Beginning of death: Existence and eternity of hell
All this is but one side of the story of what death begins. Uncomfortable as the truth may be, the fact is that there is a hell as well as a heaven, that death not only begins an eternal life, it also begins an eternal death; there is not only adequate reward, there is also adequate punishment. We have it on the authority of the infallible word of God that there is a hell and that in that hell devils and men who die in mortal sin are punished eternally. This, you understand, is not something submitted for the judgment of our individual taste; it will not do to decide that we shall accept some of the truths of revelation -- pleasant truths like grace, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and heaven -- and reject one that is particularly displeasing. To reject any one is to reject them all, for it is to reject the reason for accepting any one of them, namely, the infallible veracity of the God Who has revealed them all.
Nature of its punishment: Pain of loss
With the fact of an eternal hell certain from revelation, the reasonableness of the fact is by no means obscure. By mortal sin, a man breaks off his friendship with God, giving his heart to something less than God; with charity gone, then, man is in exile from God and charity is not to be recovered after death. Inevitably, the exile from divine life must endure eternally; which is precisely the very essence of hell. To look at it from another point of view, by mortal sin, a man chooses a last end other than God; dying in that sin, his will remains firm in that choice. In other words, he wants exclusion from God eternally, only by violence could he be dragged into heaven; hell assures him of getting what he wants. From the other side of the picture, his offense was committed against an infinite Being and is, therefore, infinite no matter how quickly the act was over and done with; it deserves an infinite punishment, a thing impossible to inflict upon a creature except from the angle of duration. Lest there be any question about this, let it be remembered that the whole reason of the necessity of the Incarnation was that only the Son of God could give the infinite satisfaction demanded for man's infinite offense.
It might also be argued that as long as a man's guilt endures, he should be punished for it; and the guilt of a man dying in mortal sin, judged immediately after death, is not wiped out by the passage of any number of ages in hell. The angle of adequate sanction, too, is no light matter; if hell were not to be eternal, a man might well offend God as he pleased and laugh at Him and His punishments, sure that there would some day be an end to them and then he could look forward to an eternity of happiness. Piling up arguments, however, does not bolster the certainty of the truth and the eternity of hell; that certainty needs no support for it rests on the word of God Himself.
To understand the nature of the punishment of hell it is necessary to recall our previous analysis of sin in Volume II of this series. In every mortal sin there is a double element: a turning away from God, and a turning to some created good in place of God. The first is punished in hell by its perpetuation, by an eternal separation from God that is the direct opposite of the eternal union with God which makes up the essential happiness of the blessed in heaven; this is the essential punishment of hell, the pain of loss. Obviously, there is no variety or gradation in this punishment; everyone in hell suffers this, and equally. This is by far the sharpest, the most penetrating pain of hell; for by it, the damned are deprived of the greatest good, God Himself, and they are keenly conscious of their loss. They know then that the goal of life, the one source of order, the one climax of living, is lost to them, not for a day, a year or a century, but forever; their desperation is complete, there is not the slightest grounds for the wildest hope. This is infinite justice, bolstered by infinite power, proceeding against an infinite offense; and there is no escape.
Pain of sense: Eternity and reality of hell fire
The turning to a created good as a last end is punished in hell by what theologians have called the pain of sense. While this has occupied the center of the stage in human considerations of hell, it is actually secondary; it has been given first place only because we find it as impossible, now, to appreciate the loss of the Supreme God as we do to express the ineffable possession of it. This pain of sense is inflicted by the fire of hell. Whatever the lengths of aversion to which sentimentality has pushed modern discussion, the reality of this fire of hell is so universal and so ancient a doctrine of the theologians that question of it would be an extreme of temerariousness. There is indeed hell-fire, and it is real fire; by it the devils and damned souls are punished until the resurrection of the bodies of men, when the punishment of the fire is extended to these risen bodies.
It is quite clear that such fire must operate supernaturally, as an instrument of divine justice and to effects entirely beyond the natural powers of fire. There can be no question of burning devils or separated souls; just how fire punishes them is by no means clear, although it was Thomas's opinion that its action was primarily one of limiting activities, hemming in the proudest creatures of the universe. After the resurrection, fire's natural effects will be produced on the bodies of the damned. without however consuming them, that is, there will be a miraculous effect here, too, analogous to that of the fire which named in a bush without consuming it to awake the wonder of Moses.
Inequality of pain of sense
In the punishment of the pain of sense there is plenty of room for inequality. It is inflicted in proportion to man's conversion to created good in preference to God, and the degrees of men's absorption in the world of creatures are practically infinite. Here, then, there is a kind of hierarchy of misery corresponding to the hierarchy of happiness in heaven; these are the mansions of hell in sharp contrast to the heavenly mansions prepared by the Savior of men. There is no easing up of either the pain of loss or the pain of sense, no gradual mitigation, for there is no change in the reason for both punishments -- the perverse will of the sinner; there is no escape from the eternity of these punishments through a dulling of perception, a gradual slipping into unconsciousness, or eventual oblivion. It is of faith that these punishments are eternal and without mitigation.
Accidental sufferings: Of intellect and will
Artists are not to be taken literally when they picture the misery of hell by the medium of extreme ugliness and distortion. In fact, nothing of nature is changed or lost in hell. The devils have their full complement of perfect natural knowledge, men retain all the knowledge they have stored up in this life; yet that very knowledge, in both cases, is but another source of suffering, keeping vividly in their minds both the good they have lost and the evil that has reduced them to their present misery. They have had a glimpse of the joyous glory of the blessed, the splendor of the risen Christ, and the perfection of the justice of God at the last judgment; yet, there is not an iota of consolation in any of this for one to whom it is lost forever.
Of company of others
Rather, it is the other way around. The wills of the damned are confirmed in adversity. While there is a full cup of remorse that never empties though it is steadily drunk, the sharpest of regrets for the punishments that must be undergone, there is no repentance for the sins committed; sin is not surrendered and God embraced; rather sin is held fast while God is cursed, the more so as the justice of His punishment is beyond cavil. Love, then, is something totally foreign to the very atmosphere of hell, while hate is of the very air the damned breathe: they hate God as the inflicter of punishments, they hate the blessed as having all that they lack, they hate each other as integral constituents of their present misery, and they thoroughly hate and despise themselves. They would willingly accept annihilation, oblivion, as an escape from their torments; but they know there is no escape, not even so bitter an escape as this. It is indeed a terrible thing to fall under the justice of the living God.
Limbo
The horror of hell might well strike a spark of fear from the heart of a saint; but, while we shrink from the grim prospects of it, it is well to remember that no man slides into hell, as it were by accident. This is a place that must be deliberately entered; a man must knock at the door perseveringly demanding admittance, for no man can get into hell without the passport of his own actual mortal sin which proves he has rejected God. A fifth column in hell is a complete impossibility; there are no victims of unjust court procedure there protesting their innocence. It is quite impossible, then, for an infant who is incapable of personal sins to get into hell; the same holds for idiots, the congenitally insane, and, in general, those who are incapable of sin. If these have not received the gift of supernatural life in the sacrament of Baptism, obviously they cannot get into heaven. Their's is an intermediate place called Limbo; a place of natural happiness, free of the torments of hell, yet without the divine perfections of heaven.
Conclusion. Aversions to eternal beginnings: To hell
It is not surprising that we should shrink from hell; in fact, that very aversion is one of the first and surest guarantees of avoiding the place, particularly since a man can act into it only by deliberately choosing the road and furnishing himself with the proper identification cards. What is surprising, and not at all flattering to humanity, is that men should shrink from the truth of hell, as if the place of eternal torment could be obliterated by our denial of it. It is a triumph of unreason so to deal with any truth; it is the height of unreason to give a divine truth treatment of this kind.
There is the usual scramble of reasons behind the unreason, rendering it to some extent reasonable in the sense of explicable; but dissolving none of its unreasonableness to the consequence of making it excusable. Certainly, there is a strong dash of anthropomorphism in our modern refusal to take hell seriously; this is not the way human justice would work, so it cannot be though the whole thing is advanced, not as an implement of human, but of divine justice. There is, too, that strange modern fear of going beyond the field of the sensible; hell is not sensible, we cannot experiment with it, while eternity completely escapes our present experience, so of course there can be no hell. Unquestionably, here and there, there is an element of cowardice that shrinks in terror from the responsibility of acts possible of such momentous consequences. In the case of the first two viewpoints, a man wraps himself in a fog of unreason that allows him to approach the abyss with a certain sense of security until he has actually plunged into it. But in the third, a man begins to taste his hell long before he has swung open the infernal portals; indeed, one of the most horrible characteristics of hell is becoming a modern commonplace precisely through this fear of life. The devils and the damned would, but cannot, embrace annihilation as an escape from their punishments; living men are actually embracing the prospect of personal oblivion, not as an escape from punishment, but in preference to the risk involved in the living of human life.
To heaven
It is somewhat harder to understand how the prospect of heaven can leave men uninterested, indifferent, or positively hostile. One reason may well be the materialist contentment with the world in which he moves, or rather, with that part of it which his blinded eyes can see; this world has been kind to him -- for materialism is an error for the prosperous or those with a prospect of prosperity -- and life seems long, with a great stretch of comforts still awaiting him. He might be willing to settle for present comforts; unfortunately for him, life does not end at death but begins there. It may be that many men have pretty well p1umbed the depths of despair; they have despaired of God and despaired of men, so they steadfastly refuse to look beyond the moment when they will leave men behind even though at that moment they must face God. But the most extensive basis of our modern American disregard of heaven undoubtedly lies in the ignorance or contempt of the supernatural -- a natural consequence of positivism's confinement of man to the prison of nature -- and a thorough misunderstanding of the nature of Christian doctrine on both hell and heaven.
The truth of the beginnings
Diluted Christianity has done much to further this tragic condition. There has been a kind of heartless mercy in this dilution, the weakness of compromise, and the kindness of a lie. When fundamentals are in question, this sweetly corruptive delicacy destroys all it touches; certainly, this half-hearted Christianity is fundamentally destructive of man and his acts as well as of God and His acts, though the thing is advanced as a favor to man. Hell must be taken without appeal to sentiment, without a softening process that eliminates it; it must be taken, as truth must always be taken, literally, straight, with its full force. And heaven must be taken without dilution, with no recourse to a symbolic fog that reduces it to the level of subjective ideals or objective myths for simple people. These two are divine truths; in face of them, man does not choose, he accepts or he is lost.
Naturally all appeal is removed from the prospect of heaven if it is looked on as a giant almshouse with no quarters for the rich and fully equipped with all facilities for the poor to gorge themselves on all the things they missed in their lives on earth. If heaven is to be a place of wholesale revenge where those who were persecuted on earth have their innings doing to others what had been done on earth, it would be a good place to keep away from if a man wanted peace and quiet. If it is a kind of eternal watering-place where the fatigued can sit in the sun eternally doing absolutely nothing, it is a place of torpor rather than of happiness. The point is that heaven is none of these things. True, it has been promised to the poor, but to the poor in spirit; to the persecuted, but to those persecuted for justice sake; it has been described as a place of eternal rest, but of rest for the soul.
In other words, heaven is not at all a simple reversal of the lives men lived on earth; rather it is a completion, a fulfillment, a maturity of what was begun on earth. The poor in spirit, the persecuted for justice sake, those who have exercised their souls in virtue to the point of weariness are not the miserable men of earth; they are the most supremely happy of all the people who walk the face of the earth, regardless of the circumstances of their external life. Heaven comes to these people, not as the answer to his dream would burst on an astonished beggar, the realization of his idyll to a lazy man, or the agony of an enemy to a man on fire with hate; it comes as manhood comes to a child.
Determination of eternal beginnings
The mansions of hell, no less than the mansions of heaven, are not makeshift shacks thrown up after the darkness of death has come down upon life. Both are built slowly, carefully, stone by stone, through all the abundant moments that measure the length of a man's life. A man does not achieve hell by a last minute quirk of divine judgment, but when he embraces sin; a man does not win heaven when God embraces Him eternally but when he embraces God despite the alluring promises of all that is contrary to God. Heaven or hell, in other words, never comes as a shock; it is the harvest that was planted so long ago, watched, cultivated, defended and now reaped in all its fullness. It is the house at the end of the road that could lead nowhere else. In the case of heaven, it is home; and all along the road there were signs marking the path, help proferred to pilgrims, and directions to be had for the asking. Arriving there, man has come home to the God Who made him.