A Brief Visit to Hell

"Lucifer" by Cornelius Galle, 1595

     Who wants to talk about Hell?  Just about nobody, and we can hardly blame them - why dwell on something as, well, hellish, as eternal torment?  Many people, both inside and outside the Church, only mention the Abode of the Damned at all in order to discount it.  At the same time, we don't have the luxury of ignoring it. Hell and eternal damnation are spoken of often and explicitly in Scripture, very often by Jesus Himself. He tells us in Matthew's Gospel, for example: "The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." (Matthew 13:41-42)  This is not an isolated statement, neither on the part of Jesus himself, nor elsewhere in the New Testament.  The most vivid description outside of the words of Christ is in the Book of Revelation, which on four separate occasions refers to the "Lake of Fire"  into which the Devil, his angels, and other evildoers are cast.

     It's difficult for us to balance the idea of a Hell of eternal torment with the image of a God who "is Love" (1 John 4:8), especially in our world today where sentiment is king: Hell "feels" wrong.  In fact, I recently had a reader of my discussion of Pascal's Wager who accused me of believing in a "monster" God who "would torture you forever" if you didn't believe in him. I answered that neither I nor the Catholic Church believe in a God who "tortures" people "forever" . . .

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