Death, Hell, Purgatory

FOR EVERY MAN the moment comes when the body has been so weakened or damaged that it can no longer respond to the life-giving energies pouring into it from the soul. This is the moment of death. The body proceeds to dissolve. What of the soul?

The soul, remember, did not receive its existence from the body; each soul is created directly by God.

The soul did not begin from the body; there is no reason why it should end with it. And once we have grasped that the soul is a spirit, and realize what a spirit is, we know that it cannot end. We are so accustomed to the union of soul and body that it is easy to feel that neither can exist, still less function, without the other. In the conditions of this life, the mind gets knowledge by its action upon the information so brought to it by the body's senses, and we feel that it would be helpless without them.

But closer consideration shows that the real strangeness lies not in the soul's separation from the body but in the use the soul makes of the body while their union lasts. That a spirit, whose very nature is to know, should be dependent of its knowing upon a material body, which itself knows nothing, is sufficiently mysterious. We do not know how the spirit takes over the information brought by the senses, only that in the conditions of this life it does. Nothing entitles us to hold that in the totally different conditions of the next life it still must.

The philosophers will carry you further. Meanwhile let us concentrate upon what God has told us of what follows the separation of body and soul.

It could hardly be put more neatly than by a song of a century back:

"John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave,
His soul is marching on!"

Marching on to what? Go back a further half-century to Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner":

"The souls did from their bodies fly—
They fled to bliss or woe."

Bliss or woe—what decides?

Where the soul goes at death is decided by what we love. There is a marvelous phrase of St. Augustine—"amor meus pondus meum"—my love is my weight. In material things he saw weight deciding their movement—the heavy things went downward, the lighter upward. In the person, love does the same. He continues with a phrase roughly translatable as "wherever it is that I go, my love takes me there." One remembers the Scripture's grim phrase about dead Judas—"he went to his own place." His love bore him there, his love for Judas.

For by the end of life the will has made its choice. Our love is either for God, or for self as distinct from God. Love of God takes us to God. Love of self as distinct from God takes up to a separation of self from God. Our Lord (Matthew 25.41) condenses the reality of hell into two elements—departure from God, everlasting fire.

There is a horror in the thought of hell which, unless we use our mind fully upon what it means, can bring a taint, a perversion, into our comprehension of God. It can in plain words damage or destroy our grasp of the supreme truth about God uttered by the beloved disciple—"God is love." The perversion can take two forms.

The commonest is the feeling that hell and a loving God cannot be reconciled; if hell exists God is not love or, alternatively, since God is love, hell cannot exist.

Less common, subtler, but if anything more dangerous is one that can be found among many devoted Christians—a whole-hearted acceptance of hell, an almost luscious delight in the invention of tortures to be inflicted by a raging God upon sinners (in whose number they themselves evidently are not). They will associate this with God's love, but in such a way that love has a meaning unrelated to any known among men.

They tell a story in Scotland of a preacher describing the sufferings of the damned: these are up to their necks in boiling pitch; suddenly an angel swoops down with a scythe; they bury their heads in the pitch, emerge with their eyes steaming and gasp: "But Lord, we didn't know!" Then the Lord, being over them said, "Well, you know now!"

It is a jest, of course, an exaggeration. But the exaggeration is not wholly wild, and there is a streak of seriousness in the jest. It would be no gain to be right about hell and wrong about God. We must see both truths—hell's existence and God's love—together.

The first perversion—that hell is incapable of reconciliation with love—is shown to be such by the single fact that hell's existence is taught us by Christ Who was supremely love. We have referred to one phrase. Earlier in St. Matthew's Gospel comes the Sermon on the Mount which begins with the Beatitudes and continues through three chapters. In it Our Lord warns His hearers of hell at least five times.

Leaving aside fancy—especially the sort of lavish indulgence in the invention of horrors that Dante goes in for—what do we actually know about hell? That it exists; that it came into existence with the fall of Satan and the angels who joined him in rebellion; that it is a place of suffering; that it is eternal. Of details, we have the one word fire, used of it more than once by Our Lord. It clearly means great suffering, for there are not many sufferings possible on earth worse than fire can inflict.

Approach it as profound mystery—the mystery not of God's cruelty but of man's power to hate God. I do not mean that in most sinners hatred of God is primary or that sin begins with it. Sin begins with a perverted love of self. But love of self can grow monstrous, a sort of idolization of self, crowding out the love of all else and capable of turning into hatred of God. That may occur in this life or at death: to self-love grown monstrous God will be hateful once He is seen as the rival to adored self.

The man, then, has chosen separation from God. The principal pain of hell results inevitably from the separation. Theologians call it the pain of loss. We were all made by God for union with Himself. Every one of us is a mass of needs which only God can meet. It is no exaggeration to say that the soul needs God as the body needs food or water. To be deprived of these means agony, fearful while it lasts; but it will end in death. There is a like agony of un-met need for the soul deprived of God; and it will not end in death, for the soul is a spirit.

The lost soul has chosen self-sufficiency, and it is not sufficient. It has made itself its god, and a pitifully, desperately needy god it proves. This is the deepest torment of hell. What punishment, seeing the pain of loss primary, speak also of the pain of sense. This may very well include punishment, and must in any event include sufferings of soul, and ultimately body, from the loss not only of God but of so much beside—the love and fellowship of other men and women, for example.

But being deprived of God is the essential pain, and this deprivation is willed by the self. It has nothing of God but His will to maintain it in existence. The God Who alone could nourish it, it will not have.

When a man dies loving self to the hatred of God, what can God do with him? What He does do we know on His own word—He lets him go to his own place. It is hard to see what else He could do. He can hardly take him into heaven, for that would mean an inconceivably close union with the God he hates, a ceaseless torment to the self he loves. Those who deny the existence of hell so confidently never seem to have considered this problem of the people who have made the choice of self against God. When their attention is drawn to it, they still do not consider it: there merely rap out the suggestion that God should simply annihilate such people—before birth perhaps, by withholding existence from those He knew would make the choice of hatred. A study of the reasons God may have for not annihilating those who hate Him would take us theologically very deep.

It is with some relief that we turn to the other possible love. At the end of life the will may have chosen to love God. As we have seen, the love of God will take the soul to God. The God-loving soul will go to its own place, and its place is the presence of God.

In simple words, the soul is in sanctifying grace, whose very life principle is charity, whose one purpose in the design of God is to bring men to the Beatific Vision. Yet it is possible for the soul, even supernaturalized by grace, to love God, yet not wholly. Its love of God is the decisive element in it, yet there may be lightless, lifeless elements in the way of that love's totality. There may be small things, unimportant things that we cling to, which are not according to God's will; along with the upward flight there may linger a certain downdrag to self, which may be no great matter yet is a defect in love, a defilement of love's purity. We learn from the Apocalypse (21, 27) that nothing defiled can enter heaven.

We might feel that faults so trifling might simply be overlooked by God, but He knows that perfection is, Himself aiding, within our grasp and He has given us the command: "Be ye also perfect, as My heavenly Father is perfect."

For most of us it is a plain matter of existence that our life is like that. We may really love God and try hard to serve Him. Yet we are conscious of venial sins committed in the past and not repented, liable to be committed in the future; we are conscious also, if we really think about it, of mortal sins repented yet not with the intensity that their foulness calls for; we feel that there are tendencies unconquered in us that could lead again, as so often in the past, to mortal sin. We make continuing efforts at improvement, but can hardly convince ourselves that we have tried our hardest. The state I have described is that in which a great many people live. The possibility is that in that state many will be found by death.

We may well believe that there are special aids at death. The prayers of others can bring actual graces. Extreme Unction can cleanse us wholly—yet even that sacrament we can keep from complete fullness by some defect in the disposition with which we receive it. We may leave this life loving God, yet not perfect, not undefiled.

Observe that things of the kind I have listed are defects in nature, elements preventing total harmony between our nature and the supernature that has been infused into it. We love God, and there is no abiding place for love of God save the presence of God. But for that place we are still not ready. Purgatory exists to make us ready. The word is from a Latin verb meaning to cleanse; and cleansing is precisely what Purgatory is for. We gain no grace there, we emerge from Purgatory with no increase of supernatural life. It exists solely for the cleansing of our nature.

How are the defects of nature removed in Purgatory? By direct action upon them, the most direct action possible, namely suffering. Suffering of this kind is not the vengeance of an angry Judge, but the remedy of a Physician who understands us perfectly. We see the truth in operation in Purgatory. Of the nature of the suffering, we have no revelation. But two elements in it seem obvious enough. The first is the soul's realization, surpassing any that could possibly be had in this life, of the evil of even venial sin, still more of the mortal sins which in this life it repented but not sufficiently. The second is the soul's longing for the vision of God, which it may not yet have.

But, as we have already shown, the acceptance of suffering is a reversal of the process of sin. For sin is the thrust of one's own will against God's. The total acceptance of God's will at whatever cost to the self brings sure healing.

One final matter seems worth mentioning. The Church teaches us that souls in Purgatory may be speeded towards healing, and so towards entry into heaven, by the prayers of us who remain on earth. There is a special joy for the Catholic in praying for his dead, if only in the feeling that there is still something he can do for people he loved upon earth.