Posted on 05/01/2014 6:46:08 AM PDT by NYer
In Robert Speaight’s The Unbroken Heart, a novel sadly neglected in the long years following its publication in 1939, a character named Arnaldo has just been told of his beloved wife’s untimely death. His reaction, by today’s standards, seems very strange indeed. “It does not really interest me,” he confesses, “to know by what accident Rhoda died. All our lives are an accident and we must all die somehow.”
So what does interest him? The answer, to his interlocutor at least, sounds almost incomprehensible. “I want to know how she died, what was in her mind, what her soul said to God when she fell from the rampart. Nothing else is of the least importance whatsoever. Our life is directed to that moment when we fall from the rampart, and our eternal destiny is decided by that. But I see that you don’t believe that.”
Nor, would it appear, does anyone else. Certainly not anyone these days, i.e., people anxious to appear hip and stylish, their opinions plugged into the usual circuits of secularity. People for whom the parameters of life are far more plausibly found between the covers of, say, Time or Newsweek or People Magazine, are not interested in tracing the soul’s trajectory at the moment of death. A huge eruption in sensibility having taken place in recent years, the traditional eschatological landscape remains largely unrecognizable.
And not only that, of course, but for those who believe that virtually all souls go straight to Heaven anyway, there to enjoy forever the identical joys they experienced in the flesh, there can’t be much point in fussing about Hell.
Does anyone actually go to Hell anymore? I mean, leaving aside the usual suspects—Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—are there really enough reprobates around to justify the existence of such a place? A place of eternal unending torture no less? Seriously now, just how wicked does one have to be to get in? Surely it is not even thinkable that good, respectable Catholics might take themselves there.
What are we to make of Hell?
More to the point, perhaps, what does the Church make of Hell?
In contrast to the mincing multitude unwilling to countenance anyone going there, least of all regular churchgoers, the position of the Catholic Church is refreshingly emphatic. There is not anyone on the planet, she teaches, however pure the specimen of one’s sanctity, that is not at liberty to take oneself straight to Hell. In fact, it is a place where, on the strength of even one unshriven mortal sin, one shall languish forever in the most frightful and unimaginably hellish torment.
“Mortal sin,” we are told, “is a radical possibility of human freedom…. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of Hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1861).
In every life, therefore, never mind the brevity of its duration, the essential drama of human existence unfolds against an absolute horizon beckoning each of us to one or another eternal possibility. To find ourselves thus poised between the hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell, terrifyingly free to choose one or the other, is a good and salutary thing. As Dr. Johnson famously said about the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight: nothing more wonderfully concentrates the mind.
It is a terrible mistake to so trivialize man’s dignity than in this most awesome discharge of human freedom, in which the human person decides for or against God forever, the full seriousness of what may be undertaken is treated as mere child’s play. How can we expect our freedom to be respected if God will not honor our right to throw it away? A human liberty that does not include the right to say no to God—yes, even to the point of rejecting his invitation to commune in his company forever—is no liberty at all.
Accordingly, one could define man as a being free to break the umbilical cord with Being itself, burning his last bridge to God. Only man possesses so radical a liberty that he may choose—yielding, God knows how, to what pressure of perversity—his own annihilation. And the temptation to do so stalks even the most self-respecting of Catholics. “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” as Shakespeare tells us. This being so, it is the good Catholic especially who will guard against a final fall into one or another failure of hope, i.e., the despair of no longer aspiring to reach Heaven, or the presumption of no longer thinking it necessary to try. The corruption of the best, it has wisely been said, is the worst corruption of all.
It is precisely the fear of these twin evils, incidentally, that threatens to unhinge the heart and soul of the old man portrayed in John Henry Newman’s dramatic poem, “The Dream of Gerontius,” a masterpiece of lyric beauty and lucidity written in 1865. The story depicts the journey of a soul to God at the very hour of death, who, despite all the recollected powers of mind and will, of a lifetime steeped in habits of Catholic piety, despite even the presence of dear friends eager to help shepherd him along, remains very much afraid. Afraid of what? That God, seeing the real truth of his inner life, the impoverishment of his soul, may simply refuse to admit him into the Company of the Elect; that despite the sheer desperation of his desire to go there, to taste the unending joys of Paradise, God will not at the last allow him to enter in.
And so, moved by charity, the Assistants take up the chant, repeatedly imploring God to show mercy, to impart that virtue of final perseverance of which we all stand in need, particularly those inclined to take salvation for granted. “Be merciful, be gracious,” they entreat him. “Lord, deliver him
From the sins that are past;
From thy frown and thine ire;
From the perils of dying;
From any complying
With sin, or denying
His God, or relying
On self, at the last…
The invocations continue in the same rhythmic, resonant way until, finally, his Confessor, marshaling all the forces of Heaven, urges the dying Gerontius to “Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the name of God
The omnipotent Father, who created thee!
Go, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Son of the living God, who bled for thee!
Go, in the name of the Holy Spirit, who
Hath been poured out on thee!
What a stirring send-off to accompany the soul home to God! And when at length the moment of blessed release comes, it is his own Angel Guardian who announces the work is done, “For the crown is won…
My Father gave
In charge to me
This child of earth
E’en from its birth,
To serve and save,
Alleluia,
And saved is he.
This is the basic formula for how Catholics are enjoined both to live and to die. Under the Mercy. For if salvation depended on us propelling our winsome way along some purely Promethean path to Heaven, the place would be empty. To remain faithfully Catholic, therefore, right up to the end, is to live and die always as the recipient of a blessing one could never oneself give.
And then to pass it on to others in the spirit of the mendicant whose lively sense of gratitude for the little he has moves him to share it with others. Unlike, writes Joseph Ratzinger in that wonderful exposition of faith he wrote back in 1968, Introduction To Christianity (on which so many of us first cut out theological teeth), “the calculatingly righteous man, who thinks he can keep his own shirtfront clean and build himself up inside it.” Beneath the weight of such sanctimony, he warns, the self-satisfied will sink into an abyss of utter unrighteousness.
Shouldn’t this be the constant fear and danger facing the so-called good Catholic? Knowing how much easier it may prove for grace to move the pagan than the prig, he refuses to preen himself on even the least show of virtue? “Righteousness,” Ratzinger reminds us, “can only be attained by abandoning one’s own claims and being generous to God. It is the righteousness of ‘Forgive, as we have forgiven’ … it consists in continuing to forgive, since man lives essentially on the forgiveness he has received himself.”
It is to sear upon the memory the words of the Apostle James, who warns us that God’s “judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy” (2:13). And for anyone to suffer such exclusion from God’s kingdom, it does not follow that the sins need be satanic in any sort of grand or gaudy way, as if he’d taken out first-class accommodations on an express train bound for Hell. Hell is not, as the holy curate in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest informs the old woman whose soul stands in the gravest peril of going there, like anything we might imagine in this world. “Hell is not to love anymore, Madam. Not to love anymore!” We may judge Hell by the standards of this world, but to do so would be a terribly mistake. It is an altogether other world that only the mitigating exercise of mercy prevents our falling into.
Who among us is not well advised, therefore, always to be mindful lest our poor show of love fall dangerously short of even the most minimal expectation Christ sets for those who claim to love him? To quote that profound and shrewd Castilian saint, the mystic John of the Cross: “In the evening of our lives, we shall be judged on love.” God help us if we come up short.
Editor’s note: The image above is a detail from “Hell” painted by Hans Memling in 1485.
" Today, I was led by an Angel to the chasms of hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw: the first torture that constitutes hell is the loss of God; the second is perpetual remorse of conscience; the third is that one’s condition will never change; the fourth is the fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it, a terrible suffering, since it is a purely spiritual fire, lit by God’s anger; the fifth torture is conditional darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own; the sixth torture is the constant company of satan, the seventh torture is horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies. These are the tortures suffered by all the damned together, but that is not the end of the sufferings. There are special tortures destined for particular souls. These are the torments of the senses. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings, related to the manner in which it has sinned. There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me. Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity, in those senses which he made use of to sin. I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there, and so no one can say what it is like. I, sister Faustina, by the order of God, have visited the abysses of hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence. I cannot speak about it now; but I have received a command from God to leave it in writing. The devils were full of hatred for me, but they had to obey me at the command of God. What I have written is but a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: that most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell. When I came to, I could hardly recover from the fright. How terribly souls suffer there! Consequently, I pray even more fervently for the conversion of sinners. I incessantly plead God’s mercy upon them. O my Jesus, I would rather be in agony until the end of the world, amidst the greatest sufferings, then offend You by the least sin. (Diary 741).
Visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven according to St. Faustina
So.. she spent a weekend in Chicago?
**But I noticed one thing: that most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell.**
An interesting line from St. Faustina.
BUMP to send to a godless liberal...
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
“Cards are as good as murder, if cards to the trick.”
Meaning, the sin need not be spectacular, as long as Satan wins the soul.
I don’t think God sends anyone to hell.
I think we send ourselves there when we reject God and God’s love, and commit sins against Him, especially sins against charity. And I believe people who are Hell-bound also experience that here in earth as they create a hell around them.
And I think the WORST part of Hell is the total absolute absence of God. The only thing that gives me hope for myself is that God is all forgiving as well as all just, and if you try to lead a decent life, avoid committing sins and seek forgiveness for those you do commit from God, He will save you.
There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 100 who have no need of repentence.
Satan’s greatest lie: “I do not exist.”
True enough. People orchestrate their own trips to hell by declining salvation and therefore going to the evil they — we — all had embraced in the original sin.
God is rightly angry — wrathful — at hell. But the evil in it is so deep that its occupants would rather be there than to yield to God and become heavenly and go to heaven. They despise God.
The idea that any entity other than God could be self sufficient is the idea that ends up creating a hell. Because it is untrue. Management of your life by anyone other than God is a disaster in the end.
If you’re scared of hell then that means you haven’t yet lost the touch of God. If you lose that touch enough not only won’t you be scared of hell, but hell will thrill you.
That’s frightening.
president obammy will surely end up in hell.
He is a mooselimb, not a Christian who has accepted Jesus as his savior and the son of GOD,
He’s going that way now, to all appearances.
Will he always? Only God knows the answer to that question. There have been wickeder people saved.
You still have the touch of God. The truest reprobate would say bring it on, I love the torment.
No sin can go into heaven otherwise sin would overtake heaven and God will not have that. Even one sin, not dealt with, would keep one from heaven. That is why we need the Savior - The Lord Jesus Christ. And believing He died for all ones sins and following Him brings assurance of heaven. There is no other way.
**No sin can go into heaven otherwise sin would overtake heaven and God will not have that. Even one sin, not dealt with, would keep one from heaven.**
That’s why there is a purging place called Purgatory — so the souls can atone for the reparation they did not do on earth.
Lol!
You really believe people make the an informed and rational decision to march into eternal agony?
The thought process that would cause someone to believe that is fascinating to me.
A loving God would not force a person to remain in His presence FOREVER if that person chooses not to.
**You really believe people make the an informed and rational decision to march into eternal agony?**
Yes, think of all the people that you have talked with who are more comfortable with remaining in their sin than changing their lives and focusing on the Lord.
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