International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43: 69– 86, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Hell, justice, and freedom CHARLES SEYMOUR University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Introduction Many arguments have been given against the doctrine of hell, particularly in recent work in the philosophy of religion. Thomas Talbott, for instance, argues that the existence of hell precludes the existence of heaven, since the blessed in heaven are perfectly compassionate and would thus feel pain knowing the misery of the damned.1 Marilyn Adams believes that human freedom is impaired by so many psychological flaws that God would be cruel to make one’s eternal fate hang on decisions made in this life.2 William Craig considers the objection that God would create only those persons whom He knew beforehand would freely accept salvation.3 But the doctrine of hell has not only modern detractors. Augustine refutes certain ‘tender hearts’ in the ancient church who found the idea of eternal punishment unacceptably harsh.4 In the medieval period, Aquinas found it necessary to expand on Augustine’s defense of hell. After the reformation, conservative Protestants like Jonathan Edwards faced growing universalist movements. The argument which engaged all these theological figures, and which continues to draw the attention of contemporary philosophers like Marilyn Adams and Jonathan Kvanvig, I will call ‘the argument from justice’. This argument may be schematized as follows. (1) All human sin is finite in seriousness. (2) It is unjust to punish sins disproportionately to their seriousness. (3) To punish sins finite in seriousness with infinite punishment is to punish sins disproportionately to their seriousness. (4) Therefore it is unjust to punish sins finite in seriousness with infinite punishment. (5) Therefore it is unjust to punish human sin with infinite punishment. (6) Hell is infinite punishment. (7) Therefore it is unjust to punish human sin with hell. (8) God does nothing unjust. (9) Therefore God does not punish human sin with hell.

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The first premise is based on the fact that not even the worst villains in history have done an infinite amount of wrong; Nero, Gengis Khan, and Hitler inflicted a limited amount of harm to a limited number of people. Even if one does not measure the wrongfulness of actions by their consequences, there seems no reason to assert that the amount of guilt incurred by any human action is infinite. Premise (2) is held to be an obvious ethical principle. Premise (3) is plausible, for if a finite punishment can be disproportionate to a finite sin (as twenty years of prison is disproportionate to the sin of petty theft), surely infinite punishment is disproportionate to finite sin. From (2) and (3) follows (4), and (5) follows from (1) and (4). The sixth premise is based on the definition of hell as everlasting punishment.5 Premises (5) and (6) entail (7). Premise (8) is held to be true by virtue of God’s nature as perfectly good.6 From (7) and (8) we can draw the conclusion that God does not punish human sin with hell. In this essay I will attempt to defend the doctrine of hell against the argument from justice. Before defending the doctrine, however, I need to define it. There are numerous doctrines of hell, if we mean by that term some more or less detailed model of eternal punishment. In this sense Aquinas’ doctrine of hell, with its insistence on the inability of the damned to repent and the physical torments they endure, differs from the doctrine of hell sketched in C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce, in which the lost souls experience only emotional pain and are given the opportunity to enter heaven. In the recent philosophical literature on the subject many different ideas about hell have been described. Jerry Walls looks as the ‘traditional popular view’, the ‘modified orthodox view’, the ‘traditional Calvinist view’, and others.7 Jonathan Kvanvig describes the ‘strong view’, ‘second chance theories of hell’, and the ‘quarantine model’.8 These particular views may be called doctrines of hell, but by ‘the doctrine of hell’ I mean that which is common to all these views, and in fact essential to any model of hell. I define this generic doctrine as the belief that it is logically and epistemically possible that some persons will experience an everlasting existence, each of whose moments is on the whole bad.9 It is not always clear whether arguments against ‘the doctrine of hell’ are presented against some particular version of hell or against the generic doctrine. This is an important question because an argument which (perhaps implicitly) assumes a specific view of hell may not be effective against other versions, and so leaves open the possibility of defending the doctrine of hell in its generic form. I will argue that this is true of the most obvious objection to the doctrine of hell, the argument from justice. I will first look at the various ways Augustine, Aquinas, and Edwards have attempted to answer the argument. After seeing that none of these approaches works, I will suggest that the answer lies in revising our idea of

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hell. While the argument from justice seems to be aimed at the generic doctrine of hell, it in fact sets up a particular model of hell as its target. This model is a very traditional one, which explains both why the argument from justice assumes it implicitly, and why Augustine, Aquinas, and Edwards, working from within this tradition, were unable to answer it effectively. By rejecting one key feature of this model, we take the force out of the argument from justice, and show how our revised model, and ipso facto the generic doctrine of hell, is consistent with God’s justice.

1. Augustine Augustine defends the justice of hell by looking at the norms which govern society’s punishment of crime. He first notes that there is often a disproportion between the length of the punishment and the time it took to commit the crime. A theft which is accomplished in ten minutes may be punished by five years of imprisonment. There is nothing unjust, says Augustine, about this disproportion. Secondly, he points out that the state has the right to punish certain crimes with death or exile, which are analogous to hell in that they are permanent. If such punishments are justified by the state, God is equally justified in punishing unrepentant sinners with an everlasting hell.10 It is not hard to agree with Augustine’s central point that the punishment may last longer than the crime. One may agree, however, and still find the argument from justice compelling. The argument never claimed that the punishments must last no longer than the crime, only that the seriousness of the punishment must be proportioned to the seriousness of the crime. It is clear that five years imprisonment is acceptable punishment for a beating that took ten minutes; it is also clear that life imprisonment is unacceptably severe punishment for the same crime. According to the argument from justice, it is equally obvious that no finite sin deserves everlasting punishment, although it may deserve punishment which lasts for a very long time. The second of Augustine’s objections purports to give examples of permanent punishments which are justly inflicted on criminals: namely, death and exile. Two replies are possible. First, as Augustine himself notes, these punishments are not truly everlasting: ‘Fully eternal they cannot be, for the life which they afflict is but temporal’.11 From a traditional theistic perspective, capital punishment only hastens a person to their everlasting destiny, be that heaven, hell, or purgatory. If that fate is heaven, then execution could actually be considered a blessing, in that it spares the criminal many years of unhappiness in favor of everlasting joy. If the criminal ends up in hell, then at most death is a finite punishment, in that it robs the criminal of

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a few years of pleasure. Likewise, to kill someone who is headed for purgatory is at most a finite evil, for he would have lived only a finite number of years before ending up in purgatory. One complication that arises is the possibility that a damned person who is killed young may have made it to heaven had he lived longer. In this instance execution could be considered an infinite punishment because it brings it about that the victim experiences everlasting punishment rather than everlasting joy. This possibility, however, falls to the second reply: to say that killing someone can bring it about that he enters hell is to assume that some sins can merit hell. This assumption is under dispute by the argument of justice and so cannot be part of Augustine’s defense.

2. Aquinas In addition to employing the arguments of previous philosophers such as Augustine and Pope Gregory I, Aquinas offers two original responses to the argument from justice. They are similar in that both appeal to heaven as an example of how finite actions can be justly rewarded with everlasting consequences. It is undeniable, Aquinas says, that heaven is an appropriate fate for the virtuous. But if everlasting punishment is an unjust response to finite sin, then everlasting bliss is an unjust response to finite goodness. Since only heretics like Origen deny that heaven is everlasting, orthodox Christians should not deny that hell is everlasting. The difference between the two arguments Aquinas offers in this vein is subtle but significant. In the first argument, found in Article 1 of Question 99, he states that everlasting joy is owed to the blessed. Thus it is consistent to say that everlasting punishment is owed to the unrepentant. As he puts it, ‘As reward is to merit, so is punishment to guilt. Now, according to Divine justice, an eternal reward is due to temporal merit: Every one who seeth the Son and believeth in Him hath life everlasting. Therefore according to Divine justice an everlasting punishment is due to temporal guilt’.12 The second argument, found in the next article, does not hold to the strong claim that heaven is owed to the good, but only that it is an appropriate reward. That is, even if the blessed cannot demand heaven as their due, it is not unfair to give it to them. Likewise, everlasting punishment is a fair treatment for the damned, even if it is not the only fair treatment, and thus considerations of justice cannot tell against the existence of hell. The argument as Aquinas gives it deals with the fate of the angels: ‘For it would seem equally reasonable for the good angels to remain in eternal happiness, and for the wicked angels to be eternally punished’.13 But the same principle can be applied to good and wicked humans.

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It is difficult, in evaluating the first argument, to decide whether everlasting happiness is owed to the good. Assuming, as the argument from justice does, that God has duties with respect to his creation, we still have to ask whether granting everlasting life to the good is one of them. Most of the duties we might think God has towards us are negative: for instance, the duty not to create innocent life in a hell, or the duty not to punish unfree actions. God does not have the duty to create life, but this cannot help us in deciding whether or not, once life is created, he has the duty to maintain that life. Perhaps a related passage in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo will clarify the issue. Anselm says that ‘it is inconsistent with God’s wisdom and justice to compel man to suffer death without fault, when he made him holy to enjoy eternal blessedness’.14 Here Anselm brings in a consideration not mentioned by Aquinas: since God made people for the sake of their everlasting happiness, he is not going to take away that happiness for no good reason. To do otherwise is inconsistent with ‘God’s wisdom and justice’. We can easily see how it would be inconsistent with his wisdom. It would be foolish to create something for a certain purpose and then prevent that purpose from being fulfilled. However, at this point we would rather understand how God’s withholding everlasting life from the sinless would be inconsistent with his justice, since Aquinas’ argument is concerned with the justice of hell. Anselm does not comment further on the above statement. Perhaps his idea is that since God gave happiness to humanity, he cannot take it back again without good reason, as if through God’s gift we came to have a property right to joy. If this is Anselm’s meaning, the argument cannot be used to support Aquinas. Aquinas’ claim is that after a finite period of goodness, the blessed come to earn everlasting happiness. Anselm, according to our hypothesis, begins with the right to everlasting happiness and argues that it should not be taken away from the good. The two theologians picture the same result: the good have everlasting life. But their justification of this result differs. Another way to get at the same point is this. If the sinless person deserved everlasting happiness only because God previously granted it to him, then there is no reason why the sinful necessarily deserve everlasting punishment, as Aquinas wants to claim. It is important that Aquinas say the good earn everlasting blessedness through their good actions, so that he can draw the parallel and say that the wicked earn everlasting punishment through their evil actions. On Anselm’s view, as I have taken it, the good deserve everlasting happiness only because they were granted it by God, not because they earned it. Therefore, the everlasting happiness of the good would not justify the everlasting punishment of the evil.

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So Aquinas’ first argument is hard to endorse; there is no compelling reason to believe that the good come to earn heaven. An even stronger case can be made against his second argument, which concludes that if it is acceptable for finite goodness to be rewarded with infinite bliss, then it is acceptable for finite evil to be rewarded with everlasting damnation. Aquinas thinks that denying this inference commits one to an asymmetry; and he is right. But this sort of asymmetry is part of ordinary moral judgements. If a child does her duty by cleaning her room, she will not be able to demand a reward, but no injustice is done if she receives one. Indeed, no injustice is done if she receives an extravagant gift, say a hundred dollar allowance, for her small obedience (although from the practical standpoint of raising a child such a gift would not be wise). However, if she were to disobey, it does not follow that she is justly subject to extravagant punishments. Justice more strictly regulates punishments than it does rewards.

3. Edwards In the arguments described above, Augustine and Aquinas deny premise (3) of the argument from justice; they attempt to show how finite sin can merit everlasting punishment. Jonathan Edwards instead denies premise (1) and argues that all sin is in fact infinite in seriousness. In moving on to early modern Protestantism we do not leave medieval Catholicism behind entirely, for Edwards’ argument is built upon the discussion of punishment and redemption developed by Anselm. However, it will be more appropriate to focus on Edwards rather than Anselm since the former explicitly applied the principles of the latter to the question of hell and justice. Anselm had argued that the seriousness of sin is related to the person against whom the sin is committed. The more honorable the victim of one’s sin, the more punishment the sin deserves. Commentators note that this idea was best illustrated in Anselm’s own time by the feudal system, in which crime against nobles and clergy was much more severely punished than crime against peasants.15 Since God is infinitely honorable, sin against God is an infinite offense, worthy of infinite punishment. In a pamphlet entitled ‘The Justice of God in Damning Sinners’, Edwards gives a more elaborate version of Anselm’s argument.16 He says that ‘our obligation to love, honour, and obey any being, is in proportion to his loveliness, honorableness, and authority’. Edwards believes that this premise is true as a matter of definition: to say something is lovely is just to say it is lovable, i.e. that it should be loved; to say it is honorable is to say it should be honored; to say someone has authority is to say he should be obeyed. Since God is infinite in loveliness, honorableness, and authority, our obliga-

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tion to love, honor, and obey him is infinite. How do we know these traits are infinite in God? We know God is infinitely lovable because he is ‘infinitely excellent’. His honorableness is infinite because ‘he is a being of infinite greatness, majesty, and glory . . . he is infinitely exalted above the greatest potentates of the earth, and highest angels in heaven’. And his authority is infinite because ‘we have an absolute, universal and infinite dependence on him’. Because our obligation to love, honor, and obey God is infinite, and sin is a failure to love, honor, and obey God, sin is ‘infinitely heinous’ and so deserves a punishment that is ‘infinitely dreadful’.17 There are three similar but distinct arguments contained in Edward’s article, based on, respectively, our obligation to love, honor, and obey God. The main problem running through all three arguments is their insistence on the infinitude of God’s traits. Of course this insistence is necessary for Edwards to conclude that sin against God is infinite in seriousness. But it is doubtful whether all of God’s properties can be truly infinite. For instance, according to Edwards, it is God’s ‘infinite greatness, majesty, and glory’ which makes him infinitely worthy of honor. Can these traits be infinite? Consider analogous cases. Can something be infinitely beautiful? It might be very beautiful, even as beautiful as something can possibly be, but it is hard to conceive of something being infinitely beautiful. Likewise with pleasure. Perhaps for any pleasure there is one greater that can be conceived; perhaps on the other hand there is a pleasure than which none more pleasurable can be conceived. But what would an infinite pleasure be like? Greatness, majesty and glory are in this respect like beauty and pleasure; they cannot be infinite, not even in God. Again, Edwards says that our dependence on God is ‘absolute, universal, and infinite’. Certainly our continued existence is subject unconditionally to God’s will and so is absolute; likewise we are dependent on God at all times and places, and with respect to all our talents, abilities, resources, etc., so our dependence on him is universal. But what does it mean to call this dependence infinite? As the character of Cleanthes says in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, I have been apt to suspect the frequent repetition of the word ‘infinite’, which we meet with in all theological writers, to savor more of panegyric than of philosophy, and that any purposes of reasoning, and even of religion, would be better served were we to rest contented with more accurate and more moderate expressions.18 Of course there are traits of God which can be called infinite. God is omniscient and so knows an infinite number of truths. God is omnipotent and so can choose among an infinite number of actions to perform. If God exists in time then God has lived, or at least will live an infinitely long time. The problem is that our limited knowledge, power, and duration are infinite

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in similar ways. Certainly humans know an infinite number of truths: that 1 + 1 = 2, that 1 + 2 = 3, etc. If space and time are continuous, we can choose from among an infinite number of actions, say, walking in one of an infinite number of directions, or lifting one’s arm for any of an infinite number of durations between one and two seconds. One standard western theism, although we have not lived forever, we will live forever and so our life is infinite in at least one temporal direction. Since the sins humans commit against each other seem to be finite in seriousness despite the fact that humans have the above-mentioned ‘infinite’ traits, Edwards will have a hard time arguing that sin as an offense to God deserves infinite punishment.

4. The separationist view of hell It seems that the argument from justice is victorious and that the doctrine of hell is inconsistent with God’s justice. But the argument from justice makes certain assumptions about the nature of hell which are not essential to the generic doctrine. We might be able answer the argument from justice by rejecting one or more of these assumptions. One way to do so would be to adopt a ‘separationist’ view of hell. The argument from justice concludes that God does not punish human sin with hell. Such a conclusion is irrelevant to the separationist view because according to it hell is not a punishment at all. The separationist believes that sin causes the person to be alienated from God, in whom lies our happiness. The pain of hell consists in the unhappiness necessarily attendant upon separation from God; it is not a punishment imposed by God in retaliation for transgressing the moral law. Because the separationist view denies any aspect of retribution, questions about the justice of everlasting punishment are bypassed. This approach is taken by most contemporary defenders of hell, including Jonathan Kvanvig, C. S. Lewis, Jerry Walls, and Richard Swinburne. Perhaps this is the case because separationism seems to be a more humane version of the doctrine of hell. In fact it is too humane to be considered a serious alternative. According to the definition given in the introduction, hell is an everlasting existence each of whose moments is on the whole bad. For separationism to qualify as a version of the doctrine of hell, it would have to state that separation from God makes every moment of a life bad. It is quite natural for devout theists to believe that without God happiness is impossible, and separationists in particular make this assumption. Thus Lewis writes: It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each

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must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. To be God – to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response – to be miserable – these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows – the only food that any possible universe ever can grow – then we must starve eternally.19 However, it is at least questionable whether this view squares with the facts. Judging other people’s psychological states is sometimes difficult, but there appear to be people who give no thought to God but who live enjoyable lives. Lewis himself knew such a person: ‘I have an elderly acquaintance of about eighty, who has lived a life of unbroken selfishness and self-admiration from the earliest years, and is, more or less, I regret to say, one of the happiest men I know. From the moral point of view it is very difficult!’20 For a purely separationist view of hell, such cases are indeed troublesome. It might be said that we can only remain content without God so long as we have no clear idea of the joy of heaven. Perhaps the damned will see the happiness of the blessed and gnash their teeth in envy and disappointment. But why would God allow the damned to see the joy they failed to attain? This vision would be a form of everlasting punishment and so leads to the problems we have been discussing. Although he is not a separationist, Georges Panneton recognizes the fact of religious indifference as a problem for any view of hell which gives a prominent place to the ‘pain of loss’. As he puts the objection, ‘It would seem that the pain of loss ought not to be so very great in Hell, seeing that on earth we are without the enjoyment of the beatific vision, and yet are not greatly afflicted in consequence’.21 He deals with the problem in a number of related ways, none of which is conclusive. First he says that ‘while man is living on earth, the lack of the vision of God is no punishment for him; it is simply the expectation in hope of a good thing to come, and this hope of Heaven is already a kind of happiness in anticipation’.22 Although this explanation shows how Christians can live peacefully in this life without the vision of God, it cannot account for the happy atheist who presumably does not hope to see God after death. Next Panneton argues that ‘on earth God is present with us, though hidden; and He manifests His love by His beneficent activity, His favors, His miracles. Moreover, we can, even here enjoy His infinite perfections, in the reflections of them which creation gives us’.23 A number of questions can be raised. How many of us experience miracles? And those of us who do, how often do we experience them? Not frequently enough, I submit, to come close to easing the pain of loss that should be felt on earth. Another

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question: Why believe that God will totally remove his beneficent activity and his favors from the damned? Perhaps he will do so for a short while, as a temporary punishment for finite sins. But none of the defenses of hell examined thus far have proved that our sins deserve everlasting punishment. Similarly, it does not seem justified that God will forever cut the wicked off from the beauties of creation. Panneton’s arguments will not help preserve a separationist account of hell. Is there a punishment version of hell which does not give rise to the problem of justice?

5. The freedom view of hell We must retain the traditional notion of hell as a place of punishment, while remedying the faults in the traditional view which make it susceptible to the argument from justice. I believe there is a model of hell which allows us to do both. Not only does the argument from justice assume, without explicitly stating so, that hell is a punishment for sins, but it assumes that hell is a punishment for the sins of this earthly life. On this traditional view free choice ceases with one’s entry into hell; one becomes a merely passive recipient of suffering. It is this assumption which gives the argument from justice a foothold. Since the sins of this life are finite, both in seriousness and in quantity, it seems unjust to bear everlasting punishment. We can solve this problem by supposing that the damned have the freedom to sin even after death. If they choose to sin continually, it is fair that they suffer continually. This suffering may come directly from God or it may, in whole or in part, come from the other damned. For the sake of simplicity, imagine there are only two damned persons, both of whom freely indulge in their violent tendencies. In their anger they choose to fight each other tooth and nail for all eternity, much like the Wrathful in Dante’s Inferno. Since they sin forever, they deserve to be punished forever, and being subjected to each other’s violence is at least part of this punishment. Assuming that there are more than two damned the picture must be more complex than this. There would be different types of sinners whose degrees of wickedness varied. Hence God would have to arrange the infernal society so that each person only receives the amount of punishment appropriate to the sin they commit. It is not necessary that the damned receive punishment only from the hands of their fellows. God might punish some of them directly. What is essential is that the continued punishment of the damned is proportioned to their continued sin; no one in hell is merely a victim.

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This conception of hell could allow punishments as richly varied as a Dantean inferno. Persons whose chief vice is gluttony, for instance, would deserve less punishment than those who are violent, treacherous, etc. (Whether the punishments would be as ingeniously appropriate to their respective sins as Dante pictured them is another matter.) Some of the damned might receive physical punishments while others purely emotional ones. Because the damned are thought to have significant freedom in this picture of hell, let us call it the ‘freedom version of hell’. The freedom version of hell is not new. D. P. Walker says that ‘one of the easiest and most obvious justifications of eternal torment is to suppose that the damned continue freely to sin and therefore continue freely to be punished’.24 Walker finds the freedom version of hell in William King’s book An Essay on the Origin of Evil, and tentatively endorsed by Leibniz in his Theodicée.25 More recently, Marilyn Adams mentions in a footnote the possibility that ‘men retain their stature as moral agents in the next life and that some men will be forever punished, not because their deeds on earth deserve everlasting torment, but because after death they continue to offend God in small ways and to suffer a succession of light penalties as a consequence’.26 Though the freedom view is described in passing by these authors, none of them develops the idea in depth. I will attempt to do so by defending the freedom view against the major objections which can be brought against it.

6. Objections There are a number of problems which immediately suggest themselves, but I believe they can be met. Objection (1). The freedom view supposes that God will place the damned in situations which give them the opportunity to continue sinning. This supposition allows the damned to continually merit punishment; if the damned were corrupt but were given no opportunities for sinning, they would by default no longer sin and so would no longer deserve punishment. For instance, I imagined above two of the damned physically assaulting one another and deserving punishment for doing so. But God could place these persons in a prison, or supernaturally prevent their blows from reaching their target. The damned would then be prevented from committing violence. If God were to similarly prevent all sinning, then there would be no sin and so no punishment. The objection claims that the damned would prefer to be placed in a world in which they cannot sin anymore, and, therefore, a world in which they suffer no everlasting punishment. The freedom view of hell, forcing on the damned a fate they would wish to avoid, is therefore unjust.

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Response. First, it certainly seems possible for God to prevent all sins that require some sort of physical conditions to be accomplished. To commit violence against someone requires free access to the victim and the physical instruments capable of inflicting pain. To insult someone requires the ability to communicate with the insulted. But not all sins can be so easily prevented by God. God could make the damned completely impotent to harm others, but could not take away their ability to sin in thought – for instance, by blaspheming interiorly against God or inwardly cursing other people – without removing their free will altogether. Would the damned want their free will entirely annihilated, so they are not free to commit any sort of sin? This brings me to my second response. Criminal recidivism shows that some people choose evil deeds despite the punishment they expect to follow from them. There are people who keep committing crimes although they have been in and out of prison many times before. Apparently they prefer a life of crime, despite the punishment it brings. The damned could be likened to such criminals; they prefer a life of sin and punishment to one of virtue. Objection (2). Not only will the damned feel the results of each others’ evil actions, not only will they feel the dissatisfaction resulting from their exile from God, but they will be frustrated because of their unfulfilled drives. Hell is normally thought of as a place in which none of our desires are fulfilled. The normal desires for food, sex, friendship, knowledge, play, meaningful activity, etc., will be everlastingly frustrated in the damned. This additional punishment threatens to render hell unjust. On my original conception the sins of the damned were punished by the sins of other damned. In this way there was a balance; a person who committed seriously wicked sins in hell was subjected to the wicked actions of others to just the extent necessary for appropriate punishment. Adding the punishment of frustrated desires may throw this process off balance, resulting in injustice. Response. It is not inconsistent to think the damned could suffer from unfulfilled desires as well as from the wicked actions of other sinners. In fact the two could coincide; the wicked actions of some of the damned could consist precisely in preventing the drives of other damned from finding expression. Will the added suffering make hell unjust? There is no reason to think so. It is possible, for instance, that the sins of the damned are more serious than the effects they cause in each other. This could occur if the intention behind the actions was, for instance, cold-blooded disrespect for the moral law, rather than the heat of the moment. If a groups of sinners merely insulted each other, but did so out of deadly hate, then the pain of being insulted might not be adequate punishment; something more would be needed – perhaps the frustration of unfulfilled desire would be part of this added punishment.

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Objection (3). We defined hell to be a period of everlasting existence, each of whose moments is on the whole bad. Surely there are people attached to minor sins, who deserve some everlasting retribution, but not enough to make life on the whole bad. These people would not deserve either heaven or hell, but some fate including a mixture of pleasure and pain. Objection (4). Similarly, there may be people who do not sin against anyone at all. Although they are not saints who love God with all their being and their neighbors as themselves, they do not harm their neighbors or blaspheme against God. Their chief goal in life is to be left alone. It seems that these people, who are neither sinners nor saints, deserve some sort of neutral fate between heaven and hell. Limbo, the moderately pleasant fate assigned to unbaptized infants by Aquinas, might serve this purpose. Perhaps the morally neutral inhabit a place such as the first ring of hell in the Inferno, a place of quiet leisure spent in interesting discussions. Response to (3) and (4). The third objection deals with people whose sin is only trivial. To answer the objection we must be careful to describe the people in question. Are they people who are respecters of other people’s rights, although not particularly self-sacrificing? But we are required to love our neighbor as ourselves, and failure to do so deserves punishment as much as theft or assault. In his parable of the sheep and goats, Jesus does not mention flagrant sinners like murderers or embezzlers, but says only that those who refused to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or visit the sick are the ones consigned to the flames.27 On the freedom version of hell, the damned deserve everlasting punishment because they sin everlastingly. For our response to work, then, we have to suppose that the damned in question, those whose chief sin is a failure to love their neighbor, fail in love everlastingly. How is this possible? Perhaps they refuse to prevent other sinners from committing their evil acts. A person who stood idly by while someone was being attacked would be guilty of sin; and if he remains forever idle while such things happen, he deserves everlasting punishment. Perhaps the merely trivial sinner referred to in objection (3) is someone who was full of charity, doing good works with pure motives, but who nevertheless held stubbornly to some small wrongdoing, perhaps petty lying or vanity. The objection holds that someone like this does not deserve everlasting unhappiness. It is true that Christianity, for instance, holds a high standard of conduct, which means we are bound to ‘pursue the holiness without which no man can see the Lord’.28 But God will give as much help and time as we need to attain this goal. Furthermore, in practice it is unlikely that someone could obey the two great commandments to a high degree and yet lack the courage and sacrifice needed to be rid of a minor sin.

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It may seem inconsistent to assume that even small sins are worthy of hell and yet to reject Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and Edwards for believing likewise. But there is a difference in the two cases. The earlier philosophers claimed that a single sin was of infinite seriousness, and so a particular wrong act made one worthy of everlasting punishment. I am claiming only that every sin is serious enough to make the sinner unhappy for some period of time. Hell does not arise because a particular sin deserves everlasting punishment, but because the damned keep on sinning and so continue to earn finite periods of suffering. The same considerations apply to the fourth objection. In sum, hell is a place for those who continue to sin. But sin includes not only sins of commission but sins of omission. God will cease to place in hell any who repent, but repentance involves learning to help others as well as ceasing to harm them. Are the responses to (3) and (4) too bound up with Christian ideals of self-sacrifice to be of any use to non-Christian theists? If this is true then the defense of hell presented in this essay will not be helpful to any but Christians. This is a question for theologians and scholars of religion to decide, but the Old Testament does say explicitly to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and the Koran warns repeatedly that failure to give alms will lead one to hell.29 So the requirement to go out of one’s way for others seems to be recognized by Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity. Objection (5). By introducing freedom into the afterlife, I make heaven and hell unstable. There is nothing to prevent someone in hell from repenting and entering heaven; likewise, someone who is in heaven may freely begin to choose evil and so be expelled into hell. In fact a person could bounce back and forth between heaven and hell for all eternity.30 Response. This objection ignores the power of habit. Those who enter heaven have, during their time on earth (and, if it exists, purgatory), developed the habit of acting virtuously. This force of habit, and the vision of God they enjoy, powerfully combine to make sin an unappealing option. It would still be possible for someone to rebel and fall from heaven, but the above consideration makes it also possible, and plausible, that in fact no one will do so. If scripture and tradition teaches us the latter, we are not inconsistent in assenting. It is less troublesome to think of people leaving hell for heaven: this possibility is envisaged by C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, for instance. All that the doctrine of hell states is that it is at least possible that some people endure an everlasting life each of whose moments is on the whole bad. The power of bad habits that the wicked developed on earth and continue to develop in hell could explain why some people choose to remain in hell. Certainly God could through his grace break to some extent the power of

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bad habits, but since these habits are freely chosen, to do so would lessen the value of freedom. As Richard Swinburne says, ‘It is good that God should not let a man damn himself without much urging and giving him many opportunities to change his mind, but it is bad that someone should not in the all-important matter of the destiny of his soul be allowed finally to destroy it’.31

Conclusion Let us return to the argument from justice as I have schematized it in the introduction. Working with the freedom view of hell, we can see why premise (1) is doubtful. Any individual human sin, it is true, is finite in seriousness; but an everlasting series of sins is infinite in seriousness and so deserves infinite punishment. By preserving freedom in the afterlife we can suppose it possible that the damned commit such a series of sins. The medieval tradition distinguished between two kinds of pain that the damned endured. The first was the poeni sensus, the pain of sense, which the damned endured as punishment for their sins. The second was the poeni damni, the pain of loss, which consisted in the absence of God. Some contemporary philosophers like Jonathan Kvanvig reject the pains of sense because they believe it is unjust to punish finite sin with everlasting punishment. If, however, we reject the notion that hell is a punishment only for the sins of the past, and allow that the damned can continue to sin, then we can believe that there is no injustice in the damned suffering unending punishment. Philosophical reasoning shows that the freedom view of hell is consistent with the justice of God. Whether it is consistent with the scriptures and traditions of the historical religions which espouse the notion of hell is not a question for philosophy to decide.32

Notes 1. Thomas Talbott, ‘Providence, freedom, and human destiny’, Religious Studies 26 (1990): 239–241. 2. Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘The problem of hell: A problem of evil for Christians’, A reasoned faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 313–314. 3. William Lane Craig, ‘“No other name”: A middle knowledge perspective on the exclusivity of salvation through Christ’, Faith and Philosophy 6 (1989): 172–188. Unlike Talbott and Adams, Craig defends the doctrine of hell. 4. Augustine, The City of God, Book 21, ch. 17, trans. John Healey, ed. R. V. G. Tasker (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 339.

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5. As Thomas Flint pointed out to me, not all everlasting punishments are infinite. To see this, consider the following example. Let punishment be measured by the ‘pain-hour’ unit, obtained by multiplying the intensity of pain by the number of hours that intensity of pain is suffered. If a mild itch produces one unit of pain, then to feel that itch for an hour would be a punishment of one pain-hour. If the damned experienced one thousand pain-hours of punishment the first hour, five hundred the next, two hundred fifty the third hour, and so on everlastingly, then the total amount of punishment approaches the finite amount of two thousand pain-hours. The punishment is finite, yet it lasts forever. So not all everlasting punishments are infinite. In response, it may first be questioned whether there is not a smallest conceivable pain of intensity N. If there is then such geometrically decreasing series of pains are impossible. Secondly, I define hell below as ‘an everlasting period of existence, each of whose moments is on the whole bad’. But there is some minimum degree of suffering necessary to make any moment on the whole bad. Let that minimum degree of pain be N. In the scenario envisaged above, the damned experience 1000 pain-hours, then 500, then 250, then 125, then 62.5, then 31.25, etc. At some point in time the degree of suffering will fall below N, and from that point forward life will not be on the whole bad for the damned. They will no longer exist in hell, which contradicts the everlasting nature of damnation. 6. Of course the premise could be true in an Ockhamite sense; perhaps God’s choosing an action makes it just, rather than God’s choices being restricted to what is necessarily just. In this case, however, premise (2) would not be known to be true with respect to God. If God chooses to punish finite sins with infinite punishment, doing so is for Him just. Therefore an Ockhamite interpretation of (8) defuses the argument (8) is supposed to support. 7. Jerry Walls, Hell: The logic of damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 12–14. 8. Jonathan Kvanvig, The problem of hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 20, 71, 102. 9. For those interested in the rationale underlying this definition, I offer an explanation. First, everlasting unhappiness must be thought to be both logically and epistemically possible, for a convinced naturalist, to whom it is most implausible to attribute belief in hell, could believe that there is nothing logically inconsistent in the idea. Even a theist might allow the logical possibility of hell while denying its actuality; he might base this denial on a private mystical experience, or a certain reading of religious texts, or simply groundless optimism. Such a theist would no more believe in the doctrine of hell than the convinced naturalist. Hell must be an epistemic possibility; that is, it must be a live option for belief; it cannot be strongly disbelieved. Second, I say the unhappiness envisaged must be everlasting rather than eternal. In much philosophical theology the word ‘eternal’ is used to describe an existence outside of time, and ‘everlasting’ describes an infinitely extended existence in time. As Peter Geach points out, it does not make much sense to say that we, who now exist in time, will after death come to be timeless. What is timelessly true is, of course, unchanging. If our existence in heaven and hell is timeless, then it is an unchanging truth that we exist in heaven or hell. But this cannot be an unchanging truth, since we have not yet arrived at our afterlife destination. It is not now true that we exist in heaven or hell, but it will be true sometime after our death. See Peter Geach, Providence and evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 130–132. Clearly, then, our life after death will be, strictly speaking, everlasting rather than eternal. Finally, I claim that hell is an everlasting existence each of whose moments is on the whole bad, for an everlasting existence which was on the whole bad

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

could have moments or even long stretches of bliss, but such a life would not be strictly speaking hellish. Augustine, The City of God, op. cit., pp. 333–334. Augustine, The City of God, op. cit., p. 334. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 99, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1946), p. 3008. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 99, a. 2, p. 3010. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, Basic Writings, trans. S. N. Deane (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1966), p. 241. See Marilyn Adams, ‘Hell and the God of justice’, Religious Studies 11 (1975): 442; George Cadwalader Foley, Anselm’s theory of the atonement (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1909), pp. 109–115; William J. Wolf, ‘Atonement: Christian concepts’, The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 495–499. Jonathan Edwards, ‘The justice of God in damning sinners’, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1865), p. 669. Edwards, p. 669. David Hume, Dialogues concerning natural religion, ed. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 67. C. S. Lewis, The problem of pain (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 41–42. C. S. Lewis, ‘Answers to questions on Christianity’, God in the dock: Essays on theology and ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 58. In The problem of pain, the same book in which he said that our only happiness is in God (see note 19 above), Lewis imagines a person who commits the greatest injustices and yet lives ‘eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant – a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world’ (Pain, p. 109). Georges Panneton, Heaven or hell, trans. Ann M. C. Forster (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965), p. 271. Panneton, p. 271. Panneton, p. 271. D. P. Walker, The decline of hell: Seventeenth century discussions of eternal torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 24–25. William King, An essay on the origin of evil (New York: Garland, 1978), pp. 308–310. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essay on the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of evil (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), pp. 290–293. King says that the damned ‘indulge themselves in their obstinate Election [i.e., free choice], and tho’ every way surrounded and possessed with Woes, yet will they not alter what they have once embraced. . . . As Men that are desperately in Love, ambitious, envious, choose to bear Torments, loss of Estate, and hazard of Life, rather than lay aside these foolish and bewitching Affections. We may easily conceive then how the Wicked in Hell may be in very great Misery upon the increase of their Obstinacy and Folly, and yet unwilling to be freed from them’ (Theodicy, pp. 309–310). King’s suggestion was given in reply to the objection that God would sooner destroy the wicked than punish them forever. Leibniz offers the freedom view as a tentative response to the argument from justice: ‘Ernst Sonner . . . had composed a little discourse entitled: Demonstration against the eternity of punishment. It was founded on this somewhat trite principle, that there is no proportion between an infinite punishment and a finite guilt . . . I replied that there was one thing to be considered which had escaped the late Herr Sonner: namely that it was enough to say that the duration of the guilt caused the duration of the penalty. Since the

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damned remained wicked they could not be withdrawn from their misery; and thus one need not, in order to justify the continuation of their sufferings, assume that sin has become of infinite weight through the infinite nature of the object offended, who is God. This thesis I had not explored enough to pass judgement thereon’ (Theodicy, p. 290). He then cites theologians of various churches who held a similar view: Johann Gerhard (Lutheran), Zacharias Ursinus (Calvinist), and Father Drexler (Roman Catholic) (Theodicy, p. 291). Nothing in the above entails that the damned freely remain wicked, but later Leibniz clarifies his position: ‘There is always in the man who sins, even when he is damned, a freedom which renders him culpable, and a power, albeit remote, of recovering himself, even though it should never pass into action’ (Theodicy, p. 292). Adams, ‘Hell and the God of justice’, p. 433. Matthew 25:31–46. Hebrews 12:14. Leviticus 19:18,33–34. In the Koran, Sura 107, it is written ‘Have you thought of him that denies the Last Judgment? It is he who turns away from the orphan and does not urge others to feed the poor. Woe to those who pray but are heedless in their prayer; who make a show of piety and give no alms to the destitute’. The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 28. Such was the chief complaint Augustine voiced against Origen ‘This, and other of [Origen’s] opinions, chiefly that concerning that rotation and alternation of misery and bliss which he held that all mankind should run in, gave the Church cause to pronounce him anathema: seeing he had lost even this seeming pity of his, by assigning a true misery, after a while, and a false bliss, unto the saints in heaven, where they (if these views were true) could never be sure of remaining’. Augustine, City of God, Book 21, Ch. 17, p. 339. Richard Swinburne, ‘A theodicy of heaven and hell’, The existence and nature of God, ed. Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 49. I would like to express my gratitude to Philip Quinn and Thomas Flint for reading earlier drafts of this essay.

Address for correspondence: Dr Charles Seymour, Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Phone: (219) 287–3428; E-mail: charles. s. [email protected]

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