesn’t compare to Him. This is not say that God compares to what He creates, but only that what He creates is comparable to Him. So, the very idea of being and existence are fundamentally something insofar as they compare to the “existence” and “being” of God. God, who is being, creates what we perceive and recognize to be being. Something can only be understood as comparable to God in this way. God is “wholly other,” but only in the sense that we cannot truly compare God to everything we perceive around us except through metaphor.
So, if I were to posit there actually exists such a thing universally recognized as Beauty, then this only actually exists in the world insofar as it compares to the Beauty that is God. It is the same with every immanent and transcendental thing; from being and existence to logic and good. It is the Good that I am primarily interested in here.
Since we posit that there is good, there is only good because it comes from God. There is nothing that exists that does not come from God; evil in this sense is not a “thing” because it is a privation of good. As there can only be evil if there is good (like earlier discussed), then there can only be Hell if there is Heaven.
If Heaven then is the ideal state for man, which is synonymous with God’s created intent for man, Hell only exists insofar as it is a privation of Heaven. It is the not-ideal state for man, it is in flat contradiction to God’s intent. As God is omnibenevolent, His intent will be for the best of His creation, and so by nature and the nature of God the best state, or ideal state, will always be in every possible world a perfect eternal communion with God. This is what Heaven is. Hell, then, is an eternal separation from God. If this separation isn’t eternal, it isn’t Hell.
As this is a philosophical definition arrived at without support from Scripture, we cannot yet be so bold as to identify this conception of Hell with the Hell spoken of in Scripture. Whether Hades and/or Gehenna are synonymous with this conception of Hell is to be seen. At the very least, however, it is established that Hell is a rational concept which can be understood and meaningfully discussed.
The next question then is “Why would there be Hell?” This again can only be answered by understanding Heaven.
Heaven, as being a perfect communion with God, implies a relationship of I-Thou. A relationship between an I-It is not meaningful, for the It can never return my love or appreciation in any way, because the It has no ability of being a person. For instance, my relationship with this laptop which I write this essay on is strictly I-It; as emotionally or mentally moved I may be by its being lost or broken, if I were to have a great loss, even if I died, this laptop, not even in one single atom that composes it, would have the least of sympathy, because it is simply incapable of such an act, being entirely impersonal. Hence, a communion, by implying relationship, only meaningfully exists between two or more persons. A communion between myself and a book is not in any way actually meaningful. Heaven then is only possible for persons outside of God, but not for chairs, lamps, or stars.
Further implicated by relationship is free will; if another person with whom I think I have a relationship with is not acting under their own free will, then we do not truly have a relationship. It could appear like a relationship based upon what we experience as a relationship, but the substance of what defines a relationship, mutual free will, lacking, would annihilate there being any possibility of a relationship. If I am not free of myself to choose to form a relationship with another person or not, then I cannot form a relationship. If I am just an automata who can only have the appearance of having a relationship, I cannot have a relationship. Free will is absolutely necessary for a relationship and communion.
Therefore, there can only be a Heaven if there are persons outside of God who can of their own free will choose to accept communion with God. If I am not free to accept God’s invitation, then it is not Heaven; also, if I am not free to reject God’s invitation, it is again not Heaven. There can only be the façade of Heaven, but that it is all it could be.
Now Hell, being the antithesis of Heaven, would be understood in this way to a human; since Heaven is the freely accepted perfect eternal communion with God, Hell is the freely chosen eternal separation from God. This doesn’t yet establish that there necessarily must be the possibility of Hell, but it further develops an idea of what Hell necessarily would be understood as. The question “Why Hell?” is answered, though; Hell is a person’s choice to reject God. If there wasn’t a Hell to choose, there wouldn’t be a Heaven to have.
The next question to consider in developing a conception of Hell is “Is Hell in the Biblical sense eternal?”
I think this question can be answered teleologically. If God was going to force me to make the choice an infinite amount of times whether or not I would accept or reject God without allowing me to remain confirmed in my initial choice, then necessarily I will be saved. Hence, teleologically, I have no free will to reject God. Since I would have no free will to reject God ultimately, then, because Heaven can only be Heaven if its chosen out of my free will. This seems to not make sense prima facie, but allow me to fill in a crucial detail.
If I were to truly have free will, it may not matter whether or not I can choose to have brown hair or blond hair, whether I can choose to buy a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla, it would only really matter whether I could choose to accept or reject God. In the end, the only choice that will really matter is our acceptance or rejection of God.
If this choice can only be made based on God’s continuing to offer us the choice, then it is not yet a rejection of God if I am still offered the choice. My ultimate decision will rest on one of two things; either I accept the invitation and am fulfilled such that I am confirmed in my decision, or I reject the invitation such that I am no longer offered the invitation. We are given the free will to determine whether or not God will continue to extend His mercy and grace. If I was not free to choose for God to quit extending Himself to me, then I was never really free to accept Him, because I had no way to reject God. Hell in this way becomes God giving us precisely what a person would choose in rejecting God; the absence of God, as implied by separation. After God has been made absent, then if God were to once again force Himself on us after this decision has been made, He is essentially breaking our free will, and a broken free will cannot appreciate Heaven. A person with a broken free will is nothing more than an automata.
Thus, a person in Hell is trapped within themselves, since even God couldn’t break in without making any grace He would extend to them moot, since the only meaningful grace is that which is extended to a person who can freely accept or reject it. Its a matter of logic at this point. The idea that God should be able to rescue people form this Hell is thus a matter of misunderstanding, a pretending the nature of God and free will is other than it is. It is thus established that Hell is a necessary possibility, and that the Biblical Hell can only be such a Hell as philosophically determined. If not, then the God of the Bible cannot be the God who truly exists.
The last question to consider is “Is there suffering in Hell?”
I think the answer is rightly yes, but not because the suffering of Hell is something that is positively inflicted, rather because it is God letting people who reject Him have exactly what they wish, and they find it to be unfulfilling in every possible way. It would be impossible for a person to exist eternally without eventually coming to a knowledge of what they rejected in choosing themselves over God. Thus, their suffering happens because they have caused it upon themselves, but they will choose to have this suffering over letting God rescue them (for the reason listed about about teleological free will). In fact, this may even be a matter of mercy, for certainly the person who has rejected God would find it worse to be within the presence of God than to be without, for they should find it to be everything possibly objectionable, since they have spited very existence itself.
Further circumstances of suffering may be involved in that, by having been cut off from God, persons find themselves in a situation they weren’t created for, nor could they have been possibly created for. As it was God’s intent for them to be in His presence, then they should find God’s non-presence unsuitable to them just as one might find the surface of the sun very unsuitable, because their body is suited for the temperature ranges found on earth.
Another possibility is that pain is caused in trying to escape God’s presence, since hypothetically the question of whether God, if He is omnipresent, is found in God. The Orthodox conception of Hell places it in the same presence of God and the Saints, except that people find it unsuitable because they have decided they do not like God, especially not His presence. I am wary of this particular conception, however, since I have already defined Hell as being a separation from God.
Like the Orthodox conception, though, is the idea that Hell is the attempt to escape God’s presence through continually diminishing and approaching non-being, and this is found unsuitable to the person for the reasons listed above.
Thus, I think the most probable explanation for suffering in Hell is that it is unsuitable to us by the fact of what we were intended for by God.
Final objections to Hell can be easily refuted by the application of the conception of Hell I’ve just developed here. It doesn’t make sense for God to not offer the possibility of Hell, because that would make the notion of Heaven meaningless since we wouldn’t be free to reject it ultimately. That God shouldn’t let people have exactly what they’ve chosen seems a very unjust idea, as the question we shall be asked on judgment day is not “Heaven or Hell?” but “You or Me?” We are free to choose ourselves or God.
A last question worth considering has not to do with the conception of Hell but about those in Heaven. Certainly we shall not lose our knowledge of those people who we discover are in Hell. The question then is “How shall people in Heaven be able to enjoy Heaven knowing the suffering of people in Hell?”
I am confident the question is not for the same reasons as Jonathan Edwards imagined, as if we shall be happy in the glory of God’s justice inflicting His wrath upon those sinners He decided not to save. However, I believe there may be some value to this idea, not in conjunction with Edwards’ conception of Hell, free will, and election, but with my own; those in Heaven shall be content in God’s absolute justice by letting people have exactly what they want. If we shall not be content with God’s letting them have their choice to reject Him (and the Saints, by extension), then we allow Hell a veto to the idea of Heaven, a divine extortion by the damned against God that would disallow Heaven to be a Paradise.
To some universalists, this is exactly why God must save all people, but I think the universalists are in fact in this way just selfish. They care more about their own wish for all to be saved than for each person to have the free will to accept or reject God. In this way universalists, as noble as they might appear, are as bad as the Calvinists who also don’t allow people the free will to accept or reject God (but don’t think I favor Arminianism).
On the other hand, I would support the speculation of a weak universalism. In comparison to your typical universalists who says that all will be saved, a weak universalist could say that all might be saved, and the only thing that prevents us from being a strong universalist, at least now, is our epistemological ability to know the fate of those on the other side of time. Hans Urs von Balthasar forwarded this view, and though it is highly controversial, it is still a speculative possibility to the extent that the Church cannot speak infallibly on whether or not any single person has been damned, only as to whether a person has been saved as revealed by God. The reply that it would seem Judas has been damned because Jesus said “It would have been better for this person to not be born” is tempered by the knowledge that Judas partook of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, which certainly outweighs Hell if we consider God infinitely great and anything evil without the ability to overcome Him.
To summarize, it has been developed in this essay that Heaven is a freely chosen eternal perfect communion with God as chosen by a person according to the rule of I-Thou/I-It, and that Hell, being the antithesis of Heaven, is a necessary possibility if Heaven is to be a possibility, as a freely chosen eternal separation from God in which the damned are trapped within themselves and cannot be saved by the nature of this choice.
This essay thus establishes that there is a rational way to go about conceiving Hell and discussing it, and that Hell is not contradictory to the existence of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God.
