Freedom, Just for the Hell of It?
Ross Douthat has an interesting column in the NY Times today on the importance of belief in hell for underwriting the possibility of meaningful human choice:
In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.
The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.
I think that there’s something to this, and Douthat goes on to argue that Tony Soprano is perhaps one modern illustration of the freedom to choose damnation, so to speak, just for the hell of it. But, of course, if we have the radical freedom to be evil, God has the radical freedom to be merciful. So, in the final analysis, God may also save us, just for the hell of it. This is to say that the real divine punishment might just be in not finding the freedom from God that we so willfully sought. After all, what’s worse than being loved by someone who just can’t take the hint, no matter how nasty you are? So, instead of wondering whether Tony Soprano is in heaven or hell, it might be better to wonder if, for one who so clearly didn’t want to be there, heaven wouldn’t simply be hell. In which case, it would make sense to say that such a person, like Douthat, might prefer the libertarian freedom of hell to the loving community of heaven.
This is a real conundrum! Life does seem to have more meaning when you know the consequences of truly bad actions. However, what about the all-merciful God? I believe we were taught that willfulness of actions along with refusal to seek mercy were the components of mortal sin. Of course, hell has never been a popular subject, and I don’t think it ever will be. However, don’t most notions have an opposite? Such as heaven/hell?
I would hope that Tony Soprano would not mock heaven if he attained that pinnacle. But somehow, I think that he would. Isn’t that the ultimate sin of pride in action, and isn’t pride one of the 7 deadly sins? Our church doesn’t spend as much time as it used to emphasizing hell. Is that because it’s difficult to get people filling the pews when that is the message? I believe in the concept of hell, but it presents a PR problem for expanding membership in the church. How many excuses can people have????????
I think the problem most people have with the idea of Hell is eternal torment. Your choices can make a difference without the possible fate of being tortured for all eternity in unquenchable fire! I didn’t watch the Sopranos, but I can’t think of anyone who ever lived who I think deserves to suffer eternally in the way we are taught people suffer in Hell.
Of course, Catholics don’t generally think that a person like Gahndi goes to Hell. I did once have a long discussion with someone who I presume was an Evangelical who believe all people who did not acknowledge Jesus as their savior—including all people who never had a chance to even hear of Jesus—went to Hell. Catholics had the good sense to invent (out of whole cloth) “baptism of blood” and “baptism of desire.”
In heaven, we will have an eternity to get to know one another, to watch each person’s evolution from one cell, through millions of generations of struggle, mutation, etc.
We will understand why each person made the choices s/he made, and we and the Creator would not torture anyone because of the DNA instructions received from ancestors.
Tony was the child of Johnny Boy and the nephew of Corrado. God knows (and we will know in Paradise) what previous murderers bequeated their genes to Tony. Should he burn forever for having brown hair?
Sorry—one more thought. I don’t understand why choice cannot be made after death. In Catholic thought, the angels who rebelled made an irrevocable choice, and human beings’ choices are allegedly irrevocable after the moment of death. What kind of being with free will ever loses the ability to choose?
This topic makes me think of Capaneus, who Dante depicts as suffering with the blasphemers in the 7th circle of Hell. Even though it increases his suffering, he continues to curse Zeus in order to prevent his judge from gaining any satisfaction from his punishments. “What I was living, the same I now am, dead.”
How to reconcile our understanding of God as love with anything approaching traditional views of hell is a difficult, probably impossible task. Douthat and Eric and anyone else with a fresh take on the subject are to be thanked.
But on a less fundamental level, let it be said that, historically, fear of hell was one of the greatest of the church’s control mechanisms. People went to church on Sunday, got married before a priest, believed what they were told about sexual morality, didn’t read what they were forbidden, worried about excommunication, etc., etc., because they didn’t want to go to hell. In Europe and North America, that’s gone, or almost gone. It has taken about half a century. Some church leaders haven’t noticed. Many others have noticed but haven’t begun to think about the ramifications.
Catholics also had the easy out of confessing their sins! The church (and all of us ) should come up with better reasons than hell for doing what is good and making right choices.
Reading the Douthat column this morning [b]my thoughts wandered once again to the question, which is abated from time to time in reading him, of whether he isn’t something of a Catholic fundamentalist.
I couldn’t concentrate on it. Puffed Wheat was more interesting.
I thank Eric Bugyis for linking to an interesting discussion of an age-old question – but I’m also forced to be a little disappointed that he ends by spoiling this most serious of subjects with what seems to be something of a cheap political shot at Douthat. And when did Douthat become a libertarian, anyway?
We do not know the population of heaven or hell, nor a comprehensive roster of either destination, thank God. Like von Balthasar, most of us would like to dare to hope that all men (including Gandhi) be saved, and Mr. Steinfels is correct that in the West today, quite a few of us do dare. And yet we can’t ignore the ominous warning of Christ in Matt. 7:14. Control mechanism or not, it is not a difficulty we can easily dismiss. At the end of the day, however, we can be sure of a few things, as Cardinal Dulles noted (cf. “The Population of Hell,” First Things, May 2003) in discussing von Balthasar’s thought: “We can be sure that Christ, who died on the Cross for us, will not fail to give us the grace we need. We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, and that if we persevere in that love, nothing whatever can separate us from Christ (cf. Romans 8:28-39). That is all the assurance we can have, and it should be enough.”
“Reading the Douthat column this morning by thoughts wandered once again to the question, which is abated from time to time in reading him, of whether he isn’t something of a Catholic fundamentalist.”
Is it ever possible for you, Ms. Steinfels, to disagree with someone and NOT attack them personally? I suppose you prefer Maureen Dowd’s Catholic imagination to Douthat’s.
“Reading the Douthat column this morning my thoughts wandered once again to the question, which is abated from time to time in reading him, of whether he isn’t something of a Catholic fundamentalist”
(Margaret S. 4:53)
Maybe you can take the guy out of Pentacostalism but not get all the Pentacostalism out of the guy. (He’s a convert, I understand.)
The idea that a Deity would like people choosing good for fear of punishment or hope of reward strikes me as insulting to God, but what do I know?
I do not like the fact that the church used “hell” for the ultimate control of people. And I do believe that happened in my 85 yr. old mother’s era. However, I don’t know that we are so evolved that we can dismiss “hell” out of hand. Does Pope Benedict have an official stance on this? Or is this to be dismissed like many other church “laws” that we don’t like?
“Is it ever possible for you, Ms. Steinfels, to disagree with someone and NOT attack them personally?”
—
Why is it an “attack” to say someone is “something of a Catholic fundamentalist”? Isn’t that something to be proud of, in the opinions of many?
Jeff,
Is wondering if someone “isn’t something of a Catholic fundamentalist” a personal attack? How so? Is your message a personal attack on Margaret Steinfels? How not?
A) It is an attempt to dismiss his column by labelling it. She offers no reason for her view of him as a “fundamentalist.”
B) Her comment is wholly out of line with the other comments both in the original post and in the comments. She doesn’t even address his column, nor the comments of the poster, nor any of the comments in the thread.
C) If I had responded to a column by her, or Michael Sean Winters as saying “well I’m just reminded reading this column that she or her isn’t something of a cafeteria Catholic”, people would be CRAWLING over my personal attack, and how such a comment inhibited dialogue and understanding.
Such a comment is disappointing coming not only a blog seemingly dedicated to independent and open thought, but from someone with her heft. How is labelling him with such a term responding to him on the merits? How is it furthering dialogue? It’s dismissive and its condescending, and Commonweal, and Ms. Steinfels, should be above it.
Wellll!!!! huff and puff Mr. Landry…. Just a little fact-checking here: I left as editor of CWL in 2003. The editors should not be held responsible for my remarks; I happen to know that they actually disagree with them from time to time (one of the hallmarks of the Commonweal staff, their ability to disagree with one another wo huffing and puffing).
Gerelyn puffed wheat is more puff than wheat as I’m sure you know (don’t eat it).
Didn’t know Mr. Douthat was a convert and had been an evangelical (maybe that explains it; I will not go on about the conversion process to the Catholic church).
I am by no means certain that there is no hell; my point was that it is not the reason we should do good (it is an imperfect reason as I learned in second grade at Saint Ita’s School for children who are just naturally good).
Ms. Steinfels, I’m sorry if my “huffing and puffing” offends your sensibilities (or those of the Commonweal editors whoever they may be), but I find it incongruous when labels are slapped against someone without a suitable defense of them. Sorry, but I just find labelling to be a very poor substitute for reasoning, editor or not. It is also, perhaps ironically in this situation, somewhat “fundamentalist”, don’t you think?
But perhaps I mistook Commonweal’s purpose, as it seems more inclined to want to function like a mutual admiration society for people who all think alike. So much for “independence”.
For anyone interested in a defense of the doctrine of hell see Chapter 7, “The Order of Hell” in “The Order of Things” (Ignatius, 2007) by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. In particular, Fr. Schall demonstrates that the doctrine of hell is “a philosophic position” as well as a teaching of revelation.
As I understand it, the existence of Hell is Catholic dogma. If so, the all-important question (aside from whether it is empty or not) is what the experience of Hell is like? Is it like being roasted in unquenchable flames while you writhe and scream for all eternity? I remember even in my “Catholic Fundamentalist” grade school education (in which Adam and Eve were real people who ate forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) that someone said Hell was not a place, but a state, and (old Catholic humor alert) a Heaven for fleas and a Hell for dogs could easily be combined. It is not all that difficult to think of Hell as a state where the negative consequences of your more unfortunate choices have an impact on you. But it is very difficult to imagine Hell being an eternity of excruciating physical suffering for bad people that God and good people take pleasure in watching.
We need to be careful about any dismissal of hell because that begs the question: Is there evil in the world? And there should be a resounding “yes” to that question, otherwise how did 6 million Jews get slaughtered in the Holocaust? Also, “hell” is in our Creed at mass. I agree with Margaret that “hell” should not be the deterent for doing good. And, frankly, I don’t think it is. I believe most humans answer their natural impulse to do good. But I do believe consistant choices to send ourselves farther and farther away from God are what sets a person on a path that can appear to be irrevocable.
“Does Pope Benedict have an official stance on this?”
========
I don’t know if the pope has said anything about hell, but his notion of purgatory is lovely, imho. (See III 47-48.)
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html
If your child asks you for bread, do you give her a stone? If she eats meat on Friday, will she be tortured forever?
(Catholics of my age cohort will remember the attempts to explain eternity: a little bird flies around this big steel ball once every million years, etc.)
“If so, the all-important question (aside from whether it is empty or not) is what the experience of Hell is like?”
I think the only really important thing to know about Hell is that it is the eternal absence of the love of God, and the eternal hopelessness of being aware of that. What are flames and pitchforks compared to THAT?
As for the Catholic Church allegedly using Hell as some sort of control device, is that not the same Church that teaches (touched on above in a couple of comments) an act of perfect contrition is to avoid sin not for fear of Hell but to keep from offending an all-loving God?
Catechism on Hell
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a12.htm#IV
” Catholics had the good sense to invent (out of whole cloth) “baptism of blood” and “baptism of desire.” ”
I think that most Catholics have the good sense to NOT believe that anything than humans devise as rules and regulations are binding on the God of us all!
Douthat was born in San Francisco, California, but grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.[6] He attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited the Harvard Salient.[7] As an adolescent Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,[8] to Catholicism.[9] His mother is writer Patricia Snow.[10] His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm.[11] In 2007 he married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and a writer for Smithsonian.[11] He and his family live in Washington, D.C.[12]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Douthat
Raber enjoys hearing about hell, and occasionally goes off on jags about how salubrious the belief in hell is for the Christian Person. Certainly I believe in hell. Especially when Raber’s going off on one of his jags.
However, Douthat seems to veer toward the Protestant error that heaven and hell are rewards for correct belief, a notion my Baptist in-laws subscribe to enthusiastically. This is largely what motivates their to mission work to the heathens (which include Catholics): You can’t get to heaven if you don’t believe in Jesus, and you can’t believe in Jesus if you haven’t heard the correct things about him.
I thought it was a little odd that Douthat chose to imagine Gandhi (a real person) in heaven, but Tony Soprano (a fictitious character on TV) in hell. Douthat might have strengthened his piece if he had asked, could we really imagine Hitler (Judas, Quisling, Pol Pot, etc. ad nauseum) in heaven.
But had he done so, he would have been on very thin ice as a Catholic, b/c, while Catholicism teaches there is a hell and that our own rejection of Christ can send us there, no Catholic is allowed to teach that any particular living individual is in hell, not even Judas.
My guess is that this unwillingness on the part of Catholics to deny the possibility of salvation to even the worst sinners is deeply resented by some other Christians who take a good deal of satisfaction in talking about various relatives and acquaintances “frying in hell” as if it were a done deal (which, strikes me as bringing them perilously close to the whiff of sulfur themselves). Consequently, they’ve floated the notion around that Catholics don’t believe in hell.
A possibly relevant paraphrase/adaptation of Rahner that I’ve used with students; it’s adapted from a passage in his article “Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace,” Theological Investigations Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961. 297-317). Again, I adapted it for high school students (yes, I’m crazy enough to try using Rahner with high school students):
God wishes to communicate Himself, to give Himself away, to pour forth the love which He Himself is. That is the first and last of His real plans. Everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of infinite Love. And so God makes a creature whom He can love: he creates man. He creates humans in such a way that they can receive this Love which is God Himself, and receive it as it truly is: the ever-astounding wonder, the unexpected, unexacted gift. …
God makes humans so that they can receive this Love which is God Himself; humans are made with an openness and desire for God, and have it always. Humans are always addressed and claimed by this Love. For, as they now exist, they are created for it; humanity is thought and called into being so that Love might bestow itself. This hunger for God is what is inmost and most authentic in humanity, the center and root of what it is absolutely. It has this hunger always: for even one of the damned, who has turned away from this Love and made himself incapable of receiving this Love, is still really able to experience this Love, which, being scorned, now burns like fire. Humans always remain what they were created as: the burning longing for God Himself in His own threefold life, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The capacity for the God of self-bestowing personal Love is the central and abiding human condition.
Brendan–I wholeheartedly endorse your description of the human longing for God. It seems so simple, but has been hotly debated by “atheists” for centuries.
The New Yorker often features cartoons about the afterlife, that is, Heaven or Hell – they don’t seem to recognized Purgatory. I recently heard a talk in which the speaker reported his research on the cartoons. Yes, scholars have time to do this sort of thing.
The most frequent image of people in Heaven showed them as participants in an eternal Southern California type cocktail party. Likewise the most frequent image of people in Hell showed them as participants in an eternal Southern California type cocktail party.
“The most frequent image of people in Heaven showed them as participants in an eternal Southern California type cocktail party. Likewise the most frequent image of people in Hell showed them as participants in an eternal Southern California type cocktail party.”
Catalina Wine Mixer!
Jeff Landry, allow me to defend Peggy’s claim that Douthat is a fundamentalist, which is not personal, but theological. The problem with fundamentalists is not that they believe in Hell, but that they think it is primarily about God giving people what they deserve. Jesus might have called such people “Pharisees,” who would rather have the yolk of the law and the apparent freedom that comes with knowing what the rules are and being able to follow them than the freedom of love that doles out mercy in spite of the law. Jesus would have probably also thought of Pilate as a kind of pragmatic “Pharisee,” who followed the law of political expedience, rather than that of the Jews. The main point, however, is that both are obsessed with order, and they refuse to recognize a love the works outside the law. On a more theologically robust understanding of Hell, it is precisely wanting the apparent freedom of the law to trump the apparent tyranny of divine love that keeps people in slavery. Instead of accepting the undeserved grace of God, people would rather embrace the deserved punishment of the law. Thus, Hell is more radically about what we do, than it is about what God does. God simply loves. It is we who persist in rejecting that love by clinging to what we take to be our legally legitimate free choice to reject that love.
R.M. Lender, this is related to my slight political jab at Douthat at the end of my post. It strikes me that most conservatives think they are defending freedom by arguing that everyone should simply get what he or she deserves. Somehow, undeserved governmental “grace” like free healthcare, education, unemployment assistance, retirement benefits, etc. is an attack on my own self-determination. That is precisely the “fundamentalist”/legalistic kind of freedom that Douthat’s vision of Hell seems to underwrite.
Cardinal Dulles’s formulation is, as one would expect, excellent: “We can be sure that Christ, who died on the Cross for us, will not fail to give us the grace we need.” But maybe it’s better to say “as much grace as we want, or will accept.” God cannot force Himself or his mercy on us without destroying our freedom and so making us less than human. So Ross Douthat is right, I think: Hell, or at least the possibility of Hell, vouchsafes our freedom — our freedom to love or not to love, to accept or reject love.
I’m sorry, though, that Ross didn’t at least mention Purgatory in his column. I’d have thought Purgatory — the hope of Puratory — would be a strong selling point to a former Pentecostal. (I, too, spent some time in Pentecostal churches as a child.) For surely a belief in Purgatory gets you most of the important things Ross attributes to a belief in Hell: a sense of moral consequence, a sense of justice. The point is not so much that you need the fear of Hell to get you to do good things. It’s that you need a belief in Hell or Purgatory or both to secure your confidence that not doing good things matters, whether or not you seem to get away with it in this world. Czeslaw Milosz put it best in Roadside Dog:
Mr. Landry, would it improve your opinion of Commonweal to learn that, except when he’s talking about politics, I usually agree with Ross? And, unlike Peggy, I’m still an editor here. Do you really imagine that it’s technically impossible for us to block the comments of trolls, malcontents, and other conservatives, or that we’re professionally obliged to respond to them, even when it means interrupting our expresssions of mutual admiration?
“Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano['s real life counterpart] really in heaven?”
I dunno. I don’t care. I do know that nobody else knows either. If the prospect of heaven is not enough of a motivator of good behavior, I doubt hell is any better.
Eric, the fantasy of self-sufficiency shouldn’t be confused with the desire for justice. In fact, that fantasy involves a refusal to take justice and injustice seriously, a denial of the consequences of injustice. People get hurt through no fault of their own and beyond their own power of recovery. Often, their wounds seem greater than the sins that caused them. They need grace, no doubt; but they also yearn for justice. And we have no reason to suppose God despises their yearning. As that arch-fundamentalist Benedict XVI wrote in Spe Salvi:
As for the analogy between God’s grace and state welfare, I don’t think it gets us very far. Surely the point about Medicaid, for example, is that the poor do deserve it, by virtue of who they are (members of a community that can afford Medicaid) rather than what they’ve done to earn it. Distributive justice, and not charity or mercy, requires that we give everyone what he needs before those who already have what they need spend their extra resources on what they merely desire. An unjust economy is one in which that distinction no longer matters or is hardly intelligible (Who are you to tell me what I don’t need?).
The fear of hell certainly inspired dukes, counts and others to take back the Holy Land. They were assured by Urban II that just by participating in the Crusades they would gain heaven and be forgiven all their sins. Naturally, this did not stop them from putting the heads of Muslims on spears and flaunting them to taunt the survivors. Hell is, as some point out here, the absence of God. Just as we begin heaven on earth by our union with God and following the beatitudes, so do we begin hell by selfishness, cruelty and the other sins. Virtue is its own reward. Though I hold that there is no virtue without God even if many atheists are better than some Christians. Hell is in being self centered. Which is why war is practically always wrong because it seeks to take from someone else for our own use. One who follows the beatitudes begins to experience the peace that surpasses all understanding. This is different than Matthew 25 where the just are surprised by the recounting by Jesus of their good deeds. The just feel they can never do enough for God. They do not fear hell. The dread the thought of not following the will of so loving a God.
Matt, thanks for your comments. I think I will have to respectfully disagree with Pope Benedict. It seems strangely self-interested to think that belief in eternal life ought to be based on the “hope” that our individual need for fulfillment be met by receiving reparation for all the past wrongs done to us. Of course, we do hope that our yearning for justice will be quenched, but the message of the Gospels seems to be that that yearning will not be met in the retributive way that we seem to want it to be. Rather, it will be met in learning to forgive, in humbly recognizing that God’s ways are not our ways, in being able to see the prodigal son embraced without having to pay anything back, in accepting that the workers who came last will be paid as much as those who came first. Yes, all will be well, but it will be because God mercifully wills it to be so, not because God has balanced the books and meted out the just punishments and rewards.
As for welfare, it seems that the point is precisely that some don’t see that the poor deserve it because of who they are, which is hopefully more than “members of a community that can afford Medicaid.” I hope we would agree that even if society couldn’t afford Medicaid, we would still say that all people deserve medical care simply by virtue of who they are, i.e. human beings. I mean “afford” only refers to the economic system of value that we’ve constructed to give us the arbitrary sense that things are exchanged in a “just” way, precisely because we don’t have access to their essential value. If one were to know the “real” value of something in its essence, distribution would have nothing to do with it, at least from a theological perspective. A radically loving God would want to give creation everything it needed, regardless of whether the “market” could bear it. There is no scarcity in God.
So, you may be right that the analogy does fail, but it does seem instructive in that conservatives often sound as if the “market” is not a constructed system of exchange, but rather somehow is a reflection of God’s law. And, as such, individuals within the market simply “are” (or become) whatever the market can “afford” for them to be. And, it has often been the position of Douthat that the market cannot afford for all people to be insured by “entitlements” (note that the very word seems to denote precisely that you are being given something you didn’t earn and connote that there’s something wrong with that). On a radically theological understanding of value, every human being would be “owed” absolutely everything that he or she needed to flourish, which might become a rather impractical and expensive proposition. So, maybe the analogy doesn’t get us very far, practically speaking, but it may point the way toward a more radical hope for what might be possible and should be actual.
So, God’s justice is neither retributive nor distributive. God’s justice is one with God’s love, which we either reject as not playing by our rules of what is retributively or distributively owed, or we accept as a divine gift, just like our own lives.
Eric,
The Prodigal Son suffers a great deal before he is ready to ask for his father’s forgiveness. The pigsty is his Purgatory. He does not have to “pay anything back” because what he owes his father is not the money he squandered but gratitude, which he pays in full.
Purgatory and Hell are where we are made to see clearly, and so to feel, the suffering our sin has caused others. Compassion becomes literal: one suffers with those one has hurt, and as they have suffered — in purgatory, voluntarily and in hope of reconciliation; in hell, involuntarily and without hope.
We may hope, but not presume, that there is no one in hell, that all suffering will, by the mercy of God, be fruitful.
@Eric,
Thank you–well said. His idea that strikes and home runs don’t matter if we don’t keep score and have winners and losers sure seems more like the Prodigal’s brother than the father. RD’s economics of mercy as expressed in the column seems a far cry from seventy times seven–I would prefer to believe we worship a God who is better than what we mere humans are challenged to be.
There’s also something strange going on in his early assertion that longevity and lives of relative comfort sharpen people’s sense of outrage at “the scope and apparent randomness of human suffering,” which seems both naïve and pretty dismissive of a lot of our fellow humans.
I don’t know at the end of the day what/if Hell is–but I sure disagree with his notion that choices aren’t real and don’t matter if there’s no eternal punishment.
Some more quotes:
And another, this one adapted:
I have these along with some other edgy passages from “Catholic authors” up on the walls in my classroom (high school).
Just for the record Ratzinger discusses Hell in his book Eschatologie — he is close to Balthasar and John Paul II in the hope that hell is empty. Meanwhile people like Douthat do no service to Catholics by once again portraying us as people who spend all our time brooding on hell and contraception, with endless repetition of the same usually unhistorical and heremeneutically naive speculations — a sort of pub game — and SO unsuitable to Easter week.
And putting manichean passages from Greene’s shilling shocker on the walls of Catholic schools — what kind of education is that?
Rahner defines hell as follows: the possibility of final loss. I think that is just enough.
Matt, thanks. I don’t think that we’re too far apart. But, I wouldn’t say that purgatory is about voluntary suffering with hope of reconciliation and hell is involuntary without hope. I think purgatory is about having been reconciled and wanting to do the joyful work of making things right out of praise and gratitude for what God’s done for us. So, I wouldn’t agree that the Prodigal Son’s purgatory is the pigsty. Rather, the Prodigal Son’s purgatory would be the joyful work that he willingly does after being welcomed back by the Father, joining his older brother in the fields with a heart that has been transformed by his Father’s mercy. The pigsty is his Hell. There he has no faith in the Father’s mercy and no regard for his own worth. He considers himself only worth receiving in measure to what he has done, and he wants to return only to be a slave. Persistence in Hell upon returning would have been to reject his Father’s mercy, storm out of his homecoming party, and take up a place with the servants, which, in some ways, is exactly what the older brother does. And he is scolded for expecting any reparations to be made, for wanting the younger brother’s former ingratitude to be purged before he is forgiven, and for not having enough faith in the Father’s love that it actually has transformed his younger brother’s heart.
I think that Purgatory and Hell are radically about our own freedom, not what God does. In Purgatory there is no need to hope because we know we have been forgiven, and we give our work as an unnecessary and free expression of gratitude, not as what is economically owed. In Hell there is no hope because those in it simply choose not to believe in God’s mercy and love. They see it and freely and definitively reject it. That’s how evil Hell really is. It’s not like the people in Hell are suffering and wishing that they could take back their rejection of God, but unfortunately the game is over. God’s game of love is never over, that’s what eternal life is, and their continued rejection of God just is their suffering.
Exactly, Fr. O Leary. How dare a mere journalist, who shows no sign of having read Rahner, presume to write about hell in the pages of a newspaper. Before you know it his editors will be letting him write about public policy without advanced degrees in economics and political science. No, if he’s going to speculate about the afterlife, let him show us his PhD, or at least an STD. And the day after Easter! Good grief, how could he? Easter is about bunnies and rainbows and chocolate. So please: let’s have no more pub-game stuff about sin, justice, and mercy.
God’s game of love is never over, that’s what eternal life is, and their continued rejection of God just is their suffering.
Eric,
You seem to be saying that the suffering of Hell is the willful rejection of God. But if you voluntarily refuse to accept God, why would you experience that as suffering? Why would you be “tortured by the thought of having lost God forever” if you intentionally chose not to accept him? It seems to me that those who are saved would perceive those who are damned to be suffering, but why would those who have voluntarily chosen damnation, and who persist in that choice, consider themselves to be suffering?
From The Baltimore Catechism:
Here is what seems to me to be a problem. According to what I was taught, if a wicked person is about to die and is terrified of Hell, he can go to confession with only “imperfect contrition” (fear of Hell) and be saved. But if there is no priest around, the wicked person is no doubt unable to make a perfect act of contrition, so he goes to Hell. So in this case the difference between Heaven and Hell is whether or not a priest is available—a matter of luck. Two equally wicked people can have different eternal fates based on the fact that one could make it to a priest before he died and the other could not.
Hello Eric,
R.M. Lender, this is related to my slight political jab at Douthat at the end of my post. It strikes me that most conservatives think they are defending freedom by arguing that everyone should simply get what he or she deserves.
I would echo Matt’s point about not conflating political concerns about self-sufficiency with the desire for justice – but I see that that conversation has already moved on with out me. More to the point, it annoyed me since it was yet another instance (or so it seemed to me) of the kind of politicization of theology that percolates too often here at Commonweal (and to a lesser degree, over at First Things now, too).
At any rate, whatever Ross is, he’s not a libertarian.
“But if there is no priest around, the wicked person is no doubt unable to make a perfect act of contrition, so he goes to Hell. So in this case the difference between Heaven and Hell is whether or not a priest is available—a matter of luck.”
On what basis do you say that the wicked person would be unable to make an act of perfect contrition?
If you’re homosexual, Bill, give up those immoral acts and find yourself a nice woman that you can love and bear children with the way God designed you. You can do that, Bill; you choose not to.
It seems unlikely to me that a truly wicked person, faced with death and terrified of eternal punishment, is going to summon up a love of God and make an act of perfect contrition. But if you think it is probable, I will just make it a given in my example. The wicked man or men have rejected God and continue to reject God. However, one of them, though he rejects God, fears hell enough to go to confession. That’s imperfect contrition. He gets absolution, and he goes to heaven while nevertheless rejecting God. It makes no sense if Hell is the rejection of God.
David, Thanks for the comment and quotes. So, I think my approach might actually deal with your worry about heaven or hell being about luck. If heaven, hell, and purgatory are about the state of our will towards God, receiving absolution doesn’t have much to do with it. Of course, absolution is important, but it is, like purgatory, something we receive when we have already recognized that God is merciful and wants to forgive us. So, we go to confession already in a state of grace, and joyfully confess our sins confident in God’s grace. That is why St. Paul says that he boasts of his weakness with the knowledge that he is strong in the Lord (2 Cor. 12). So, now, why would someone who willfully rejects God suffer that rejection? In short, because God doesn’t reject her. It’s like a child who willfully wants to be put down by her parent, but the parent won’t let go. So, the child just thrashes around, pushing and punching for freedom.
Another good analogy is addiction. The addict willfully refuses treatment, and often willfully refuses that there is a problem, and yet, the addict is a slave to his addiction and suffers, becoming a shell of his former self, rejecting community, alienating all of his friends and family until he has nothing. Yet, all the way down, he may never admit that there’s anything wrong with what he is doing. That’s how insidious sin can be. It seduces us into not even realizing that it is a problem, even when everyone is telling us that we’re harming ourselves, we still choose that harm because we don’t believe in the possibility of anything else. And yet, something else is always possible, which is why we continue to live eternally in God’s love. For the addict, a final death to end the game would be sweet relief, but God continues to will our existence even when we would rather give it up. That’s how much God loves us, and the sinner suffers that love, because the sinner would rather die in sin than live in love.
R.M. Lender, I take your point about Ross not being a libertarian as long as we can agree that he’s not a communist. As for your worry about politicizing theology, I can only say that theology is political and politics is theological. The former is because of sin, and the latter is because God created human beings.
Hello Eric,
Well – I wouldn’t deny that theology influences our politics – in fact, it should. It might not have been your intent; but it does get tedious (for me, at least) seeing almost every theological discussion yanked into the political food fight of the day.
At any rate, I imagine being forced to argue about health care policy for the rest of eternity would be a pretty good approximation of hell.
When I was a kid, there was a popular song titled To Know Him Is To Love Him. One would have thought that to know God is to love him, but if people (and angels) can reject him, then apparently that is not true. I am not sure that makes sense.
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris later had a great recording of the song on their album Trio.
In the course of my post-Vatican II religious education I was taught that the church’s previous emphasis on hell as punishment for our sins was the easy way out. My parents and my teachers communicated to me that simply behaving because you feared punishment was inferior to choosing to do what is right because you love God and want to stay close to God.
I’ve always been a little bit bemused by those who condemn the modern church’s failure to emphasize hell. Don’t they know how *easy* a self-interested fear of hell seemed to my twelve-year-old self, in contrast to the relentless pressure to be always selflessly loving toward God?
If there is no hell where will we put the terrible popes, bishops, clergy, not to mention all the pre-Vatican II Catholics?
In “Time” magazine (April 25 edition), the front cover had the title “What if There’s No Hell?”
Inside the magazine was an article about a radical evangelical pastor, Rob Bell, who has the Evangelicals in a fury. He wrote a book entitled LOVE WINS: A BOOK ABOUT HEAVEN, HELL, AND THE FATE OF EVERY PERSON WHO EVER LIVED.
In the Evangelical belief, one must accept Jesus as their personal Savior and Lord and they are saved, or else they go to Hell. So according to the Evangelical perspective (and Joe McFaul brought up this question also) is that people like Gandhi ARE in Hell and the Deli Lama will also be going there as well.
Rob Bell’s concept is a bit closer to the Catholic perspective. He sees Jesus’ work of redemption as a UNIVERSAL one. And he goes further by stating that “every person who ever lived” could have a place in heaven (whatever that turns out to be). Bell believes in Jesus’ atonement. But he questions whether the redemption promised in Christian tradition is limited to those who meet the tests of the church. He asserts that believing in redemption for all is living with mystery rather than the demanding certitude that the Evangelical Church states.
And Bell turns to the teachings of the early Church when he writes, “at the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.”
Bell’s congregation, which numbers 7000 on Sundays is growing. He is trying to reach a generation that’s more comfortable with mystery, with unsolved questions.
In many ways, Bell’s concepts could also cause some questions for Catholics as well. Bell states “The scandal of the gospel is Jesus’ radical, healing love for a world that’s broken.”
There seems to be an assumption in some of the posts that purgatory and hell are simply about our relationship to God, whether or not we accept Him and what our attitude is toward Him. If this is so, then, as has been pointed out, choices make no difference, and what Eichmann did is irrelevant, and the rest of us don’t have any outstanding debts to our neighbors. True, the notion that Jesus has paid those debts to a bloodthirsty father is not an acceptable teaching. But what about the other factor in so many of our sins — our trespasses against others? Need nothing be made right?
I can’t believe that forgiveness is simply a matter of accepting God’s will. We must accept the consequences of our own sins. In other words, we must accept our guilt and be willing to right our wrongs. This isn’t a popular belief these days, but there it is.
It seems to me that repentance is partly a willingness to put things back in order, it’s not just to accepting God’s will. People are not unreal.
I have even read that for some Jews Eichmann and the others *ought not* to be forgiven. Since he can never make those wrongs right, I can understand their position, both from an intellective perspective and an emotional one. It would seem to make a mockery of justice.
Are we to reject the Old Testament? I doubt that the answer is simple.
I think that Kierkegaard’s saying that he believed that hell would be empty except for one person, himself, is an appropriate posture.
The point of hell is to underscore the importance of the choices that we make here on earth. Those choices have eternal consequences. The teaching should give us all pause to reflect more on all of our choices in light of what has been received by faith.
A good definition I heard of ethics was knowing why it is you are doing what it is you are doing.
The teaching of hell, then, necessitates the need to assist people in making considered, informed choices and not in using it as manipulative ploys to induce neurotic guilt.
PS
Given that we have just emerged from Good Friday and Easter Sunday, I think the proclamation of the saving work of Christ is important to underscore.
I think the eclipse of hell is connected with the success (perhaps) of the teaching on grace.
By the way this entire issue will surface in Advent when the new missal comes and we have the translation of “pro multis” as “for the many” in the liturgy instead of for all.
You know, what really ticks me off about Catholic thought is that when something is problematical, like God damning human beings to Hell to suffer everlasting torment in eternal flames, attempts to grapple with the issues get ever more abstract and nuanced, until no one actually said, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Instead, he said something like, “Gee, I’ve really wished all along that you’d spend eternity in paradise with me, but I really had to give you you’re freedom, and you chose to reject me, not vice versa. So I’m just letting you have what you want. When I said for you to depart from me into eternal fire, what I really meant was you’re free to go to Hell, and you want to, so have it your way.”
David:
Maybe that was what was actually said and St. Jerome was just having (yet another) bad day when he translated it.
“A good definition I heard of ethics was knowing why it is you are doing what it is you are doing.”
George D. –
Too simple. I can know with complete clarity that what I’m doing is stealing my neighbor’s pig and doing it because I want a roasted pig feast, but that alone has nothing to do with good and evil. A definition of ethics with no reference to good and evil is just psychology.
And as soon as good and evil enter the picture, so does guilt. There is since Freud, I think, an inclintion to dismiss all guilt feelings as mere products of our psyche. While it’s true that guilt *feelings* are self-produced, guilt feelings are not the same thing as guilt — old fashioned, fire and brimstone guilt.
I once knew a psychoanalyst who thought that if you *felt* guilty you *were* guilty. Nonsense.
Joseph — You wrote:
I really was rather stunned and somewhat offended that you’d take a swipe like that at me — the way I read it, it sounds like it’s saying I’m a bad thing for Catholic schools or something. I’m 28; I care very deeply about Catholic schools (I’ve gone to Catholic schools all my life), and want to devote my life to serving within them. Anyway, my point is, that swipe seemed to come out of nowhere — if you’re thinking that I’m teaching hellfire or something, I’m not. Speaking of which, I also have on the walls the quote from Brighton Rock that says, “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” The point of the various passages I have on the wall is to show them the edgy side of Catholicism, something different from some of the “Jesus loves you; draw a rainbow” sort of thing that many of them as sophomores and juniors would start to see as cheesy.
Also, where is the Manichaeism in those Greene passages? Manichaeism is the idea that there are two ultimate principles: good/spirit/light/etc. and evil/matter/darkness/etc., almost like two Gods, with the idea that the world came about from a sort of conflict between them in which the light got trapped within matter (our souls trapped within bodies), etc. There’s nothing like that at all in those passages from Greene. There’s a strong sense of the reality and possibility of hell, with the paradox that due to invincible ignorance, it’d be hard for a non-Catholic to be damned, but that’s not Manichaeism.
P.S. — By the way, after that, I’m sure glad I didn’t mention having Julia Flyte’s breakdown at the fountain scene from Brideshead Revisited on the wall too! …Oops…
@brendan
Now you’ve opened the door—what’s all on the walls? Do give a full accounting, kplzthx.
(Seriously, I’d love to know. I have no clue what counts as edgy vs cheesy anymore and I really would be interested in what you’ve picked. Cheers!)
Good points, David (very entertaining!) and Ann. The truth is that we only know what is available to us in the inspired word of the Bible and through the words of Jesus. As always, it makes for a lively discussion that has been thought provoking!
Re: Gandhi and Pastor Bell: it just seems to me that Catholics don’t actually land perfectly in what is summarized here.
We do believe that baptism is urgently important. I will add the opinion that we’ve become much too casual about baptism. The following paragraph from the Catechism of the Catholic Church is important in this regard. Note especially the simple declarative force of the first sentence:
“The Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation.60 He also commands his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and to baptize them.61 Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament.62 The Church does not know of any means other than Baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude; this is why she takes care not to neglect the mission she has received from the Lord to see that all who can be baptized are “reborn of water and the Spirit.” God has bound salvation to the sacrament of Baptism, but he himself is not bound by his sacraments. ”
… and then note the important qualifier in the last sentence above. That thought is expanded in a subsequent paragraph:
“”Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.”63 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.”
I know very little about Gandhi (I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never even watched the film) but wasn’t he Oxbridge-educated? Whether a person could attend one of those colleges in those days and not have the Gospel proclaimed to him could be an interesting question; e.g. would he have been expected to attend chapel? As for Goebbels – glad I don’t have to judge cases like that one. I hope God is even more reluctant to eternally condemn us than I would be.
Ann
If I steal a neighbours pig because I want a pig roast that is not necessarily always sinful. For example, it could be a case of the rest of the village going hungry while one person has all the pigs for him or her self. Perhaps I have been charged by the community to take my neighbours pig. My “theft” of the pig is not a sin.
Private property, in Catholic social thought, does not have an absolute value but is ordered to the community.
So there is a lot of context that needs to go into evaluating the morality of a given situation.
However, if I am greedily or selfishly taking the pig just to have a party with my friends, I am not respecting his or her property and I have sinned. I would say, however, that I would know that what I was doing is wrong, and I am doing it with complete clarity. But I would not claim that what I was doing was ethical. I would claim that I am stealing. St. Augustine talks about this very thing in his Confessions when he talks about how he and his friends stole fruit from the pear tree; not because they were hungry but because it was wrong and for that very reason they loved it. They loved doing wrong. But they knew they were doing wrong (in the deepest recesses of their conscience).
Ethics needs to be a postive response to the other. And I agree that due to our sinful nature we do need correction and education.
My example presumes a certain level of moral education and instruction.
.
Not to worry, Brendan. On my wall I have a postcard that reads, “Please stop talking.”
Julia Flyte etc. is also pretty sickly as theology.
Luther talks about the opus alienum dei, whereby the sinner is condemned at every moment, and the opus proprium dei, expressed in the declaration “your sins are forgiven” which makes us saints in God’s eyes at every moment, simul iustus et peccator. Look to yourself and you are damned and cast out, look to Christ and you are transferred to the realm of grace, mantled with his righteousness. Luther calls this dialectic of Law and Gospel the highest art of Christendom. Douthat reflects our lack of that art, a sort of pub talk about God and freedom and good-’n-evil all conceived in total abstraction from the realities of Redemption. Keeping Catholic kids worried about hell and sex is not”edgy” in any redemptive sense; nor is Kierkegard; but Luther may be a master of salvific edginess.
Jim,
Are you saying if Gahndi knew of Christianity but did not convert, he went to Hell when he died?
Mary and Grant — thanks for your replies, and humor! The Brideshead Revisited quote is the only other quote that I printed out, mounted on construction paper, and put on the walls, but I was going to add more and will eventually — I’d like to put some from Flannery O’Connor, particularly something from the ending of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (the line about the sun being like an elevated Host drenched in blood) and also her line about the Eucharist: “If it’s [only] a symbol, then to hell with it.” However, every few weeks or so I write new quotes on the white board. Currently, there’s a long quote (slightly edited and adapted) from Teilhard’s “Mass on the World,” plus the following three short quotes, that are from three of the Teilhard t-shirts that Fr. King made at Georgetown:
I’ve also had quotes on the white board from the First Letter of John (which I juxtaposed with lyrics from the song “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd), Meister Eckhart (which I juxtaposed with lyrics from “A Murder of One” by the Counting Crows — the connection was a line about “springing out in the Holy Spirit” and “there’s a bird that nests inside you, sleeping underneath your skin”), St. Catherine of Siena (You, Trinity, are a deep sea, etc.), Julian of Norwich (the hazelnut passage), St. Augustine (at one point the “You have made us for Thyself, O God” one, plus another later on), St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Justin Martyr, John F. Haught, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, plus others I can’t recall.
Here’s a sampling of some which are from stuff I did with them in packets, though for some I can’t recall the exact stopping and starting points of the quotes as I displayed them:
Finally, here’s the quote from Brideshead Revisited, which is actually a trimmed version of the lines as they’re spoken in the 1981 miniseries; the italics are my own; the ellipses are usually for dramatic effect, not because of something omitted. The point of these and the ones from Brighton Rock is really to be sort of arresting, attention-grabbing, edgy, almost like something from a movie “trailer” for the book:
Here’s a clip of this scene from the miniseries:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtQoUs1rVz8
Joseph — I am one of the last people who could ever be accused of “keeping Catholic kids worried about hell and sex.” If anything, some might accuse me going too far in the other direction. To me, the beauty and power of that quote from Brideshead Revisited is the way it shows the indelible, irresistible impact of Catholicism, which you can never get away from. The “twitch upon the thread,” etc. Certainly, if Julia Flyte’s breakdown were the ONLY sort of thing I exposed the kids to, that would be sickly, but as part of an overall tapestry, I think it has its place.
Oh, by the way, I also meant to talk about the bulletin boards, which have Eastern-style icons mixed with nature pictures. I’ve also got a picture of Mary’s face from the Pieta and Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.”
Who would have thought that Charles Ryder would go on to become Pope Alexander VI?
What I think I’ve learned from Rahner:
1. God always love all that he has created.
2. There is evil, though we don’t fully understand why there is, even though we are caught up in it, both as perpetrators and as victims. So we always need the redemption that God wants to give us.
3. God clearly wants us both to love Him and to love one another. It should be obvious that none of us (excluding Mary and Jesus) does full justice to what God wants of us.
4. None of us knows what happens when we die, when we confront the all-good and all-loving God, but we have reason to hope that both we ourselves and every other person will accept the love He offers us at that junction.
Even if Hitler winds up in heaven, it remains true that his crimes were awful. But however awful anyone’s crimes, those crimes belong to the temporal order and do not wholly determine the outcome of our meeting God at the moment of death.
All of our talk about justice, mercy, punishment is finite and fallible. That doesn’t make it flawed or false, but it keep it from being definitive.
If I’ve gotten Rahner wrong, then I regret it.
Ann said: “There seems to be an assumption in some of the posts that purgatory and hell are simply about our relationship to God, whether or not we accept Him and what our attitude is toward Him. — If this is so, then, as has been pointed out, choices make no difference —”
This smacks of the “once saved, always saved” mantra that the fundgelicals love to parrot. Unfortunately St. Paul didn’t know that or he wouldn’t have told the Philippians that, obedient though they have always been, they still need to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12).
“Are you saying if Gahndi knew of Christianity but did not convert, he went to Hell when he died?”
David N – not for me to say. I truly don’t know. At the very minimum, I’d think the bar needs to be set higher than “knew of Christianity”.
Aquinas, as always, has an interesting take on things, including who has the potential to be “saved.”
When he speaks of the church, he means all of humankind, past, present, and future. This is what the nuns in the old days used to call “the Mystical Body of Christ.” Aquinas describes it thusly (letting his “inner engineer” shine forth): “So there are potential members of the mystical body and actual members; some potential members will never be actual members, but those who will may be members at three levels: by faith, or by love as we know it on earth, or by the enjoyment of God in heaven.” Christ is also the head of those “only potentially united but predestined to actual unity” and those who are not, so the future of humanity is covered as well as the past, as are those who believe and those who don’t. “Unbelievers are potentially, even if not actually, members of the church: a potentiality based first on Christ’s power to save the whole of mankind, and secondarily on their own free will.” (all 3A, 8, 3)
Basically, if you are human and have existed or will exist at any point in time, you have a shot at being a member of the church: at healing and growing towards the divine by sharing in the grace of Christ. Works for me.
On a previous post a while back we had a good go-around on eternity and I don’t think you can talk about heaven or hell without talking about eternity. I think the traditional view is that there was some eternal time before, and then we’re born into space-time and live our lives, and then there’s this eternal time after in which our souls reside in either heaven (eventually) or hell.
Yet I can’t help but wonder if space-time and eternity really look more like parallel streams and when we meditate or whatever we escape space-time and loop into eternity, during which we’re no longer conscious of space-time (until we are again).
I never found the eternal view of hell personally meaningful but I sure have seen people living in hell here on earth, usually as a result of indulgence in what we traditionally call sin and avoidance of what we traditionally consider the virtues.
@Brendan
You know, until your post, I never fully appreciated Waugh was such a ridiculous emo… :)
David N – not for me to say. I truly don’t know. At the very minimum, I’d think the bar needs to be set higher than “knew of Christianity”.
Jim,
So suppose someone is raised a Catholic, and they convert to Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam. Are they going to Hell? That seems to be the position you are edging toward.
I don’t know why, but this seems to be the thread of quotes for me. This one is relevant to a lot of what’s been said; I’m going to leave the identity of the author until the end — you might be surprised:
Give up?
It’s Pope John Paul II, from Redemptoris Missio #10.
George D. –
I agree that taking the pig is not in itself necessarily sinful. But if I do it because I want a feast and have no right to it, then evil/good has become part of the equation. And becasue i know clearly that is and make the choice to take the pig, I am guilty of theft. The guilt is a state of soul — not a feeling, though “guilt feelings” are often the result of such wrongs.
I don’t understand what you mean by “ethical”. If ethics is not concerned with chosen good and bad human behavior, then what is it concerned with?
Lots of people are uneasy with the “twitch upon the thread” structure of Brideshead Revisited, as if the characters had been changed into puppets to fill out an apologetical schema in the latter part of the novel. The recent adaptation plays this as the reabsorption of the characters into a nightmarish ghetto Catholicism. The BBC version of 1981 remains a flawless classic and one of the most haunting tv series ever. I look forward to catching the Borgias.
No one took up my recommendation of Luther — who is an indispensable voice in any discussion of these issues. Of course Luther is often problematic, especially in De Servo Arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will, against Erasmus), even though it is one of his most eloquent and stunning works. I believe that when it was translated into Finnish it met with strong negative reactions from the Lutherans. In interpreting Luther we do well to focus on the themes that were taken up and given prominence in Melanchthon, the Confessions and the culture of the Lutheran churches, while playing down some more extreme points.
Speaking of the Sopranos, what about Livia, Tony’s mother? She was a miserable, life-draining harpy who did evil just because she could. But she was also, it would appear, a classic borderline personality type, clinical depressive and a psychopath. Can God punish her even if that is how he made her?
Ann:
Ethics is concerned first and foremost with the response to the Other. I am with Levinas in making ethics the “first philosophy” meaning that the response to the Other precedes morality although it is related.
The nakedness of the Face appears before me with the silent words “Do not kill”. Do not kill by absorbing me into the sameness of your system.
There is not an absolute morality that is imposed from without as it were. Instead through that dialogical process. God arises to presence in the centre. And from there arises morality.
J.C. Marrero,
You raise an interesting point. People keep maintaining that those who wind up in Hell have chosen their own fate and have not been sent there by God. But what about people who were not competent to choose? What about those whose choices were made in less-than-perfect freedom? What about “there but for fortune go you and I”? What about, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead”? In order to be morally culpable, human beings must know what they are doing and choose to do it freely. How many of us truly know all the ramifications of our own actions and choose to perform those actions with perfect freedom?
“How many of us truly know all the ramifications of our own actions and choose to perform those actions with perfect freedom?”
And that, I’m quite sure, is why Jesus said “Judge not that ye be not judged”. We ought not to judge because we are incompetent to judge. Yes, we can judge behavior, but not motives.
George D. –
It seems that Levinas has re-christened metaphysics as “ethics”. Hmm. To me that sort of word-play just serves to obfuscate matters. If you’re inventing a new idea, then the wise thing is to invent a new word for it.
What a pity the continental philosophers had so little appreciation of Wittgenstein.
St. Therese of Lisieux worked closely with a nun who was so difficult, so mentally unstable that no one else in the monastery could deal with her. Therese said that this poor nun was like a broken clock that needed to be wound every fifteen minutes to run at all. She saw the nun as heroic in her own way that she could still be as functional as she was–a “merit” that seemed to have escaped everyone else’s notice. There was no real happy ending to the story. The mentally-ill nun was asked to leave the convent after Therese’s death and many years later she died basically homeless. But she retained a loving memory of her by then canonized friend. I suppose that even the most emotionally challenged may have some abillity to receive and give love. And that may be all that God expects of them.
One of the great weaknesses of the Sopranos – probably the greatest – is that it put entirely too much stock in therapy. Whenever Tony is in a therapy session is my cue to turn the channel.
If pristine mental health is a prerequisite to freely accepting God’s offer of salvation through Jesus, then heaven must be a pretty empty place.
“So suppose someone is raised a Catholic, and they convert to Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam. Are they going to Hell? That seems to be the position you are edging toward.”
I think it’s quite possible that someone who converts from Christianity to something else, and holds fast to that something else to his death, is at risk of going to hell.
If pristine mental health is a prerequisite to freely accepting God’s offer of salvation through Jesus, then heaven must be a pretty empty place.
Jim,
My point would be that mental health problems would be an impediment to being held responsible for rejecting salvation. The less mentally capable you are, the less accountable you are for your actions. Hopefully God counts people who are not against him as for him, otherwise the infants who die before baptism go to hell.
I think it’s quite possible that someone who converts from Christianity to something else, and holds fast to that something else to his death, is at risk of going to hell.
Jim,
If they convert in perfectly good faith, according to their conscience, and lead an exemplary life as, say, a Buddhist?
And since geography is the best predictor of religious affiliation, presumably the Creator has decided some people get a head start.
JP2 was quoted above — remember that he taught that people are saved through their religions (a teaching quoted also in Dominus Iesus, 2000). So we don’t need to worry about geography and invincible ignorance — there is a greater wideness in God’s mercy since Vatican II as interpreted by John Paul II.
“I think it’s quite possible that someone who converts from Christianity to something else, and holds fast to that something else to his death, is at risk of going to hell.”
E.L. Doctorow, in one of his less successful books whose title I forget just now, wrote about an Episcopal priest who marries a Jew and converts, and says something like, “I’m a better Christian as a Jew than I ever was as a Christian.”
I’m not exactly sure what that means, but in becoming a Jew, the ex-priest gives up a lot of his self-deception and begins to take the example of Christ more seriously.
In my view, he hasn’t rejected his Christianity, but his erroneous notions about what a Christian is.
Then, again, Doctorow is a Jew, so perhaps there’s a bit of gloating there?
“If they convert in perfectly good faith, according to their conscience, and lead an exemplary life as, say, a Buddhist?”
I dunno, David. Can a Christian embrace Buddhism without simultaneously rejecting Christ as being the Way, the Truth and the Life? It sounds unlikely.
Here is Dominus Iesus:
“14. It must therefore be firmly believed as a truth of Catholic faith that the universal salvific will of the One and Triune God is offered and accomplished once for all in the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.
“Bearing in mind this article of faith, theology today, in its reflection on the existence of other religious experiences and on their meaning in God’s salvific plan, is invited to explore if and in what way the historical figures and positive elements of these religions may fall within the divine plan of salvation. In this undertaking, theological research has a vast field of work under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium. The Second Vatican Council, in fact, has stated that: “the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude, but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a participation in this one source”.43 The content of this participated mediation should be explored more deeply, but must remain always consistent with the principle of Christ’s unique mediation: “Although participated forms of mediation of different kinds and degrees are not excluded, they acquire meaning and value only from Christ’s own mediation, and they cannot be understood as parallel or complementary to his”.44 Hence, those solutions that propose a salvific action of God beyond the unique mediation of Christ would be contrary to Christian and Catholic faith.
“15. Not infrequently it is proposed that theology should avoid the use of terms like “unicity”, “universality”, and “absoluteness”, which give the impression of excessive emphasis on the significance and value of the salvific event of Jesus Christ in relation to other religions. In reality, however, such language is simply being faithful to revelation, since it represents a development of the sources of the faith themselves. From the beginning, the community of believers has recognized in Jesus a salvific value such that he alone, as Son of God made man, crucified and risen, by the mission received from the Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit, bestows revelation (cf. Mt 11:27) and divine life (cf. Jn 1:12; 5:25-26; 17:2) to all humanity and to every person.
“In this sense, one can and must say that Jesus Christ has a significance and a value for the human race and its history, which are unique and singular, proper to him alone, exclusive, universal, and absolute …”
This problem was dealt with a long time ago:
“There are many people whom the Church has but God does not have; and there are many people whom God has whom the Church does not have.”
St. Augustine (paraphrased) ca 4th century
But it continues to vex –
“The question we have to face is not that of whether other people can be saved and how. We are convinced that God is able to do this with or without our theories, with or without our perspicacity, and that we do not need to help him do it with our cogitations. The question that really troubles us is not in the least concerned with whether and how God manages to save others.
The question that torments us is, much rather, that of why it is still actually necessary for us to carry out the whole ministry of the Christian faith—why, if there are so many other ways to heaven and to salvation, should it still be demanded of us that we bear, day by day, the whole burden of ecclesiastical dogma and ecclesiastical ethics? And with that, we are once more confronted, though from a different approach, with the same question we raised yesterday in conversation with God and with which we parted: What actually is the Christian reality, the real substance of Christianity that goes beyond mere moralism?
What is that special thing in Christianity that not only justifies but compels us to be and live as Christians?”
‘What It Means to Be a Christian.’ Joseph Ratzinger (1965).
I dunno, David. Can a Christian embrace Buddhism without simultaneously rejecting Christ as being the Way, the Truth and the Life? It sounds unlikely.
Jim,
I would not say such a person rejects Jesus. I would say he reaches the conclusion, using his intellect to the best of his ability and in good conscience, that Jesus is not what Christians believe him to be. I would say that the Church teaches that one must follow one’s conscience at all costs, even on pain of excommunication. If one reaches a decision in good conscience that Christianity is not true, I think one is obliged to look elsewhere. I can’t believe a loving God would send a person to Hell for sincerely seeking truth and being a good person to the best of his abilities.
David, I’m sure there is much to what you say.
Also – when I think of why people tend to drift away from Christianity, I tend to conclude that it isn’t a personal decision made in a vacuum. In my observation, it’s the fruit of a long process that probably started when the person was very young. It could be something for which the parents bear some responsibility. It could be for reasons for which nobody is entirely to blame – as you say, it could be because of mental illness of some sort. It could be because a priest or a teacher was a jerk, or abusive.
The parable of the seeds and the sower is food for thought in this respect. If the soil is shallow or the birds eat the seed, then is it the person’s fault that her faith didn’t take root?
We do not know whether someone mentally ill or pathological is responsible or irresponsible and therefore punishable. The rule of thumb is what Jesus gave us. “Do not judge. ” The reason is we are not God. At the same time we have to hold people accountable in a civil society by confining them if they are a threat to others.
Paul, Newman and other have asserted that one has to follow one’s conscience. During the crusades the clergy presided over the crusaders slaughters. God is the judge here again as well as the avenger if necessary.
Even though it increases his suffering, [Capaneus] continues to curse Zeus in order to prevent his judge from gaining any satisfaction from his punishments. “What I was living, the same I now am, dead.”
Seems like there’s a kind of heroism in that, as there is in the defiance of Milton’s Satan. As they say, the villains always get the best lines.
It seems clear to me that what some of the neo-atheists mean by “Jesus” and what I mean by the word are two different things. So I don’t think it is meaningful to say that they have rejected Jesus (in my sense of the term). To speak logical lingo, their referent of “Jesus” is not my referent, and neither is their sense of the word my sense of it. We’re literally not talking about the same subjects.
One can also be helped by someone without being aware of it. For instance, I doubt that many young people these days in some old American cities know that their public libraries were originally funded by someone named Andrew Carnegie, a philanthropist. But that doesn’t stop Carnegie from being their benefactor. Same with Jesus — one might never have heard His name, but that doesn’t imply that His actions have not actively assisted in my salvation.
@Antonio, re villains get the best lines: yep, guess that’s why you choose Hell for the company, Heaven for the climate… (Twain, right?)
@Ann, re yet another thing you say on here that makes me think…
The statement about atheists who have a different notion/referent of the “Jesus” they reject than you/other Christians have for the “Jesus” you’ve accepted. Very interesting. Do you think if their referent and yours were the same, they would necessarily make a different choice? Is proper understanding (intellectual?) enough?
Unrelated next question–given how people’s beliefs about Hell have changed, what does that mean for Baptismal vows? If someone doesn’t believe there is Satan–dismisses the referent the Church has–what does it mean to swear before God and everybody that you reject him and all his works?
When I read the lines “do you reject Satan etc.” at baptisms I deliberately try to make it feel as if this is just mythological shorthand. Hermeneutics are at work all the time in pastoral adjustment of the old language to a current sense of reality. I would be chary of priests who strongly emphasize the reality of Satan as a personal being.
David Nickol, you should be aware of the work of John Keenan, The Meaning of Christ (1989) which combines Christology and Buddhism in a mutually illuminating way.
Dominus Iesus should have emphasized the positive, instead of integrating it is what sounds like a grudging concession, as in the following paragraph:
“Nevertheless, God, who desires to call all peoples to himself in Christ and to communicate to them the fullness of his revelation and love, “does not fail to make himself present in many ways, not only to individuals, but also to entire peoples through their spiritual riches, OF WHICH THEIR RELIGIONS ARE THE MAIN AND ESSENTIAL EXPRESSION even when they contain ‘gaps, insufficiencies and errors’”. Therefore, the sacred books of other religions, which in actual fact direct and nourish the existence of their followers, receive from the mystery of Christ the elements of goodness and grace which they contain.”
Notice how the “therefore” functions here.
In the parallel documents about intra-Christian ecumenical dialogue, the CDF would have done well to emphasize as the primary factor that the Church of Christ is “present and operative” in the other Christian Churches; but here too the Ratzinger negation has prevailed over the Wojytla affirmation.
Fr O Leary,
Thanks for the book recommendation. I have ordered a copy. I have a book called Without Buddha I Could Not Be A Christian by Paul F. Knitter that I have not read yet.
David, Another good book on the Buddhist-Christian connection, but from a slightly different angle, is Paul William’s conversion story “The Unexpected Way.” Williams is a leading scholar of Madhyamaka Buddhism at the University of Bristol, who practiced with the Dalai Lama before converting to Catholicism. Interesting trivia: He dedicated the book to one of my teachers, Denys Turner.
Eric,
Thanks. I love book recommendations. Unfortunately, this book is out of print, with used copies priced from $70 to $170!
It seems Satan and Hell (like practically everything in the faith) need to be re-imagined in a way that makes sense in today’s world, rather than being “metaphor’d” into some kind of cozy tameness. All the mysteries in the old days pointed to something real and those realities have not changed, even though the old symbols (cloven hooves, pointy tails) no longer illuminate.
It seems Satan and Hell (like practically everything in the faith) need to be re-imagined in a way that makes sense in today’s world, rather than being “metaphor’d” into some kind of cozy tameness.
Let’s hope but until that happens what does the Church tell second and third graders about God and Hell?
If you have them make enough felt banners you don’t have to tell them anything! Problem solved.
Mary –
I don’t think knowledge of Christ alone is sufficient for conversion. There must be the acceptance o mystery. Some people need courage to do so, and this is where the grace of God enters. But it also depends on the character and intellectual values of individuals.
ISTM that for many atheists the big problem is not understanding Jesus’ claims so much as not being able to accept that all His claims might even possibly be true. For them the biggest stumbling block to accepting what He preaches is His claim that God is always good, just, and loving. The suffering of innocent beings — God’s purported creatures — is strong evidence against that claim. For many atheists it is decisive. If there is a god, he is not just, and they won’t worship him, or they just don’t believe there is any god at all.
But sometimes they change when they realize that not only does the suffering of innocents need an explanation, but the beauty and goodness of creation *equally* needs to be explained. To me, the world is philosophically a draw — there is evidence both for and against a personal God, and this is the position of most agnostics, I think.
By the way, The Guardian has a most poignant article by Martin Amis this week about and to his dying friend Christopher Hitchens. Amis (an agnostic) pleads at the end for Hitchens (an atheist) to turn agnostic. It is so obvious that Amis hopes that his dear friend will somehow survive in some way it is heartbreaking. But it also illustrates, I think, that not all nonbelievers are nonbelievers because they *want* to be.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/24/amis-hitchens-world
@Ann
Appreciate the first paragraph–that’s what I figured you were thinking. (Matches up with your other comments about grace unwanted.)
Gosh, I wish Amis had stopped typing before he decided to argue for agnosticism. Just a personal opinion, but it doesn’t seem to me to be how a good friend should act to a dying friend. He’s had a long time to attempt to change his friend’s mind; given what he knows of Hitchens, a deathbed conversion of any kind isn’t going to happen. (Even if it were, a newspaper article seems a crass approach.) But that’s just me.
Here’s Hitchen’s most recent statement. Amis won’t be getting his wish.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214×276426
Mary –
Amis and Hitchins have been extremely close since college. I”m guessing that since deathbed conversions seem possible, Amis decided to try to help his friend be a bit more optimistic. No, I wouldn’t expect Hitchens to change. His thinking about God and religion (they’re not exactly the same subject) is so simplistic that I suspect that his belief is founded more on temperament than evidence, and temperament doesn’t change.
I wonder if he has seen the Amis article. His remark about being supported by friends who share his nonbelief indicates to me he hasn’t. (His article is dated the 23rd, Amis’ the 24th.) I guess he doesn’t know his friend Martin as well as he thought. It;s all terribly sad.
Yep Ann, I was aware of the longevity of their friendship. (Sorry for implying otherwise, but I didn’t intend Hitchen’s letter as his literal response, merely to say that from all indications Hitchen’s is quite happy with his position–simplistic though some might find it–and a deathbed conversion is unlikely.) My point was that I was troubled by Amis’ judgment that the tail end of that otherwise lovely article was a good idea (on many levels). To each their own, I guess, but ultimately, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me for Amis to fuss (especially to a crowd of 3rd parties) over whether Hitchens ends up dying with one version of agnosticism versus his version of atheism on his lips–seems a bizarre form of the old Wager. End of the day, “I suppose there could be but I’ve seen no evidence for it thus far” and “As there’s no evidence for it, I conclude there is none” seem too close to bother mentioning when a dear friend is dying. I dunno.
“What does the Church tell second and third graders about God and Hell?”
The Church needs to tell them very little before they’ll embrace these notions on their own and run with them! Kindergartners at my son’s Catholic school talked about how sin was going against Jesus and there were seven ways to do that that you could see even in the classroom, e.g., gluttony = eating other people’s food.
This opened whole new array of weaponry for one particular little tattle-tale concern troll who would solmenly raise her hand and tell the teacher, “Mrs. B., Austin is going against God, and I’m worried he might go to Hell if he gets run over by a car on the way home.”
Mrs. B, whom I suspect was an unreformed tattle-tale concern troll from an early age, would write Austin’s name on the board and put a check next to every time he went against Jesus. If kids acquired enough checks, they were put at the isolation desk, which the teacher explained was like hell in that you were separated from your classmates like a lost soul separated from God.
Three of us whose kids seemed to end up in “hell” every day started volunteering in the classroom after that. All of us ended yanking out kids out of there at the end of the school year.
In what is now ancient history, we got the “eternal torment” message along the lines of Father Marshall’s sermon to the would-be novices in Fred Schepisi’s “The Devil’s Playground”.
Ann said: “I don’t think knowledge of Christ alone is sufficient for conversion. There must be the acceptance o mystery. Some people need courage to do so, and this is where the grace of God enters. But it also depends on the character and intellectual values of individuals.”
To me this means simply that grace, freely given, must be freely received. At best, then, it’s a bit of a crap shoot.
Mary –
I agree that the end of that particular article didn’t seem the logical place for an argument pro agnosticism. It’s not well integrated with the rest of the article. It’s my impression that Amis just took a long shot, blurting it out in hopes that agnosticism might lessen just a bit the bleakness of the end of Hitchens’ life by affirming at least the possibility of something more than the grave.
I’m not sure Hitchens has seen the article yet. (His article and Amis’ were published one day apart.) If Hitchens is only now seeing it, he is probably surprised that Amis even tried to argue the point.
Gotcha, Ann. Of course it’s only from our perspective (theism) that the end would be experienced more bleak-ly for atheists. I’d guess the anti-monarchist experienced today as pretty bleak, dead or no :)
Mary –
A digression, speaking of anti-monarchists: I fell asleep on my couch last night, woke up at 3 a.m. and watched the wedding. I must say I was highly impressed by the religious tone, especially the reading of Scripture by the bride’s young brother and the poem written by the bride and groom themselves for the occasion. It was my impression they weren’t just going through the pretty motions. It wasn’t at all sweetness and light, but very grounded in the difficulties of life and oriented to reliance on the Lord and service to others. Beautiful. Considering that William will probably one day be head of the Church of England, he might help bring faith back to that highly secular country. Yes, there are many different sorts of graces.
Yes! My eeeviiil plan to bait you onto the wedding worked like a charm! Dintcha think the Bishop of London’s sermon was lovely? And did you notice how those Brits all sing? I loved how the crazy throngs a mile away all stopped to sing “Jerusalem.” I only wish I’d had company to watch, as there could be a great drinking game involving how often we heard the word “betwixt.”
Mary –
Yes, the whole thing was worth not going to bed at dawn. I noticed that the Duke of Edinburg sang, but the Queen didn’t. I wonder why. I loved the choir boys best. So good to see a little black one in there and one who looked Filipino :-) The other really good thing about it is that everyone looked so happy, including especially the Queen. This will strike a blow against English classism.
Well, now England has changed while holding on to its valuable traditions. Can the RCC be next? (Don’t hold your breath.)
You know, I did see the Queeen singing (though not “God Save Me”), but her hat hid a lot and she’s got that thin-lipped German thing going on. I hate the whole fairy tale Princess thing, especially the idea that the daughter of millionaires is a commoner in anything other than the technical sense, and I tuned in to mock the fascinators and shore up my cynicism. I fully expected the service to remind me of the movie The Princess Bride’s Impressive Clergyman (“maywwidge, that bwessed awangement, that dweem wiffin a dweem”). Maybe I’m a sucker, but I was struck by how down-right sacred the service felt, leaving aside the royal bits. It was pitch-perfect, I think (music, reading, sermons, prayers). Apart from what it says about class, spectacle, our obsession with royalty, fashion statements, and everything else the media will focus upon, the ceremony did Anglicanism proud.
Mary, I agree — it was a masterpiece. And to see the world’s elite sing Christian hymns so devotedly, for an audience of 2.5 billion, must have made the new atheists wince. Two details showed exquisite good taste and a sharp sense of public opinion: the prominence given to a gay couple and the pointed non-invitation of a discredited ex-PM.
My young Irish cousin’s Facebook comment: “jaysus, the protestants love their hymns!” No guitars for the Anglicans. They’ve managed to maintain a robust sense of the sacred AND evolve a sane attitude towards birth control. Where did we go wrong?
The music director at the Abbey is RC and the former MD @ the Catholic Westminster Cathedral. The job change happened within the past year. His mother was Anglican and father RC and was raised as RC, but with a strong Anglican participation and influence.
In an article in the last issue of The Tablet he indicated that making the transition was seamless for him because he was going from one memorable music tradition (yes, he meant Catholic) to another. And so it went.