341. Damnation
341. DAMNATION
Is Hell a torture chamber, something worse, or something better?
Just as every creature will be to the blessed a matter of joy, so will all the elements conduce to the torture of the damned, according to Wisdom 5:21, the whole world will fight with Him against the unwise. This is also becoming to the divine justice, that whereas they departed from One by sin and placed their end in material things which be many and various, so should they be tormented in many ways and from many sources. . . (S97,1).
The answer to the above question is: Something worse. For the same reason salvation is total and cosmic, its absence and opposite must also be total and cosmic. With God’s presence, all things are goods and joys; without God, nothing can be good or joyful. If this is not so, God is not God.
It is written (Wis 11:17): By what things a man sinneth, by the same also he is tormented. Now men sin by the sensible things of this world. Therefore it is just that they should be punished by those same things (S97,6).
This is the basis for many of the details in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Fitting punishment is not an opinion or an option; it is logically necessary and deducible once the essential nature of justice is understood. The concrete forms in which this justice will be done in Hell are, of course, in Dante merely speculative, imaginary, and almost certainly not literally accurate—but because they are too weak, not too strong. Justice cannot be weakened, even by mercy. Refusing mercy necessarily dooms us to pure justice.
The worm ascribed to the damned must be understood to be not of a corporeal but of a spiritual nature; and this is the remorse of conscience, which is called a worm because it originates from the corruption of sin, and torments the soul, as a corporeal worm born of corruption torments by gnawing. . . (S97,2).
If Hell consisted merely of tortures by agents external to ourselves (demons), it might be possible to hope to escape from these external agents of torture, and thus to escape from the torment. But if the agent that tortures you in Hell is also yourself, you can never hope to escape, for you can never escape yourself.
There cannot be a continual dissolution from the bodies of the damned, since nothing is restored to them by food. . . . [T]herefore the weeping of the damned will not be corporeal (S97,3).
A corporeal (literal, physical) Hell would not be the worst possible, since matter would limit the evil, the harm, the dissolution. Bodies cannot endure torture forever; they die. But souls do not die.
In hell the place must be so disposed for seeing as regards light and darkness that nothing be seen clearly, and that only such things be dimly seen as are able to bring anguish to the heart. . . . Now seeing is in itself pleasant . . . Yet it happens accidentally that seeing is painful, when we see things that are hurtful to us or displeasing to our will (S97,4).
Sights can be beautiful. Even fire can be beautiful. Fire is God’s creature, God’s invention. Even when it burns you, you can at the same time notice its beauty. A Hell of literal fire would not be as bad as one without it. St. Thomas’ refusal to take the imagery about Hell literally (i.e., physically) stems not from the conviction that the reality of Hell cannot be not as bad as we usually imagine it, but from the conviction that our imagination cannot be as bad as the reality of it. Dante got it right when he identified the sign over its door as: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
If Hell is not so bad, then Jesus is not so good, because He repeatedly warned us of its horror. If we seek to correct St. Thomas by spiritualizing his quasi—physical descriptions, fine—but this makes it more deeply awful, not less.