I’ve lately been finding myself increasingly horrified by the concept of hell, and its implications for a certain kind of Christian belief in God. I’m familiar with several theological ways in which Christians handle this concept; there’s the pre-New Testament view in which the unsaved simply disappear after death, or the view in which hell is simply an allegory for what we do to ourselves psychologically in life. (I think Dante, who did a great deal to create our conception of hell, is often interpreted this latter way.) I don’t have serious problems with hell interpreted in either of these ways, or with a God who created it.
My problem is with the literal concept of hell, the one you see preached in evangelical sermons. I’ve been tempted to think of it as just a superstition for those who haven’t thought their Christianity through very well. But it isn’t that. Even Augustine, a profound thinker I have a deep respect for, seems to say fairly clearly that the damned suffer physical and psychological torment for eternity. This, to me, raises huge problems.
I can’t figure any way around the view that a God who damns people to hell for all eternity is evil. Such a God would deliberately inflict far more suffering than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot put together (and added to every other vicious tyrant you might care to name). Moreover, such a punishment seems completely gratuitous, far more than anything the sufferers could reasonably be said to deserve. Augustine argues the point merely by reference to Cicero and the Roman customs of the time: “we have punishments more severe than the crime all the time!” Such a point convinces me only of the barbarism of Rome, not of God’s justice. Nietzsche notes with some satisfaction that Aquinas and Tertullian go even further than this: among the pleasures granted to the elect in heaven comes the ability to see the ways the damned are punished. What kind of God would encourage such a thing?
Buddhist hells, by contrast, give us two ways out of the dilemma. First, they’re not permanent; everybody gets a second chance, as one should expect from a merciful god. Second, and more fundamentally, nobody put them there. Like all the other suffering in the world, they’re just an unpleasant fact of nature, one we need to find a way to deal with. If the Buddhas could eliminate the hells, they would; they’re omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. Śāntideva, in redirecting his good karma, hopes that the hells will become glades of lotuses – he just doesn’t succeed in effecting this transformation, at least not for the majority of the hells.
Am I missing something here? With respect to the God of the medieval theologians, if he existed, it’s not just that I would find it hard to believe him omnibenevolent. Rather, I would find it hard to believe him benevolent at all.
But Augustine does not just stop at a comparison with Roman law. He goes on to discuss the horrifically great evil of original sin:
“But eternal punishment seems hard and unjust to human perceptions, because in the weakness of our mortal condition there is wanting that highest and purest wisdom by which it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in that first transgression. The more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning Him; and he who destroyed in himself a good which might have been eternal, became worthy of eternal evil.”
So in an Augustinian view, the punishment in Hell is not the equivalent to the slaughters of Pol Pot’s regime– rather it was mankind’s primordial rejection of God that we should regard as inconceivably evil.
Your intuition to rebel against Augustine’s claims is, from this perspective, evidence that you have not attained the “highest and purest wisdom”– it confirms that you are thoroughly shot through with original sin and its accompanying delusions.
Now, taking off my inexpertly counterfeited Augustinian hat, I guess I would ask you why you would even bother trying to argue against Augustine on this. Religious philosophers and secular philosophers have radically different axioms, different goals, and different standards for what constitutes felicitous reasoning. And arguments between these communities often reveal irreconcilable differences that cannot be resolved.
So I guess the question I have is perhaps overly broad: To the extent you are making an argument against hell, to whom is the argument addressed? Because to be totally blunt, I doubt you will convince many students at Liberty University that your moral intuitions, your judgment about what is repulsive or evil, are better than Augustine’s…
Sure Augustine would think my position is evidence that I haven’t attained the highest wisdom. I think the fact that he trusts in an evil God is evidence of the same in his. Neither fact tells you anything of importance – only that Augustine and I believe each other to be wrong on this matter, and we already knew that.
But onto the more fundamental claim: “Religious philosophers and secular philosophers have radically different axioms, different goals, and different standards for what constitutes felicitous reasoning. And arguments between these communities often reveal irreconcilable differences that cannot be resolved.”
I don’t believe this for a second, really. The differences between “religious” and secular communities frequently are resolved in the case of particular individuals, who come to be convinced by argument that their previous viewpoint was entirely wrong and a different one is entirely right. Augustine himself is an example of this, moving away from a Roman world similar to what we would now call secular, toward Manicheanism and then toward Christianity. As for an example in the other direction, well, there’s… you.
Now maybe your point has more to do with the “different axioms” – to say that any convincing across the boundaries of traditions is going to be all or nothing (as it ultimately appears to have been in Augustine’s case and yours), so that nobody’s going to be convinced by an argument like this without abandoning everything else they believe at the same time. But I don’t see that that’s the case either. As I mentioned, I respect Augustine as a thinker a lot; I’ve learned a lot from his theories of human nature and self-cultivation, and I think in many respects he’s right about these, at least up to a point. (I hinted at that point in an earlier post.) That’s clearly a matter of piecemeal convincing, not a wholesale conversion.
As for whom the post is aimed at: well, there are at least a couple of theologically informed Christians who read this blog, some of whom may have at least flirted with belief in a literal hell; I’d be interested in provoking them to grapple with this issue. But I’m also interested to see whether they, or anyone else, could come up with a convincing defence of a God who created a literal hell. So far I haven’t heard one. There are plenty of defences to be made of different conceptions of hell (Michael Reidy points to one below, about hell simply meaning the absence of God) but not, I’m beginning to think, of a literal one.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. Let me try to be a bit clearer. Lots of people can and will benefit from the supermarket approach to Augustine, where they pick whatever morsels from his work they find tasty. That’s wonderful! It’s one of the nice things about living in a globalized, consumerist world– we have access to lots of choices.
What I was trying to say was that your argument against hell can’t work against a hardcore Augustinian, because what you are really arguing against is one of the pillars of Augustine’s moral anthropology.
You dismissed Augustine’s analogies with Roman law as evidence only that Rome was unjust. But I think that misses the point. What Augustine is trying to do is plant the seed of doubt in his reader, to say “Your ideas about what is just are actually inconsistent or hypocritical, since you (presumably) have no problems with disproportionate Roman justice.”
More importantly, and perhaps I should have emphasized this more, in the next section he moves on from the Roman analogy, and says, “Actually, the justice of hell is NOT disproportionate. It is PRECISELY proportionate to the grave nature of man’s original sin. And we are all born with this sin, so we all deserve this grave punishment as a matter of genetic inheritance.”
So not only is he casting doubt on the *consistency* of our views of what is just, he is casting doubt on our ability to perceive the gravity of original sin.
You obviously do not perceive the gravity of original sin. And moreover, you seem to totally dismiss the possibility that you are misperceiving it. You don’t even open yourself to his argument here. You seem to appeal to your intuition, to a gut reaction of “Oh, that’s yucky!”
But Augustine’s point is that we have stupid and deluded moral intuitions. For example, we often think that human babies are innocent and wonderful creatures. Actually, for Augustine, they are shot through with original sin.
Here’s where you run into serious problems as a non-Christian philosopher. You presumably have no faith in many episodes of Genesis, in man’s sojourn in the Garden of Eden, or in his original sin. You probably don’t believe that original sin is passed down through the generations of mankind.
So the most convincing and important parts of Augustine’s arguments about hell rest on foundations that you simply won’t accept. This is not a matter of simple disagreement– this is about an impassable chasm, and crossing over this chasm requires a leap of faith, either for you or whoever it is you are arguing with.
This isn’t to say that you can’t pick and choose “piecemeal” all sorts of neat things from Augustine. It’s just to say that some parts of his system are totally incompatible with your system, and they are *so* incompatible that making arguments against them strikes me as a strange thing to do. I think that to successfully attack Augustinian hell, you need to attack his entire framework of original sin.
Sure we often have stupid and deluded “moral intuitions.” I agree completely with Augustine on that, to the point that I don’t even think “intuition” is an accurate term to describe any such thing. If you’d like to continue debating this aspect of the issue, I think it would be helpful if you read my post on so-called moral intuitions, to know where I stand on that methodological issue.
I suppose it’s possible that you wrote this comment already having read the previous post; if so, I’m guessing you describe my position as an appeal to moral intuition as a way of undermining it, given that I’ve disavowed the concept? But my point there is not to rule out appeal to what is called “intuitions,” only to recognize that these are nothing more than the prevalent ordinary beliefs, or prejudices, with which we begin inquiry. Augustine’s appeal to Roman law, it seems to me, is the exact same thing; if you don’t share the beliefs of his readers that Roman law is just, his argument doesn’t work on you. Assumptions must be shared for arguments to work. Appeals to preexisting beliefs are not a matter of “oh, that’s yucky” – they’re the way that the vast majority of arguments proceed. (That includes arguments to empirical evidence, which require a whole number of shared assumptions, including that our senses are in the majority of cases trustworthy.)
Now, clearly, Augustine does not share my assumption that infinite punishment is evil, which I think is a point closer to the heart of what you’re getting at. But why not? His most explicit argument on the subject is found in chapter 21.11, the point about Roman law, which I’ve argued against, in a way that doesn’t make me think the point of that chapter is salvageable. Let’s assume then that his point rests primarily on 21.12, containing the claims you’ve been referring to, and pick that section apart.
Here, there’s a great deal I’m not rejecting in Augustine’s moral anthropology; as I’ve said, his account of human nature is something I’ve learned a lot from, to the point that in many ways I agree with Augustine’s account of babies in Confessions book I. It shocks most people today (including my students), but not me. If an adult were to act the way babies act – selfish, greedy, jealous, undisciplined, angry – we would have little hesitation in calling that person bad and probably evil. Clearly babies don’t know any better, but Augustine doesn’t dispute that point; he and I agree that being a good person is something that human beings have to learn, not something that comes “naturally” – even though we disagree in many ways about what makes a human being good. (For similar reasons, I would agree that many of our “moral intuitions” are shot through with evil.) This is what original sin means as an account of our conduct, and I don’t have a serious quarrel with it. Far from there being a chasm, on some of the biggest questions of moral anthropology I agree with the guy.
A much bigger gulf between Augustine and myself is on questions of punishment, which are really at the heart of the original post. Of the “moral intuitions” most often shot through with error, to my mind, the greatest is the idea that bad actions should, by their nature, be punished (as distinct from the idea that punishment is a regrettable necessity that serves the end of improving society). Such a view seems required to justify the view that original sin (even if we were to grant that its wickedness is infinite) merits infinite punishment. This view seems to me one of the most brutish inheritances of our animal nature; I would be similarly happy to call it a centrepiece of our sinfulness. Obviously Augustine strongly disagrees, and here there is certainly more to be said; there are deeper assumption to be questioned. But on this question, I think, I am at least as far from everyday (and not necessarily Christian) popular opinion as I am from Augustine. Secular Canadian right-wingers would take his side rather than mine – without necessarily even believing in original sin. I don’t think, then, that the doctrine of the original sin needs to be at the heart of an attack on Augustine’s position.
OK, now I see what your position is. I was not initially getting that you had problems with proportional justice per se– I misread your post as claiming that you had problems with hell because it was an instance of disproportionate punishment, esp. since you were primarily referring to the section on Roman law, which I see as all about disproportionate punishment.
I would be very intrigued to see a future posting on why you regard proportional justice to be intrinsically evil. I’m most familiar with utilitarian arguments against retributive justice, but it sounds like your objections to it are more severe?
Thanks for the posts, Ryan. My problem isn’t with proportional justice as such, so much with punishment treated as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. And while I do agree with the moral anthropology that Augustine derives from original sin – we are not born good – I don’t see that innate badness as infinitely wicked, in the way that Augustine seems to. But it’s the first of these points that really makes me see punishment in hell as evil. The second is more what makes it seem hideously evil, worse than the worst human villains, but the first is more fundamental. I hadn’t thought the distinction through fully when I made the post, and I thank you for clarifying it; I think you’re right that the first point deserves its own post in the future.
The Catholic Catechism has it that the chief punishment of Hell is an awareness of the absence of God. Is it any more than our present state without the distraction of other people which is in any case another form of Hell according to Sartre. The seeker’s plaint ‘I am tired of the endless round of transmigration’ is no more than an appeal – I’m in Hell get me out of here. Consider that Hell might be the unending knowledge of having turned away deliberately from the presence of God it having been offered to you if not directly then as the imago dei of other people.
Is there anyone in Hell even if it exists? Some orthodox saints did not hold by the eternality of Hell. What does eternity mean anyway, is there an agreed definition of it? Saint Teresa’s description in her autobiography touches all the bases of horror. For your edification.
Yes – I just looked it up in the Catechism and you’re quite right. The Catechism seems to accept that “eternal fire” is just a metaphor (without being explicitly labelled as such). I’m surprised to see that adopted as the official view; I’m guessing it might have been a Vatican II-era reform…?
Anyway, I say good for the Church for making that the official position. That’s one of the “theological ways” I mentioned at the beginning of the post – a way of getting out of the idea of a God who creates eternal physical torment. If the only suffering that sinners face is the absence of God – however bad that might be – that seems much closer to a punishment that fits the crime. On the other hand, even there I wonder about its appropriateness – if someone really is eternally tormented by God’s absence, the possibility of that person repenting at some point seems likely, doesn’t it? And if repentance during life gets you out of hell, why not repentance after life is over?
As a total aside, I don’t believe the Old Testament had the unjust disappear after death. Instead, the Old Testament works very hard to avoid any mention of the afterlife whatsoever- the rewards of virtue are supposed to come in the current life (a more disprovable hypothesis, but oh well). I’ve even read historical sources that suggest that the elaboration of an afterlife was added on later in Jewish history, during (and probably in response to) an exile in Babylon.
Judaism is generally quiet (though not silent) on the issue, but the stories that stuck with me the most came from the mystical traditions, wherein the unjust are made to reincarnate until they get it right.
You may be right – I’m no expert on the Hebrew Bible by any means. I certainly find the mystical traditions’ view (similar to Buddhist views) to be much more palatable, something a just God could have put there.
Probably Origenes’ view of the Hell as an empty place is worth mentioning. God is just and hence created hell. But He is benevolent, and hence saves from eternal hell everyone. A temporary punishment might instead be acceptable.
Do you mean an empty place in the sense that it’s just nothingness (the way an atheist conceives of death)? That’s what I had in mind when I referred to the “pre-New Testament view.” Or did Origen have something else in mind?
If I am understanding him correctly (and this is not so easy to say, since Origen has been misunderstood by generations of Christians), Origen is quite explicit in explaining that the hell’s fire is only a spiritual fire and that it is meant to purify one’s sins. Moreover, he hints at the idea (is it a hope or a dogma? probably the first) that, in this way, everyone will eventually be free of one’s sins and be able to go back to God. Later authors added (I am here following P. Armandi’s interpretation) that such an “empty” (because no one is left in it) hell is implied by God’s justice and benevolence (see my comment above).
The Greek Patristic agrees on the spiritual nature of hell.
Ah, I see. Yes, I have no problem with Origen’s interpretation then either; it’s comparable to the other views I mentioned in the first paragraph. It would make sense for a good God to make a hell like that. Augustine’s hell is a different matter.