FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Defence of Hell‏

Rant Number 340 18 February 2009

Defence of Hell

‘Monster burns in hell!’ screamed the headline of a popular tabloid years ago. Concerning a fiend who had murdered a number of schoolchildren and then killed himself. Commendable sentiment. Vox populi vox Dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. Huh! A new angle on Britain’s gutter press.

Children and hell. A tricky subject. A school receptionist found that out. Her five-year-old was reproached for telling another child about God and also…hmmm… hell. Mum, apparently, could get the sack. A trivial little incident? Nah! Highly significant. But hardly new. Schoolteacher friend of mine once was almost assaulted by an angry parent: ‘How dare you teach my child about hell?!’ And that, notice, in a Roman Catholic school. Peerless anecdotes. How wonderfully they concentrate the mind. Anti-Christian Britain in a nutshell.

Hell and children. ‘Frightening children is wrong’, a school might contend. OK. No more warning kids about strangers, then. Surely that is pointless, unless it instils a certain fear in a child’s mind. The same applies to fires, drugs, knives, wild dogs and the like. Taking alarm – to a reasonable degree - about potential danger is essential to sound child training. But let us not fool ourselves. It is not frightening per se the school objected to. No. It is hell.

Hellfire and adults. You should not threaten anyone, even grown-ups, with that. Moral threats are wrong. You should not do the right thing from fear. Virtue is its own reward. Lofty, admirable prescriptions. Let us therefore forthwith shut down the police, the army, judges, law courts and tax inspectors. People ought to be virtuous for the sake of virtue, not from fear of fines, prisons, pain, death or even the inland revenue. No doubt everything thereafter will be hunky-dory. Pure motives will triumph and, like in a fairy-tale, we shall live happily ever after.

I wonder if the innocent five-year-old had blabbed to her little friend not about the nasty place below but about the jolly one above. Heaven. Clouds, golden harps, schmaltzy angels, all that. Would that have been kosher? Not really. Heaven too is a bit of a problem. Because it seems the little girl’s no-nonsense theology implied that, unless you believe in Jesus…geddit? Dear me! Maybe the nipper should have told her friend that, as soon as she got a lusty boy friend and…all the rest, she’d get Heaven on earth. The school would have rejoiced, no doubt.

That said, hell has a way of working people up. ‘Does your priest talk to you about hell?’ a bellicose Irishman once demanded of the youngsters of my parish youth club. ‘No, he doesn’t’ they replied. The fellow looked disappointed. No doubt the ghost of some remote, scolding Father O’Hara still haunted him. But, mercifully, hell has never been one of my things. Still, I do believe in hellfire. Only, as Bishop Ian Ramsey pointed out, remember that hellfire ain’t quite the same as gas fire.

You cannot get hell out of revealed religion. The Bible and the Quran are explicit about it. Jesus admonishes his hearers about that nether realm where ‘there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. And Buddhist hellish iconography pulls no punches, either. But ignorance of religion language is a problem. ‘Nothing burns in hell, except the ego’ a mystic wrote. Sensible view. No physical pain can be had without a physical body. The damned in hell have no physical body, hence they cannot suffer physically. QED.

How then do the wicked souls suffer? St Thomas Aquinas replied that they suffer spiritually, through the frustration of their evil wills. A bit woolly? No way. Aquinas is no pussycat when it comes to sin and punishment. He was thinking logically. Yearning to commit adultery, and being so prevented for all eternity must be pretty frustrating. The Greek myth of Tantalus shows it. Tantalus suffers in the world below from unappeased hunger and thirst, being at the same time immersed in water up to the chin, while the juciest fruits hang before his eyes. Whenever he opens his mouth to eat and drink, the water dries up and the fruits vanish. Thus a bodiless Tantalus would be tantalised by being unable to hurt or cheat.

‘Justice motivated my maker; divine omnipotence, highest wisdom and aboriginal love created me’. Dante sees these words written on hell’s gate. His Inferno is often poetically lurid but the point is crystal clear. Jehannum’s rationale is perfect justice, not arbitrary power. The supreme judge is no Saddam Hussein. He is like Solomon. Even our touchy-feely, effete culture does accept a just punishment, no? Otherwise why arraign villains like Milosevic and Omar Bashir?

War on religion. That is what is going on in Britain. As clear as a pikestaff. The syndrome of progressive thought – to use Ernest Gellner’s brilliant coinage – is getting more and more arrogant, invasive and intolerant. A syndrome that dominates virtually all public discourse, the media, the political, social and educational systems. It is the mindset, the outlook of what passes for Western intelligentsia. This syndrome or disease opposes incessantly all revealed, historical religion. It rejects any non-material or extra-mundane explanation of phenomena. It denigrates idealism and all spiritual authorities and traditions. Instead, it obsessively promotes and seeks to inculcate into young and old alike moral relativism, hedonism, rationalism, materialism, determinism and egalitarianism. Nothing has really changed since the so-called Enlightenment. Voltaire’s battle-cry, ecrasez l’infame, is as topical as ever. Darkness wars against the light OK.

The Churches, on the other hand, shake in their boots. Few clergy have the guts to preach and teach the eternal verities. Instead, they prostrate themselves before the idols of our neo-pagan culture and tiresomely parrot its clichés. The General Synod of the Church of England some time ago, I believe, officially ‘abolished’ hell. Guilty conscience, I imagine. If they were trying to scotch divine justice, well, I figure they are in for a bit of a shock.

No, hell is no hobbyhorse of mine. Heaven is. However, as our cultured despisers of religion are on the attacks, and mean to give no quarter, the priest has no choice. Defiantly, he shouts out: ‘Long live hell!’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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