“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.
In that sense we need Hell. But not so as to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us, nor to scare us into heaven. Hell-fire and brimstone style preaching sometimes may seem to have that as its purpose but often backfires, as seen in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Fr. Arnall’s homily on Hell is a satirical precis of an English version of a 17th century Italian tract by a Jesuit priest, Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti. Theatrical and rhetorical in its use of physical images to depict the horrors of the soul’s separation through sin from God, it is meant to provide a cautionary prophylactic against sin and Hell. It has the opposite effect on Stephen Dedalus, who is unable to see and feel the reconciliation of divine justice and mercy in the extravagance and exaggeration of the images. It is satire. The reason we need Hell, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope and the redemption of our desires, and not simply the fear of condemnation.
Yet all sensual images belong to the spiritual understanding. “The corporeal world,” as Thomas Aquinas notes, “is governed by the spiritual world.” Kierkegaard rightly observes that Christianity raised sensuality to a spiritual principle. Heaven and Hell are about nothing more and nothing less than the reality of our lives as spiritual creatures.
The English theologian Austin Farrer observes that in Scripture “there is not a line of theology, and of philosophy not so much as an echo”. Peter Kreeft, an American philosopher, on the other hand, states that Ecclesiastes is the only book of philosophy, pure philosophy, mere philosophy, in the Bible” and indeed is “the greatest of all books of philosophy”. I think both are right.
Farrer calls attention to the primacy of the images given in the witness of the Scriptures which are not presented in the systematic or logical style of either philosophy or theology technically speaking. “Theology is the analysis and criticism of the revealed images,” and unpacks “the sense of the images”, but “it does not create that sense but depends entirely upon the images” which “of themselves, signify and reveal.” Peter Kreeft is unpacking the sense or meaning of the images.
To put it in another way, the form of the Scriptures in metaphor and image is poetic but its content is philosophical and theological. By philosophy here I am referring to what we can know even about God through the exercise of our God-given natural capacities as rational creatures. By theology, I am referring to what is made known to us above and beyond the natural capacities of human reason through Revelation which perfects and makes known what we cannot know on our own.
Farrer is right in recognising the danger of thinking that the Scriptures are systematic theology in style and form. Theology is really our thinking upon the images in their poetic form to arrive at their philosophical or theological content. Kreeft focuses on an important philosophical and theological theme – the idea of ethics, the idea of the highest good for our humanity, the summum bonum. Hell in the Christian understanding, paradoxical as it may seem, belongs to that form of thinking about our humanity. This is wonderfully concentrated for us in the readings in Advent from Isaiah and from the Revelation of St. John the Divine. Both gather together a collection of images that reveal at once sin and grace and always in a dialectical dance of complementary contrasts and opposites. But what is the underlying teaching or doctrine about Hell?
The 17th-century Anglican divine John Pearson in his classic Exposition of the Creed (1st ed., 1659) comments on the Apostles’ Creed as it developed in the early Church. He notes that the article on “the resurrection of the dead” is rightly and necessarily connected and conjoined to the final article about “life everlasting”. “The resurrection of the dead is taken in the Scripture for everlasting happiness, and yet the same language is and may be used for the general resurrection of all men, even of such as shall be everlastingly unhappy.” All shall rise to everlasting life whether into everlasting punishment or to eternal happiness, “all which the Scriptures expressly teach”, noting in support a host of Scriptural passages.
With respect to “the resurrection to condemnation,” there are only “two ways this eternity may be denied,” he says, “both of which are repugnant to the clear revelations of the justice of God against the disobedience of man.” Either by way of “a destruction or annihilation of their persons, with which the torments must likewise cease.” This would deny the justice and goodness of their created being. Or “by a suspension or relaxation of the punishment, and a preservation of the person, never to suffer the same pain again,” a sentimental view that might appeal to us but one which would negate their agency, accountability, and freedom as grounded in the justice of God. But more importantly, the argument turns on the idea of immortality which belongs to our being human and to the agency of our being and especially to what is learned most clearly through Revelation. Thus both ways are “repugnant”.
Peter Kreeft’s book Three Philosophies of Life is a commentary on Ecclesiastes as ‘Life as Vanity’, on Job, as ‘Life as Suffering’, and on The Song of Songs, as ‘Life as Love’. He makes a nice analogy to Dante’s threefold division of his Divine Comedy – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. He suggests that Ecclesiastes in its remarkable treatment of boredom and vanity having examined all of the toils and labours under the sun in which we invest ourselves and seek happiness, only to find them all wanting, relates to the Inferno, the Book of Job to the Purgatorio in the positive and redemptive forms of suffering, and the Song of Songs to the Paradiso in the motions of love that perfect and restore all things to their unity in God. Dante says that the purpose of the Commedia is to lead us “from misery to felicity” or blessedness. All three biblical books belong to Wisdom literature and, especially, it seems to me, to the examination of the ethical.
Ecclesiastes is an ancient work but as Kreeft suggests, it is also quite ‘modern’ It illustrates modernity’s greatest fear – not so much the fear of death as for the ancients, nor the fear of hell as for the medieval world, but the fear of meaninglessness. This is the vanity. It is the existential vacuum, the fear of nothingness. But can these categories of fear really be so easily catalogued and separated off from one another? Are not all three present to us? Do they not all contribute to how we think about our humanity?
The great illustration of the fear of death, as Rilke noted, is The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu’s vision of the underworld as the house of dust and darkness from which there is no returning shows how death is the great leveller of all forms of order and hierarchy. Kings and priests are now servants. Along with Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, there is Belit-Sheri, who keeps the book of death. Somehow the dead are not just nothing. In Revelation that book of death is transformed into the book of life. Enkidu’s death launches Gilgamesh on the greatest journey, the quest for wisdom concerning life and death in finding Utnapishtim, the precursor of the biblical Noah. He and his wife survived the flood and have been granted everlasting life owing to the caprice of the gods.
But what kind of life is that? They are alone – far, far away from the human community, stuck in the land of Dilmun beyond the ends of the world. Yet there is an even greater paradox. Gilgamesh is told by Utnapishtim that for humans “there is no permanence”; but Utnapishtim is now immortal. There is a constant tension and interplay between mortality and immortality which belongs to the history of culture and civilization.
The homecoming of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey depends in part on his journey to the underworld to speak to Teiresias. Plato provides a remarkable vision of the underworld in the Myth of Er in the Republic with the idea of the cycle of souls and states and the different suburbs of Hades including Tartarus as the place of torments. Along with the Hebrew images of Gehenna, the abode of the dammed that recalls the burning of children sacrificed to Moloch, and Sheol, the abode of the dead in stillness and darkness, these all contribute to the imagery of Heaven and Hell in the New Testament, particularly Revelation. The idea of Hell belongs to the sense of our humanity as more than just dust and ashes and calls attention to the significance of intentionality and rationality that belongs to human identity and thus to the reality of separation and contradiction that we ourselves create.
Dante’s Divine Comedy contributes to the ‘modern’ understanding of ourselves. As he teaches, Hell is about getting exactly what you want which is not the same thing as what you think it is. Hell, as he puts it, is for those who have lost “the good of intellect”, for those who have not grasped and remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember what we have “received and heard” and so have not “kept” the word, and thus have not repented as the letter to the church in Sardis bids us and which we heard last Sunday at Mattins in Revelation. More poignantly, “because you are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth” is what is said to the church in Laodicea which we heard at Mattins this morning; a strong word against our complacency and indifference; in short, our not hoping or desiring owing to our being imprisoned in our sense of self-sufficiency and completeness.
They have, Dante says, “abandoned all hope.” The key word is abandoned; it is always a matter of our will and our reason. That sense of loss and separation is not externally imposed but internal to us. It contrasts completely with the Advent intention that we should abound in hope. And yet, even the contemplation of Hell points us to the hope of heaven, not just for ourselves but for one another. It is what we pray for the repose of the soul of John Swain. All judgement is God’s as Paul puts it in this morning’s Epistle and God is love. Our evensong readings complement the eucharistic readings as John the Baptist voices the question and sounds the warning, calling us to repentance and thus to hope and love; to be the wheat and not the chaff.
“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.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, Evensong, St. George’s, Hfx.
December 14th, 2025