Life Plans and Ultimate Destinations

It is now time to tie the idea of life plans and ultimate just- and unjust-good-seeking choices to the matter of heaven (perfect happiness) and hell (the lack of perfect happiness). The link is as follows: those who make an ultimate just-good-seeking choice are plumping for the long-term good of heaven (or, more precisely, the new heaven and new earth), while those who make an ultimate unjust-good-seeking choice are plumping for the short-term good at the expense of forfeiting heaven. In simplest terms ultimate justice is the idea of a separation of persons on the basis of their ultimate choices about life plans into two camps or modes of existence where this separation leaves both parties to do as they have chosen. Heaven is occupied by those who have made an ultimate just choice of a way of life, and hell is inhabited by those who have made an ultimate unjust choice of a way of life.¹⁷ Thus, heaven and hell must ultimately be understood in terms of how a person chooses to live his life in pursuit of what is good. Does an individual choose a way of life of restraint and deference to others who are created by God in the short term for the purpose of experiencing perfect happiness in the long term? Or does he choose a way of life of a lack of restraint and deference to others in the short term for the purpose of maximizing his happiness in the short term?

Those who make the former kind of choice know all too well how others who make the latter kind of choice want to have nothing to do with them. Those who make the choice to exercise restraint in pursuit of what is good are thought of by those who do not make it as boring, prudes, goody-goodies, etc. Indeed, those who make this choice are often despised by those who do not make it. Moreover, those who do not make this choice also want to have nothing to do with God and despise Him for the same reason. Given that they can't be happy in the short term in the presence of either those who have chosen to exercise restraint or God, they couldn't be happy with either of them in the afterlife, and God will ultimately justly give them their wish to be left alone to live with others who have ultimately chosen to live the same unjust way of life with all of its sorrows and pains. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1033) states, hell is the “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” Lewis makes the same point:

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.¹⁸

[T]he damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.…In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.¹⁹

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”²⁰

In explaining why it is reasonable to believe in the existence of hell, I have not claimed that libertarian free will is an intrinsic good (good for its own sake) and that its existence justifies the existence of hell. I do not believe that libertarian free will has intrinsic value. Indeed, I believe that it lacks intrinsic value. Rather the great intrinsic goods of perfect happiness and justice justify the existence. St. Paul said about perfect happiness “that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18 RSV). And given the goodness of perfect happiness, it would be unjust if one were to receive it regardless of what kind of ultimate choice one made to live a way of life. And the making of an ultimate just- or unjust-good-seeking choice of a way of life requires the existence of libertarian free will.

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