The End of Christianity (33 page)

The Christian replies that that is precisely what sin is: insanity, the deliberate refusal of joy and truth…. Perhaps the most shocking teaching in all of Christianity is this: not so much the doctrine of hell as the doctrine of sin. It means the human race is spiritually insane.
⁹

However, insanity requires treatment, not punishment—therapy, not torture. If Kreeft and Tacelli mean that sin literally is a form of insanity—and if they do not mean this they should not say it—then they cannot mean that sin is freely chosen. Schizophrenics, for instance, clearly do not choose to suffer their various delusions. To punish the insane for their delusions would obviously be grossly immoral.

Suppose, though, that sin is freely chosen in the libertarian sense of “freely chosen,” that is, the decision to sin is the agent's own, not coerced or compelled by any factors, internal or external, beyond the agent's control. Further, let's suppose that the action was done out of sheer malignity, a desire to do evil for evil's sake, as Augustine recalled doing in his
Confessions
when as a boy he and his friends stole some pears for the sheer pleasure of the mischief. Did Augustine and the other boys thereby come to deserve an eternity of torment? Augustine seems to think so, but his personal sense of guilt seems to have been grossly, perhaps pathologically, hypertrophied. How can temporal sin, whether it is stealing pears or genocide, deserve eternal punishment? Isn't there an obvious imbalance between finite wickedness, however malign, and infinite retribution?

Apologists have offered a number of replies to the “imbalance” argument. One online source argues that the punishments of hell are not infinite, though they are everlasting.
¹⁰
Even if punishments in hell will never end, there will always be a finite time since any sinner began to suffer the torments. Therefore, up to that point, even if it is googol years from now, only a finite amount of torment will have been suffered. This argument seems to rest on a fairly simple sophism. “Infinite” need not mean “exceeding any finite quantity in magnitude” or “extending beyond any finite measure.” The basic meaning of infinite-indeed, the first definition given in the
American Heritage Dictionary—
is “having no boundaries or limits.” Unending punishment has no boundaries or limits in time; it is everlasting (recall the Jonathan Edwards quote above). Therefore, it seems to be perfectly correct usage to speak of hell's punishments as “infinite” in the sense of “having no boundaries or limits in time.” If not, however, the problem may simply be rephrased: Why is
everlasting
torture a just punishment for sin of limited duration? It takes more than equivocation to address this question.

Kreeft and Tacelli try to avoid the problem of endless punishment for limited sin by saying that the punishments of hell are eternal, not everlasting. I think they mean that eternity is not endless time but some sort of timeless dimension. Therefore, the problem of endless suffering does not arise since hell is a state of timeless eternity, not everlasting temporal duration. Unfortunately, this proposed solution raises more problems than it solves. In fact, it seems scarcely intelligible. What would timeless suffering be like? Pretty clearly, there is nothing in our experience that would be a parallel since the only suffering we experience is suffering in time. Would eternal suffering be as bad as endless suffering? If so, then the whole “imbalance” problem arises again. If it would not be as bad, then how bad is it? Indeed, why should we fear hell if it lasts no time at all? Is it even possible to be atemporally conscious? I think we may confidently defy Kreeft and Tacelli to give adequate answers to these questions.

Another common answer, one offered by
The Catholic Encyclopedia
(under “Hell”), is that sin is an offense against the infinite moral authority of God:

Sin is an offence against the infinite authority of God, and the sinner is in some way aware of this, though but imperfectly. Accordingly there is an approximation to infinite malice which deserves an eternal punishment.
¹¹

The apparent power of this argument seems to turn on a rhetorical device—the strategic placement of the adjectives “infinite” and “eternal”: defiance of God's
infinite
authority approximates
infinite
malice, and so deserves
eternal
(i.e., infinite) punishment. But what, exactly, does it mean to say that God has “infinite” authority? It seems to mean that God's authority is total, absolute, or ultimate in the sense that there is no higher or equal authority to supersede or limit God's authority. Understood in this way, however, the ostensible connection between defiance of God's authority and worthiness of eternal punishment is lost. Even if God is the ultimate authority, why should the act of defying him merit unending torture instead of lesser punishment? Indeed, since mere humans cannot harm God, why should defiance of God, per se, merit any punishment at all? The
Catholic Encyclopedia
author has given us no argument here, just assertion dressed with clever rhetoric.
¹²

Also, what is “infinite malice” supposed to be? Is it the conscious desire to defy the moral authority of God? If so, then it is apparently necessary to believe in God in order to sin, because I can intend to defy God's moral authority only if I think that there is a God and that he does have such authority. Apparently, on this view, atheists cannot sin! After all, if someone does wrong but is completely unaware that in doing so he is offending a being with infinite moral authority, then it seems hardly fair to charge that person with infinite malice. The author does say that the sinner is “imperfectly” aware that he is offending the infinite majesty of God. How imperfectly? The more imperfect it is, the harder it will be to make the charge of infinite malice stick. I'd say that my awareness that I ever offend the authority of God is very imperfect since I do not believe it at all. Maybe the author means to imply that all sinners, even professed atheists, are tacitly aware that they are offending God when they do wrong. If this is the claim implied, then, I think the best reply is the proverb frequently attributed to Christopher Hitchens: “That which is offered without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.”

Further, the
Catholic Encyclopedia's
author seems to hold the oddly medieval view that the wickedness of an action is proportional to the degree of authority of the person offended. If you offend the king, you have done a terrible wrong; if you only offend a peasant, not so much. Surely, though, the intrinsic wickedness of an action depends on the intention of the agent in performing the action.

I recently read of someone in San Antonio, Texas, who was convicted of animal cruelty. He would buy cats on eBay, tie them to trees, douse them with gasoline, and burn them to death—apparently for no other reason than the pleasure of torturing them. What makes torturing cats for fun wicked is the intention to torture cats for fun, not that such acts offend the moral authority of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the law of the State of Texas, or even God. Maybe the
Catholic Encyclopedia
author means that sins are committed with the intention of offending the authority of God. However, it seems highly unlikely that even Augustine was intending this when he stole the pears. People who steal seem to be motivated by such things as greed, selfishness, covetousness, the need to satisfy the cravings of a drug addiction, or maybe just the thrill of the mischief. The desire to flout the moral authority of God, if it ever motivates anyone to steal, would be way down the list.

C. S. Lewis, perhaps the best known of all Christian apologists, had quite a bit to say about hell. Lewis was not a systematic thinker, and many of his remarks on any particular point are scattered among various writings. Further, what he said in one place may be contradicted, or at least modified and supplemented, by what he says elsewhere. Also, Lewis has an enormous, often cultlike following that has written a vast amount of commentary on his work. With the exception of John Beversluis's extraordinary critique, nearly all of that commentary has been sympathetic or even sycophantic.
¹³
When you criticize Lewis, as Beversluis quickly discovered, a bevy of angry disciples will charge that you have distorted the words of The Master, taken them out of context, or ignored countervailing assertions elsewhere in the corpus. So, I shall address what Lewis says about hell only in
The Problem of Pain
,
chapter 8
.
¹⁴
If he takes back or modifies these assertions elsewhere, I am not concerned about that because what he says in
The Problem of Pain
is important and needs to be addressed on its own terms.

Lewis here addresses five common objections to the doctrine of hell:

1) The punishments of hell are purely retributive, and purely retributive punishments are merely expressions of spite and vindictiveness and so are wicked.

2) Eternal punishment for transitory sin is unjust.

3) The punishments of hell are too severe to be just.

4) The blessed in heaven will be unhappy contemplating the ongoing torments of the damned.

5) God, who desires the salvation of all, is defeated when a soul is lost for eternity.

We will consider Lewis's response to these objections in the order given.

1. The doctrine of retribution holds that it is good that the evil suffer for their sins, even if that suffering serves no further purpose such as leading the sinner to repent or to deter others from sin. Such retributivism contradicts the utilitarian view that all pain is bad, and is permissible only if it leads to consequences sufficiently beneficial to justify the suffering. For many ethicists, inflicting pain solely for the purpose of retribution is tantamount to seeking vengeance. Lewis counters by asking us to imagine a man who has attained wealth and power by treachery and cruelty, and who, far from repenting, ends his days fat, rich, powerful, sassy, and utterly unremorseful. Lewis then asks us whether we would be happy for such a man to go without ever having to suffer for a life of misdeeds:

Can you really desire that such a man
remaining what he is
(and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness—should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side? And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness—only spite—that prevents you from doing so?

Lewis thinks not. He thinks that even the most merciful cannot wish that such a man be allowed to continue forever laughing at both God and man and basking in his own wickedness. In this case, says Lewis, “You are moved not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in the rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow.” Also, the postmortem infliction of pain on the unregenerate sinner would at least show him that he was wrong, even if he chooses to cling to his wickedness, knowing it to be wicked: “In a sense, it is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake. Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such a ghastly illusion.”

There are a couple of odd things about Lewis's argument here. First, he appeals to our feelings about what is tolerable or intolerable to us. Yet, as John Beversluis points out (by personal communication), when criticizing ethical subjectivism Lewis condemns the appeal to feeling-like what we find tolerable or intolerable-as a guide to what is right or wrong. Also, the sterner Christians of yesteryear, like Augustine or Calvin, would certainly have dismissed as hubristic the attempt to justify God's judgments by appeal to human ethical intuitions. Surely, even our ethical intuitions would have been warped by humanity's fall into sin and so are unreliable. After all, if that rich man can have the wrong feelings and intuitions about what is right and good, so can we.

Second, and more seriously, retributivism is what philosophers call a “deontological” ethical theory. Deontological ethical theories base judgments of right or wrong on a conception of duty; that is, an action is right if and only if it conforms to the dictates of duty. Such theories are opposed by “consequentialist” theories, which hold that actions are made right or wrong by their consequences. Lewis's defense of retribution is oddly consequentialist. He justifies the infliction of pain on the recalcitrant sinner in terms of teaching him a lesson. Pain plants the flag of goodness in the rebellious soul and therefore forces him to acknowledge that his evil choices led to ultimate defeat. Instead of enjoying the last laugh, he has to admit that he wasn't so smart after all. Yet such an appeal to the sinner's edification appears to be consequentialist; that is,
not to affirm the goodness of the pain per se, but only insofar as its infliction leads to desirable consequences-in this case, the sinner's education. A genuine retributivist would say that we have a duty to punish the sinner because he deserves it. Full stop. That is, when someone has done as much evil as our imagined malefactor, then for retributivists the “truly ethical demand”
is
for “the wretched creature's pain as such.” Whether the sinner gains anything from the experience is irrelevant. Perhaps Lewis was too nice a man to face up completely to the sternness of his own position.

It is true that one of our deepest ethical intuitions is that people who do vile things should suffer for their acts, whether or not that suffering serves any other purpose. Surely it is a good thing, for instance, that Adolf Eichmann, the coordinator of Hitler's “final solution” to “the Jewish problem,” was caught, tried, and punished, even if his punishment did not edify him and served no further purpose such as deterring future genocides. Speaking personally, I am willing to admit that retribution, to a degree, might be a legitimate justification for punishment. I found it outrageous that the cat torturer mentioned earlier was given only a two-year sentence. I think ten years would hardly have been enough punishment for such despicable cruelty. On the other hand, we now refrain from subjecting even the worst criminals, like Eichmann, to the sorts of punishments that the most advanced societies regularly inflicted on criminals just a few centuries ago. Not that long ago criminals were regularly broken on the wheel, roasted on gridirons, torn to pieces with red-hot pincers, drawn and quartered, impaled, crucified, flayed, starved, and so forth. We no longer inflict such punishments on even the worst criminals. Why? It is not that criminals have gotten any better;
we
have.