Without Hell, There Can Be No Heaven
The surprising reason why Christianity without eternal damnation would be impossible
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, contemplating Hell can bring us closer to God and make us understand how deeply He loves us.
“How can God be a loving Father and at the same time throw people into Hell?”
I’ve been hearing that question for as long as I can remember, and there was a time when I myself was wondering the same thing. The answer, of course, is that God doesn’t “throw people into Hell.” People send themselves to Hell by their sinful actions and their rejection of God.
But to my chagrin, I’ve never been able to give a really eloquent, beautiful, worthy-of-God answer to this question. Until I read The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life by Fr. Charles Arminjon, a comprehensive work about the End Times, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory of which St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, “Reading this book was one of the greatest graces of my life.”
Even though the book was originally published in 1881, it becomes clear that people had the exact same questions back then because Fr. Arminjon addresses them head-on.
Is it a good idea to think that much about Hell?
Most Christians would rather forget about Hell and think about more fun things. Even some clerics have uttered that they would like to think Hell might be empty—understandable, but not likely considering that Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
I’ve been considered morbid by some because I spend a lot of time contemplating Hell and Purgatory. But according to Fr. Arminjon…
St. Ignatius of Loyola used to say that he knew of no sermon more useful and beneficial than those on hell. Reflections on the beauties of virtue and the delights and attractions of divine love have little influence upon coarse, sensual men. Amidst the noisy pleasures of their lives, the seduction bad examples set before them, the traps and pitfalls set beneath their feet, the threat of hell is the only curb powerful enough to keep them on the path of duty.
For the same reason, St. Teresa would often bid her austere nuns to go down to hell in spirit and thought during their life, so as to avoid, she said, going there in reality after their death.
Some people just have to be scared straight. I was one of them. If God hadn’t given me a real kick in the butt that fateful day after the 2020 election (find out what happened here and here), I don’t know where I would be today. I often find it easier to learn from the dark reflection in the mirror than from looking directly at its light counterpart.
When I, a new Catholic, doubted Mary’s importance, what convinced me were the assurances from the exorcists that demons flee screaming when the Holy Mother shows up during a session. When I doubted the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, what convinced me was the immense value Satanists and witches place on the consecrated hosts and to what lengths they will go to get their hands on one.
Obviously, we shouldn’t spend all of our days in fear. Yes, our foremost concern is to love and serve God, but sometimes I nod off and need to jolt myself awake with a few thoughts on the consequences of falling off the wagon.
Is the punishment in Hell really forever?
Yes, says Fr. Arminjon, and he explains the reason why this must be so. If eternal life has no time limit, then eternal death can’t have one either. There are only three ways, he says, “whereby the reprobate and the demons could be released from justice and obtain freedom or mitigation from their pains”: through an act of sincere repentance (which they’re not capable of); through prayers of the saints on their behalf (which the Church doesn’t approve of because “she will not pray for those sentenced by the just Judge to everlasting torments”); or through the destruction of their existence (basically, God sparing them further torture by snuffing out their souls, which He will not do).
Most of us don’t understand how essential Hell actually is to the entire cycle of the Incarnation, redemption, and salvation. Let this sink in: “If there were not an eternal hell,” Fr. Arminjon writes, “Christianity would disappear and the moral order would be abolished.”
If there were no eternal damnation…
…[this] excess of love on the part of a God who became man in order to die would have been an act devoid of any wisdom, and out of proportion with its declared aim, if it had been simply a matter of delivering us from a temporal, transient punishment, such as is purgatory. […]
There would no longer be any redemption in the strict sense and absolute sense of the word: Jesus Christ would not be our Savior; the debt of boundless love and gratitude He demands of us would be an inordinate and unwarranted claim. With the God-made-man cast down from the throne of our hearts and our worship, Christianity would become a hoax, and all consistent minds would necessarily be led to reject revelation and to reject God Himself.
Let’s say punishment for the wicked were finite, maybe 1,000 years, or 100,000. As a result, both the virtuous and the evil would ultimately end up in the same place, says Fr. Arminjon, and that cannot be.
Remove the fear of eternal punishment from mankind, and the world will be filled with crime; the most execrable misdeeds will become a duty whenever they can be committed without risk of prison or the sword. Hell will simply happen sooner: instead of being postponed until the future life, it will be inaugurated in the midst of humanity, in the present life.
But would a loving God really do something like that?
Fr. Arminjon is cleverly countering this argument too. Surely, the detractors say,
”God is too perfect, too sublime, too disinterested to want to crush eternally, under the impressive display of His power, a frail creature, one who has been led into evil by an outburst of anger, or by weakness. That would be an act of vengeance and retaliation, unworthy of His glory and perfections.”
His answer:
So God must have been laboring under an illusion the day when, for His glory, leaving His state of repose, He enacted the fundamental law that the creature must tend toward Him in each of its aspirations, serve and love Him by constant acts of praise, allegiance, and worship? God would then no longer be our essential and final end.
If that were true, he says, then Satan and his demons could just lean back and go, “Mech, it’s reasonably okay down here. Thanks but no thanks, God, we’ll do just fine without you.”
And the devil wouldn’t be the only one…
Such would be the sentiment of every creature shut out from God’s bosom if he succeeded in rejecting his heritage without experiencing pain that is intense and unending, like the happiness he freely and obstinately spurned.
Were God, in order to alleviate the misery of the devils and the damned, to allow them but a shadow of good, a slender hope, or a drop of water to refresh them, they would cling to that shadow, that semblance, with all the strength of their exhausted, gasping will; they would strive with their whole soul after that crumb of solace, seeking to beguile themselves with it, and to delude themselves as to the extent and depth of their misfortune; and one would have to be ignorant of man’s nature to imagine that he would not resign himself to this mitigated hell, rather than bend the knee and submit.
To see the truth of this statement, Fr. Arminjon says, you only have to look at Purgatory.
A temporary hell, such as purgatory, could not suffice to maintain its order and sanction. Indeed, how many people in this life care about purgatory? How many ungenerous, fainthearted Christians there are who would willingly bear a thousand purgatories in order to satisfy their momentary desires!
And then he follows up with this paragraph, which really threw me for a loop. It’s so true, but we never think about this:
Man values only that which is infinite. […] Anyone who does not admit this has never fathomed the depths of human nature. An immortal being must have hopes and fears on a level with himself; everything that is not eternal vanishes before the frightful immensity of his desires.
I had to read that passage twice to realize that by “immortal being,” Fr. Arminjon means us. You and me. We are the immortal beings he speaks of, but due to the illusions of this world and the appearance of a hard cut at the end of our earthly life, we’re hardly ever aware of it. How often do you really think about the fact that God, in His infinite goodness, created us to live forever and ever?
God wants no one to go to Hell.
“God desires the salvation of all men,” writes Fr. Arminjon. “He did not willingly create hell; on the contrary, He exhausts all the means of His wisdom and all the secrets of His tenderness to forewarn us against such a misfortune, as He says by the mouth of Isaiah: 'What more was there to do for my vineyard that I had not done?’”
Behold Jesus at the Last Supper: He gazes upon Judas with an expression that shows sadness and the bitterest grief. He is violently troubled and in the last extremity of consternation. He understands, better than we can ever conceive, how horrible is the state of a man adrift, irremediably lost, left without any means of retracing his steps and taking his destiny back into his own hands. He tries, by every imaginable means, to avert the loss of this wretched man; He casts Himself at his feet and kisses them; He admits him, despite his unworthiness, to the feast of His sacred Flesh; and when the darkness, which more and more engulfs the obdurate soul of Judas, has blocked every avenue by which divine grace might have forced its way in, Christ weeps. He seems to forget that this traitor has chosen Him as the victim of his dastardly greed. He sees only the horror of his fate and says in anguish, “Better for him if he had never been born.”
For God to abolish Hell would mean to abolish Heaven, says Fr. Arminjon.
Shall He then wait, pardon, and keep on pardoning? That is just what He does. In this life, He never abandons even the person who spurns Him. He pursues him right into the sanctuary of his conscience, through an inner voice that does not cease for a single instant to make itself heard. […]
If we turn a deaf ear, He does not hasten to cut the thread of our life, as would be His right. […] He comes back to us. He makes us feel the sting of remorse and, not disheartened by our refusals, waits for years. […]
A man’s last hour finally rings; most often it is preceded by illness, the premonitory sign of his approaching end. This man is still obdurate. One minute before his last sigh, God still offers to take him to Himself and save him from the fires of the abyss. […] It would be enough that, in the intimacy of his heart, he should utter these simple words: “I love You, and I repent.” These words would be his saving grace… and the sinner stubbornly refuses to say them.
We ask: What can God do? Shall He, to sanctify the hardness of heart of this creature, overturn the whole plan and all the counsels of His wisdom, annihilate the darkness by a foolish act of omnipotence because a confused man has blinded himself so as to have no part in the divine light?
Consider this, Fr. Arminjon says: “[If] we consider the person of God, the insult offered to Him by sin is an infinite insult.”
Incredible how God is twisting Himself into a pretzel in order to save us. What love He must have for us! Fr. Arminjon is right when he says God pursues us relentlessly. I was a “free spirit”and a New Ager for 30+ years, doing just about everything that’s strictly forbidden by the Bible—from dabbling in divination, witchcraft, Native American spirituality, Reiki, you-name-it, to a promiscuous, self-absorbed lifestyle. And yet, He never dumped me. He never thought I was a hopeless case. In more than one instance, He saved me from losing my life and my soul; had I died then, I would have gone straight to Hell.
A lot of the great saints, among them St. Thomas Aquinas, were fascinated with and wrote extensively about “the last things.” Because when we ponder the last things, the scales fall from our eyes and it gets easier to see the first things: God made us for Himself. He loves us without restraint, and He wants us to love Him back… for who He is, not just for all the graces He gives us. He wants us to trust Him completely because He’s the one with the plan and knows what’s best for us. We don’t see the big picture, but He has the 30,000-foot view.
So open up and let Him love you. Get started today. And don’t forget to pray for the poor souls in Purgatory; they desperately need our help.
God bless you!
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