The Easiest Sin

     Happy Ides of March, Gentle Reader! If you enjoyed your Pi Day – we did – then perhaps you’ll also enjoy this commemoration of the day, in 44 B.C., when a group of civic-minded patricians decided to take an aspiring dictator “off the ballot” in a rather final and unappealable way. It’s a recipe for averting tyranny that we should always have in our back pockets, just in case…

     “Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.” – Catholic maxim.

     This recent article surprised many Christians:

     Pope Francis appeared on Italy’s most popular prime-time talk show on Sunday night where the pontiff shared how he hopes that hell is “empty.”
     […]
     When asked by the interviewer, Fabio Fazio, how he “imagines hell,” Pope Francis gave a short response.
     “What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is,” Pope Francis said.
     The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that Catholic teaching “affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.’ The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.”
     The catechism also says: “In hope, the Church prays for ‘all men to be saved.’”

     A splendid hope, whether or not it describes the actuality. For Pope Francis, of whom I have no great opinion, to express that it’s his hope raises my evaluation of him a notch. But not everyone shares that hope:

     I have a different — indeed, completely opposite — view.
     I should make it clear that I, too, hope that sometime in the future — hopefully the near future — no one will be sent to hell. That would mean goodness had finally so prevailed on Earth that not one person was deserving of punishment in the afterlife.
     But as of this moment, I fervently hope that some people are in hell — or whatever one wishes to call punishment after life; just as I hope some people are in heaven — or whatever one wishes to call reward in an afterlife.
     Why? Because if no one is punished after death, that would mean either there is no God or, equally depressing, it would mean God is not just.

     Before this, I held a moderately approving view of columnist and radio personality Dennis Prager. However, I must condemn the above as vile. I hope Prager doesn’t understand the implications of his statement; I’d find it hard to forgive him if he does.

     And of course, I shall tell you why.

     It’s Church doctrine that sincere repentance of one’s sins, even just before the instant of death, will spare a man from Hell. It’s also Church doctrine that internment in Hell is “eternal.” Yet our comprehension of “eternal” and “eternity” are incomplete. Prager wants justice for the great sinners and evildoers on his little list. That’s understandable and laudable, especially considering that some evildoers get out of this life without ever being brought to book. But what is justice? Isn’t just punishment supposed to be proportioned to the offense? Could any crime committed in our temporal realm, in which all things have a beginning and an ending, justify infinite, eternal punishment?

     Saint Thomas Aquinas thought so:

     “The magnitude of the punishment matches the magnitude of the sin. Now a sin that is against God is infinite; the higher the person against whom it is committed, the graver the sin—it is more criminal to strike a head of state than a private citizen—and God is of infinite greatness. Therefore an infinite punishment is deserved for a sin committed against Him.”

     Aquinas, the greatest intellect ever put to the service of the Church, must always be listened to respectfully…but that doesn’t mean he was right about everything. The above embeds a rationale akin to medieval notions of lese majeste. As justice, I can’t see it, and I’m not the only one:

     “Every torture in Hell was too much too late. Punishment? But it’s infinite punishment for things that are little in comparison. Dracula caused a lot of people a lot of pain and death, but it ended. George only lied to people to make them buy things! And what about the fat lady in the Vestibule area?
     “What’s the point? To teach us a lesson? But we’re dead. Revenge, punishment? Completely out of proportion.”

     It’s hard to square that with any notion of justice comprehensible to men.

     Dante Alighieri’s vision in his Inferno, upon which the Niven / Pournelle novel was based, included a way out of Hell: protracted, difficult, and with severe requirements, but possible to the truly repentant. Dante was not a theologian, yet his conception has been praised for centuries, including by many theologians.

     We also have the conception of the great Clive Staples Lewis:

     “Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.”
     “The name is familiar, Sir, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it means.”
     “It means that the damned have holidays–excursions, ye understand.”
     “Excursions to this country?”
     “For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary Ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.”
     “But if they come here they can really stay?”
     “Aye. Ye’ll have heard that the emperor Trajan did.”
     “But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?”
     “It depends on the way you’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.” (Here he smiled at me). “Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.”
     I suppose he saw that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.
     “Son,” he said, “ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless, he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”

     This casts quite a different light upon the notion of eternity in Hell…and I can find no reason to dismiss it out of hand.

     Hmph. Fifteen hundred words already and I have yet to get to what I regard as the heart of the matter. Well, here goes nothing.

     If the Church is correct in asserting that at the instant of death, sincere repentance will shrive the foulest sinner, sparing him from Hell, then that is something for which we must hope: i.e., that even the greatest evildoers of history found that sincere repentance within them as they met their ends. Yes, all the greatest ones: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, add your favorite villain here. Not to hope for that is to wish unimaginable sorrow and suffering upon them: a degree of hatred which is forbidden us. That’s the true theological meaning of hatred as a capital sin: to desire that another human being be damned.

     Even if Dante and Lewis were correct, and that there is a way out of Hell, to wish Hell upon someone is to condemn him to a variety of suffering that’s not only beyond imagining, but about which he can do nothing. For regardless of the actuality, the details of which are unavailable to us the living, our conception of damnation involves permanence, and therefore disproportion. It involves a form of despair.

     To despair – to abandon hope – is the easiest sin. It surrenders. It dismisses possibility and despises effort. Even to despair of another person’s ultimate redemption is horribly sinful. To wish for it…words fail me.

     And so, being a person of hope, who has been taught to hate the sin while loving the sinner, I must express here a pair of hopes.

     First, I hope that Dennis Prager comes to understand the implications of what he’s said, and to repent of it.

     Second, I hope with equal fervor that Pope Francis’s vision of Hell as empty is accurate. If it is not so today – whatever “today” means in the supratemporal realm – then may it be so “when all has been accomplished:” i.e., when all have truly suffered enough, repented enough, and above all hoped enough.

     May God bless and keep you all.