Conflict over Hell
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the doctrine of hell is involved in a crisis of conscience and a crisis of faith today. For many Christians, even those who are strongly committed to loyal orthodoxy, the implications of this doctrine as traditionally understood are inconceivably appalling, whereas to others questioning the traditional understanding of the doctrine is tantamount to rejecting the word of God and the authority of Christ.
The problem the former group has is not with the reality of punishment in hell, but with the eternal nature of the sufferings. That the wicked should be punished is accepted, that they should receive an infinite recompense is not. Indeed, the concept of ‘the God who is Love’ deliberately and continually torturing sinners, ‘world without end’, is considered to be self-refuting in its absurd horror. Added to this emotional repugnance and perception of spiritual dissonance is an associated intellectual position: whatever the sins of men, they are finite in extent, and so can only be due a finite penalty in justice. In other words, hell exists, but is experienced for a limited time by evil humans before they are destroyed, that is, annihilated, in the process. Hence, the generally accepted name for this doctrine of Hell is annihilationism.
An increasing number of ‘mainstream’ Evangelicals, though still very much in the minority, have come to this conclusion, John Stott being, perhaps, the most notable example. The debate over this issue is largely an Evangelical phenomenon, mostly absent from the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church and other Catholic bodies such as ‘continuing’ Anglican churches and the ‘Oriental’ Orthodox, for example. Other ways of ameliorating the perception of Hell are countenanced in these traditions, as explained below.
The debate between the Evangelical camps has been loaded with possibly more heat than light at times, as ad hominem accusations have come to the fore and pushed theological reasoning into the background. Annihilationists are accused of a lack of trust in God’s word coupled with a sinful reliance on human reason in isolation from the guidance of Revelation. Thus it appears their exegetical arguments are treated as not merely wrong but disingenuous. It is claimed that their reaction to the traditional teaching is a result of weak, worldly sentimentalism rather than Christian charity, a triumph of emotion over moral sense. On this view, any honest exegesis of the New Testament evidence in particular will prove that Jesus and the Church, like most Jews of the time, believed and taught everlasting punishment in Gehenna for condemned sinners.
Annihilationists in turn accuse the traditionalist opposition of either a refusal to face up to the full, insupportable viciousness of their belief or a careless contempt for the mass of humanity if they have. They see them as wilfully blind to the obvious fact: even the worst humans do not deserve unending and extreme torment for their sins. The annihilationists also contend that the dismissal of their exegetical case is due to a hypocritically (for Evangelical Protestants) selective reverence for tradition instead of a commitment to interpret Holy Writ on its own terms. They claim that, if the relevant data of both Testaments is considered, there is overwhelming evidence for complete destruction of the wicked. The apocalyptic genre of those texts in Revelation which come closest to explicitly saying the damned are everlastingly tormented is seen as calling for a non-literal interpretation, while it is inferred that Jesus’ words about worms dying not and fires being unquenched refer to the perpetuity of Hell’s environment not the perpetuity of the conscious experience of it.
In this article I am going to suggest that there may be a way to resolve the dialectic while respecting the true insights of each side. There could be a way to reconcile the two apparently contrasting contentions: finite punishment and eternal duration. But first we need to be aware of the “qualifications” of the traditional doctrine which can be found in the Catholic Tradition itself.
Mitigation of Hell in the Tradition
While the Catholic Faith clearly teaches the temporally infinite nature of Hell’s punishment, there is also evidence in the Tradition for mitigation of Hell. A useful summary of the range of permitted opinions having this characteristic was given in Fr A.G. Mortimer’s Catholic Faith and Practice: A Manual of Theology, Part II (Second Edition, 1901, p.425):
Some theologians … admit what they call an “accidental mitigation” of this punishment on several grounds; first, because the punishment for venial sins will come to an end after a certain time, and also the temporal punishment due to mortal sins that have been remitted; so that S. Thomas thinks it probable that there will be some diminution of the punishment required by the justice of God.
Other theologians and Fathers also hold that by
reason of Divine Pity, not of Justice, there will be successive mitigations of
the punishment of the lost; so that though they will always remain separated
from God, their condition will be more tolerable. This view is permitted by S.
Augustine, hinted at by S. Chrysostom, and plainly taught by S. John of
Damascus. …
Zaccaria in his notes on Petavius shows that both in
the East and the West prayers for the lost were said in the Mass. He cites an
ancient Latin Missal which contains a touching prayer for a person taken away
without time for repentance, beseeching God, if the dead man’s crimes make it
impossible for him to rise to glory, at least to make his torments endurable.
Another even more radical view held by some Fathers, following Origen’s confessedly speculative opinions, was Universalism, where all those in Hell would eventually be released after varying amounts of remedial punishment, and thus evil would be entirely extinguished. While this teaching was probably condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council, the condemnation is thought by many to apply only if the opinion is taught as dogmatic fact rather than as a permissible hope.[1]
Another Alternative: Finite punishment despite eternal duration
A common, unquestioned presupposition in this debate is that if any process is eternal, it must be infinite in total effect. This idea is false. However counterintuitive it may seem, unlimited time does not necessitate the unlimited extent of anything, even a continuous event.
I will illustrate this with four examples relevant to the concept of Hell and consciously experienced punishment. However, please note, these examples are meant as analogies, not descriptions of Hell. The first two models concentrate on the objective nature of the conditions of the damned, the second two on the subjective experience of those conditions.
- The Black Hole is the object in nature which may best symbolise Hell. It is enormously and frighteningly destructive, able to swallow anything. It is surrounded in many cases by a hot maelstrom of chaotic energy and matter. And once something is sucked in, it cannot escape.[2] But the black hole also provides a superb example of combining infinity and finitude. An object falling into a black hole is violently destroyed after a certain amount of time in its own frame of reference. However, due to relativistic effects, in the frame of reference of outside observers, the doomed object never quite makes it to the event horizon (the outside ‘edge’ of the black hole, the point of no return). It falls inwards for an infinite length of time. The light from the object is increasingly red-shifted as well, ad infinitum.
- A
progressively decreasing active agent operating forever can still have a
merely finite total effect. This can be seen in calculus, in the
integration of certain functions. For example,
, where 
, has the solution P = kS. If we allow the Scriptural
verses quoted by the annihilationists their force at face value, and take
seriously the references by Jesus to “worms” in Hell and to the variation
in punishment between those who receive “few stripes” and “many stripes”,
may we not infer that there is a progressive destruction of the damned
which affects their ability to feel further pain? Note that p in the above
equation never goes to zero, though it gets ever-closer to it, and its
total impact over time, P, is, nevertheless, finite.[3]
The biggest problem with this scenario is that it could be objected that
the intensity of punishment, by becoming ever-smaller and infinitesimal,
would really be no noticeable punishment at all after a certain period.
However, while this would be true of human sensation in the present, there
is no guarantee it would be after the General Resurrection and Final
Judgement. - The reason lengthening of the duration of an experience increases its felt pleasure or pain seems to be the involvement of memory and foresight in the experience at any one moment. Remembering the good or bad feelings preceding, combined with the knowledge they will continue, results in the actual sensation of temporal extent. For example, if you have complete amnesia about whatever happened yesterday, its joys or horrors have no conscious effect in the here and now. Similarly, not knowing that tomorrow will be a terrible day means the awfulness of it has no effect on the present. What if those in Hell knew only the present moment and remembered only the sin which brought them there? In that case their experience would be mentally a ‘frozen moment’, so to speak, forming one punishment measured only by its intensity at any point in time. If time is objectively different or is experienced differently after judgement, as traditional Western theology has taught using the concept of “aevum”, which is different to both normal time and God’s eternity, could not this be one effect of that on the damned? Might this not be a consequence of the diminishment of personality in Hell?
- Another possibility is that the person undergoes a kind of disintegration of consciousness in Hell. It is significant that the effects of sin are commonly pictured in the Fathers and Doctors of the Church as a kind of breaking up of primal unities: between us and God, between each other, and within ourselves. If Hell allows this process to go on unrestricted, then it could affect consciousness so that while there is a sea of isolated experiences of suffering, no one self-aware unit of mentally-continuous consciousness suffers infinitely. Individuals might, for example, undergo a kind of exponential internal subdivision into smaller and smaller units of awareness, the ultimate consequence of their rejection of union with God.
Difficulties with this view
The first objection to these analogies might be directed specifically at the Black Hole comparison. It actually combines annihilation for the damned person with everlasting visibility of punishment for those outside Hell. Since the traditional view has always asserted the infinite duration of punishment is experienced by the object of that punishment, this solution may be seen as “too clever by half”! While the infinite length of time characterising the “punishment” for the outside observer is not an illusion – that is, the person genuinely never reaches the black hole’s event horizon in that external frame of reference – it does not reflect the subjective reality for the one “punished”.
I freely admit that, despite the uncannily fitting symbolism of the Black Hole combined with its convenient provision of a beautiful example of juxtaposing temporal infinity with finitude, this model may well be simply contradictory to essential elements of the traditional doctrine, rather than of a merely qualifying nature. Nevertheless, I would be loathe to dismiss it unless it can be clearly proved to be absolutely incompatible with the dogmatic teaching of the Church.
More general objections might be as follows. First, this speculation is a novum, a theological innovation that was not dreamed of before now by Christians. This in itself is sufficient, perhaps, to disqualify it, even if it can be shown to be compatible with the traditional faith in some minimalist, merely verbal sense. Second, the little traditional support it claims only refers to permitted speculations concerning alleviations of the pains of Hell that seem to assume a limited rather than a progressive mitigation and also seem to assume such alleviation is an act of mercy, not justice. Third, while there are some Scriptural passages that in isolation more naturally (but not necessarily) imply annihilation and others that explicitly teach unending punishment, there are none that teach anything clearly corresponding to any of the four suggested scenarios.
My response to these three objections would be to note that while these particular suggestions have, as far as I know, never been constructed or combined in just this way, they draw on and synthesise ideas that can be found in Scripture and Tradition. So, while my suggestion could never be more than a permitted theological opinion this side of Final Judgement, I hope that it could be considered by the Church not to be heretical or inadmissible.