By Maureen McKew
Last summer, Pope John Paul II threw a figurative pail of cold water on
the popular image of hell as a place of unending flame. His statement
followed an article on the subject in La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit
magazine believed to have close ties to the Vatican. The article said that
hell is not a place but a state of being in which a soul suffers from
being deprived of God for all time.
"Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and
definitively separate themselves from God," the Pope told a group of
visitors shortly afterwards. The pontiff went on to say that the "lake of
fire and sulfur" referred to in the Book of Revelation was symbolic.
This set off a brief but intense firestorm, particularly among some
fundamentalist Christians. Other theologians, however, said it was high
time for the notion of a great furnace, with its apparently limitless
supply of fuel, to be updated.
For one thing, classic images of hell, its fires and its denizens have
been trivialized. The evil one himself is popularly portrayed as a little
fellow sporting horns on his head, wearing an outfit that looks
suspiciously like red long underwear, and carrying a pitchfork.
"What the hell," we say to express either mystification or insouciance.
"When hell freezes over" is more colorful way of saying "never." Even
curses, which really are a very dangerous business, have become
commonplace and more acceptable in polite society than many well-known
Anglo-Saxon epithets.
Perhaps these are just ways of keeping one from dealing with the
unthinkable. Reduce the devil to a cartoon character and douse hell with
humor, then they won't scare you so much.
When did hell catch fire?
The Old Testament books say very little about hell. More references to
it appear in the New Testament, especially in the Book of Revelation.
There are scattered mentions in the gospels, too. Matthew's gospel speaks
of a hellish place of fire and torment called Gehenna. (A January article
in U.S. News & World
Report noted that this Gehenna got its name from the Jerusalem city
dump, where garbage was disposed of by burning.)
Some of the early Church fathers also believed that hell was a place of
physical punishment. St. Jerome, who was given to vivid imagery, wrote of
eternal fires. St. Augustine of Hippo, however, taught that hell was a
place of both real pain and separation forever from God.
The Rev. Donald X. Burt, O.S.A., '52, in his book, Augustine's World,
An Introduction to His Speculative Philosophy (University Press of
America, 1996) wrote that Augustine's idea of hell certainly included
fire.
Augustine also believed hell had a sizeable population and warned
people not to risk ending up there.
Yet, as terrible as everlasting fire might be, even worse was
separation from God. It was a second death, as Augustine described it in
The City of God. Unlike physical death, which happens in a second,
this second death was endless.
In the 14th century, an Italian poet joined with the theologians and
philosophers in fanning the flames of hell.
Dante's Inferno offered a terrifying, unforgettable scenario of
damnation. Michelangelo used his talent to paint scenes of hell in the
Sistine Chapel. By the 17th and 18th centuries, many Christian preachers
were regularly terrorizing their congregations with sermons that were
themselves pyrotechnic events.
However, there were exceptions to this view of hell. Theologians and
philosophers believed hell to be a real place, to be sure, but a place
whose real punishment was everlasting separation from God, not fire. This
separation they maintained, was worse than any fire imaginable. Martin
Luther, that old firebrand and spiritual son of Augustine, was of those
thinkers.
In the 20th century, hell's fires began to cool down in people's minds.
For one thing, all the fire-and-brimstone descriptions of hell paled in
comparison to the sight of an atomic bomb detonation or to the photos of
Holocaust victims. Also, in the latter half of the century, particularly
the 1960s and 1970s, the belief that "God is Love" overtook the "God is
just" theory in many people's minds. Polls indicated that a growing number
of people no longer believed in hell.
As the century drew to a close, however, the Roman Catholic Church, in
preparation for the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ,
issued a new Catechism. It restated the existence of hell and its
punishment as a state of everlasting separation from God. This tenet was
the one the pope himself spoke of in 1999.
Who sends souls to hell?
Surely not God? This is a question that has puzzled believers since
before Augustine's time. How could God, who is all love and all good,
consign the highest expression of divine love--humankind--to hell?
Back in the 3rd century, Origen of Alexandria taught that hell was a
place to do time, rather like a penitentiary, and that once a soul was
sufficiently rehabilitated, it went to heaven and the loving God.
Unfortunately for Origen, the Church did not agree, and his view was
held as heretical by the Council of Constantinople in 543.
Origen's theory appeared to ignore the fact that the loving God wants
all souls to be saved; the just God must give human beings a chance to
reap the consequences of their actions.
This is the answer to the question of who actually condemns souls to
damnation: We do it to ourselves.
God doesn't send anyone to hell. Anyone who winds up eternally
separated from God, and the souls of the just, has chosen it. Human beings
who reject God book their own passage to damnation and wind up in a state
of everlasting isolation, sorrow and indescribable regret for having
brought it all on themselves. That's a worse prospect than anything the
most imaginative fire-and-brimstone preachers--or even Dante
himself--could have conjured up.
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