Heaven and Hell

Previously, in my two part exploration into Dante and the God of wrath, I delved into the theology of heaven and hell.
Part One: A God of Love or a God of Wrath
Part Two: Jesus — Our Virgil
Now I wish to draw a more complete picture of the meaning of heaven and hell, as I see it.

————————————-

We have a great choice—selfishness or love.

Our answer is the ultimate question, which not only affects the happiness of the world, but will determine our fate beyond the grave. While love is humanity’s greatest desire, death is our greatest fear. The Christian religion promises that death can bring us through to love. Heaven is an eternity of love and beauty. But we must earn heaven by living with love now. Love must be given in order to be received. If we wish to receive the gift of everlasting love, we must live lives of giving now.

Selfishness, on the other hand, is the opposite of love by being the opposite of gift. While love opens us up to one another and ultimately to God, selfishness closes us off to others, drawing us inward to a point where we have no one to trust, rely on or hope for, other than ourselves. When we reach a state of total selfishness, we have completely closed ourselves off from Love.

To modern sensibilities, heaven and hell seem mythological. Heaven is a kingdom in the clouds with streets of gold. The souls of the saints flutter around singing “hosanna.” God sits on his throne, bearing a striking resemblance to Michelangelo’s God with white hair and flowing garments who reached out to touch Adam’s hand. Jesus, still looking very much like a Nazarene, sits on his right hand. Hell, conversely, is a dark cave with pools of fire, wardened by hideous, horned demons. The modern reality is that these images of heaven and hell seem to fit better in a story-book than in our realistic expectation of what follows death. Both Christian and non-Christian sometimes prefer to consider heaven and hell as metaphor, and do not think it is worth their worry. It is true that the imagery is metaphor, but heaven and hell themselves are very real, and our exploration into the meaning of love begins to show us what they really are.

Heaven is the perfection of beauty and love. Heaven will be an experience of our soul where love is fulfilled to a degree which we cannot begin to imagine. We will live in a constant embrace of Love. Our desire to possess beauty, which on earth led us into so much wrong, will be fulfilled. All desires will be fully possessed, because, in a state of perfect love, all things will be gift. While we will be constantly giving all that we have, everything else will constantly be being gifted to us. So all things will truly belong to all. This will be true happiness. The paradox of possession is that it can only be fulfilled through giving, and never by taking. Heaven is love, and our closest approach to heaven in this life, is the loving companionship of one another. St. Augustine says “there is no gift of God more excellent than love. Love alone distinguishes the children of the eternal kingdom and the children of eternal perdition.” (De Trinitate, XV 32)

Hell, then, is the perfection of selfishness, where our selfishness grows so deep that love can no longer penetrate. In this state of the soul, God’s gift of love is utterly rejected. What becomes abundantly clear by this definition is that hell is a choice, and not by an abstract formula of punishment for transgressions. Rather, hell is an active choice we are making by prioritizing self over love. Love is always reaching out toward us, but we can choose not to accept the gift, by refusing to give in return.

Pope Benedict XVI identifies hell in relation to humanity’s fear of being alone. Truly what is loneliness but an absence of community, which is love? Our fear of death is a dread for a journey which we can only take alone. “Death,” he writes, “is an absolute loneliness.” “If there were such a thing as a loneliness that could no longer be penetrated and transformed by the word of another; if a state of abandonment were to arise that was so deep that no ‘You’ could reach into it any more, then we should have real, total loneliness and dreadfulness, what theology calls ‘hell.’ It denotes a loneliness that the word ‘love’ can no longer penetrate.” (Ratzinger: “Intro. to Christianity,” II, 2, 3)

Is this not what our selfishness does to us? By relying exclusively on our own capacity, we close off the “You” that would come to us in love. We fear being alone, yet in our selfishness, ego and greed we rush to a place where we will be utterly alone.

Just as love gives us our closest glimpse of heaven on earth, so our selfishness gives us our worst misery, the closest thing to hell on earth. Even in pain and suffering, if we feel the love of one another, our misery is moderated by this comfort. Yet when our selfishness and our pride close us off from one another, we become truly miserable. Ironically however, even when we know we are miserable, it is so hard to turn away from self.

Hell, therefore, is a chosen rejection of love, not a place designed for the punishment of the damned. If a soul chooses selfishness over love, hell will be their fate. If a soul wishes to be with God, and demonstrates it with their own love, God will not reject that wish. Yes, hell is a place of suffering, but it is a chosen suffering, because to be embraced by love, self must be sacrificed.

God cannot reach into hell to save the damned because hell is the absence of love, and there, God cannot go. With Jesus’ final words from the cross we see the darkness of hell grimly depicted. He cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15:34) With his death Jesus descended into hell. With these words Jesus stared at the gates of death, glimpsing the realm where Love was void. God had forsaken hell, because hell has forsaken love.

No soul in hell can ever be repentant, for hell’s darkness is eternal selfishness. When in such a state, there is no desire for change. If we are to experience hell, we will discover that it was our own choice that put us there. I do not only mean this metaphorically, but that we will be actively choosing to be in hell by rejecting love. We see here the awful truth of Jesus’ words, that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake [the sake of love] will find it. For what will it profit them they gain the whole world [selfish possessions] but forfeit their life?” (Matthew 16:25, 26)

There is a third realm which Catholic tradition tells us about, and which we now almost completely tend to discard as mythological: that is purgatory. Yet we should not be so quick to abandon the idea of purgatory. Protestant minister George MacDonald, in an 1890 lecture, said that “when Christians came to the conclusion that three places in the future world were too many, they made the blunder of throwing away the wrong one.” It is hardly conceivable that the moment of death will deliver us immediately into either perfect love or perfect selfishness. Truly, most of us lie somewhere in between. We have not yet learned to love completely, nor have we fully abandoned the will of self. Purgatory is the journey of the soul away from self, toward love. The existence of purgatory is proof of God’s mercy. God wants every chance to gather his beloved to himself.

God is love, and love could not wish any of his creation to suffer eternal hell. With purgatory, we are assured that our opportunity to choose love does not end with earthly death. The journey from self to love will be difficult, but it is a journey we have the opportunity to make. Yet even after death, faced with hell on the one hand, and God’s love on the other, many will still choose self.

The most helpful allegory for me to understand the three realms of the afterlife, was C. S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce.” This book narrates a cosmic bus ride from a dark and dreary city up to a stopping point where the souls are offered various choices. Ultimately the choices lead to the decision whether to continue upwards (to the allegorical heaven) or to return to their city below. The choices all necessitate giving up something precious, whether a possession, or comfort, or security. Interestingly, most of the souls eventually get back on the bus and return. At one point the protagonist asks his guide if the city is purgatory or hell. “For those who stay it was always hell,” explains his guide, “for those who leave it was always purgatory.” (Chap. 5) One of the more interesting characters in the tale is a resident of hell who keeps building a new home further and further away from the bus stop. During his first few years in the city he took the bus up to the point of choice, but eventually, after moving further and further away (deeper into his selfishness, further into hell), he stopped taking the bus anymore. His journey took him in the wrong direction, but it was always his choice. He himself has created the great chasm fixed between the rich man and Lazarus, over which none can cross. (Luke 16:26)

With the common imagery of heaven and hell it is difficult to imagine anyone choosing hell. Rather we view it as a cosmic prison or torture chamber. But Lewis’ book helps to show how it can indeed be a choice. Even in hell our pride may be too great for us to ever want to change. With our pride we hang onto sin even when faced with the promise of redemption. God however, being himself perfect love, has no such pride, and thus, no unwillingness to forgive if we will only ask.

Fearing hell, we have learned to fear God and the punishment he might inflict. But there is no reason to be afraid of God. We should be afraid of ourselves, for our condemnation is always our own doing. God is love. We should run to Love’s embrace as the answer to all our desire. Yet instead we seek to fulfill our desire through selfishness, thus cutting off the Love which offers endless joy.

Heaven is the living experience of perfected beauty and perfected love. There our desires will be satisfied. The lesson Jesus attempts to teach us is that we must give up our selfishness in order to gain this reward. It is not such a strange command, since we all know that true love requires sacrificing our own desires to the desires of the beloved. Shouldn’t this make us all desirous to experience heaven?

What is your choice? Will you believe the greatest longing of your heart, and follow that longing toward everlasting Love by practicing love and charity now, or will you choose the selfish satisfaction of your pleasures and cling to them with the pride and ego that digs the pit of hell?