​Chapter 16. Hell

The fork was present from the moment the first side of a cut was raised into law. A cut alone leaves two sides without ranking them. A law declares that one side ought to prevail: this is the good, the true, the healed, the state toward which every will must move. From that declaration the opposite side changes its rank and becomes what ought not to remain.

Hell follows from this preference. Wherever one side of a distinction is appointed as the universal end, a place must be found for whatever does not cross to it, and the retained remainder becomes damnation. The Abrahamic religions draw the governing cut as good and evil, communion with God and exclusion from him, and their eschatology gives the two sides places: paradise for what has been aligned, hell for what remains opposed. The Eastern systems commonly draw another cut: suffering and release, with saṃsāra and nirvāṇa as its architecture. Saṃsāra is no judicial sentence and nirvāṇa is not a prize awarded by a judge, yet the same law of preference operates: one side is the condition from which every being must be delivered, the other the terminus toward which the path is ordered.

A preferred side cannot stand without the remainder. Heaven is the name for crossing to the favored pole, and the crossing means nothing unless there is a state of not-having-crossed set against it; a salvation with nowhere to be saved from is empty. Hell is what guarantees that paradise refers to something. Remove it, let every will arrive regardless, and the favored side stops being an achievement and collapses into the mere fact that everything is where it is. The two termini hold each other up: abolish the pit and the summit goes with it, because a universal end with no excluded remainder is not an end at all. Punishment may later be added to the structure, but the structure precedes it, and it is not optional to it.

The predicates Christianity fixes to hell are the same it assigns to heaven. Each state is eternal, changeless, sealed against exit, past the reach of any further event. Hell lies as far outside succession as the vision of God does — the same arrested now the schoolmen granted the blessed, tilted into grief. Whatever else the two states are said to be, they share the one mark that matters here: nothing in either will ever again become otherwise.

Christianity leaves the symmetry on the surface. Matthew's last judgment hangs both arms on a single word, the punishment eternal and the life eternal in one breath (25:46), a duration-predicate laid evenhandedly on bliss and on ruin. The condition of the lost is drawn as a process that cannot complete, "where their worm doesn't die, and the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:48), repetition arriving forever at what it has already been. The seer who gave heaven its creatures that never rest gives hell the same clause: of the damned, "they have no rest day and night" (Revelation 14:11). And the state does not turn back — the gulf between the two is fixed, and none cross it (Luke 16:26). Deathless, restless, unchanging, irreversible: the marks of the pit are the marks of the summit, worn in the dark.

The Qur'an sets the rejecters on a way to a fire wherein they abide, while other inhabitants may be purified and released. Sheol belongs to the older Hebrew picture; punitive Gehinnom develops later and is often temporary rather than final. The furniture and the tenancy differ from tongue to tongue. Where damnation is final, its rank is the same: a terminus sealed against reversal. A minority Christian reading points toward destruction: the annihilationists hold that the damned are finally unmade, their existence ended. This softens the cruelty and, read through the mechanism, tells the truth the vision of torment obscures — at the bottom waits a cessation, the will that would not be gathered brought to an end. Whether it is fire without end or final unmaking, the state is the stopping of the one who arrives in it.

The dissolving systems keep no hell of this kind. Where no person is seated at a center, there is no seeing of him to be withheld, and no state built as its withholding — the address the others call damnation is missing. In its place appears the same imprisonment turned inside out. Saṃsāra is a confinement without a floor: the will is bound to a wheel of birth and death that offers a next moment endlessly and never a different one, driven by craving and accumulated deposits, arriving forever at more of what it already is. The Abrahamic pit locks by stopping — nothing further can happen. The wheel locks by never stopping — something further always happens, and it is the same restless agony. Their hell and their heaven meet where the others' do, in the quenching of the one who turns.

Within the Abrahamic pair, the separator of the two termini is the presence of God, and nothing besides. Heaven is the seeing of him; hell is that seeing withheld. The schoolmen weighed the matter and set the pain of loss, the poena damni, above the pain of the senses, the poena sensus — the fire a lesser affliction than the absence it surrounds. Isaac of Nineveh held that the same love gladdening the saved is what scourges the lost, a single radiance met as joy by acceptance and as fire by refusal. Lewis wrote that the doors of hell are locked on the inside — the state entered and kept by the one inside it, chosen as the blessed are said to choose their rest — and Swedenborg had each soul move after death into what it had most loved, the damned no less aligned than the glorified, drawn onto a different deposit by the law that draws the rest. In all three, the decisive difference lies less in two places than in the will's relation to what it encounters or has chosen, with the will arrested either way.

Both ends abolish time and will: time, because nothing further happens in a state that cannot change; will, because a condition that admits no otherwise leaves nothing for a will to do. The religion stages the choice between them as freedom at its highest pitch, the eternal weight resting on what a person elects. Under the staging the election runs between two forms of one stillness — aligned glory, or unaligned fire — with the alignment making the whole of the difference and the arrest making none of it. A machine that offers, as its two final outcomes, two names for the cessation of the one it processes has spent what it was processing. Nothing that moves waits at either end, so whatever keeps the machine in motion is found at neither. It has to be looked for on the road.