evil’s event horizon

I. To Hell With It

Coming from a religious background largely influenced by Buddhism in recent years, the concept of an eternal hell has been, for me, one of the most difficult to swallow during my recent return to my childhood Christian faith (albeit via the Eastern Orthodox Church, rather than the Catholic Church I grew up with). The Buddha propounded a reality divided into several different planes, none of which has the character of eternity attached to it, including the Buddhist hell. This is because of an essentially mechanistic metaphysic, inherited from its parent religion Hinduism (or more properly Sanātana Dharma), which depends on the workings of the law of karma for its understanding of human nature and its relationship to the rest of the cosmos.

The metaphysics of karma essentially explain that a manifested being (in the provisional sense of an entirely conditioned, contingent existence with no essential nature specific to it) is the resultant vector, throughout all the various worlds of manifestation, of that being’s own past actions, and that karma can be both accumulated and exhausted much like money. Thus, given enough positive karma, one can end up a deva in one of the god-realms for unimaginably long stretches of time, and with enough negative karma one finds oneself in one of the Naraka (hell) worlds for correspondingly long periods. However, the point is that in both cases, one’s stay is for a finite amount of time, a function of the finite nature of all action and the karma accruing from it. Thus, even the most evil of beings eventually gets a reprieve from the hell of his or her actions.

The Christian hell is substantially different, as most of us remember all too well from Bible classes or Fundamentalist caricatures captured on video or Chick Tracts. In fact, it’s likely that such a conception of hell is one of the foremost factors responsible for lapsed Christians, such as I once was. The idea of a perdition of infinite duration based on the actions of a finite lifetime is seen by many folks as inherently repugnant to any sense of justice based around anything other than base vengeance and caprice.  It may also strike one as just totally logically untenable that a finite something (the human lifetime) should produce an infinite something (eternal damnation). Add to that the Christian God’s billing as the God of love and compassion, and one can see trouble brewing.

II. Will All Hell Break Loose?

I’ve just finished reading The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works of Greek Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware, and the last chapter of this well-written and well-thought-out collection of essays tackles this very question: “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” His Grace Bishop Ware examines the question of eternal perdition not only from the position of logical ethics, but also uses the writings of Fathers of the Church, and, of course, the Bible, to examine the question—from both sides.

Bishop Ware begins with an anecdote related in the annals of 20th-century Russian Orthodoxy, from Archmandrite Sophrony’s monograph on his elder (“Starets” or “Staretz“), Saint Silouan the Athonite.

It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the hell of separation from God… He could not bear to think that anyone would languish in “outer darkness.” I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, “God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.”

Obviously upset, the Staretz said, “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise, and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire—would you feel happy?”

“It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,” said the hermit.

The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance. “Love could not bear that,” he said. “We must pray for all.”

To this we can add two observations from the Bible:

1. Christ Himself was known for cavorting with sinners and other generally undesirable elements, a habit which earned him the ire of the local religious ruling class, the Pharisees (see for instance Mark 2:15–17), and thus completely invalidating the above-mentioned hermit’s evident satisfaction at the plight of sinners (and St. Silouan was thus following Christ’s example);
2. we are told by both the Catholic and Orthodox Traditions of Christ’s “harrowing of hell,” that is, his descent into hell itself to redeem the condemned, based on such Biblical sources as 1 Peter 3:19–20: “… He went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah….” (note that the “harrowing” is a doctrine so central that it is an article of faith expressed in the Apostles’ Creed used by numerous large Christian denominations).

While the passages in the Bible describing hell as eternal are the ones more generally known, there are others that are usually not given as much airtime, passages that would seem to contradict that attribute of eternity, making a case instead for apocatastasis. Bishop Ware lists three places where St Paul gives us cause to question whether hell is eternal:

1. “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22)
2. “Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.” (Romans 5:18)
3. “For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all.” (Romans 11:32)

The most that is generally conceded by those certain that damnation is for all time is that these passages suggest the possibility of salvation open to all. But this is to discredit the logical rigor with which Paul elaborates his syllogisms. In case 1, it is scriptural dogma that Adam cursed all of humanity with mortality, without exception, through his disobedient curiosity (indeed, from the standpoint of etiological mythography, this story is intended to explain why we die). Therefore, for the syllogism to make any sense and to be possessed of parity, all of humanity, without exception, must likewise be made the object of Christ’s act of redemption. The same applies, then, to the following two scriptural excerpts. If, then, there is a chance that all of humanity is to rejoin their Creator, then hell must in some sense be conditional and temporary—as is suggested by Christ’s having visited hell himself.

To be sure, I am not trying to put forth a definitive argument for universal salvation from a Christian perspective, for the simple fact that: a) there are indeed numerous (evidently) conflicting scriptural references to an eternal hell which must be held in the same esteem as the excerpts I just quoted (the Bible can start to resemble a tightly-wound Zen koan after a certain point); and b) because I would not be so presumptuous as to purport to know the mind of God. However, the issues raised here are intended to get folks to see that certitude in an eternal hell is just as scripturally untenable as certitude in eventual universal salvation. In the final analysis, for a Christian, God is the sole sovereign, and His ultimate universal will (and, more to the point, the extent of His love for His creation) is unknowable to all except Himself. Even in the Holy Tradition of Orthodoxy, which maintains theosis (“becoming [one with] God”) as the standard metric of salvation, a distinction is made between God’s energies, which can be known, and God’s essence, which cannot (see “essence—energies distinction“).

III. God Damn the Sun

Let’s look at this from yet another perspective. After all, the question of evil remains: what exactly constitutes a condemnable life, and what might merit eternal damnation? In other words, to borrow the language of astrophysics and horribly misapply it: does evil possess an event horizon, beyond which there can be no return?

A black hole’s event horizon is that theoretical region of space-time where/when a large star “tightens up,” implodes, under its own gravitational pull, leaving a body with an escape velocity so high not even light can escape it (hence black hole). I find gravity an apt real-world metaphor for the question of evil, because evil is that which puts itself before all else, which swallows and never gives back, which contracts under the pressure of its own “spirit of gravity,” and which sees no end other than itself: to THE WORLD, it opposes ME, and it is thus a perfect parody of God’s I AM of burning bush fame. Evil is gravity’s usurpation of the prerogative of God’s universal love and attraction (hence, gravitationally-enforced stasis opposed to motion). Given sufficient gravity, light (traditionally identifiable with the evidence of God) enters, but never leaves. Gravity is the reason the center of the earth, once said to be the location of hell itself, is a ball of superheated molten and solid metal, fire and brimstone. Gravity is a characteristic of the physical property of mass, and thus every body (including our own) has an “escape velocity” of sorts; but rather than being measurable in terms of distance over time, on the minuscule scale under investigation, it possesses its own moral metric which the exact sciences of empiricism have never been able to examine.

Thus, what constitutes a moral black hole? Is it the obvious choice of Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Manson? Is it the four protagonists of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, who torture and kill young women and children in ways too hideous to describe here, all for sheer entertainment value? Is it the character of Dr. Peters in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, who tries to wipe out all human life in a misguided quest for environmental parity? Is it the character of Pinbacker in Danny Boyle’s 2007 indie sci-fi film Sunshine, who deliberately sabotages a space mission to jump-start our dying sun, thus deliberately attempting to consign all life as we know it to the cosmic dustbin?

Rather than attempt a catalogue based on history or fiction or pop culture, we can refer back to the abovementioned essay by Bishop Ware, who in turn refers back to the writings of a saint of the Orthodox Church, St Isaac of Nineveh (or St Isaac the Syrian). “In his view,” writes Bishop Ware, “the real torment in hell consists, not in burning by material fire, nor in any physical pain, but in the pangs of conscience that a person suffers on realizing that he or she has rejected the love of God.” He goes on to quote St Isaac:

Also I say that even those who are scourged in hell are tormented with the scourgings of love.

The scourges that result from love—that is, the scourges of those who have become aware that they have sinned against love—are harder and more bitter than the torments which result from fear.

The pain which gnaws the heart as the result of sinning against love is sharper than all other torments that there are.

It is wrong to imagine that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God… [But] the power of love works in two ways: it torments those who have sinned, just as happens among friends here on earth; but to those who have observed its duties, love gives delight.

So it is in hell: the contrition that comes from love is the harsh torment.

Another way to figure this “event horizon” of evil is to call CS Lewis to testify: “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” That is to say, it is not God who consigns the rejector of His love to torment, but it is rather the conscience itself of the rejector which both torments and keeps the Exit locked.

Say you met your soulmate. You knew almost instantly that it was real, got married the second time you met, and post-nuptial bliss ensued, again reconfirming your initial decision and impressions, a sense of having been separated at birth, of having been made for each other in a different universe where such things can and do happen. But then for some reason things went south, you got divorced, you moved far apart, and only years later you realized that it was your fault, way past the expiry date of reparations to your aggrieved former better-half. “Hell” here is the lover’s broken conscience, a cold knowledge, the knowledge that you royally f*cked up, and that had you not, a lifetime of fusion to the other half of your very self would have been your happy destiny.

Now imagine the person you sinned against in such a way was not only responsible for your happiness and a deep and abiding sense of fulfillment, but was additionally responsible for your very existence, predicated on the fundamental assumption that existence itself is good, even sacred—because only thus comes the opportunity to love. Since the chasm of debt (and therefore gratitude) existing between creature and creator is verging on an infinite factor, is it too much a leap of faith to suggest that the lover’s torment be multiplied by a practically infinite factor in order to understand the “outer darkness” of hell? Doesn’t “outer darkness,” in fact, suggest the feelings of utter desolation spawned by true love gone awry?

Hell’s eternity could be likened to that conviction that there is an expiry date on reparations, beyond which anything one says or does is all for nought. But is that a reality? Is it ever really too late to try again? It’s an open question as far as I’m concerned, and better minds than mine have milked millions from the masses with ever more creative ways to look at this question (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, anyone?).

Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim “Hell is other people” is the perspective adopted by the hell-bound, and the promise of such a perspective is explicitly stated in the title of the play whence the quote originates: No Exit. The moral black hole suggested by such examples as I briefly listed above, then, chiefly consists in a rejection of love on a level so fundamental to our being that it is our being. Every one of the examples listed is guilty of trespass against Christ’s two commandments—Love God, and Love your neighbor as yourself—because the two are, like lovers bound for true, inseparable and unrecognizable without each other. Self-centeredness so magnified that it utterly denies the love of one’s fellow-beings is the same as rejecting the love of one’s creator (which is the love implied in the possession of both an ontos and a telos, to put it into philosophical terms). Self-centeredness of this magnitude wraps back on itself like the ourobouros, and is the same thing as ultimate self-negation. The star collapses in on itself with such force and violence that its event horizon, the egoic self-imposed boundary of no return, surrounds it like a counterfeit halo.

Tags: black hole, chrisitianity, evil, hell, love, swans, theology, tighten up!