Category: Heaven and Hell

Two Types of Humanity: The Mystic and the Profligate

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, entry of 30 December 1940, p. 104:

Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? [. . .] There are only two types of humanity . . . the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes , searching, each is his own way, for the absolute;  but, of the two, the profligate is to my mind the most [more] mysterious, for he never tires of the only dish served up to him by his appetite and on which he banquets each times as though he had never tasted it before. Probably because of this, I have always had a tendency to consider an immoderate craving for pleasure as an accepted form of madness.

Only two types of humanity? No, but two types. Man is made for the Absolute, and some of us seek it.  Mysticism and profligacy are two ways of seeking it. Eschewing the phony and conventional, some of us strive after the really real, τὸ ὄντως ὄν.   Some by world-flight, others by immersion in sensual indulgence.  An enlightened upward and a deluded downward seeking.  The solid and stolid bourgeois type will consider both types of seekers mad. But only those who seek the really real in the pleasures of the flesh are truly mad.  They are bound for a hell of their own devising as I suggest in A Theory of Hell. Excerpt:

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell would then be not as a state of pain but one of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise —  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. On fire with the fire of desire, endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists but will never experience.

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.)

Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Will to Believe

My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".
 
Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not…." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?
Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote  (and to which I now add bolding):
. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking.  [. . .]  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  
 
Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc.  But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important.  What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.) 
 
You have read Sextus Empiricus and know  something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise.  In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed.  But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus.  One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.)  With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it.  We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.
 
As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it.  (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)
 
Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.
 
I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew.  I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be.  One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.  
 
It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part.  You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days;  if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to  cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc.  You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse.  That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.
 
Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult. 
 
I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this  world is the creation of  an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.'  Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich?  And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil.  You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument'  is one way.
 
This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.
 
Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation. 
 
I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens,  I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas.  In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle.  Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness.  We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision — a cutting off of ratiocination — is will-driven
You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?
 
You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now.  "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.
 
So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is  “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit.  Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.  
 
It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,
. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."

Heaven and Hell: the Looming of the Last Things at the End of the Trail

A friend of mine, nearing the end of the trail, afflicted in body and soul, writes:
 
A question, my friend. Can you imagine someone on his deathbed saying, "Well I never really believed I'd meet Jesus, but the possible reward (eternal salvation) was so great that I was persuaded to be a believer so long as the probability of salvation was not effectively zero. I can't say I really believe in Jesus, but the possible rewards of believing are so great I had to buy the ticket." A decision-theoretic argument for belief that some think can made stronger by also postulating Hell (eternal damnation). If I don't believe, I risk Hell, even if I think the probability of that is very small.
 
Well, the Hell branch of the argument has the problem that eternal damnation is incompatible with a just and benevolent deity. Way too many people are sent to Hell for merely not believing (especially children). So what about Heaven? Can a just and benevolent God reward me with eternal happiness just for believing in (and maybe worshipping) him? Just as the threatened punishment seems totally disproportionate, so the promised reward seems "too good to be true" (in other words, a scam).
 
Not necessarily MY view of Heaven, but one that I hear often.
 
As for hell, I tend to agree with my friend.
 
Suppose God exists and there is an afterlife the quality of which depends on how one behaves here below.  Suppose that the justice which is largely absent here will be meted out there.  And suppose we take as a moral axiom that the punishment must fit the crime.  The question then arises: what crime or series of crimes by any human being could merit everlasting post-mortem punishment?  I would say that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment.  Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer. 
 
Two qualifications. (1) It is reasonably presumed to be  otherwise with angelic evildoers such as Lucifer, so let's leave them out of the discussion.   (2) It is also reasonably presumed to be otherwise if a human, whether evildoer or not, wanted to maintain himself in a state of rebellion against God, after coming face-to-face with God, in which case my moral sense would have no problem with God's granting the rebel his wish and maintaining him in a state of everlasting exclusion from the divine light and succor.  Candidate rebels: Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Josef Stalin.

Suppose that, after death, Stalin sees the errors of his ways and desires to come into right relation with God.  He must still be punished for his horrendous crimes. Surely justice demands that much.  What I fail to grasp, however, is how justice could demand that Stalin be punished everlastingly or eternally (if you care to distinguish eternity from everlastingness) for a finite series of finite crimes. 

Thomas Aquinas disagrees:

The magnitude of the punishment matches the magnitude of the sin. Now a sin that is against God is infinite; the higher the person against whom it is committed, the graver the sin—it is more criminal to strike a head of state than a private citizen—and God is of infinite greatness. Therefore an infinite punishment is deserved for a sin committed against Him. (Summa Theologica, Ia2ae. 87, 4.)

Some years back, my friend floated the suggestion that we are in hell right now. This can't be right, for reasons I won't go into. But it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10. "Reincarnation as Purgatory.")

As for heaven, my friend asks,

Can a just and benevolent God reward me with eternal happiness just for believing in . . . him? Just as the threatened punishment seems totally disproportionate, so the promised reward seems "too good to be true" . . . .

The question is essentially this:  If justice rules out everlasting, 'infinite,' punishment for finite crimes committed by miserably limited humans, does it also rule out everlasting reward for finite good deeds? If the threatened punishment is totally disproportionate, is the promised reward also totally disproportionate?

To sharpen it a bit further, let's translate the interrogative into a declarative:  If no everlasting punishment is justified, then no everlasting reward is either.  If that is the claim, then I would respond by saying that the Beatific Vision is not a reward  for good things we do here below, but the state intended for us all along.  It is something like a birthright or an inheritance.  One doesn't earn one's inheritance; it is a gift, not a reward.   But one can lose it.  Similarly with the Beatific Vision.  One cannot earn it, and one does not deserve it.  But one can lose it.

It is also worth noting that 'totally disproportionate' and 'too good to be true' differ in sense.  The visio beata is admittedly totally disproportionate as a reward  for the good things that we wretched mortals do, but that is not to say that it is too good to be true.  If it is true that our ultimate felicity is participation in the divine life, and true that this participation is open to us, as a  real possibility and a divine gift, then that is the way things are. How could it be too good to be true?  Whatever good thing exists, precisely because it exists ,cannot be too good to exist.

Concluding Existential-Practical  Postscript

What I really want to say to my friend is that, while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking. The 'presuppers' are out to lunch, to mention one bunch of those who fabricate a fake certainty for themselves to assuage their overwhelming doxastic security needs. And the same goes for the Biblical inerrantists.  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  

In my own case, I have had enough mystical, religious, aesthetic, moral, and paranormal experiences to convince me to take the Unseen Order with utmost seriousness — and I do. And so that's the way I live, devoting most of my time to prayer, meditation-contemplation, lectio divina, study of the great classics of philosophy and theology, moderate ascesis, such good works as befit my means and station, and writing philosophy, which I view as itself a spiritual practice.  I mean: what could be a better use of a life than to try to ascend to the Absolute by all possible routes?  But this won't make any sense to you unless you perceive this world, the Seen Order, to be a vanishing quantity devoid of ultimate reality and value, and our fleeting lives in it unsatisfactory and ultimately meaningless, if they end in annihilation.  

So I say to my friend: you are on your own. Going to a church and participating in external rites and rituals won't do you much if any good, nor will confessing your sins to a pedophile priest. (Ex opere operato is on my list of topics to discuss.) There is no need to go outside yourself; truth dwells in the inner man. Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas. (Augustine) Review your life and try to recall those moments and those experiences which seemed most revelatory of the Real, and live and then die in accordance with them. 

In the face of temptation, ask yourself: How do I want death to find me? In what state?  The lures of this world are alluring indeed, and it is well-nigh impossible to resist them, as witness the corruption of (some of) the cardinals who voted on the new pope. You have a sense of the Unseen Order if you sense that temptation ought to be resisted.  Whence the bindingness of that Ought? Whence the vocation to a Higher Life?  Are they just illusions of brain chemistry? Could be! You decide!

I myself have decided that The Greatest Temptation must be resisted.

One more point about church-going. It may be necessary for those excessively social animals lacking inner directedness, but I'd say that Matthew 6:6 hits the mark: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)

But I don't want to deny that special places, some of them churches, have an aura that aids and may even induce contemplative repose.  I recall a time in Venice, Italy when I entered an ancient and nondescript little church and spent a few moments there alone. Upon exiting, I was unusually calm and collected.  My girlfriend at the time, noticing the transformation,  remarked, "You ought to go to church more often." The following, though AI-generated, is spot on. 

Aura of Places

An aura of a place can be described as a distinctive atmosphere or feeling that seems to surround and emanate from it. This term is often used metaphorically to convey the unique quality or vibe that a location gives off. For example, a place might have an aura of mystery, tranquility, or invincibility.

In spiritual contexts, auras are thought to be energy fields surrounding all living and non-living things, including places. These fields can be influenced by the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of those who frequent the location.

 

How Christian is the Doctrine of Hell?

The traditional doctrine of hell appears to be a consequence of two assumptions, the first  of which is arguably unbiblical.

Geddes MacGregor: ". . . the doctrine of hell, with its attendant horrors, is intended as the logical development of the notion that, since man is intrinsically immortal, and some men turn out badly, they cannot enjoy the presence of God." (Reincarnation in Christianity, Quest Books, 1978, 121)

1) We are naturally, and intrinsically, immortal.

2) Some of us, by our evil behavior, have freely and forever excluded  ourselves from the divine presence.

MacGregor: "Having permanently deprived themselves of the capacity to enjoy that presence [the presence of God] , they must forever endure the sense of its loss, the poena damni, as the medieval theologians called it." (Ibid.)

Therefore

3) There must be some state or condition, some 'place,' for these immortal souls, and that 'place' is hell. They will remain there either for all eternity or else everlastingly.

According to MacGregor, premise (1) is false because it has no foundation in biblical teaching. (Ibid.) St. Paul, says MacGregor, subscribes to conditional immortality.  This is "immortality that is dependent on one's being 'raised up' to victory over death through the resurrection of Christ." (op. cit., 119)   It follows that the medieval doctrine of hell  is un-Christian.

The choice we face is not between heaven and hell but between heaven and utter extinction which, for MacGregor, is worse than everlasting torment.

Two issues: Would extinction of the  person be worse than everlasting torment? That is not my sense of things. I would prefer extinction, for Epicurean reasons. The other issue is whether the Pauline texts and the rest of the Bible support conditional immortality.  I have no fixed opinion on that question.  

Combat Veterans

They descended into hell and some rose again from the dead. Who am I to ask them any questions? Do I have the right?

Craig was a housemate of mine in undergraduate days. When he was 18 he ran away from a troubled home and joined the Marine Corps. He ended up in Vietnam. One day I asked him what it was like. Distraught, he ran from the room. Later he told me the story. His platoon entered a village.  After the fire fight, he alone was unscathed. Everyone else was either killed or badly wounded. Craig told me that as he walked toward what he thought would be certain death, he was overcome with a feeling of deep love for everybody and everything. In that Grenzsituation, that boundary or limit situation, my friend perhaps glimpsed the world's ultimate depth dimension, a peace surpassing all understanding in the eye of the storm of war.

To encroach with curiosity upon the liminality of such experiences shows a lack of respect.  So now I ask no questions.

What the Hell?

Just as Biden and his supporters are disasters for the USA, Bergoglio and his supporters are disasters for the RCC. 'Twould appear that all of the institutions of the West are in dire need of fumigation. See here:

But Pope Francis appears to have scotched that possibility. “No one can exclude themselves from the Church,” he insisted, “we are all saved sinners.” Even those, he adds, “who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism.  

Yes, these too. All of them. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven…the saints, the sinners, all.

What are we to make of this? Surely, one asks, he cannot have meant to include unrepentant sinners in the Kingdom of Heaven? That those who deliberately take themselves to Hell, choosing an eternity of loss rather than the joys of Heaven, are nevertheless still members of the Communion of Saints? This is not Catholic doctrine, and no one, not even the Pope of Rome, can make it so by saying so.

Would it be Heaven for a Mother Whose Child is in Hell?

Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question.

This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death.  My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises from my pondering the question of the doctrine of immutability in relation to those of salvation, either immediate (Heaven) or eventual (Purgatory) or damnation (Hell) as these concern the loved ones of departed persons. Specifically, I am thinking, for example, of the deep love of a mother for her children. If it is the case that the soul of a loving mother finds, through the meritorious life that she has led, immediate salvation in Heaven after death, but that of her child, lacking in such virtue, ends up in Hell, is it rational to belief that the former soul is happy or at peace? In following up this question, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has an entry on “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” which, assuming the inclusive nature of love, “especially in the form of wishing the best for another” (Section 4.1), poses the question in the following way: “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever”? (Section 5.2)  More generally, how is it just to allow souls to become embodied and to form loving relationships if such an end awaits so many of those who are loved?

One answer could be along the lines of what I say in Soteriology for Brutes? which ends as follows:

[Edward] Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

One might speculate that the saintly loving mother who goes straight to heaven upon death will be so swept up in the ecstasy of the Beatific Vision as to give her children no thought at all.  All sublunary concerns will fall away in the presence of the infinite reality of the divine life.  She will no more think of her children than I will think of my cats after I have served my 'time' in purgatory.  Ed Feser, however, would not and could not give this answer given his strict Thomism. Thomas famously states that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” So we get the curious and indeed horrifying result that the saintly loving mother who loved her child in time will experience schadenfreude at the child's unending torment in eternity.

Part of the problem here is that we quite naturally tend to waffle between two very different conceptions of the afterlife. I call them Life 2.0 and Beatific Vision.  I explore the difference in considerable detail in  Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Thomas himself may be waffling. If the souls of the blessed in heaven are wholly absorbed in the infinitely rich and endlessly variegated, and thus not possibly boring, absolute life of the Supreme Reality, how could they continue to be distracted by finite concerns? How could they continue to care about other finite persons, whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or on earth? How could the blessed take satisfaction in the torment of the damned? But insofar as we think of survival of bodily death as personal survival, as opposed to an absorption into the Absolute that effaces personal individuality, we will tend to think of finite persons as preserved in their individuality together with their sublunary interests. 

This sort of attitude which disallows a clean break with the finite and an ascent to the Absolute is reflected in the popular song from 1941,  I Remember You. The version I remember from my boyhood is Frank Ifield's 1962 effort which features the lines (written by Johnny Mercer):

When my life is through
And the angels ask me 
To recall the thrill of them all
Then I will tell them I remember you.

The singer goes on to remember two distant bells and stars that fell like the rain from the blue. So the singer in heaven, presumably in the divine presence, is thinking about bells, shooting stars, and a woman! Now a woman for a (heterosexual) man is the highest finite object, but still a rather paltry bit of finitude as compared to to the stupendous transcendent reality that is the Godhead.  The things of finitude and flesh are next-to-nothing in comparison, and one's ultimate felicity could not possibly be thought of as attainable by way of loving and being loved by a mere mortal.  One wants to love and be loved by eternal Love Itself.  This is the sort of attitude one finds in Aquinas and such first-rate expositors as Pierre Rousselot and Etienne Gilson. I quote Gilson in World + God = God? See also Again on 'God + World = God.'

The sort of heavenly retrospective on one's earthly tenure found in the sentimental old tune from the '40s can also be found in serious religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See the latter's Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society, 1983, pp. 38-39:

When the righteous sit in the world to come, where there is neither eating nor drinking, with their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the divine presence . . . they occupy themselves with the study of the Torah, which treats of bodily life in our lowly world.

[. . .]

The creator of worlds, revealed and unrevealed, the heavenly hosts, the souls of the righteous all grapple with halakhic problems that are bound up with the empirical world — the red cow, the heifer whose neck is to be broken, leprosy, and similar issues. They do not concern themselves with transcendence, with questions that are above space and time, but with the problems of earthly life in all its details and particulars.

[. . .]

The universal homo religiosus proclaims: The lower yearns for the higher. But halakhic man, with his unique mode of understanding, declares: The higher longs and pines for the lower. 

Thus the waffling may be inevitable, even for the doctor angelicus, given the ineluctably discursive nature of finite mind.  We think in opposites and cannot do otherwise. So we think: either the individual soul is extinguished in the Godhead thereby losing its individuality — which would make hash of the notion of personal immortality — or individuality is retained together with finite concerns for other persons and things from one's sublunary tenure.  

Back to Vito's question. He asked how it could be rational to view the saintly mother in heaven as happy or at peace given the mother's loving concern for her child who she knows is in hell. The problem is exacerbated by the Aquinate asseveration, “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.”  My suggested answer was that the blessed, wholly absorbed by the visio beata, will have lost all memory of the finite, including the persons they loved in the sublunary. The trouble with this suggestion is that it does not comport well with the orthodox view that individual souls are never wholly absorbed into the Godhead, but retain their individuality. But if so, the deepest sublunary loves could nor be wholly effaced or forgotten in the way the old man forgets the toys he fooled with as a young boy. So I have no good answer for Vito.

One again we see that the philosopher's forte is not the answering of questions but the questioning of answers. 

An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:

Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).

Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).

Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) — e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case.  (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)

I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness.  There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling.  A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock.  This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.

I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ."  Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible.  A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure.  In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc.  The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.

So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory.  But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder.  I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ?  On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion.  It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.

It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:

By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.

This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to.  These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators.  Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.

My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.

Beatific Vision

 

Why There Has to be Hell

Here is an amateur theological speculation.

Suppose a rebellious nature such as Bertrand Russell or Jean-Paul Sartre or Christopher Hitchens finds himself in the divine presence and yet continues to refuse to acknowledge reality, which includes the rebel's creature status.  Hitchens, or whoever, continues to assert himself madly with Luciferian pride and egomania against the Source of all being, truth, intelligibility, personhood, and value, making of himself an absolute when there can be only one Absolute.

How could such a rebel be admitted into divine fellowship, or even into a purgatorial condition preparatory to divine fellowship? No God worth his salt could allow such a thing.

There has to be hell for rebels who freely choose it.  Allowance must be made for the rebels and their shouting of the eternal No!

A Theory of Hell

The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the Sky. This will lead either to a childish form of theism (God as Big Daddy, supplier of material needs, wish-fulfiller) or to a form of atheism of the Edward Abbey 'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon' variety.

Something similar is true of conceptions of heaven and hell. The materially minded will develop crass conceptions. Popular Islam's notion of paradise as an endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins, as a doing there all the carnal things one is forbidden here, is as theologically hopeless as is a Christian fundamentalist's notion of hell as fire and brimstone.

I suggest the following as closer to the theological reality of hell where hell is permanent separation, recognized as such, from one's absolute good, recognized as such.

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell not as a state of pain but of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise –  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. The fire of desire endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists.

Metaphysical Joy and Sadness

There is a rare form of joy that some of us have experienced, a joy that suggests that at the back of this life is something marvellous and that one day this life may open out onto it.  It goes together with a kind of sadness, call it metaphysical nostalgia, a sort of longing for a lost homeland, so far back in time that it is outside of time. This is the joy that C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, and that Nietzsche may have had in mind when he had his Zarathustra exclaim, "All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity!"

The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart

Here (HT: Karl White):

Let me, however, add one more observa­tion that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Chris­tianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.

Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that.  For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.

But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)