TO HELL WITH FREEDOM J o h n Zeis
Erie Community College, State University of New York.
I.
Introduction
The concept of hell or eternal damnation receives little attention from contemporary philosophers of religion. Even when one considers merely the religious importance of hell. this is a puzzling oversight. But given all the recent attention that the problem of evil has attracted, this lack of philosophical analysis of the concept of eternal damnation is inexcusable. In this paper I will attempt to provide a sympathetic philosophical analysis of the Christian concept of hell. c o u n t e r i n g positions r e p r e s e n t e d by c o n t e m p o r a r y commentators like John Hick and Charles Hartshorne who hastily dismiss the notion as incompatible with a successful theodicy? The prima facie plausibility of their rejection of the notion seems to be based on the following sort of reasoning. God is all-powerful and all-good, and as such is an all-forgiving God of love. But hell is eternal punishment and consequently an eternal suffering for those who are damned and this eternal retribution seems contradictory to God's nature as an all. forgiving God of love. I wish to defend the classical retributivist view of eternal damnation against this type of argument and counter that not only does hell not render a solution to the problem of evil impossible or implausible, but on the contrary that any satisfactory solution to the problem of evil based on the freewill defense implies the possibility of hell. This position is in the spirit of Augustine when he states: Then what a .fond fancy it is to suppose that eternal punishment means long continued punishment, while eternal life means life without e n d . . . If both destinies are "eternal", then we must either understand both as long 41
and continued but at least terminating, or both as endless. For they are correlative--on the one hand, punishment eternal, on the other hand, life eternal. And to say in one and the same sense, life eternal shall be endless, punishment eternal shall come to an end, is the height of absurdity. ~. It will be argued that heaven and hell's being correlative is essential to the theist's freewill defense, and specifically t h a t they are correlative because both are functional states of a created person's free character. From this point of view, hell is not viewed so much as an externally imposed punishment inflicted on the person which as a result impinges on their freedom, b u t is a self-inflicted punishment which is brought about by the freely chosen development of a vicious character, s One of the positive consequences of this view of hell for theodicy is that it does not imply a distinction between God's love for the saved and His love for the dRmned. It is consistent with the view that God is all-forgiving to everyone always, and His forgiving love for the saint does not exceed His love for the sinner.
II.
Character and Free Choice
One of the cornerstones of the freewill defense is the doctrine that created persons are what I term "metaphsicaUy" free beings. According to this doctrine a person is metaphysically free if and only if he is morally responsible for at least some of the evil actions which he commits and those evil actions for which he is responsible are brought about through the free choice of that agent and are not in any other way causally determined. 4 Whether this doctrine is true is of course controversial and how it is to be explained in the theory of action is unclear, b u t I do not wish to argue those issues here and instead will j u s t adopt the doctrine that created persons are metaphysically free as a premise of the argument concerning hell. But however questionable this doctrine is, I think it is clear that without it there is no possibility of a coherent freewill defense. In developing a freewill defense, the theist cannot hold that created persons j u s t happen to be free, but must take the stronger position that created persons are necessarily free. For 42
if persons just so happen to be free, the atheist can object that a good God should then have created persons who were not free in order to avoid moral evil. It seems that the only reasonable retreat for the theist is that God, in choosing to create persons, is logically bound to choosing to create free beings with the awesome consequence that in exercising their power of free choice these creatures attain autonomy even from their creator2 God, in creating persons, m u s t refrain from determining their choices. Certainly, since God is all-powerful, He could determine any created being's choices: but then this being would not be a person. If GOd chooses to create persons, ipso facto he chooses to create autonomous beings. That persons are essentially free beings is in fact the grounding principle of the explanation of hell. And if created persons are not essentially free, then God is not justified in allowing or causing hell and the hasty dismissals by people like Hartshorne and Hick would be justified. That created persons are in this way free can be developed in a number of different ways. But if what is needed is an explanatory basis of the possibility of hell, we m u s t focus on the connection between free choice and the development of character. What is not so often noted in discussions of free choice is that persons not only have the capacity for freely choosing what to do, they also have the capacity to choose what kind of person to be. In other words, through free choice a person develops their character, and it is this character which determines their moral worth. It would be misleading to view persons as entities constituted by an episodic series of free choices, each of these choices being independent from the others. This would be to ignore the fact that a person has a personality, i.e. an assemblage of character traits which constitute the person as an individual. And character traits, like the particlar virtues and vices of an individual, are patterns of will and action which the individual developed through a directed course of behaviour. Through the development of a personality then, a person not only chooses what to do, but also what kind of a person to be. The moral significance of the free choice of character is that a person, through the power of free choice, can develop character traits which become incorrigible. In other words, it seems quite possible that because of the free choice of character, a person is capable of developing a character so good or so wicked that 43
the capacity to choose evil over good or good over evil becomes utterly destroyed. And it seems t h a t it is because of the development of an incorrigibly vicious character that eternal damnation is deserved and gained. St. Thomas argues t h a t "from the very fact t h a t he (the damned} fixes his end in sin, he has the will to sin everlastingly."6 1 take this fixing of one's end in sin to be the choosing of a wicked character which renders oneself incapable of fiTiug one's end in the good anymore. This does not seem to me to entail t h a t every wicked choice has this consequence, but only that every wicked choice carries this risk, for by our choices we build or determine our character. Of course this also does not entail that the person see their choices or that initially t h e y recognize their character as incorrigibly wicked. In fact, the denial of a developing wickedness exacerbates the situation for such a person would be unrepentent and more likely to continue the same vicious p a t t e r n of will and action. III.
Heaven and Hell
If the analysis of character offered here is plausible, we can then proceed to give a speculative analysis and defense of eternal damnation: one which is based on the conception of damnation being a functional state of the free development of character. I will take eternal damnation to be an eternal separation from the love of the all-forgiving God. And in order to more clearly grasp the significance of free choice in the separation from God which consists in damnation, I will focus on a comparative analysis between a character in the damned state and a character in the heavenly state, those two states which St. Augustine called "correlative".: Heaven and hell are of course contrary states rather than contradictory states. Hell is not merely the negation of the heavenly state. Heaven is the eternal unification in {with} the love of God, and an individual can lack this yet not be damned. Damnation is gained only when eternal separation is gained, only when there exists a final severing of one's relationship with God. As any other true love relationship, the heavenly state m u s t be a reciprocal relationship which is entered into freely. Hence only persons can enter into a love relationship and they cannot be compelled to enter into (or remain in) the relationship. Even 44
if I am capable of loving my cat. my cat can't love me and so no love relationship is possible. And I can love my wife b u t nothing that I can do can compel her to love me. 'x and y are in love' implies that x loves y and y loves x. It is necessarily a reciprocal relationship, and no matter how great x's love for y, x and y are not in love unless y also loves x and x's loving y cannot bring about y's loving x. This is brought about only b y y's free reception and reciprocation of x's love. And furthermore, I propose that y's capacity for loving x is equivalent to y's having a disposition for the reception of the love of x. It seems t h a t y could not love x unless y were also open to the reception of x's love, and y could not be open to the reception of x's love unless y loved x. The possiblity of the heavenly state is then contingent upon beings with the capacity for freely accepting and projecting love, which I would want to claim is the same capacity with distinct exercises. Hence God has to create persons if He wanted beings which could experience the heavenly state. And since the experience of the heavenly state is the greatest of all goods, then it would be fitting that a good God who wanted to create a good world create persons, for each of whom necessarily exists the risk of eternal damnation. If God wants beings capable of experiencing the heavenly state, these must be beings capable of entering freely into a love relationship with Himself; and beings which are capable of freely loving God are also capable of freely not loving God. This is merely an instantiation of the general principle that a developing person's being free to do x entails being free to do non-x. The heavenly state then is a relationship between God and another person, say x, such that 'God and x are in love' becomes eternally true. In this context, by becoming "eternally true" I mean becomes true necessarily and forever, x's being in the heavenly state entails that God loves x necessarily and forever and x loves God necessarily and forever. A n d the first conjunct of this propostion is universally true for all persons. GOd loves all persons always and there is no possibility that God stop loving those persons whom He has created, no m a t t e r how wicked the person m a y become. God's love is given to the damned, despite their incorrigible wickedness, as deeply, as truly and as everlastingly as to the saved and this is an enigma to all b u t God and the saints. B u t for the damned this love is ineffectual, and this is in no way a reflection on the capacity 45
of God's love, power, or wisdom. God's love for them is ineffectual because through free choice the person has developed a character which is incorrigibly vicious and as a consequence has made himself incapable of entering into a love relationship with God, or anyone else for that matter. God's all-forgiving love which He bestows unqualifiedly upon each individual is ineffectual for those who choose by their own wickedness to reject and not return His love. God's relation to His creatures in this matter is I think somewhat understood when we contemplate the relation between a good and loving mother and her very wicked child. There are some persons for whom it almost seems true that "only their mother could love them" and yet that their mother does love them despite their wickedness, and loves them just as deeply and truly as she does her other, more devoted children, is an enigma to all but the mother. And if her child's wickedness is very great, the mother's love for that child is ineffectual; but this is not a reflection upon the sincerity of the mother's love nor on her wisdom or effort. She may have done (and continues to do) all t h a t one could for the child, but the child stills rejects her. The possibility of hell and heaven is then contingent upon the possibility of the autonomous development of a morally significant character. Because of their autonomy, a person can freely develop a character which is incorrigibly virtuous {as the saints in heaven). For them, the possibility of sin is something that was, but is no more, and because of this they experience God's everlasting love in total bliss. But correlatively, a person could freely develop a character which is incorrigibly vicious and for them the possibility of virtue and blessedness is something that was, but is no more. They have made themselves hopelessly habituated to sin and their intellectual recognition of God's goodness {and hence all goodness), coupled with their recognition that because of their own fault they are no longer capable of accepting God's love, causes them only misery and despair. IV.
The Relation Between the D a m n e d and the Saved
If something like this version of hell is correct, there remains at least one notable difficulty, and this concerns the relation between the damned and the saved. What effect does the misery 46
of the damned have on the saved? If we carry-on the analogy. offered in the last section of the mother and her very wicked child, it would seem that the mother {as the saved now} does suffer because of the misery of her child. This would then compel us to reject the notion of heaven as total bliss and give substance to the doubts of those concerned with the permanency of damnation. But on the other hand, the suffering of the earthly mother as she experiences her child's misery could be the result of some illusory responsibility of her's which she perceives as a cause of the suffering of her child. How many parents can say with confidence that they have done all that could be done? But in the heavenly state the blessed see all through the wisdom of God where there is no ignorance or doubt, and they will then know that they have done all they could, or at least enough, and they will also see clearly that the misery of the one who is damned is a misery wholely selfinflicted. This recognition that the damned have destroyed, by their own free choice, that capacity itself to choose goodness instead of evil, will elicit only pity from the blessed; for the damned have gone to hell with freedom.
References 1
John Hick, in his Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1983}, concludes his discussion of what he calls "The Augustinian Theodicy" with the comment that hell " . . . would render impossible any solution to the problem of evil, for it would build both the sinfulness of the damned and the nonmoral evil of the pains and sufferings into the permanent structure of the universe" {p. 45}. And in his Death and Eternal Life {New York: Harper and Row, 1976} he claims that unlike pre-20th century days when "theology was exempt from moral criticism and the theologian could with good conscience attribute to God an unappeasable vindictiveness and insatiable cruelty . . . today theological ideas are subject to an ethical and rational criticism" {p. 200}. Charles Hartshorne, in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes {Albany: SUNY Press, 1984}, a veritable catechism of fallacies, gives us even less rationale for rejecting the idea of hell {see pp. 97-99}. Hans KNng, in EternalLife {Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1984} claims that the eternal punishment of hell "remains subject to God
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and His will" {p. 42), for no punishment, even freely gained, can be "definitive" if God is all-good, all-merciful and almighty (p. 137). 2
St. Augustine, The City of God Bk XXI, Chapter XXIII, cited in Oates, Basic Writings of St. Augustine INew York: Random House, 1948}, p. 593. This is how I think Dante's Inferno needs to be interpreted and this view is nicely presented in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce INew York: Macmillan, 1946}. Although some contemporary theists would deny this doctrine e.g. James Ross in his Philosophical Theology (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), most who develop the freewill defense take this position. This position is defended in the paper "Omnimpotence and Concurrence" by Zeis and Jacobs in the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 14:17-23 (1983). St. Thomas Aquinas, I.II q. 87 a.3 ad 1. See n. 1 above.
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