Hell as a Mercy

From the point of view of Hell, Heaven is a deep, dark, and bottomless abyss.

A passage I read recently from the Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani’s excellent (and challenging) book, Religion and Nothingness, has sent me on a weeks-long meditation on the metaphysics of Hell; and from there to a meditation on divine mercy. Nishitani is explaining the classical Buddhist notion of śūnyatā (emptiness), and extending it to apply it to theology in terms more amenable to a Christian perspective. A kind of ecumenical metaphysics emerges where God is more or less described as śūnyatā, an emptiness that encompasses both being and nothingness, infinitely transcending all oppositions and contradictions. Thus, Nishitani writes:

In this sense, just as nihility [i.e. nothingness] is an abyss for anything that exists, emptiness may be said to be an abyss even for that abyss of nihility. As a valley unfathomably deep may be imagined set within an endless expanse of sky, so it is with nihility and emptiness. But the sky we have in mind here is more than the vault above that spread out far and wide over the valley below. It is a cosmic sky enveloping the earth and man and the countless legions of stars that move and have their being within it. It lies beneath the ground we tread, its bottom reaching beneath the valley’s bottom. If the place where the omnipresent God resides be called heaven, then heaven would also have to reach beneath the bottomless pit of hell: heaven would be an abyss for hell. This is the sense in which emptiness is an abyss for the abyss of nihility. (Religion and Nothingness, p.98.)

“Heaven would be an abyss for hell.” It struck me how well this comports (on my understanding) with the traditional Catholic theology of Heaven and Hell, which I’m not sure is quite what Nishitani has in mind. I want to push this concept to its eschatological limits. Just as śūnyatā in the Buddhist tradition is said to encompass both being and nothingness, being deeper even than the abyss of nihility (“hell'“), there is a sense in which God (or his dwelling place, Heaven) encompasses both being and nothingness, encompassing even Hell itself. As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 139:

7 Where can I go, then, to take refuge from thy spirit, to hide from thy view?

8 If I should climb up to heaven, thou art there; if I sink down to the world beneath, thou art present still.

9 If I could wing my way eastwards, or find a dwelling beyond the western sea,

10 still would I find thee beckoning to me, thy right hand upholding me.

11 Or perhaps I would think to bury myself in darkness; night should surround me, friendlier than day;

12 but no, darkness is no hiding-place from thee, with thee the night shines clear as day itself; light and dark are one.

Transposed to the plane of Christian eschatology, this might be taken to equate to the universality, or even the inescapability, of man’s heavenly destiny. According to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, there is a real sense in which eternal beatitude is truly the universal destiny of mankind. All men are intended by God for such an end. Thus, in the Summa Theologiae, I, q.12, a.1, on the question of whether any created intellect can see the divine essence, Aquinas writes:

For as the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of his intellect; if we suppose that the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else beside God; which is opposed to faith. For the ultimate perfection of the rational creature is to be found in that which is the principle of its being; since a thing is perfect so far as it attains to its principle. Further the same opinion is also against reason. For there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees; and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.

Similarly, in the Prima Secundae, q.3, a.8, he writes: “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence.” Leaving aside the rich theological debates that have raged over the interpretation of these texts, I wish merely to note now the “universalism” implicit in them. This ultimate beatitude, which is the vision of the divine essence, somehow belongs to man as his end by virtue of a “natural desire.” That is, in some sense human nature as such is oriented towards this lofty end — however that is to be explained. Indeed, if it were not possible for this end to be reached, “the natural desire would remain void.” A radical interpretation of these texts might yield the conclusion that, in some respect, the attainment of this end is almost “inevitable,” “inescapable,” and “irresistible,” that it will inexorably encompass all men — were it not for the freedom of the will.

But whose will? Man’s or God’s? The usual answer would of course be that human will often gets in the way of the realization of his natural and universal destiny, as man seeks for his final end in lesser goods where it cannot truly be found. Sin is the result. Seems like common sense. Thus, in the actual “historical” order of Christian eschatology, it happens in fact that for many men this natural desire does indeed “remain void,” eternally unfulfilled. These are the souls who are damned to Hell: they are deprived for all eternity of the beatitude which is their ultimate destiny. They seem to stand as an exception, thus, to the “universalism” of that ultimate beatitude as an end. At any rate, the case of the damned seems to make that universalism into nothing more than abstract universalism: that is, based on this abstract concept of human nature, the vision of God is the proper end of man; but that is not how it actually works out in practice. Some get to heaven, some don’t. The universal end is not fulfilled universally.

Imagine if it were. That is, imagine if the reprobate — those who have eternally turned away from God — were allowed to look upon Him face to face in Heaven nonetheless. This would be a torment altogether too terrible to conceive. It would incinerate a man to the very core of his being, causing a pain infinitely and incomprehensibly worse than the pain of Hell itself. The theological tradition sometimes goes so far as to claim that it would spell the total annihilation of the creature before God. “No one can see me and live.” (Exodus 33:20) This is what, indeed, the fulfillment of the universal destiny of man would mean for sinners. From this perspective — that of the sinner — the onset of his last end would be something most of all to be feared. And the irresistibility of this destiny — to stand face to face with God — should cause not hope but the utmost despair.

Yet out of the abundance of his mercy, God does not permit this to happen to the unrepentant sinner. Thus Saint Thomas: “Even in the damnation of the reprobate mercy is seen, which, though it does not totally remit, yet somewhat alleviates, in punishing short of what is deserved.” (ST I, q.21, a.4, ad.1.) Indeed, we might go even further than Thomas here and say that Hell itself is a great mercy precisely because it is how God spares those souls for whom the vision of his divine essence would be a destiny too terrible to conceive.

On this account, it is not first and foremost the will of man that prevents him from realizing his ultimate destiny, the vision of God. Rather, man’s willfulness and his obstinacy in sin do no more than ensure that, when/if he gets to heaven, he would be subjected to the unspeakable torment of eternal annihilation. Thus, it is not man’s wickedness that prevents him from getting to heaven, but God’s love: God cannot abide the annihilation of his creatures, therefore it is he who decides the “exceptions” to the otherwise universal rule of beatific vision. For man, this universal end is irresistible — and for the sinner, it ought to be mortally terrifying for that reason. It is only thanks to the omnipotent and merciful will of God that sinners are spared such a terrible destiny, and allowed instead to survive in Hell, free of the torment that would be inflicted on them by Heaven. The pain of Hell — the loss of God — is nothing to the pain of standing before God in sin. Heaven is a deep, dark, bottomless abyss to Hell.

On a finishing note, this might offer some alternate perspective to the theological debate, recently re-instigated by David Bentley Hart, over the question of “universalism,” or whether it is permissible to hope that all are saved (and thus that Hell is empty or will be empty in eternity). What I have proposed is “universalism” of a kind, but it is the polar opposite of Hart’s universalism. It’s a universalism with God-made exceptions — and thankfully so. Dare we hope that all are saved? I answer: for their own sake, we had better not hope that the unrepentant are saved. That is, we had better not hope that they “meet their maker” and be annihilated for all eternity by the gaze of his terrible countenance. Hell is altogether preferable. Thankfully our God is merciful.