WEEKEND COLUMNISTS In a sermon in a Rome suburb just before Easter, Pope Benedict XVI told the congregation that - even though no one talks about it - ”hell exists and is eternal” for those who shut their hearts to the love of Jesus. That’s a pretty big statement, especially if it’s a statement of fact. It was widely reported the following day. ”POPE’S ONE HELL OF A RANT” was the headline in one London tabloid - though, far from being a rant, it seemed a remarkably casual comment. After that life carried on as normal: there was a lively correspondence in the Dublin newspapers, but the letters were nowhere near as respectful as they would have been even a few years ago.
Benedict does seem to be having some trouble deciding whether he wants to maintain his pre-papal reputation as ”God’s Rottweiler” or if he is really God’s cuddly Labrador. Last year, he turned against the notion that souls of unbaptised babies were consigned to limbo. But the Eastertime remark takes him back into the Rottweiler kennel: even his predecessor, John Paul II, said in 1999 that hell was a state of mind ”representing the frustration and emptiness of life without God”. But the Rottweiler’s growl is a toothless one because, of course, no one fears the Pope’s bite any more.
The concept of heaven remains attractive, as an antidote to the manifest unfairness of life. Hell is altogether less marketable these days. And yet for the first 1,750 of Christianity’s 2,000 years it was almost wholly unchallenged. The historian D.P. Walker, author of The Decline of Hell (in 1964, when hell was already on the skids), offered two main reasons for its success. First, the scriptural authority was very strong - for instance: ”Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire” (Matthew 25:41) and: ”Whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15).
Second, it was the most effective deterrent imaginable against sin, an unparalleled method of social control. Be good and kind and Christian - or else. No chance of evading detection; no chance of appeal. ”A useful, pragmatically justifiable lie,” as Walker put it. There were other possible benefits too. One was the concept described in the 19th century by Dean Farrar of Canterbury Cathedral as the ”abominable fancy”. This idea, very popular in the Middle Ages, was the notion that part of the joy of heaven would be enjoying the misery of the damned - maybe from a glass viewing platform similar to the one just erected over the Grand Canyon. One would have thought there was a problem of internal logic hereabouts. Many of us might occasionally damn someone to hell (the neighbours, the boss, a loud phone-caller on a train - and you should hear some very nice women talking about their ex-husbands). We may even gain some pleasure from witnessing our enemy’s discomfiture. But, generally, we would recognise that this was not the holiest facet of our character. Supposedly both St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas were keen on the fancy, though not perhaps on their most saintly days. This pious version of schadenfreude did, however, go out of fashion by the 17th century, even before the Enlightenment started to cast doubt on hell itself. Walker thinks humankind was growing more ashamed of its instinctive vindictiveness by then.
I would prefer to think that heaven and hell had a system of promotion and relegation, as used in football leagues. Residents of heaven who succumbed to the fancy would automatically be ejected - at least for a while. However, this is totally against the traditional rules of redemption. Although death is not the end, it is the moment of judgment: after that, it doesn’t matter what you do. One is reminded of the 11+, the old exam that used to segregate British children. Those who passed went to the heavenly and well-funded grammar school; those who failed were doomed to attend a dreaded secondary modern.
There was no second chance.
As an intellectual basis for the universe, this does seem peculiarly flimsy, and one the Pope might be best advised to avoid. He has some difficulties. The Catholic church is clinging to a number of notions that seem ill-adapted to modern experience: the ban on birth control, priestly celibacy and the whole panoply of miracles, for instance. If he sticks by them, he runs the risk of increasing irrelevance.
If he rejects them, the foundations of the edifice might collapse completely. It is a fearful dilemma. But if the Pope has a message worth hearing, it is surely that of a loving, all-merciful God, not just because it is more appealing, but because, frankly, it is less incredible than the idea of one taking notes and rejecting those who don’t happen to believe in Jesus.
