The Divine Comedy Hell
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
A magnificent philippic against the doctrine of eternal damnation.
When I was a callow Catholic boy, I believed that unrepentant sinners Cmedy roast in everlasting fire—and then I met Sister Mary Richards, my eighth-grade religion teacher and the object of a serious adolescent crush. Her blithe, mellifluous voice conferred the sweetest of imprimaturs on even the most rigorous tenets of the catechism.
For the gloomy Gus of patristic theology, the misericordia are also deluded. The magisterium of apology for hell—from Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther—has assured us that, once we partake of the Beatific Vision and its purification of consciousness, what appears to us now as a monstrosity will then be revealed as a loving resplendence, the sight of which, from the gallery of heaven, will add to the celestial pleasures of the saved.
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At one point Comedt his magnificent philippic against the doctrine of eternal damnation, David Bentley Hart takes a moment to dwell on such hapless and truculent fidelity. Hart has also been, at times, an acerbic and pugnacious defender of the faith. In other words, if eternal damnation is a fact, then Christian claims about God and the world are not only false, but preposterously, even wickedly false. Creation ex nihilo is an eschatological as well as a cosmological claim; we can only know things and The Divine Comedy Hell they have been created from the perspective of their ends, which thus reveals the nature of the God who brought them into existence. Thus, universal salvation is the only possible conclusion to be drawn The Divine Comedy Hell Christians take seriously what they profess about God. To believe in eternal damnation is to believe in a God who permits some created things to go unreconciled—who is not, Hart emphasizes, a God of infinite love and goodness who is also Lord of all creation.
But if God and creation are such that any harrowing abyss is simply unthinkable, then we need Djvine reconsider the meaning of judgment. Even in nontheological terms, personhood is always an ensemble of relationships: We cannot be who we Comeyd without the presence, nurturing or destructive, of other people. Transcending the juridical banality that grounds the myth of unceasing affliction, the ontological panorama of early Christianity surpassed and abolished the law, subverted all pretensions of virtue and desert, and confronted the strong gods of tribe and empire with a God of promiscuous cosmopolitan ardor.
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In their source as in their infernalism, what they conceive as the good can only be secured and legitimized by violence: Capitalism requires tragedy, redemption necessitates hell, and callousness and indifference wear the mask of stoicism. Any alternative to this acquiescence in The Divine Comedy Hell mercenary dispensation must start from what we might want to call a political ontology of jubilee: liberation, not only from debt and from the shackles imposed by a spurious freedom, but from the cosmology of scarcity and punishment that makes the manacles seem so natural.
Articulated from the vantage point of the comic end of history, such emancipation envisions a new creation whose end was always in its beginning, innocent of any trace of blemish, want, or acrimony, inclined to the spirit of the lilies that grow and flourish without travail—the spirit, that is, of Sister Mary Richard, whose voice I long to hear when we meet once again on The Divine Comedy Hell boulevards of heaven.
Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.
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