Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Who’s Hell Bound?

Just over the transom from Derwood:

Help me understand something. When Jesus died, the vast percentage of humanity had and would never hear of the Jewish messiah/god.
True.  And that would seem to include all sorts of righteous Old Testament individuals, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Surely, the latter three are not in hell. As I understand traditional RCC theology, Abraham & Co. upon their deaths were sent to the "limbo of the fathers" (limbus patrum), a 'place' distinct from both hell and purgatory wherein the Old Testament righteous enjoyed a natural happiness, but did not partake of the Beatific Vision (visio beata).  This, I take it, is the 'place' Christ visited after his crucifixion when he "descended into hell' (as we read in the NT) before rising on the third day.  He went there to release the OT saints from their 'holding pen' and bring them to the Father in heaven.  It follows that the hell into which Christ descended is not hell as a 'place' of everlasting/eternal damnation and torment. 
Does that mean that the vast majority of humanity, men, women and children, were hell-bound heathens?
The problem of unbaptized children motivated a nuancing of the limbo concept by Albertus Magnus: there is not only the limbus patrum but also the limbus infantium/limbus puerorum, the limbo of children.  Surely a just and benevolent deity would not send them to hell, sensu stricto.
How does a just and benevolent deity allow that? That persists today, doesn't it? How much of the world knows about, much less worships, Jesus? All hell-bound?
The topic of limbo is not currently discussed.  If I'm not mistaken, the 1992 RCC catechism makes no reference to it. Theology ain't what it used to be  What a degeneration from Ratzinger to Bergoglio! The German has a first-rate theological head. I recommend his books.  It should noted, however, that Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) considered limbo a doctrine it was not necessary for a Catholic to believe. See our friend Michael Liccione's First Things article on the topic, A Doctrine in Limbo.
 
I am just scratching the surface, and in any case I am not a theologian.  This fact does not dissuade me from 'pontificating' on this and plenty of other theological matters! Here are three good sources for anyone interested in this topic: an article from The Thomist; a Britannica article; and one from the Catholic Encyclopedia. 
 
At some point I want to discuss purgatory.  Calvin rejects the notion. Surely that is a theological error of major proportions! (I'm baiting my Calvinist friends.)

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Bill Vallicella

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8 responses to “Who’s Hell Bound?”

  1. Richard Norris Avatar
    Richard Norris

    Bill,
    How is it a person can come to be punished eternally? If a person is in eternity, it cannot be that they enter it, as this would increase the number of individuals in eternity. That would mean there is a change in an eternal place, which is impossible. This would also be true of an eternal place of reward, plausibly. It would seem we would both have to be here in mundane time and in the eternal state we are to be rewarded or punished with, which also seems impossible. Is there a way out of this problem?

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Richard,
    There are two questions here. The first is how a just and benevolent God could punish any finite person eternally or everlastingly.
    The second is your question, which is even more difficult. To put it abstractly, how could the number of items in eternity increase or decrease? Logically prior question: what is it to be eternal? The eternal is not the same as the everlasting. What lasts forever is in time, but the eternal is ‘outside of time.’ Time is the dimension of change. No time, no change. It would seem to follow that the number of persons in eternity, whatever that number is, cannot change. That seems to imply that when a person dies, he cannot enter eternity; for if he did he would increase the number of persons in eternity.
    But before we get to that question there is the question as to what ‘enter eternity’ even means. Perhaps we don’t enter eternity, we are ‘already’ eternal. So I am eternal: I did not begin to exist nor will I cease to exist. I exist eternally. My temporality is a merely contingent feature of me: it has nothing to do with what I am essentially. It is perhaps a mere appearance, or an illusion.
    If this were the case, wouldn’t that solve your problem?

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  3. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Derwood,
    “How does a just and benevolent deity allow that? That persists today, doesn’t it? How much of the world knows about, much less worships, Jesus? All hell-bound?”
    No, such persons are not “all hell-bound,” for among the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church is that of the possibility of salvation for those who are “invincibly ignorant” of the “Gospel of Christ and His church” through no fault of their own. The Catechism speaks explicitly of such persons (1260: The Necessity of Baptism):
    “Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery. Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of His church but SEEKS THE TRUTH and DOES THE WILL OF GOD IN ACCORDANCE TO HIS UNDERSANDING OF IT [my capitals], can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity”
    Notice that while the Church regards baptism as the ordinary means for the forgiveness of original sin, it does not exclude those who have received this sacrament from the ranks of the saved, either in purgatory or in heaven (“ALL who die in God’s grace and friendship”: Catechism 1030).
    Vito

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  4. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    “If this were the case, wouldn’t that solve your problem?”
    Am I wrong in assuming that it would solve it, but only if one accepts a Platonic rather than a Christian understanding of the soul?
    Vito

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  5. james soriano Avatar
    james soriano

    My understanding of limbo comes from the greatest of Catholic theologians: Dante Alighieri.
    The Roman poet Virgil was sent to Earth to rescue him and the two begin their descent. Their first stop is limbo. They come to a wide green meadow. The air is gentle, the light is soft, even dim, but there are none of the torments of Hell. Suffering is in the sighs of the inhabitants, the longing for a vision of God denied.
    “There, as it seemed from listening,
    Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
    That tremble made the everlasting air.
    “And this arose from sorrow without torment,
    Which the crowds had, that many were and great
    Of infants and of women and of men.”
    The two walk along and encounter the Old Testament patriarchs and the great pagan philosophers and poets.
    Years ago, on my first reading, I came to a scene in limbo that caused me to put the book down in disbelief.
    As Dante and Virgil continue on their way, four shades approach in the distance. Dante can’t make out who they are. The one in front, Virgil tells him, is Homer. The others we learn are those of Ovid, Horace, and Lucan. Virgil, who was taken from them to go to Earth, re-joins their company. The five converse together and Dante, standing a distance off, beholds an assemblage of the great poets of antiquity. The five then look up, turn to him, and Virgil beckons him over. Dante joins the group! “The sixth was I, amid so much wit.”
    Even the novice reader gets the scene. A thirteenth century Florentine, self-consciously writing an epic, puts himself in the direct line of descent of Homer. Dante did not suffer from a lack of self-esteem.
    But something else is going on in Dante’s limbo that’s relevant here, that fits, I think, within the pages of the Maverick’s blog:
    Throughout his sojourn in limbo, Dante’s tone is respectful and he is often in awe of what he sees. The reader gets a two-fold message: a deep appreciation of the achievements of pagan antiquity and the awareness that something’s missing without the Christian revelations. The righteous pagans represent the Virtues. We have much to learn from them. But virtue alone is not enough for salvation.

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  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito @ 4:32: You are not wrong. I was suggesting a solution for Richard who as far as I know does not accept Christian metaphysics. What I suggested is not consistent with the latter. In fact, Richard may have made his point as a reason to reject the Xian scheme. In Xianity we are contingent creatures in toto, not merely in our bodies.
    But note that on the Xian scheme there is one person who acquired a body who is eternal, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity. Mirabile dictu!
    The broader point here is that Xianity, at least in its Eastern and Roman versions, cannot dispense with Platonism.

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  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    Also quite amazing is the doctrine that in the Ascension, the God-man returns to the eternal, heavenly, immaterial realm and injects matter into it, albeit ‘transfigured’ matter. He ascends body and soul, not just soul. The Godhead acquires a material adjunct! And if the material is temporal, then a temporal adjunct as well.
    This all makes no discursive sense. How then are we to take these dogmatic theological pronunciamenti?
    I have long toyed with the idea that these are the koans of Xianity. This is allied with the claim that the ultimate truth cannot be compressed into propositions which is what the dogmatic formulae are.
    And then to murder fellow mortals because you do not like the formulae, in the style of the mad-dog Sharia-spouting Muslim head chopper-offer is the height of insanity.
    It is ALMOST enough to make one a damned positivist of either the Carnapian or the Stovian stripe. Almost.

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  8. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    I don’t know how to “take them.” I generally run away from them out of frustration. I am sympathetic to “the claim that the ultimate truth cannot be compressed into propositions which is what the dogmatic formulae are.”
    Vito

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