307. Heaven is pure good but Hell is not pure evil
307. HEAVEN IS PURE GOOD BUT HELL IS NOT PURE EVIL
If Hell is the opposite of Heaven, and if Hell is the apotheosis of evil as Heaven is the apotheosis of good, does this mean Hell is pure evil without any good, as Heaven is pure good without any evil?
It is impossible for evil to be pure and without the admixture of good . . . as the supreme good is without any admixture of evil.
Consequently, those who are to be conveyed to beatitude, which is a supreme good, must be cleansed of all evil; wherefore there must needs be a place (Purgatory) where such persons are cleansed if they go hence without being perfectly clean.
But (because of the same principle) those who will be thrust into hell will not be free from all good . . . since those who are in hell can receive the reward of their goods in so far as their past goods avail for the mitigation of their punishment (S69,7).
In Christian cosmology, everything real is created by God, not by the Devil, as it is in Manichean dualism. The Devil cannot create. He is a mere creature; his opposite is not God but St. Michael the Archangel. God has no opposite; the very name “Michael” means “Who is like God?”
Therefore Hell is not the opposite to Heaven as a cave is the opposite of a hill or as Detroit is the opposite of Honolulu. “Absolute good” is conceivable and real, in God; but “absolute evil” is inconceivable and self-contradictory, and therefore not real even in the Devil.
For the very essence of evil is the perversion of good; therefore evil is like a parasite: it presupposes and needs its good host to pervert. Without innocent victims, Dracula has no blood to suck, and dies.
The very same principle that necessitates Purgatory, namely that in Heaven there can be no evil at all, also necessitates the existence of some good in Hell: at least mitigations of its evils. Although Hell is infinite in time, i.e., unending (a “life sentence without possibility of parole”), it is finite in quality. Its pains and punishments are just, and therefore finite, and can be mitigated. A hater of God who was something of a lover of men on earth would not be punished as severely as a hater of God who was not a lover of men at all. And those whose motives and souls were mixed during their lifetime, if it is impossible to separate the good from the evil in them and purify them from their evil in Purgatory, would still necessarily suffer less than those whose motives and souls were more unmitigatedly evil.
This is a kind of natural justice even in the supernatural order. Just as virtue is its own reward, vice is its own punishment. God does not have to add anything eternal and additional, from the outside, so to speak. Perfect justice must be done in the end simply because God, that is, ultimate reality, is perfectly just as well as perfectly merciful. Neither justice nor mercy can be compromised because both are divine attributes. But mercy can be resisted and refused, while justice cannot. That is why there must be a Hell even though divine mercy is infinite.
But Hell is in no way equal to or parallel to Heaven. There must be some good in Hell, but there can be no evil in Heaven. Even the agents of torture in Hell, whether they are physical fire or spiritual hate or despair, have some ontological goodness. Take fire, for instance. Some of the saints doubt that there are physical fires in Hell precisely because fire is good, because fire is a beautiful, innocent creature of God. Some of the saints and visionaries (like Lady Julian of Norwich, in her Revelations of Divine Love) say that the damned are tortured not by God’s wrath (“for I saw no wrath but on man’s part”) but by His love, which they experience as wrath because of their perverse spirits, as a hate-filled child who wants only to fight with his parents might feel their hugs as tortures.