Schizophrenic Hell

Hell is a problem for theologians as well as sinners; to reconcile the worm and the fire with the Christian concept of a loving and forgiving God has been a perennial difficulty. In the Roman Catholic quarterly, Thought, Fordham University's Assistant Professor Robert W. Gleason, S.J., investigates Satan's kingdom in the light of modern thought. Says Theologian Gleason: "A combination of sentimentality, secular humanism and determinism have produced their own bitter fruit ... It is no longer generally believed, to put the matter bluntly, that man is capable of choices that could bring him to eternal death." There is the additional difficulty of specific references to fire. "To many it appears that for God to plunge the soul into a sea of fire [suggests] a vindictive God who takes joy in torturing His enemies."

Jesuit Gleason meets this problem by suggesting that the agony of hellfire is not something created by God at all, but rather that it grows out of the damned soul's eternal tension between love of self and love of God--and is much like the pain of schizophrenia. "We know that in this life the schizophrenic personality suffers greatly. Such a man believes that he is himself and someone else, [and] riven by this conflict he suffers as though devoured by himself. Now it is possible that the soul in Hell could feel this inner division with regard to itself and to the God for whom it thirsts with all its being . . . But the soul in Hell has throughout its life insisted upon making itself the center of the universe. Now that it is in Hell it sees with unmistakable clarity that the center of the universe is Christ Himself. The pain the soul suffers ... is then the pain of fire and it is the direct result of the pain of loss."

It is the very nearness and glory of God's love, rather than Divine wrath or vengeance, Father Gleason suggests, that tortures the damned soul. "Just as the sun without alteration to itself nourishes one plant and burns another, so the fiery love of God without change in God rejoices the saints in heaven, purifies the souls in purgatory and tortures the souls in Hell . . . The violence of the soul's tension in Hell is simply a tribute to the enormity of God's goodness . . ."

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