WHAT IS HELL?
La Carte de l’Enfer (Map of Hell) by Sandro Botticelli, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
One of the most significant questions that people ask about Christianity goes something like this: “Why would a loving God condemn people to a place of torment and suffering for all eternity?” It’s a good question, one that Christians have and should continue to grapple with. In this article, I’d like to stress a few things I’ve come to believe about Hell that have helped me to answer these types of questions. One is that Hell is the state of a human soul after death that is continuous with one’s earthly existence; it represents the final destination of a human heart that has built up immense and ultimately immovable defenses against God’s love for the duration of a person’s life. And the second is a corollary to the first: that Hell is therefore very hard to get into. Our hearts were made for Love, molded and shaped in the Divine Image from the beginning; and while we all move toward and away from that Love throughout the course of our lives, to reject it wholly, ultimately, and finally would require a lifetime’s worth of deliberate, conscious, and tragic rejections of the essence of our very humanity.
The best thing that ever happened to my relationship with Hell was teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy to sophomore college students. Up until that point, I had walked a meandering road in my understanding of Hell. As a young Baptist, I was terrified of Hell, and I understood it to be a place of conscious eternal torment that was visited on everyone who did not consciously pray to accept Jesus into their heart as Lord and Savior. In that sense, my understanding of Hell was of a terrifying future prospect, something that I wanted to avoid happening to me, and something that I wanted to help prevent from happening to others. It was the default human condition: without that single moment of powerful conversion, it would happen to everyone on the planet. Thus, a great sense of urgency animated me and those around me, as we, of course, would do anything we could to help save the world from this horrible fate.
The relationship of Hell to this earthly existence, however, is something I hadn’t really considered until Dante. In the most famous of the three sections of the Divine Comedy known as “Inferno,” or Hell, Dante offers a glimpse of the attitudes and perverse moral reasoning of those who walk among the damned, placing many of his contemporaries there in order to make his illustrations relevant and vivid to his immediate audience. But what struck me as I started to teach the poem, and what continues to inform my understanding of Hell so deeply, is that Dante makes Hell a reflection of the perverse and sinful ways of the earthly city: both of his own literal earthly city, Florence, as well as the “Earthly City” we all inhabit.
Hell, in this understanding, is all around us, right under our feet, an impulse toward which we see much of the world around us hurling at breakneck speed. It is the violation of Jesus’s summary of the Jewish Law that we find in the Gospels: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength . . . [and] ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31)
From this summary, we understand that there are three things to be loved in this world: God, our neighbor, and our selves. And all sin, all evil, all hellish impulses in the world flow from the myriad ways we continue to violate the love of God, the love of our neighbor, and the love of our selves. We learn, too, that these loves are inextricably tied to one another, a three-fold cord that, if we pull on one thread, begins to unravel the whole thing. When we fail to love our neighbor, for example, we diminish our love of God and our own soul. Or when we harm our selves, we are helping to destroy the image of God implanted in the deepest part of our being.
The Christian life is meant to be a cycle of sin, repentance, and forgiveness. As the bumper sticker I grew up with said, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” But what Dante shows us, and my own life’s experiences have confirmed, is that sin can fester like an infection deep in the body that goes undetected for years, until the infection spreads, threatening other systems of the body and even leading to its ultimate demise.
The warning against Hell that Dante provides is not the simple remedy of a one-time prayer that might save us from the fires of eternal damnation. It is much more along the lines of what God says to Cain in Genesis 4:7: “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”
The fourteenth-century saint Catherine of Siena said that “all the way to heaven is heaven.” Living in the light of God’s love and practicing love toward God, our neighbor, and our selves gives us a real foretaste of heavenly joy. We can live a heavenly existence now, even in the midst of pain and suffering, if we dedicate ourselves to the daily practices of the Christian life: prayer, works of mercy, kindness, the fruits of the Spirit.
But if sin is crouching at the door, we must always be wary, because perhaps the converse of Catherine’s dictum is also true, as I think Dante implied: all the way to Hell is Hell. When we let down our guard, when we stop being vigilant defenders in our own souls of the love of God, we begin to allow that infection of sin to creep in. And once the first cells start to multiply, they become more and more effective in spreading our own resistance to the love of God, our neighbor, and our selves.
What if that resistance becomes permanent? What if the infection goes unchecked? This is a phenomenon the Bible calls “hardness of heart,” or what Dante calls “the loss of the Good of the Intellect.” This is the state of damnation, the place where we have built up such a fortress in our own hearts that no ray of the light of God’s love can penetrate it anymore. In other words, what if it were possible to lose the ability to love? What if it were possible to lose the ability to be loved? Even to the point, ultimately, that someone could reject love forever, be totally closed off to even the smallest gesture of compassion and mercy?
Sin is whatever kills; sin is what leads to death. And yet, all too often, we choose things that lead to death. The message of salvation that Christianity offers is a way out of this conundrum, a way for God to transform our wills so that we don’t choose the things that are killing us. God enables us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to choose the things that bring life rather than death. Like a parent who forbids a child from playing on a construction site, attractive though the prospect may be to that child, God transforms our hearts so that we can learn to avoid the things that will hurt us, even though our tendency may still be to choose those things at times.
Hell represents the ultimate rejection of that Divine parental love. It represents the culmination of a lifetime of choices that pull someone farther and farther away from the love that wants to preserve our souls and bodies. When Dante says that the inscription to Hell says “Abandon all hope, you who enter here,” I believe he is drawing a picture of what happens to the soul that desires to be so free of the responsibility of being human—the responsibility of Love—that it actively chooses the things that kill the body and the soul, the things that bring death, not life.
To such a soul, all hope has already been abandoned. To such a soul, the light of God’s love appears as judgment, as pain, even as torture. This is what JRR Tolkien tries to show in the Lord of the Rings trilogy through the character of Gollum: a soul that has been twisted and turned completely around, that has lost the ability to choose goodness, a soul utterly consumed by a perverse and false notion of “freedom,” a soul whose desire is single-minded for the thing that is killing him. Thus Hell is the final embrace of our perverse and twisted ideas of human “freedom.”
We do fear Hell, as Christians, but not because we believe that it is our default destiny. Neither is it because we believe that a vindictive God takes pleasure in the eternal punishment of souls that neglected to pray a certain prayer, or to go to church regularly, or any of the other nugatory things that the popular imagination might see as reasons that someone would go to Hell. We fear Hell because we know what such a state would represent, and what it would mean for our selves and for the world around us. We fear Hell because, as Dante showed in the Divine Comedy, the hellish city is full of those who have lost the ability to love, and such a city is truly Hell on Earth. We fear Hell because we don’t ever want to lose the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through Jesus Christ.
Thankfully, Christianity tells us that Hell is hard to achieve. God’s love is overpowering and compelling beyond anything we can imagine. Our souls long to be part of that Love, to be drawn into it in this life and the next. Love is stronger than Death (Song of Songs 8:6), and eternal Love is stronger than eternal Death. This is why the Church does not state with certainty that any particular soul is definitively and eternally damned. (Dante’s work, of course, was an imaginative exploration of Hell, not a theological treatise itself.) What happens after death in the course of Eternity is for God and God alone to know, to determine, and to work out according to God’s own mercy and forgiveness (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church 1033-1037).
What remains the work of every Christian in this life is to see Hell for what it is: a bed of lies, pretending and promising “freedom,” but crouching at the door, ready to pounce, full of the things that are killing us. We partner with God in the work of redemption, knowing that the transforming power of God’s love can, and will, always overcome the lies and deceptions of Hell.
