From the Nineteenth Century.

DANTE’S terrible words truly express what was the almost universal belief of Christians for many centuries. The mental agony of despair, in addition to extreme physical torture, was recognized as the inevitable lot of the multitude of lost souls. It was also of the essence of this belief that the agony should be eternal, and known to be eternal by the wretched inmates—the “perduta gente”—of that “citta dolente,” that city of despair.

  But the modern mind has come to feel an abhorrence for beliefs which were viewed with complacency or accepted without difficulty for so many ages. And not only the sentiment of our day, but what we take to be its more highly evolved moral perceptions, are shocked beyond expression at the doctrine that countless multitudes of mankind will burn forever in hell fire, out of which there is no possible redemption. Our experience shows that not a few persons have abandoned Christianity on account of this dogma, which also constitutes the very greatest difficulty for many who desire to obtain a rational religious belief and to accept the Church’s teaching.

  Is, then, the doctrine against which so strong a repugnance is felt really one essential to Christianity; and, if so, can it be a belief reconcilable with right reason, the highest morality, and the greatest benevolence?…

  As to the nature of damnation, there are two affirmations we think it well to quote. One is by an anonymous theologian, who represents it as a necessary result of universal law. He says:—

  In a similar vein Mr. Oxenham asks:—

  Let us now further address ourselves directly to the consideration of what Christian authoritative teaching affirms and permits us to believe with respect to hell. We have already seen how benevolent its teaching is with respect to those who die in a state of mere nature without deliberately committing grave sins the gravity of which they fully recognize.

  Let us imagine a man in perfect health of mind and body, intelligent, amiable, and wealthy, enjoying the universal esteem of all who know him, the devoted affection of his family, the peace of a good conscience, and the happiness of a natural love of and union with God. Let us further suppose that all his wishes are gratified, and that he has a full and certain knowledge that this great felicity will exist unimpaired and be unceasingly enjoyed by him for all eternity. Yet such a being will be in hell. Such at least (according to Catholic teaching) will be the lot of the immense multitude of mankind who, from before the formation of the earliest flint implement to the present day, have died unbaptized and free from deliberate mortal sin, understood to be such. They are subjects, indeed, of the pœna damni, (penalty of loss), but that is no cause of regret to them. Not having had the “light of glory” (i.e., been raised to the order of grace) they have no aptitude or faculty for the supernatural, without which its possession (were it possible) would rather be torture than happiness. Perfectly happy according to their nature, they could no more desire the supernatural state than fishes can desire to become birds, or oysters sigh because they are not butterflies.

  A singular consequence follows from the above consideration. Since the inexpressibly higher condition, according to the Church, carries with it fearful risks and responsibilities, there is, on Church principles, small reason to regret the late advent and limited diffusion of Christianity or the falling away from the Church of masses of Christians. In consequence thereof, the diminution of risk and responsibility to multitudes of mankind—unfavorably placed to fulfill higher claims—is so great, that God alone can know whether the apparent loss is not a real gain.

  As to the nonbaptized who lead abandoned lives knowingly and willingly, their lot must be light indeed, compared with those who, having been called to the higher state, have voluntarily outraged its privileges. And thus we come at last to the one great difficulty, the real crux of the whole matter: what are we to say to the state of baptized Christians who lead bad lives and depart from the world in their sins—what are we to say of them from the Catholic point of view?

  Now, in the first place, we must never forget the mitigating circumstances as regards heredity and environment, to which we have before referred. Multitudes of sins which are “mortal” according to the letter of the Christian code are, owing to such circumstances, but “venial” in fact; so that their perpetrators, if condemned by “law,” must be absolved by “equity.” Secondly, we must also remember what has been already said about the need of advertence and deliberate volition, in order that any sinful act should be a mortal one.

  But those who knowingly and with malice sin mortally and so persist till death, obstinately turning a deaf ear to all good influences, are, the Church tells us, really condemned to hell, there to suffer, not only the state of loss, but the pœna sensus also.

  Nevertheless, their state is declared to be most unequal, and to vary with their demerits. Also the existence of the very worst is felt by him to be preferable to his nonexistence. He does not, like so many poor wretches on earth, even desire the cessation of his being. May we not therefore believe that his suffering is not so great as theirs? It seems also that, in spite of Dante, hope may still be his if a process of evolution does, as some theologians teach, take place in hell.

  But we cannot think that right reason demands the belief that no one in hell suffers severely, even compared with life on earth. For although we may judge no man, and although reason tells us how almost impossible it is for us fairly to judge even ourselves, yet men do seem, now and again, to give evidence of extreme malice and of a positive hatred of God; so that it would ill become us to represent hell as being in no case an object of just fear, nay of prudent, reasonable terror. The poignancy of persistent regret for a misspent past, and for actions to recall which life would be willingly surrendered, are states of mind by no means unknown in our present existence. It may well be that the clearer mental vision of a future day as to what might have been may give rise to a wretchedness which it is beyond our power to imagine.

  But for the multitude of even the positively damned, besides the possible consciousness of their state and the also possible consolations of a hoped-for amelioration, we are not, so far as we know, forbidden to think that as they have by their actions constructed their own hell, they may therein find a certain kind of harmony with their own mental condition. It may be they seek and meet with the society of souls like minded with themselves, and, as it were, together hug their chains, esteeming as preferable these lower mental activities and desires which had been their choice and solace upon earth. We read in the New Testament the words:—

  But to have the will persistently averted from what is best must entail suffering; nor can it be denied that (according to the teaching of the Church) some positive suffering will never cease for those who have voluntarily and deliberately cast away from them their supreme beatitude.

  The reader will naturally ask how, if such views as some of those which have been here brought forward be tenable views, can those teachers be pardoned who have represented hell in the uniformly terrible and revolting way they have represented it.

  The answer to this reposes upon the joint consideration of God’s perfection and man’s intellectual limitation.

  As to the former, it is simply beyond, infinitely beyond, all our powers of conception, and the same must therefore be said of the supernatural happiness it is in his power to bestow—the happiness of a nature endowed by “the light of glory,” with a capacity for the Beatific Vision. This is what “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.”

  Such being the case, the limitation of our nature necessitates what Cardinal Newman has called “economies” in making known facts concerning the life hereafter. We are reduced to symbols so inadequate that words cannot adequately express their inadequacy. The result is that in order to convey to the mind as practically serviceable an image as may be of what such bliss and glory are, the only possible course has been to endeavor to depict them by contrast. In order to bring home to men what their loss will be should they by vice and malice forfeit so inconceivable a beatitude, it has been necessary to represent that loss by means of such symbols as may, least inadequately and most effectively, strike the imaginations of the greatest multitude of mankind.

  If a painter has to depict, as best he may, a brightness which no pigment can approach, he is reduced to attempt it by deepening shadows as much as his palette will permit—regretting all the time that he has no sables nearly black enough to convey, by contrast, a due appreciation of that unrepresentable brightness.

  Just as we saw that the contrast between Christianity and Paganism was only most imperfectly and inadequately represented by its earliest advocates when they spoke of the heathen gods as demons, so the bliss of heaven was only most imperfectly and inadequately represented by those who described hell as a place of all the horrors their imagination could possibly depict.

  So to have represented it has not caused the least practical error or misled any one by one jot or tittle.

  Thus, on the presumption that heaven is what the Church declares it to be, the author of “Hell Opened to Christians” only speaks the words of truth and soberness when he says: “Do not suppose I have exaggerated anything; I have failed, indeed, in the opposite way.”

  The horrors of that book multiplied a thousandfold could not give the faintest conception of the real difference which exists between the attainment of heaven and its loss, even though the lost ones had an eternal existence of the most extreme natural beatitude far exceeding all we can possibly imagine on earth.

  The loss of heaven is an infinite loss, and therefore no symbols can represent it adequately.

  Thus the preachers and writers of the Church, her sculptors and her painters, have barely done their duty in seeking to portray the contrast between such loss and gain by the most practically serviceable symbols which were at their disposal. The teaching of theologians (very unlike that of Rousseau) deals not with imaginary human beings, but with living men and women with all their vivid passions and keen temptations, seeking to make them apprehend, least inadequately and most forcibly, what it is impossible adequately to express.

  The limitation of our faculties, even as regards the natural world, often compels us to make use of different means with respect to one and the same sense, and it is frequently impossible to gain an accurate perception of one object without thereby simultaneously obtaining a quite inaccurate perception of another object.

  We shall vainly seek with a field glass to observe Jupiter’s satellites or the rings of Saturn; and if when observing with a high power we so adjust a microscope as to bring a deeper stratum of some object into focus, we are, by that very act, presented with an inaccurate image of the higher stratum we may have correctly seen before.

  Thus while the most startling symbols are applicable for depicting the difference between the final lots of grace (hell) and life in heaven, they altogether fail if they are taken to depict existence in hell as compared with life on earth. It is, indeed, absolutely certain that in the latter case they are and must be altogether false; for the difference between what is divine and aught else is an infinite difference, and infinitely greater than any other contrast and distinction whatsoever it may be. Therefore, what is most proper approximately to represent the former cannot properly represent the latter also.

  Thus it seems that the objections of our own day against the Catholic doctrine of hell altogether fall to the ground.

  When it is said that the belief in eternal tortures really comparable with the pains of our present life, and enormously exceeding them is “a horrible doctrine, worse than atheism,” the reply that such symbols are not comparable with life on earth appears to us to be a completely satisfactory one.

  If our estimate of the value and significance of the most authoritative and dogmatic Christian teaching be correct (and we have sought the most skilled advice), then, while it permits of the most practically effective appeals being truthfully addressed to the multitude, it none the less proclaims nothing which is not reconcilable with the most benevolent ethical conceptions.

  Its teaching, as we understand it, may be briefly summed up as follows: God has with infinite benevolence, but with inscrutable purposes, created human beings, the overwhelming majority of whom, being incapable of grave sin, attain to an eternity of unimaginable natural happiness—the utmost of which their nature is capable and which includes a natural knowledge and love of God. Another multitude undergo a certain probation on earth and attain to a future state exactly proportioned to their merits or demerits, which may equal or fall short of the natural happiness of those incapable of sin.

  God has further endowed a certain number of mankind with faculties whereby they are rendered capable of a supernatural union with him—a bliss which, in life, they can neither imagine nor really desire, though they may aspire to it as to a good beyond their power to picture.

  This privilege carries with it a dread risk of failure, resulting in the loss of such supernatural happiness. But this failure may be of all degrees, with corresponding divergencies of conditions. Yet for the very worst, in spite of the positive and unceasing suffering before referred to, existence is acceptable and is by them preferred to nonexistence; while we are permitted to believe in an eternal upward progress, though never attaining to the supernatural state which would be most unwelcome and repugnant to such souls. They are left to themselves in those various inferior conditions which they have made theirs by their own choice and which they have led themselves to persist in and prefer. Thus the hell even of the positively damned, who have forfeited grace bestowed, may yet be regarded as a place which God has from all eternity prepared for those who will not accept the higher goods offered by him for their acceptance.

  Nevertheless, if we consider how impossible it is for us to understand, on the one hand, our own real responsibility (our full relations with our environment) and, on the other, our knowledge of our own individual demerits, there is plenty of reason for anxiety and apprehension concerning those two final states, one of which must, the Church teaches, be the lot of every one of us. Yet when the variety of conditions of reprobation and their nature, as here put forward, are pondered over, it appears to us that the eternal duration of such a hell may well result from the creative action of God’s benevolence and justice combined. In the words of Dante: “Fecemi la divina Potestate, la somma Sapienza e il primo Amore.” Nothing, in fact, has been defined by the Church on the subject of hell which does not accord with right reason, the highest morality, and the greatest benevolence.

  According to it no one in the next life suffers the deprivation of any happiness which he can imagine or desire, or which is congruous with his nature and faculties, save by his conscious and deliberate choice. According to it, also, God has refused to no man who fully obeys the voice of conscience, heathen though he be, the full beatitude of the light of glory and the Beatific Vision.

  Hell in its widest sense—namely, as including all those blameless souls who do not enjoy that vision—must be considered as, for them, an abode of happiness transcending all our most vivid anticipations, so that man’s natural capacity for happiness is there gratified to the very utmost; nor is it even possible for the Catholic theologian of the most severe and rigid school to deny that, thus considered, there is, and there will for all eternity be, a real and true happiness in hell.