The Sentience of the Damned

Towards the end of his book That All Shall Be Saved Dr. David Bentley Hart makes the following extraordinary statement: “I have been asked more than once whether, if I were to become convinced that Christian adherence absolutely requires a belief in a hell of eternal torment, this would constitute in my mind proof that Christianity should be dismissed as a self-evidently morally obtuse and logically incoherent faith.  And, as it happens, it would”.  To state it in fewer and simpler words: Dr. Hart’s rejection of an eternal hell is more fundamental to him than adherence to the Christian faith.  If a belief in hell was required of Christians, he would reject Christianity.

       One can only applaud such clarity of thinking and honesty of expression as well as the courage to face and state the matter so forthrightly.  I cite Dr. Hart’s words here only because I suspect that his sentiments are shared by many.  That is, many people regard the notion of “a hell of eternal torment” as so emotionally intolerable that a belief in its reality would disqualify any religion that holds that belief from being true.

       But let’s be clear: the engine driving this rejection of the doctrine of hell is emotion—the emotional difficulty of contemplating the notion that God would permit sentient beings like us to be eternally tormented.  This difficulty is compounded if we imagine those we know personally and love are the ones being tormented—for example, dear old uncle Edgar, who was an atheist but who was a good guy nonetheless, honest, hardworking, a man who liked dumb jokes and who loved playing with his dog.  The notion of Uncle Edgar being eternally tortured is simply too much too bear. 

       I have tried to deal with the moral arguments directed against the Church’s traditional doctrine of hell in my book Unquenchable Fire.  Here I would like to focus upon a single aspect of the difficulty felt by people those who find the notion of Uncle Edgar’s eternal grief intolerable—that of the sentience of the damned. 

       That is, their eternal torment is felt to be intolerable because we imagine the person we know experiencing it. We imagine Uncle Edgar as we knew him in pain, writhing in despair with no hope of relief and it is this imaginative picture of Uncle Edgar that we find intolerable.  But what if the Uncle Edgar we knew was not the person who was suffering in hell?  Let me try to explain.

       We imagine the person suffering in hell as exactly the same as the person we knew in life—dear Uncle Edgar with the same sense of humour we knew, the same love of dumb jokes, the same delight in playing with his dog.  All that will have changed is Uncle Edgar’s location:  instead of living in his house on Maple Street, he is living in hell, but in every other way he is the same person. It is this picture we find emotionally upsetting and intolerable. But there is reason to think that the Uncle Edgar we experienced and knew while he lived among us is not the same Uncle Edgar now in hell.

       That is because sin changes us.  It erodes all that is good and human—things like a sense of humour, compassion and empathy, and delight in life, a delight that would include liking dumb jokes and playing with one’s dog.  All that remains when the erosion of humanity is complete is the sin, the obsession.  Sin burns away everything else leaving only itself as a victorious cancer, a horrifying monomania.

       We can see sin in operation like this even in this life.  One sometimes reaches a place where one becomes sulky, a dark place where one is determined to sulk and where one wants others to be miserable, a place where one refuses all attempts to bring one around and emerge again into sunshine and good spirits.  Happily, most people choose to emerge from their sulk.  But—and here’s the point—sin works on the human heart in the same way and while the sin and sulk are in operation nothing else exists in the soul.  The sin crowds out everything else.

       C. S. Lewis knew this.  In his invaluable little volume The Great Divorce he examined at length the psychology of damnation.  In it he posits a man visiting hell under the guidance of his Teacher, George McDonald.  There they meet a woman in hell who was a grumbler.  After meeting the woman the man said to his Teacher, “I am troubled because that unhappy creature doesn’t seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn’t wicked: she’s only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into the habit of grumbling”.  The Teacher replied, ‘That is what she once was…The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble.’” The man asked, “But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?” and the Teacher replied, “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye’ll have had experiences…it begins with a grumbling mood and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”

       That is what sin does to the soul, even in this age.  How much more will sin erode and burn away our humanity in the age to come when our choices are clear and therefore irrevocable, when all the ambiguities and ambivalences that allow for our repentance are no longer present.  In that day our willing and embracing of sin will be complete and total with a determination which will allow no ambivalence and therefore no repentance.  That is what Lewis meant when he spoke of not being able any longer to come out of the mood and choice we have made.  In this age, attended as it is by a multitude of clouding factors and ambiguities, repentance is always possible.  But in the age to come such ambiguity will be gone and we will choose light or darkness with unclouded finality.

       It is this finality which will allow the sin we have chosen to triumph in our souls, burning away everything else—in the case of Uncle Edgar, everything we knew about him that made him likeable, tolerable, human.  All that we experienced of him—his delight in dumb jokes, his love for his dog—will be gone. All that will be left will be the sin, whether the sin of grumbling or anger or lust or resentment, going on and on forever like a machine.

       In that day the human sentience such as we now experience it and that we found in Uncle Edgar will have vanished.  We will not recognize him as the Uncle Edgar we knew.  That dear man will have ceased to exist. To quote Lewis one more time, “What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’…[such a being would] consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature—already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins rather than a sinner—would be like.”

       Note again: what is finally cast into hell is not “a sinner” so much as “loose congeries of sins”, a monomania of passions going on forever like a machine.  Uncle Edgar might have been a sinner while he lived, but that sinner, as we knew him, no longer exists. Only the tangled mass of of sin remains.

       It is still terrible, of course.  Hell is a terrifying notion, for it will be a terrifying reality. That is why God became incarnate and suffered on the cross to save us all from it.  But at least we can acknowledge that the picture we have of the human beings we know (such as Uncle Edgar) suffering in hell does not accord with the reality of hell.  Damnation is still terrifying, but perhaps less emotionally intolerable.  In one sense (though not in the sense intended by the Conditionalists) the sinner is annihilated in hell—self-annihilated, to be precise.  Human sentience such as we now experience it is burned away and the human sinner becomes a machine, its sin and wilful mania going on forever in the outer darkness where reality shades off into nothingness.

       At the end of the day our Lord’s teaching about hell was not meant to comfort us, but to terrify us.  However we imagine the threat of hell we are meant to flee from it into the loving arms of God.  For hell was not made for men, but for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41). Having fled from sin and the possibility of damnation, our focus should be on the love of God and the work that He has set before us.