Diary of a Theologian

The Insignificance of Hell

For the first-time reader, it is a surprise. C. S. Lewis (the character in his “dream,” The Great Divorce) asks his guide, George MacDonald, where he came from, when he came out of the Grey Town (which is, for those who stay there, hell)? He came by a bus which had flown up into the air and landed on the outskirts of what is (for those who stay there) heaven. Where had he come from?

His guide bends down to the earth and picks out a tiny crack in the ground between two blades of grass. He can’t say for sure it was from that particular crack, but it was from something like it, he says. Meaning: the trip from hell to heaven was not just a movement in space, it was a movement of expansion. Hell is about as close to nothing as anything can be.

It’s insignificant.

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When Dante gets to the very center of the Inferno, the lowest place of hell, it’s the center of the earth, and he finds there Satan. Satan has a three-faced head, and in each of his three mouths he is chewing, forever, the greatest traitors of all time. (One of them is Judas.) Satan himself is frozen in ice—it’s all ice there. The center of hell, in other words, is frozen existence—in Dante’s imagination. I like to think of this as something like “absolute zero,” the temperature, never quite reached, at which all motion completely ceases. It’s absolute zero at the center of hell. Not fire, but its opposite: complete inaction. Nothing happens.

In this view also, hell is insignificant.

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Now a “nothing” can be a very significant nothing. If you are driving along a road and the bridge is out, the lack of a bridge can be mortally significant, particularly if you don’t stop in time. “Nothing” (where there ought to be something) can hurt us grievously, even mortally.

But we shouldn’t think of hell as a frightening counter-reality to the reality of God. God just is reality. The opposite of God is non-being. It’s nothing.

There was a elderly woman in my parish, long ago, who had been trained as a philosopher. She once said, quoting an old proverb, that she would choose heaven for the climate, but hell for the company.

It’s a charming quote. We think of heaven as a very pleasant place, but we think people are interesting only insofar as they have some sin, break some rules. Interesting people may be hard to live with (they may be cruel to their spouses), but somehow that’s what makes them interesting to be around.

Not true. Absolutely not true! There is no interesting company in hell. There is only smallness, inactivity, near-nothingness. Hell is the ultimate insignificance.

Out & About. The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on Sunday, March 10, at Incarnation, Dallas, at 6pm. We’ll discuss a story by James Joyce called “The Dead.” It’s in his collection called Dubliners, and (I note) there are many copies available at the Dallas Public Library. But it is also a lovely book to own. The story’s action takes place on Christmas Eve, and anyone who reads it is welcome to the conversation. However, to participate you must be alive!

Looking further ahead: On Sunday, March 24, I’ll give the spring theology lecture at 6 o’clock: “What Good Is Suffering?” I will endeavor that it not be a practicum.

Collateral Beauty

She says something like, “Don’t forget to notice the collateral beauty.” She is a stranger who has come up to a grieving mother in a hospital corridor. The mother’s daughter is dying. It’s deeply tragic, but this stranger (a messenger? an angel? one doesn’t know) does not in any way deny the awfulness of it. Nonetheless, she says we should be sure to see, even in the midst of tragedy, the beauty that’s there.

The film came out a few years ago; I was watching it on DVD, thanks to my public library. Despite having a great cast (Smith, Murrin, et al.), the film did poorly in the theaters. It came out at Christmastime, and is itself set at Christmas—perhaps people didn’t want to think about dying children at Christmas? (On the other hand, when you think about Jesus in the manger, are you not thinking about a child who will die? Father Mead used to say, with concise wisdom: “no Easter, no Christmas.”)

The critics panned it. Indeed, I don’t know what to think about its ending. It wasn’t sappy or sentimental, it didn’t fail that way; neither was it brutal or despairing. It was a surprise to me, a big surprise, but not clearly a fitting surprise. Good plots, Aristotle says, develop surprisingly yet fittingly.

Still I recommend it, “Collateral Beauty,” the film. You’ll love the actors playing actors. You’ll love the winter snow and the city lights at night. You’ll appreciate the hard honesty of much of the dialogue. You’ll marvel at the despair and dysfunction of the bereaved father—marvel and sympathize: that’s not me, but I can imagine, if certain things had happened in my life, that could have been me. And you won’t forget to look for the collateral beauty around us.

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This, I think, is rather like the book of Job. Talk about tragedy! Talk about catastrophe! Talk about a situation where there is nothing good that might come out of it to make it all right! Job could well say with scorn that God did not look down from heaven and say, “Job’s children, they’re wonderful people; I’ll send a tornado to kill them so that they can be with me.”

No: Job says it’s awful and God is responsible. He seems to be saying something true, but he doesn’t know the whole of it. So God invites him to some (shall we say) “reality therapy,” a walk on the wild side of things. Job sees how dangerous the cosmos is, and how tiny he is. He is only dust and ashes. But still, he sees, dust and ashes can be precious. That’s beautiful. That’s the collateral beauty.

And what we don’t want to miss is the final scene: human communion, people helping people, the meal at his home, his friends, the gifts, the comfort with which they strengthen each other. We speak sometimes of collateral damage, bad things and evil things in the world. Without denying their reality, the book of Job and perhaps this film suggest a different focus. There is something else to be seen, something of love, something of the author of love.

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Out & About. Sunday, Feb. 10, I’ll lead a discussion on Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. If you haven’t read this, it is at once powerful and simple, full of frontier American faith and questions of morals and tradition and family and friends. The seminar, part of the Good Books & Good Talk series, meets from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation in Dallas; anyone who reads the book is welcome to the conversation.