Hell is Necessary
It has become unfashionable to talk about the afterlife, particularly the most punishing parts.
I’m thinking about hell (again). What can I say? I find it a particularly compelling topic. No one talks about hell anymore, or at least not much in public debates and political commentary. Which is too bad. I do recall John McCain, with casual yet somehow admirable bluster, shouting out things like “God may forgive you but I won’t.” Is that apocryphal? I’m not sure. I’m looking for it now and it doesn’t seem to exist. Did I imagine it? Either way, it’s a great quote. But, while this some kind of final judgment and therefore presumably the existence of an afterlife, it seems to be more about heaven than hell. John McCain, or someone like him, will give you hell in this life, because you deserve it, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that God will forgive you in the next.
I was thinking about hell in the context of our surprisingly combative episode with Martha Nussbaum, who I think it is fair to say one of the most important and consequential living American philosophers. There were a number of tense moments in our back-and-forth. One such moment came when I said that many of us are afraid of death because we’re worried about punishment or some kind of limbo phase (which would presumably be nerve-wracking).
She seemed to find my mention of partial or eternal damnation somewhat odd, and in some very real sense it was odd. She responded with the following:
I think nonetheless that religions today think of the afterlife as a source of hope rather than fear. I just wrote a book that's coming out in the fall about Benjamin Britten's war requiem. And what's interesting is the more wrath-filled parts of the requiem mass have now dropped out. No one uses them anymore… They don't talk about eternal punishment. If you look at the requiem mass for Queen Elizabeth, for example, it's all about love and togetherness in the afterlife.
She’s right. Yes, religions—even the “last badass religion”—don’t talk about hell as much as they once did. That’s probably a good thing. Too much hell-talk can push people away. But it’s possible we’ve overcorrected in the other direction, where hell simply becomes absent, or perhaps at most a metaphor for our being separated from God. That doesn’t mean, though, that we need to accept this new order uncritically. “Progress” is real, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. (Also, love and togetherness in the afterlife sounds a bit underwhelming, if I’m being honest).
Religions don’t focus that much on eternal punishment is a descriptive assessment. The more interesting question is why they don’t, and whether this change is, in fact, good. To answer the question, we would need to have some conception of what makes something “good” actually good. Presumably, we wouldn’t be able to simply assert the goodness of something without expounding on the first principles that animate our understanding of the Good. (For a primer on how to think about this semi-mystical thing called first principles, see our friend
’s recent piece).
Hell is, quite literally, not a laughing matter. One prophetic Hadith observes that the angel Michael stopped laughing after hell was created. The idea, here, is that the simple knowledge of hell had—or at least should have—behavioral consequences. As Marsilius of Padua, a predecessor to Machiavelli, once noted: “The function of the priest, in fact, is to supplement the action of the police and the judge by the fear of hell.”
People need incentive structures. But it’s not just that. The pre-modern state didn’t have bureaucratized prison systems. Police forces were relatively small. Surveillance capabilities were obviously limited. Mass incarceration was not yet a thing. It wasn’t even an option. So you couldn’t just rely on the judicial system to impart justice, because that system was weak, particularly in far-flung rural areas where prisons might not even exist.
Now we have mass incarceration, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have justice. And in the absence of worldly justice, what are we left with? This is why the question of hell is a political question, after it is a theological one (or is it the other way around?) As Hannah Arendt writes in Between Past and Future:
The most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell.
In a sense, hell is necessary, or becomes necessary, once we realize that the Good remains just out of reach and that evil is inevitable even in a just order. And of course, justice will remain out of reach however just the order may be. To be sure, there were ideological movements that were totally and utterly unwilling to accept the provisional nature of human, temporal arrangements. If heaven was not possible in another world, it would have to be made possible in this world. Or so their thinking went. This gave rise to various utopian schemes. If anyone promises “heaven on earth,” most of us know, instinctually, that it’s time to run for the hills. But that’s the obvious one. There are less obvious turns of phrase that we take for granted, like the notion that the purpose of politics is to “overcome evil.” Have we ever really taken a moment to think of the political and theological implications of such a phrase? It’s messianic. It is a way of superimposing the vastness of God onto the smallness of politics. In reality, I would argue, the domain of temporal political arrangements is simply not capable of even considering the possibility of transcending evil.
The late Jesuit priest and philosopher James Schall had a wonderful, albeit frightening way of capturing the paradox of secular evil, and the desire to overcome it:
The belief that evil can be removed by political action, thus, turns out to be the cause for the secularization of hell as a political instrument to justify the good life.
The secularization of hell. This is what we have created, unwittingly. But hell belongs where it belongs. Not here, but there. Because it is real. Once it becomes real—whether theologically, politically, or both—it can help to liberate politics of a burden it cannot carry.
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I remember the point in the second semester of my intro systematic theology class at Union Seminary when Christopher Morse -- then a graduate student who had taken over for the retiring Paul Lehmann, later Bonhoeffer Professor of Theology -- challenged those of us who were squeamish about some point of John Calvin's about heaven and hell with a question, "Is there a moral structure to the universe -- or not?"
It occurred to me then, though I did not yet have the courage of my convictions and so wasn't able to say it, that the answer is no. There is nothing "necessary" about hell unless, and this is a significant qualification -- unless it's a necessity that arises out of human nature. Hell is something we make, or else a fever-dream of being human. I don't actually like this conclusion. I'm not, by temperament, a constructionist. I prefer to grapple with the given world, but I can't deny this human-made hell is part of it. Let's talk about THAT and those logical chains that justify the horrific.
Where this leads to is a rejection of Shadi's assertion that discussion of the afterlife is simply "unfashionable." It's unfashionable for a reason, namely, that, whatever our fear or longing, we can't say anything about the afterlife beyond what our ancestors made up about it.
Even without the beyond-this life hell we dream of, the Archangel Michael, looking down on the human world, had reason enough for lamentation.
The idea of hell (or at least of an all knowing, omniscient, moralistic god who can punish you) has been theorized to underlie morality. Research on these “big gods” has suggested that they emerge when societies are urbanizing and becoming complex (exactly when cheating in an anonymous way becomes easier). So I agree that the idea of hell/punishment can restrain “evil.” But, there’s another route that religions often use that doesn’t require a punitive stance. Spiritual practices often alter our emotions, with ones like gratitude, empathy, and compassion emerging from those practices. In my lab, we find that those emotions, however evoked, increase moral behavior. They don’t require a corrective response due to worry about what God(s) want; they simply alter moral calculus toward cooperation and prosociality. So, for some, this route can foster virtue from the bottom up, as a practice, rather than from the top down, as a fear or correction. I don’t think this is the reason why hell is falling out of fashion. But it is one way spiritual traditions can foster virtue without the idea of eternal damnation.