Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent, Evensong
“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will … gather his wheat into the granary. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
“Hell is other people,” it is famously said in Sartre’s play No Exit. The Covid pandemic perhaps brought that idea out into the open in the fear and hatred of others but is Hell really other people? I think not and even in Sartre’s play that is really a form of self-delusion on the part of the characters who find themselves confined together after death. Hell is really themselves and not just after death but in their lives as the characters Garcin, Estelle, and Inez actually acknowledge.
But such recognitions are without any sense of repentance, without any sense of any kind of objective goodness or ethical principle that they have denied, contradicted, or violated. Garcin, the pacifist journalist is a coward who deludes himself as brave. He has died with twelve bullets through his chest, having been caught as a deserter fleeing from the war, but has been unspeakably and unbearably cruel to his wife, treating her abominably, as he admits, despite or because of her complete devotion to him. He is without any sense of remorse, let alone repentance. For that is Hell – the rejection or denial of repentance. And again for the same reason, a denial of any order or sense of an objective and ethical good. The others, too, have been utterly cruel to others in their lives. The only other thing they have in common, it seems, is a disdain for Second Empire style furniture; for Sartre, the epitome of bourgeois comfort and pretension for which he had utter contempt.
Yet somehow they know that they are in Hell but for all of their descriptions of themselves they do not know themselves. In a masterful image, they see one another but not themselves for there is no mirror, no glass in which they might see themselves, not even “in a glass darkly.” They are their darkness. Hell as other people belongs to the characters in their egotistical obsessions about themselves. As such there can be no repentance because that would mean love. Hell is the rejection or the refusal of love.
It is the modern paradox of self-consciousness without any real self-knowledge. And in the Scriptural understanding that is because of a denial or refusal to acknowledge the objective Spirit of God, the Creator and Redeemer of the world and our humanity, a refusal to seek to know even as we are known in the truth and love of God. In the imagery of Advent, they do not “look up and lift up their heads” towards the redemption of God that Advent proclaims is always nigh. They are imprisoned in themselves, oblivious to anyone or anything else. Hell is unending solipsism.
In the play, the characters allude to the traditional images of Hell. “You remember all we were told”, Garcin says, “about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl’”. All this he dismisses as “Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers! Hell is – other people.” And yet, other people are precisely those from whom they are incapable of learning anything either about themselves or anything else. There is, to be sure, no mention of God whether as Judge or Redeemer. Hell is set up, it seems, by an unnamed “they”. Who is that? other people?, society?, the world as utterly indifferent to humanity?, the existentialist Hell of having been thrown into being? Yet at the same time there is a strong sense of the reality of our choices that come to define us. The play speaks to our questions and confusions about ourselves. Hell belongs to how we think about what it means to be human.
