Seminary graduate N. C. Harrison discusses the enduring concept of hell.
A lot of Christians, especially my fellow evangelicals, believe that hell is a physical place. Some believe, as that great philosopher Master Shake, that it is a “fiery pit of unpleasantness at the center of the earth,” and some that it is on another planet entirely. Most gesture vaguely when asked about the location of perdition. “It’s, y’know, somewhere,” they seem to say. Many excellent theologians, including thoughtful biblical scholars like the late and lamented John Walvoord (who wrote the best explication of the book of Daniel that I have ever encountered, and I have read a lot of them considering that Daniel is my favorite biblical text) have held on fervently to this position. It seems a little bit too much like “Big Boogeyman is hiding in the closet and is coming to get you,” for me, and so I don’t give it much personal thought anymore even if the concrete images of crime and punishment, like those found in Dante’s Divine Comedy, are poetically evocative. It is probably the predominant idea in my denomination, however, and so when communicating with others in a ministerial capacity it is one that I have to address.
We muddle through, feeling heaven beside us and hell within, catching glimpses of each through the ethereal veil.
|
Other scholars, like Bill Crockett, hold that hell is metaphorical concept, rather than a physical place that one can go and live, setting up an address and receiving mail—which will undoubtedly almost immediately burst into flame—there. The concrete images, men like Crockett argue, are a human’s way of groping to describe unhappiness and misery that is beyond the limits of human language. C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, referred to hell as a “grey and joyless city,” where the inhabitants trudged through an eternity of grim survival with no hope of relief. The doors of this prison were locked from the inside, Lewis wrote, but implied even more insidiously that the only things keeping these souls in a state of such existential torment was their inability to even imagine any other kind of place, anymore. What happens is that what lives, in the shape of a man, is no longer a human being but and, indeed, doesn’t live any longer but lies in Sheol in an eternal act of dying. This is a little closer to what I personally believe. It is, perhaps, not a one-to-one ratio but feels true at the core of me. I do agree with what Lewis, and in a sort of cockeyed sense Joseph Campbell, said about heaven, hell and perception. The blessed, to paraphrase, will see themselves as having always been in heaven, and the damned in hell.
♦◊♦
The concept of a metaphorical hell is so poignant that even philosophers and novelists of an agnostic or atheistic frame of mind have found it useful for describing the agony of Dasein. Sartre, famously, wrote a play called No Exit. It depicts a group of fundamentally unpleasant characters, trapped in a closed room with neither doors nor windows. As they inventively and without artifice come up with ways to existentially torture each other, it leads one character to remark, “L’enfer est les autres.” Hell is other people. This refers to the struggle, ontologically speaking, of the Look… being forced to view oneself as an object in an alien conscience, unable to escape and develop a truly authentic sense of self untainted by the expectations of others. It is a bleak, although understandable, notion.
“What power would hell have if those imprisoned here could not dream of Heaven?” This is the torment, this is the fire–not an eternal barbecue grill.
|
The whole enterprise really reminds me, however, of a quip by one of my professors, what seems like ages ago. He was an urbane and scholarly gentleman with leonine gray hair, twinkling blue eyes and a propensity towards those tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows. When one thinks of “humanities scholar,” he is the image that probably springs to mind. As an expert on modern French literature and philosophy, teaching our little unformed minds a seminar on twentieth century continental philosophy, he felt compelled to have us read No Exit, even though he felt a personal distaste for it. After an hour or two of discussion (Sartre always seems to provoke this in the young), my professor threw his hands up and exclaimed, “L’enfer est Jean-Paul Sartre!”
♦◊♦
Other evangelicals, who believe in a less literal interpretation of hell, believe that it is simply a state which represents the ultimate and eternal separation from God. This is probably the closest thing to my view, although it is maybe a little bit more esoteric. I believe that the Highest Good (Plato’s notion of Agathon) is difficult for our limited minds to understand but, to borrow an idea from Paul Tillich, each man or woman has an Ultimate Concern, a thing which for them represents what the Highest Good must be like—in their understanding—but only more so. Hell as a state of separation, then, would be separation from whatever a person understood as Maximal Greatness. In that way metaxy, which Plato called the torsion of a human between animal and god, could also be the stretching of our closeness to our conception of the Maximal Greatness between heaven and hell. Heaven, then, would be complete unity with one’s Highest Good—no greater closeness could be imagined. Hell would be a state of such alienation that reconciliation would seem impossible and, indeed, absurd to even attempt—thus reminding one of the comment, by C.S. Lewis, that the gates of hell are locked from the inside. The Ultimate Concern can still be imagined, because as Neil Gaiman wrote in Preludes and Nocturnes, “What power would hell have if those imprisoned here could not dream of Heaven?” This is the torment, this is the fire–not an eternal barbecue grill.
And so we muddle through, feeling (like the coldest winter chill, perhaps) heaven beside us and hell within, catching glimpses of each through the ethereal veil. Maybe one day we’ll get where we’re going… but until then, that’s what artists, dreams and the love of our fellow man are for.
Photo–Flickr/gags9999