Sunday Night Journal — November 23, 2008
With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred, and have suppressed all the love within themselves… In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell.
—Benedict XVI
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.” All that are in Hell choose it.
—C. S. Lewis
I ran across the above passage from Benedict a few weeks ago at the same time I was re-reading, for the first time in twenty years or so, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, from which the second quotation is taken. I expect most readers of this blog have read The Great Divorce or at least know of it, but for those who don’t: it’s an imaginative attempt to understand how the idea of Hell can be reconciled with the idea of an all-loving and all-merciful God. The answer Lewis gives—and of course he’s hardly the only one to have said it—is that God doesn’t so much send people to Hell as allow them to choose it. Or, to put it the other way around, to refuse Heaven.
Lewis’s premise is that the damned are free to visit Heaven and to stay there. All they have to do is give up something in themselves that makes it impossible for them to receive God, some sin to which they are so attached, some illusion so powerful, that it cannot co-exist in their hearts with God. And one after another the characters in The Great Divorce refuse to surrender. There is the cynical man who thinks all the God and Heaven stuff is some kind of trickery which he doesn’t intend to fall for. There’s the unjust man who won’t let go of his insistence that he treated everybody fairly. And so on.
Ultimately all those who choose Hell seem to be driven by pride. To let go of their sins and illusions requires that they accept a certain amount of embarrassment, admit that they were wrong, and submit to looking very foolish in their own eyes—in short, to be humbled.
All of this is familiar to most Christians, I think. But have you ever known anyone who seemed capable of making the sort of refusal described by Lewis? Someone who seemed in real danger of actually making it, of making the choice that will send him to hell? I don’t remember asking myself that question when I first read The Great Divorce many years ago, but I’ve seen a lot more of mankind since then.
Benedict’s formulation (“…people who have lived for hatred…”) seems to suggest a monster who would be easily recognizable as such. We tend to think of Hell as being reserved, if it exists at all, for such monsters, for people who have done some enormous wickedness, like Hitler. But the people I’ve known whom I could imagine making that ultimate refusal, choosing the Hell of their self-made prison over the love and grace offered to them by God, were not wicked in any obvious or dramatic way. (I’m using the past tense because the people who come first to mind are dead, but I can think of one or two among the living who worry me.) They didn’t live for hate, and as far as I know they had not suppressed all love within them.
What they did seem to have done, as far as I could tell—and I stress seem because obviously I didn’t know the real state of their souls—was to have erected a wall of pride between themselves and God, or anything having to do with God. It appeared to me not just that they didn’t believe, but that not believing was a matter of defiance with them. Any mention of God in their presence was met with reflexive anger or contempt. They were like the cynical man in The Great Divorce: nobody was going to trick them. They seemed to feel that anyone who mentioned God to them was only attempting to dominate them or in some way to take something from them, and they were determined not to let that happen.
I hope those were only reactions, probably at least somewhat justified, to bad behavior on the part of Christians, or to clumsy or misguided or even hostile approaches by them. And I know that all the people I’m thinking of here had been hurt by life in some pretty significant way, and I’m sure that those injuries had a role in their defiance. But while everyone has suffered, or will suffer, not everyone reacts in this way; I also know people who have suffered far worse things without becoming embittered. This is the mystery of freedom.
It seems to me that it isn’t so much the entire suppression of love that is the decisive step toward damnation, but the refusal to surrender to love, the determination to hold on to some bitterness, some anger, some resentment, some pleasure, that cannot in the end coexist with love. The total suppression must eventually follow, but the real decision seems to lie in the refusal to submit: in pride, not hate. It’s a frightening thing to look at someone you know and care about and think that you might be watching him or her erect walls that will, if he persists, become an eternal prison. It makes the matter of praying for him seem pretty urgent. And it makes one fearful of doing or saying anything that might further provoke the defiance and the pride.
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