347. Memory in Hell
347. MEMORY IN HELL
Will those in Hell remember their lives on earth?
In the damned there will be actual consideration of the things they knew heretofore as matters of sorrow, but not as a cause of pleasure. For they will consider both the evil they have done, and for which they were damned, and the delightful goods they have lost, and on both counts they will suffer torments (S98,7).
In his little masterpiece The Great Divorce, a modern version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, C. S. Lewis says that damnation and salvation both work backwards:
“. . . [B]oth good and evil, when they are full grown (in eternity), become retrospective. Not only this valley (Purgatory, the beginning of their Heaven) but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town (the beginning of their Hell), but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man’s past already conforms to his (present) badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things. . . . the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ ”
St. Catherine of Siena famously said, “All the way to Heaven is Heaven.”
St. Thomas deduces a similar conclusion about the damned, most probably from the two reasonable premises (1) that memory is inherent in the soul and (2) that nothing causes pleasure in Hell, not even memory, but only causes sorrow.
Or, equally, he could deduce this conclusion from the two reasonable premises (1) that they will hate the evil of their punishment, and thus suffer the results of their sins, and (2) that they will suffer the pain of regret at not having attained all the goods of Heaven, and despair at having no hope of ever attaining them.
Bottom line: there is nothing good about Hell, nothing at all, not even the memories the damned have of the pleasures they had on earth. And there is nothing bad about Heaven, nothing at all, not even the memories of the pains the blessed had on earth. For as Heaven is the very best, Hell is the very worst.
This is true even if there were no other pains in Hell than the pain of loss, for that is the eternal loss of God, the total good, the source of all goods: happiness, joy, hope, love. St. Thomas’ traditional picture of all the positive pains of Hell, something like a torture chamber, may turn out to be only symbolical; but even if so, what it symbolizes is as bad as a torture chamber. Much worse, in fact. Remember Dante’s sign. (This is the thing we will explore next.)