Heaven: The Triumph of Grace

Last in a Series on the Life of Grace

 by

 Fr. Raphael M. Moss, O.P.

Gratia Dei vita aeterna! In the last of our Conferences on Grace, we pointed out that the works of God, in the lives and souls of His creatures, may be looked at in two ways. We may consider them according to their pre-existence in the eternal all-seeing mind of God, as determined by His will, or we may study them as they are in themselves, in their varied order and succession, the many changes they undergo, their actions and sufferings, as they gradually develop and finally attain the purpose of their being, or fail in its accomplishment. We were then considering man's supernatural life from the former point of view, whereas, in these conferences, we have confined ourselves to the latter, since our purpose was, as we stated, to contemplate the workings of this supernatural life, to understand the sources of its power and energy, the means to which it has recourse in times of weakness and failure, and the consequences of final triumph or defeat. By this route we have once more arrived at the term; we are once more face to face with that most glorious supernatural end for which God made us, the perfect knowledge, love, and possession of Himself! Gratia Dei vita aeterna. The grace of God is everlasting life!

Man has an instinctive hope of a higher and nobler life than this world can give, and the groundwork of this hope is his faith in a future state. We appealed to this universal belief when we were speaking of eternal punishment, for, as we then pointed out, it is not merely the idea of a future state which reason puts before us, but a future state of happiness or misery, reward or punishment, according to the life we live here below. For man, as a reasonable being and gifted, therefore, with understanding and free-will, is the master of his own acts, and deliberately chooses for himself the paths he intends to pursue. In other words, there is and must be some clear and definite end before his mind, moving him to this or that particular course of action; and it is the moral goodness or badness of the purpose he has in view which specifies his action, and stamps it as good or bad in the moral order.

But common sense forbids us to suppose an indefinite series of such incentives to action. There must be what we call a last end, an end in which the will of man finds all that it can desire, and to which in reality all other ends are but as means. And what is this last end? According to St. Thomas, it is nothing less than perfect happiness, for nothing less than that can satisfy the heart of man; and hence it is that all men are of one accord in seeking happiness, though, as we must confess, all are not agreed as to how and where this happiness may be found. Some would have us seek it in the paths of honor and glory, or in the possession of abundant riches, and the enjoyment of the many pleasures of mind and body that are their fruits; but the voice of nature is not easily silenced, and it tells us very clearly that it was not for such things as these that we came forth from nothingness, crowned with such manifold gifts. No created good can give us perfect happiness. The good we seek is limitless and boundless - nothing less, therefore, than the source of all good, God Himself, who alone can satisfy our desire with good things.

It surely cannot be denied that life would be a dismal failure if this world were the end of all. Quite apart from what we learn by faith, a daily experience burns in upon the soul the knowledge of that conflict between the opposing powers of good and evil, ever waging in us and around us, and so frequently resulting in the triumph of the latter. The many so-called "social problems" are evidence of this. Something has gone wrong somewhere, causing suffering and sorrow as a necessary consequence, and against this all our natural instincts rise in obstinate revolt, urging us to do our best to set things right, even though we feel we know not how or where to begin. For we are convinced that suffering and injustice cannot be the normal condition of things. Bishop Hedley notes:

It is one of the strong proofs of God's existence, and man's immortality, that there lies in the heart of every human being the inextinguishable conviction or inspiration that evil can not finally triumph.

We cannot believe that so many millions of our race have lived and suffered and died in vain. We cannot persuade ourselves, no matter how we try, that so many brave, enduring men and loving women have borne the burden of the day and the heats, only to rest for ever in the grave! The very thought of it makes our hearts ache, and it would be but a poor and empty consolation to say to ourselves: "All this is fate, all this is the result of hopeless necessity and must go on for ever, and the only prospect before us is the nothingness of death." It cannot be! It is against the instincts of our reason, and the dictates of our common sense, ever loudly protesting that there must come a time when virtue is rewarded and vice punished, and when justice reigns supreme. We talk about "success" and "failure" in this life, but no matter how sincerely we may wish to talk, there is deep in our hearts a strange uneasy consciousness that the words are but conventional. They might possibly change places, we cannot help thinking, if right were might, and we feel that a day will come when they may be transposed for good and all. It is this hope of better things which makes our lives worth living, and enables us to solve its puzzling riddles and endure its heavy burdens. Look at that wonderful story put before us by Holy Scripture, which by its very pathos, no less than by its moral grandeur, has become so familiar to all of us as well nigh to have grown into a proverb, the story of Job and his sufferings. We should utterly miss its real lesson were we to imagine that it had been handed down through the long ages merely to teach us patience under trial. The heart of its teaching is disclosed to us in the magnificent profession of faith and hope uttered by an innocent man in the hour of his abasement, when sorrow and misunderstanding had crushed him to the very earth:

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that at the last day I shall rise out of the earth and be clothed again with my body, and in my flesh I shall see my God, whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom.

For our experience of life, at all events, but rarely brings us face to face with sufferings so mani fold, and, of their very nature, so ennobling as those which were laid upon him. What we see is in every way more vulgar and more commonplace, of the sort imagined so vividly and expressed so powerfully by a well-known modern writer in words which we may be allowed to quote in full:

Thou knowest my life, God, that I was poor, so poor, and unlovely and alone! And each day I awoke so weary that I had scarce the strength to struggle up that I might go forth to work for the day's bread. And night after night I laid me down so tired, too tired to sleep. And, as I lay, the unendurable thought of the burden which I must take up on the morrow, and every morrow, and the still more unendurable thought of dying, and being thrust down among foul and rolling things into black nothingness and decay, set my heart leaping like the heart of the hunted and desperate creature which hears the hounds behind it, but sees no nook or cranny into which to creep that it may escape their cruel fangs.

But if this be a true picture of countless lives, and it most surely is, who could look upon it and realize its utter misery, and then profess his faith in the existence of Almighty God, unless that same firm faith in God assured him that the sufferings of this life were not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed? For faith in God implies belief in a God of infinite power, infinite wisdom, and infinite love. It was this faith which nerved the heart of Job and upheld him in his hour of tribulation; and it was this faith which enabled him to pass through the furnace of trial, seven times heated though it was; a faith, a belief, within the reach of our poor ordinary efforts also, a knowledge we possess in common with him by virtue of our common humanity. Once again then, as ever, we see our faith and reason walking hand in hand, showing us the same truth, enforcing the same lesson, for whilst reason so unfalteringly asserts the existence of another life beyond the grave, in which its natural instincts place all that is good and beautiful and true, faith stands by its side to help it and confirm it, by declaring that the good and true and beautiful for which we long is in reality infinite in perfection, being none other than the Goodness, Truth and Beauty of the infinite God Himself. This is the great truth we have now to examine, the nature of that Heaven, placed before us by divine revelation, when it bids us ever to incline our hearts to keep God s justifications, because of the reward. What, then, do we mean by Heaven, and what does our faith teach us about it?

Heaven is the beautiful dwelling place of the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, the everlasting home prepared from before the foundation of the world for those of God's creatures who should be found worthy of a share in its blessedness. Its gates were first thrown open when the trial of the angels was accomplished and the light of the vision of God burst upon the intelligences of those who had persevered. But they, like God Himself, were purely spiritual, and therefore we may say that it was not until our Blessed Lord ascended from the Mount of Olives and enthroned His human nature at the right hand of the Father, that Heaven became, as He Himself described it, and as we now love to think of it, the many mansions of our Father's house. Where in the mighty universe this land of happiness may lie we do not know, for God has not revealed it to us; but it would be a great mistake to hastily conclude that therefore we know nothing, and that all that we can say is purely fanciful. Though, for His own good reasons, God has left us ignorant as to where it is, He tells us clearly what it is, and from the high mountain of revealed truth, as from another Nebo, we can see the promised land; and no matter how many years of wandering in the desert lie before us, we can, whenever we wish, refresh our wearied hearts and spur on our lagging footsteps, by turning our eyes towards that world of happiness where God will be all in all.

The very first truth impressed upon the minds of her children by the Catholic Church is that God has created us to His own likeness, marking our souls with the seal of His own adorable image that we might know and understand the purpose of our creation, that we might realize our own great task of living for Him and for His glory, and so give back to God the things that are God's. It is in this likeness or resemblance to its Creator that the perfection of the rational creature consists, being gradually worked out and developed in this life and only finished and completed when the veil is drawn aside and the soul sees its Maker face to face. "When He shall appear," says the apostle, "we shall be like unto Him, because we shall see Him as He is." For this resemblance to God consists in knowing Him and loving Him, according to our limited capabilities, as He knows and loves Himself; and hence we see at once that it can only be found in the intellectual part of our nature, since it is only by means of our intellectual powers that we are capable of knowledge and love. But for the sake of clearness, we may distinguish in it three grades of intensity.

All men are capable of knowing and loving their Creator, because all possess the same human nature, made up of a body and a reasonable soul, and this aptitude or capability constitutes the first grade, which St. Thomas justly calls the likeness of nature. But many souls have more. In them, the divine resemblance deepens into what the Angelic Doctor calls the likeness of grace, and this consists, as we have seen in our former conferences, in that habitual union with God which supposes and is based upon the more or less intimate knowledge and love existing in souls made beautiful by faith, hope and charity. In this world, however, for many obvious reasons, it cannot attain its full perfection, and hence there remains the likeness of glory, which is to be the reward of God's servants in the life to come. We want to see the full significance of this and the manner of its accomplishment.

We said that this likeness of the soul to God was the groundwork of its perfection, and that it was to be found in the intellectual powers of the soul. This is equally the case whether we are speaking of the likeness of nature or the likeness of grace; and it is a truth which we learnt in the pages of our Catechism, when we were taught to recognize the divine likeness in our soul in its triple power of understanding, memory and will. But because glory, like grace, far from destroying nature, really and truly perfects it, we must apply the same teaching to the life of the soul in the world to come, and we shall find that the ultimate perfection which it there attains consists in the perfection of these same intellectual powers, for there God Himself gives to the understanding the fullness of light, the fullness of peace to the will and to the memory the fullness of eternity.

In Heaven, God will be to the mind the fullness of light. What do we mean by this? "While we are in the body," says St. Paul, "we are pilgrims from the Lord." We are separated from Him who is our last end, exiles from our Father's house, wanderers in a foreign land. This is a truth borne in upon us by the beautiful things of this world which surround us on every side, no less than by the many sorrows and miseries of which we were just now speaking. For when God made the world, He blessed it, because He saw that it was good; and though man's sin provoked His curse and covered the earth with the thorns and briars of suffering, yet it was not wholly spoiled. It is not all sorrow and misery. To quote once more the eloquent writer already referred to:

Who of us can truly say of our lives that the evil was greater than the good? That the gladness was less than the grief? For every tear that starts to the eye, our lips have worn a thousand smiles. Love and friendship, and little children, fields and flowers, sea and sky, sunshine and starlight, have made life glad and beautiful.

But all these things are meant to lead us on to God. By their very beauty, their varied perfections, their attractiveness, they speak to us of Him who formed and fashioned them, and gave them to us, the divine, almighty Artist, the tender Father, whose goodness and beauty they so faintly shadow forth. Sadness and sorrow and the many wearinesses of life drive us to God; the joys and pleasures of earth are meant to draw us to Him. We cannot rest in them, even if we try, for we were not made for them, beautiful as they may be, but for Him who is reflected in them. Hence St. Paul says so justly that we see God now as in a looking-glass, and that cannot satisfy us, nor shall we ever be satisfied until His glory shall appear and we stand face to face with the Creator of all, for in that clear vision of Him, and in that alone, can we find perfect happiness.

To prove this same great truth, St. Thomas lays down two most certain principles:

Man is never perfectly happy as long as one unsatisfied desire remains within his soul, and then, in the next place, the perfection of every faculty is always in proportion to its attainment of its object.

From these two principles, the Angelic Doctor concludes that man's ultimate and perfect happiness can be nothing less than the unclouded vision of God, for, he argues, if our intellect be cognizant of some effect, without knowing anything of its cause beyond its mere existence, it must necessarily desire a fuller knowledge and endeavor to obtain it, since its perfection depends upon the completeness with which it apprehends its object. Hence, to know the created things around us, and yet to know nothing of their Creator save the bare fact of His existence, would make real happiness impossible. The mind demands and necessarily requires a full and perfect knowledge of the first great cause, and in this knowledge of its Maker and the union with Him which it implies, finds perfect happiness. This, and nothing less than this, is the attainment of its last end, the satisfaction of all its desires, and therefore theologians call it the "Beatific Vision," or the sight that makes us happy.

It may seem at first sight that we are no nearer than when we began, and that we are attempting to explain what is in reality totally beyond us. We talk about the "Beatific Vision," but the words hardly convey any definite idea to our minds. As far as this life is concerned, we are met by the words of Holy Writ assuring us that "no man hath seen God at any time," and we cannot forget that most striking scene in the Book of Exodus, where Moses, the chosen friend and servant of God, buoyed up by the wonderful condescensions of his Maker, pleaded and entreated for this very grace. "If I have favour in Thy sight, shew me Thy face, shew me Thy glory." And God replied: "Thou canst not see My face, for no man can see Me and live. But when My glory shall pass, I will set thee in a cleft of the rock, and protect thee with My right hand until I pass, and I will take away My hand, and thou shalt see My back, but My face thou canst not see." St. Paul, too, was caught up into what he calls the third heaven, and he tells us that what he saw may not be put in words, and that over and above there was something which eye hath never seen, nor ear heard, nor heart of man imagined. Truly, it would seem that the silence of prayer were more fitted for such a subject than the heaping together of words, and yet our faith falters not nor trembles, but contemplates the revealed truths of God, and shows us clearly and definitely the happiness of our heavenly home.

The "Beatific Vision," then, which makes heaven what it is, is nothing less than the sight of God face to face; that is to say, it is an intellectual act by which the soul attains its last end, and, having attained it, is filled with the joy of possessing it; and our Blessed Lord Himself would seem to impress this wonderful truth upon us when He asserts so solemnly:

This is eternal life, to know Thee, the true God.

In this life we know God by faith; but in eternity, when "that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away," and "the glory of the Lord shall be revealed." When we were speaking of faith, we showed that, since all supernatural truth is of its very nature far beyond the reach of a created mind unless its natural powers be supplemented by divine assistance, it was necessary that God should give to the mind that supernatural help we call the "light of faith" - a "light" because it manifests; a "light of faith" because the truths so manifested put forward no intrinsic evidence. But in Heaven, all is changed. The veils that tried us so much in this life are drawn aside, the deepest mysteries are made clear, they flood the mind with the brightness of their evidence, and faith is lost in knowledge. Yet human nature is not changed. Its powers are ever finite, and God is infinite, and therefore, in the place of faith, another supernatural help is given which we call the "light of glory." By this most wonderful gift, the mind of man is lifted up and strengthened, and so endowed with power from on high, that the poor trembling soul may gaze upon the unveiled glory of God, the eternal fountain of all life and all knowledge, hitherto hidden in light unapproachable, and man sees God and lives!

But we cannot know God and see His infinite perfections without instantly cleaving to Him, and preferring Him above all things, and hence the immediate consequence of the vision of God is an unending act of love. To see God face to face and not love Him would be as impossible as to pass in to a glowing furnace and not feel the heat. In this life, it is very different. By the fall of our first parents, not to speak of our own repeated falls, our wills have become weakened, and a sad experience teaches us that, though our conscience may tell us what is right, our poor weak wills may turn to what is wrong, and as long as life lasts, so long will this struggle continue, and always shall we lean to sin and evil, and always shall we shrink from duty and from good. But the vision of God will change all this, and God will be to the will the fullness of peace. The instant that the light of God's countenance is signed upon us, our wills are made perfect, and forsaking for ever all that is unworthy of them, they cleave at once and for ever to the good that is eternal. Our freedom is not destroyed, but rather made complete and perfect, and what God wills, as He wills it, and because He wills it, becomes the delight of the soul. Moreover, in the light of the Beatific Vision the soul sees the love of God for His creatures, and the sight and perfect knowledge of that love, unutterable and eternal, at once wins back such a return of love, that her strong immortal life would break with its intensity, were such a thing possible, when the vision is even then confirming her in her immortality. To know God, to love God, to possess God, her gratitude is summed up and expressed in that inspired cry of the Psalmist:

Thou art the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion for ever.

For ever! God will be to the memory the fullness of eternity! The soul sees that God's love will never change, that it cannot change. It cannot change, because such a privation would be a punishment which an all-just God could never inflict except because of sin, and sin is impossible to the soul that has once gazed on the beauty of the all-beautiful God. Its happiness is, therefore, eternal. The soul sees that she can never fall away from God; she sees that God can never abandon her, and so her joy is made full and will endure for ever. Millions and millions of ages will pass in that beautiful kingdom of light, but they can bring no cloud to the bright sunshine of that joy. And it is a joy which never palls, a happiness which never wearies. The soul is never used to it, never tired of it, never loses anything of its first unspeakable delight. The rapture of the first moment endures for all eternity, as long as God shall be God.

But this is not all! A day must come when the body and soul are once more united, and we profess our firm faith in this truth and our longing hope for it in the closing words of the Creed: "I believe in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting." It was this same faith and hope which supported Job, as we have already pointed out:

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that at the last day I shall rise out of the earth and be clothed again with my body, and in my flesh I shall see my God, this my hope is laid up in my bosom.

The effects of the vision of God on the soul overflow on the body, and confer upon it also the most wonderful gifts, so wonderful as to appear almost a new nature. St. Paul describes them to us:

It is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it shall rise in glory; it is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power; it is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body.

Let us see what these gifts imply. Whilst we live in this world we are under the law of suffering, for our bodies are corruptible of their very nature, and a day must come when the health and strength of which we are sometimes so proud must forsake us utterly, and we shall die.

The dust returns to the earth from whence it came, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

But when the time of reunion comes, when the trumpet sounds and the dead rise again:

We shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality; and when this mortal hath put on immortality then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory! Death, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting?

The second gift of which St. Paul speaks is that of brightness or "glory." When our Savior on the mountain top allowed the glory which was in His soul to transfigure His mortal body, we are told that His face shone like the sun, and His garments became white as snow, and He Himself has assured us that, in like manner, the bodies of the just shall "shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." But brightness and beauty imply a further gift.

There may be some few people in this world whose lines of life have fallen in pleasant places, and who hardly know the meaning of incessant hard work and its consequent weariness; but for the great majority of our race, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, whose life from morning till night is one long round of toil, what comfort and consolation in this thought! "It is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power." To go where we will, to do what we like, as though we shared in some mysterious way in God's omnipotence and immensity, and yet never to feel the burden of fatigue or the lassitude that spoils the most enthralling pleasure.

And then, lastly, "it is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body." When our Lord rose from the dead, there was no need to roll away the stone that covered the mouth of the tomb. His glorified body passed through it as the rays of the sun pass through the clear crystal. So also when the disciples had closed and barred the doors of the upper room, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst of them, and it was His own real Self and not a mere phantom.

Touch Me, and see, it is I Myself. A spirit hath not flesh and bones as I have.

And this gift also is bestowed on those who have won for themselves a place in the kingdom of God.

There are many other thoughts over which we might linger, for the subject is and ought to be attractive to those who are looking forward to the coming of this kingdom, even as home-sick exiles love to think about the beauties of their fatherland. The endowment of the glorified bodies of the just with these gifts revealed to us by St. Paul, necessarily implies powers of enjoyment which we can hardly imagine. The pleasures of sense here in this world are innocent in themselves and in no way against God's law. But they sometimes seem to be the means of making us forget God's law, because of their strange power. They intoxicate the mind and heart, and even seem to dominate free-will itself. In Heaven, they will exist in all their intensity, and to surrender ourselves to their uttermost delights will be an act of highest worship and perfection.

Then there is the joy which arises from the company of the blessed. Love is the best, most perfect, most absorbing of all earthly joys and at the same time the most God-like, for "God is love." What must be the bliss of an unending life amongst unnumbered millions of perfect beings, loving each one of them, and being loved in return with a love surpassing all possibilities of earthly love. Yet we do not love, nor are we loved by all alike. The natural affections of earth are not extinguished by the happiness of heaven. On the contrary, they are intensified in every way, and what a joy to be with those we loved so dearly when on earth and to realize that another separation is impossible. The partings of earth are bitter, and sometimes cast a shadow on the soul which never seems to lift, but the deeper the shadow and the more complete our loneliness, the brighter is our gladness and our joy when once again we meet those whom we have lost.

For ever and for ever we shall dwell with them amongst that multitude that no man can number, now rejoicing at the dazzling glory of those chosen souls that follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, now exulting in the magnificence of the martyrs with their crimson robes dyed in their own blood, now wondering at those stars of heaven, the teachers of God's people, of whom Holy Scripture declares that they shall shine with the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for all eternity, because they have instructed many unto justice.

"Shew us the Father," said the Apostle St. Philip; "Lord, shew us the Father, and it is enough." Shew us the Father! Take away the veil that hides from us the face of God, and then, and not till then, the infinite void in our hearts will be filled! The world goes on its way, and the way of the world is evil. False Christs and false prophets abound everywhere, and they are ever seeking to turn man away from his true end. They would try to persuade him that his happiness is in riches, in pleasures, in an equal distribution of power, in education, in himself, for there is a fashionable religion now-a-days which dethrones the all-perfect and eternal God for a vague and pitiful deity called "humanity"! But it is all in vain; God gave us our nature and our nature cannot change; and those who listen to these false teachers only turn away in disappointment, and wander hither and thither crying out in the bitterness of an unsatisfied heart: Quis ostendit nobis bona! Who will show us any good? Only the Catholic faith can give an answer, and its answer is ever the same: God made man to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him for ever in the next. We see the same great truth solemnly affirmed by the Savior of the world Himself, when He had finished His work on earth, and for the last time gathered around Him His faithful friends and disciples to hear His words of farewell:

As the Father hath loved Me, I also have loved you. Abide in My love. If you keep My commandments you shall abide in My love, as I also have kept My Father's commandments and do abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you and your joy may be filled.

And what was this joy of which He spoke and which He called "His joy," because so utterly beyond all reach of sorrow? It was the joy of His soul in the vision of the Godhead, the joy which He promised them and all His faithful servants when He said:

I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man shall take from you. [...] Father, I will, that where I am, they also whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me, that they may see My glory which Thou hast given Me, because Thou hast loved Me before the creation of the world.

A few more words, and we have done. The very glory of heaven should fill us with fear and trembling. If the reward were less, it might seem more easy to deserve, more easy to obtain! But it is so infinitely great, and so easy to miss, and if it be missed? But it must not be missed; we must make up our minds to fight on until the end. The harder the struggle, the more chance of success, if only we fight on bravely and perseveringly, for we serve a good Master, in whose eyes effort seems to count for victory. How can this earth have any real hold upon our hearts when heaven is placed before us? How can joys and pleasures, which at the best endure but for a day, make us risk a happiness which is eternal? As Catholics nay, as reasonable beings we should be ready to despise all, to risk all, to sell all in order to buy this pearl of great price, eternal life in the kingdom of God. Once we have made up our minds to this, life must be happy because it is the way to God, and death must be welcome because it comes to us as His messenger, changing into fruition the "hope that is laid up in our bosom," and dispelling for ever the shadows of earth with words that are the revelation of heaven:

The Master is here, and calleth thee.

Hell: The Failure of Grace

Seventh in a Series on the Life of Grace

 by

 Fr. Raphael M. Moss, O.P.

In the nineteenth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, the Evangelist puts before us a scene which is one of the most beautiful, most touching, and most instructive in Holy Scripture. He describes in most graphic words our Blessed Lord's last and most solemn entry into Jerusalem, the enthusiasm of the crowds that surrounded Him, the joy and gladness of His disciples, the fervor of their hosannas, the impotent envy of His enemies, and then the strange and sudden contrast:

Seeing the city, He wept over it, saying: If thou also hadst known, and that in this, thy day, the things that are to thy peace, but now they are hidden from thine eyes. (Luke 19:41-42)

It is indeed a wonderful picture, and it is likewise a striking and instructive lesson. Holy Scripture is the word of God, whose understanding is infinite and almighty, and therefore it is not surprising that He should teach us not merely by the words He speaks, or which He inspires, but also by the actions which those words describe. There is nothing extraordinary, therefore, or far-fetched, in taking the city of Jerusalem as a figure of the individual soul, and the story of God's dealings with that ungrateful city as a picture of His dealings with so many of His creatures. There is the same abundant outpouring of favors and blessings on the one side, the same ingratitude and repeated rebellion on the other, and the picture is completed by final rejection and terrible punishment when that ingratitude reaches its limit. The inspired writer tells us that the Lord loved the city of Sion above all the other dwelling-places of His chosen people, and yet He caused it to be utterly destroyed and laid waste because it had not known the time of its visitation.

So, contemplating as we are the workings of the supernatural life of grace, its progress and development, we dare not venture to pass by in silence the possibility of its utter failure and all which that implies. We must consider, and consider carefully, in the light of faith and reason, the final state of those souls who, like the city of Jerusalem, have neglected the things that were for their peace, the eternal destiny of those who obstinately refuse to acknowledge the end of their creation and to fulfil it, and who, therefore, are at last crushed down by the unutterable sorrow of knowing that it is for ever hidden from their eyes. We must consider Hell, the only part of God's vast creation on which the sunlight of His blessing never falls, the only kingdom in His mighty empire where grace cannot and may not rule supreme; "the land that is dark, and covered with the mist of death; a land of misery and darkness where the shadow of death and everlasting horror dwelleth." (Job 10-21-22)

Chinese depiction of the torments of Hell

It is a curious fact, and one well worthy of our close attention, that belief in Hell is as universal as belief in God. St. Paul reminds us that faith in God, as the rewarder of our works, is an essential condition of our service of Him, but independently of this supernatural knowledge, we can discern in all people, of all ages, a more or less distinct belief in God, and in a future state of happiness and misery, the lingering remains, no doubt, of the first great revelation granted to our race. It would be superfluous to appeal to the ancient writers of Greece and Rome; every student of the classics is familiar with their teaching. The learned writers of the East are not less definite, and even Mohammed, who surely tried his best to invent and propagate what we might call a "comfortable" religion, has nevertheless retained the dogma of eternal punishment. Those who broke away from the Church in each succeeding age of its existence, never based the motive of their separation and revolt on this stern truth; it seems to have been reserved to our own age, so full of pride and independence, so greedy of indulgence and every sort of pleasure, to put itself in opposition to the universal feeling of past ages, and deny not merely the existence, but the very possibility of what we call Hell. In deference, therefore, to the age in which we live, we may begin by seeing what our reason ought to tell us on this subject, and how far its light can lead us in such an all-important controversy.

Faith and reason never can oppose each other. That is a truth we often find ourselves forgetting when specious arguments plunge the mind in darkness; to qualify a dogma of the faith as "unreasonable" is a gross misuse of terms, as well as a proclamation of our own ignorance. Faith and reason, as we tried to show in our first conference, are given to us by God to help us in our search for Him; if they seem to be in opposition, and to impede our progress, the fault is ours, not God's! To quote once more the teaching of the Vatican Council on this point:

God cannot contradict Himself, nor can truth ever be opposed to truth. Whenever there appears to be a sort of contradiction, it is because the dogmas of the faith have not been rightly understood and perfectly explained, or else because the assertions of opinions are taken for dictates of reason.

What then does our reason tell us about eternal punishment?

Without plunging into metaphysics, or indulging in digressions to explain the nature of good and evil in the moral order, we can all admit that they are two opposing forces, working, so to speak, in opposite directions. The difference which divides them is something more than accidental; it is rather what we call essential. To use an ordinary comparison, however poor and inadequate: they run on lines which from the first diverge, and are not merely parallel, much less converging. It would seem to follow, therefore, that as long as good is good, and evil evil, they never can produce the same result, or arrive at the same term, no matter how indefinitely the lines may be prolonged.

St. Paul's comparison of the wild olive (Romans 11:24) is strongly to the point, for the wild olive remains useless as long as it is the wild olive. But if, as the Apostle says, a branch cut from the wild olive be grafted on a good tree, then it will bring forth fruit because it is a wild olive no longer. Hence our Blessed Lord Himself so pertinently asks:

Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? (Matthew 7:16)

But if you do away with the eternity of Hell, you must infer that you do expect to find grapes growing on thorns, and figs on thistles, for you infer that good and evil, sooner or later, produce the same effect, and therefore that the difference between them is but accidental, or, in other words, that their nature is essentially the same. What appalling consequences such teaching would produce if really believed! It would not matter whether we formed our lives after the example of Nero or St. John, Jezabel or the Immaculate Mother of God - the end eventually would be the same! Could anything more absurd be imagined?

But there is another consideration. Belief in God, as we said in one of our former conferences, necessarily implies belief in God's almighty power. He is the supreme and absolute Master of all the works of His hands, and possesses an unquestionable right to their dutiful service. But in His super-abounding goodness, He has bestowed on man the power of free-will, enabling him to give or to refuse this service as he chooses, and a deliberate refusal on the part of man is what we call sin. Sin is, therefore, literally and truly war between the creature and the Almighty Creator, but it is a war which can have only one possible result. The final victory must lie with God.

Of course, there is the victory of grace, which means the absolute submission and repentance of the sinner, but we must put that aside for the present. Our argument here supposes deliberate rebellion, deliberately and willfully and obstinately persevered in until the last. That such folly is possible is necessarily implied by the possession of free will, and it equally implies as a logical consequence the possibility of eternal banishment from God. History records the despairing cry of Julian the Apostate as he fell in battle: "Galilean! Thou hast conquered!" But were there no eternal Hell, he might have hurled a last defiance at his Maker, and then endured with patience all the torments which the Galilean could inflict, triumphing in the consciousness that one day they would end, and that, in reality, he would he the final conqueror.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Now we may go a little further and listen to the arguments of faith, and here as elsewhere the greatest of the Church's theologians shall be our guide. According to St. Thomas, sin is an inordinate act because it is a violation of the right order of things, and therefore - in addition to the stain which it inflicts upon the soul - it makes it a debtor to the law so violated ; and as long as this perversion continues, as long as the right order of things is being disturbed by the sinner, so long is he justly deserving of punishment. In some cases this disturbance is only transient, whereas in others it is irreparable. If the earthquake only breaks the windows or topples down the chimneys, the damage can be easily repaired, and the house remains as good as ever; but if the foundations are thoroughly shaken and undermined, the building can no longer be considered safe or habitable, and had better be destroyed at once. In other words, says St. Thomas, if the defect be of such a nature as to destroy the very principle or foundation, then the harm is irreparable; but if, on the contrary, the principle remains untouched, it is always possible to repair and make good all other injuries. For example, if - owing to disease or any other cause - a man's eyes have to be removed, or if the optic nerve be utterly destroyed, the blindness which results is quite incurable; but if he suffers from cataract or some other minor malformation, the blindness is but temporary, and may be done away with by proper care and nursing, or a successful operation. In the one case, the very principle of vision is destroyed; in the other, its working is but hindered for a time. To apply this, then, to the act of sin: if it be of such a nature as to utterly subvert the principle of that relationship which ought to bind our souls to God, and which consists in cleaving to Him as our first beginning and last end, or, in other words, the state of grace, then is its effect eternal, and the injury inflicted on the soul irreparable, though not, of course, beyond the healing power of God. But the rupture of that bond of love which is our only means of union with God is just what theologians mean by mortal sin; and hence, concludes St. Thomas, whatever sins so turn the soul from God as to destroy the bond of charity incur a debt of everlasting punishment.

We might almost venture, therefore, to define Hell as the state of mortal sin, made eternal and indelible by the sinner's own deliberate act, and fully realized by him. Father de Ravignan writes:

God has no need of changing anything in the state of the sinner's soul in order to punish him. He abandons him to his sin, and in that the reprobate finds his everlasting Hell.

It is a thought the importance of which cannot be over-estimated. We are so apt to appeal to our imagination in this matter instead of to our reason, and so we imagine eternal punishment as a sort of unending penal servitude, a terrible expiation exacted by vindictive justice for crimes over and gone long ago, when in reality it is nothing of the kind. It is rather the perpetual accompaniment of the conscious malice of deliberate rebellion, eternally persisted in, and eternally realized as hopeless and unreasonable. An old legend represents the devil as reproaching God with never having offered him a chance of repentance after his fall, and there is a world of truth in God's reply, legend only though it be: "Have you ever asked for it?" So also with the reprobate soul. Bishop Hedley, speaking of a soul in Hell, writes:

It is not God who is angry; it is the sinner who places a barrier between himself and that Being who alone is his happiness. The sinner, therefore, damns himself. A soul in mortal sin only requires the dissolution of its mortal frame to be by that very fact in Hell.

It might perhaps be objected that it is very hard to understand how the mere fact of death, "the dissolution of this mortal frame," can effect that tremendous difference which the Catholic faith supposes to exist between the comparative happiness of a sinful life on earth, and the misery of life in hell; and the difficulty is not unreasonable, though a very little thought should be able to explain it.

Cardinal John Henry Newman

Grievous sin implies the loss of God, and the loss of God is Hell; but as long as life lasts, the soul may obstinately refuse to realize its miserable destitution and endeavor, with some show of success, to make up for the loss of God by the use, or rather the abuse, of God's gifts. The varied picture of the world around us, the many joys of life, the pleasures of sense, and those still higher intellectual pleasures which gratify the mind, the society of friends and relations all these things are tokens of God's goodness, gifts from the Giver of all good gifts, most wonderfully designed to lead us on to Him if rightly used, but by their very excellence and variety quite capable of attracting and enslaving the hearts and wills of those who use them for themselves and their own gratification, and not in obedience to God's law. But death puts an end to the delusion. When the soul of the sinner goes forth from its earthly tabernacle, it loses in an instant all that made existence pleasant, or even bearable, and what does it receive in exchange? Nothing! God ought to be all in all, for it was made for Him; but it has deliberately rejected God, and must now fall back upon itself, only to feel every faculty burning with the agony of desires that can never be gratified. It is this very truth which Cardinal Newman, in Callista, puts as an argument in the mouth of St. Cyprian, in order to bring home to the heathen mind of the heroine the possibility of ever lasting punishment:

Perhaps you will tell me that, after death, you will cease to be. I don't believe you think so. I may take for granted that you think with me, and with the multitude of men, that you will still live and that you will still be you. You will still be the same being, but deprived of those outward stays and reliefs and solaces which, such as they are, you now enjoy. You will be yourself shut up in yourself. If, then, on passing hence, you are cut off from what you had here, and have only the company of yourself, I think your burden will be so far greater, not less, than it is now. Suppose, for instance, you had still your love of conversing, and could not converse; your love of the poets of your race, and no means of recalling them; your love of music, and no instrument to play upon; your love of knowledge, and nothing to learn; your desire of sympathy, and no one to love; would not that be still greater misery? Let me proceed a step further. Supposing you were among those you actually did not love; supposing you did not like them, nor their occupations, and could not understand their aims; suppose there be, as Christians say, one Almighty God, and you did not like Him, and had no taste for thinking of Him, and no interest in what He was and what He did; and supposing you found that there was nothing else anywhere but He, whom you did not love and whom you wished away, would you not be still more wretched? And if this went on for ever, would you not be in great inexpressible pain for ever? Assuming then, first, that the soul ever needs external objects to rest upon; next, that it has no prospect of any such when it leaves this visible scene; and thirdly, that the hunger and thirst, the gnawing of the heart, where it occurs, is as keen and piercing as a flame; it will follow there is nothing irrational in the notion of an external Tartarus.

Nothing irrational! The unreasonableness is surely on the side of those who refuse to realize this, and who vainly try to silence the understanding by the murmurs of an unregulated imagination and the protestations of a sickly sentimentalism. To Catholics, at all events, the existence of a place of eternal punishment is a dogma of faith, and we profess our sincere belief in it in the concluding words of the Athanasian Creed:

They that have done good shall go into everlasting life, but they that have done evil into everlasting punishment.

Having seen, therefore, how reason and faith are united in obliging us to admit this stern truth, the existence of a place of punishment which we call Hell, set apart for souls who persist in rebellion against God, and who, therefore, die in a state of grievous sin, we may now look at the subject more closely and endeavor to gather from the teaching of our faith some idea of the nature of eternal punishment. The genius of Dante sums it all up in that terrible inscription which his imagination saw emblazoned on the gates of Hell:

Through me you pass into the city of woe,

Through me you pass into eternal pain,

Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the Founder of my fabric moved,

To rear me was the task of power divine,

Supremest wisdom and primaeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things eternal,

And eternal I endure!

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

The Gates of Hell
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

But we have no need of poets, even though they be as great and as truly theological as Dante, to help us to put in words the nature of eternal punishment. From the many pages in Holy Writ, in which this truth is plainly put before us, we need only turn to one, in which our blessed Lord Himself describes the day of judgment, and with His own sacred lips formulates the final sentence which He will pass upon the souls of the reprobate:

Depart from Me, accursed, into everlasting fire. (Matthew 25:41)

We need no more. These dread words of God Incarnate sum up briefly but most clearly all that we want to know. Let us do our best then to realize something of their meaning.

St. Thomas writes:

All punishment must be proportionate to the offence or sin for which it is inflicted. But in every sin we may distinguish two acts of the will, inasmuch as by sin, the soul first of all turns away from God, the unchanging, infinite Good, and in this respect is guilty of an infinite offence, and then, in the second place, chooses in place of God some transitory pleasure, an act which is finite in every way. The rejection of God is punished by the loss of God, which may be truly called infinite, since it is the deprivation of an infinite good, and the unlawful preference of the creature is expiated by the finite pain of sense.

Our Blessed Lord expresses this double penalty in the words of His dread sentence: "Depart from Me, into everlasting fire": the pain of loss, and the pain of sense.

The pain of loss! We have already tried to show the origin and cause of this suffering, but a little repetition may help us to see it more clearly. Almighty God has created us for Himself, bestowing upon us a spiritual nature, which implies an instinctive longing for Him, and for the happiness which can only come by seeing Him face to face and possessing Him. During the time of this life of probation, He hides Himself behind a veil, and asks us to give Him our free service, seeing Him only by faith, possessing Him by hope and love. But when death comes, the veil is drawn aside. The time of probation is over. The soul understands perfectly that God is her last end, and she longs for Him and desires to possess Him because the possession of Him is perfect happiness. But, as we have already said, if she be in the state of grievous sin, the love of God, which is the principal and only means of union with Him, is altogether absent; it has been willfully destroyed. The soul sees, therefore, that she never can possess God, that she has lost Him for ever, and the realization of that loss is Hell. The possession of God is eternal happiness, the loss of God is eternal misery; and when those awful words, "Depart from Me," ring through the silence of eternity, they are to the lost soul the revelation of its hopeless fate. God is light, infinite light, uncreated light. In its mortal life the soul has enjoyed the possession of this light to a greater or less degree; now she has approached the unfailing source of it all, only to see it disappear for ever, and to feel herself plunging into an intellectual darkness that will last for ever.

And love has gone, too! Light is the food of the understanding, and love is the food of the will, and God is light, and God is love, for He is the one object of the mind and the heart; we mean nothing else when we say that He is our last end. He Himself is the eternal home of all the souls whom He calls out of nothingness, for He made them for Himself, and, therefore, during the time of their probation in this world, His voice is ever calling them: "My son, give Me thy heart"; "I am thy reward, exceeding great"; but this gracious voice no longer speaks to the reprobate. They chose their own way, they lived for themselves and not for Him, they made their home on earth and in the things of this world, only to realize too late that it has all passed like a dream, and that their heavenly home is closed against them; and with a mind crushed down by darkness, and a will broken by the greatness of its misery, though still rebellious and unrepentant, the lost soul enters on its everlasting exile.

Perhaps we might as well confess at once that we cannot put in words the exceeding horror of the loss of God, because we do not appreciate Him as we ought, nor do we understand His infinite beauty and attractiveness. What a power there is in the beauty and loveliness and attractiveness of earthly things! The wanderer in a foreign land thinks of his own home and country, and because the beauty of it haunts his memory all else grows dull by comparison. The artist lives apart in a world of beauty of his own, a world of ideals it may be, and yet so real a world to him that the ordinary things of earth can hardly win a passing thought from him; and our own hearts too, do they not clothe with beauty everything to which they cling, and faces that have long since passed away still linger on unfaded in our hearts, because of the beauty which is theirs, a beauty none the less real to us because, perhaps, our own creation. Yet the beautiful as existing in the world around us, or as seen by the mind and the heart, is after all but a participation, and a feeble participation, of the unspeakable beauty of God. What then would be its power upon the soul? What the agony of its loss?

It may seem well-nigh useless to speak of the pain of sense, seeing that it must be insignificant when compared with pain which in itself is infinite and eternal; but if, as we have said, the pain of loss would seem to be beyond our understanding because of its greatness and its purely spiritual nature, the pain of sense on the other hand appeals to us with a special force for the very opposite reason. Hence this secondary punishment, and all the suffering which it involves, is frequently put before us by the Holy Scripture in the most vivid language, and is usually expressed by the one term "fire."

Depart from Me, into everlasting fire.

With regard to the nature of this fire, the Church has defined nothing; we are free to follow our own opinion. In the ages of faith, the common Catholic teaching maintained that the fire of hell was a real material fire, but since it is the fashion now-a-days to look askance at the theories of these old-fashioned teachers, and even to reject them as impossible in the light of our superior education, we may devote a moment to the examination of their explanations of this difficulty. It may be, after all, that they are not so foolish or unreasonable as we are tempted to think. St. Thomas shall be their spokesman; he, at least, is never foolish or unreasonable, even when cross-examined by a nineteenth-century intellect, and here as elsewhere there is a weight and grandeur in the arguments of the Angelic Doctor which must win our admiration, even if they fail to win our full assent.

Great as St. Thomas was, or rather because he was so great, he had a child-like reverence for the words of Jesus Christ and His inspired servants, and, therefore, all his efforts go to show how the words of Holy Writ can reasonably bear a literal sense, instead of weakly yielding to the clamors of an empty so-called science, and endeavoring to explain them all away. St. Thomas teaches, therefore, that the spiritual immaterial souls really suffer from the fire of which God's word so often speaks, because it is made the instrument of divine justice, and as such binds them down and holds them fast within its fiery grasp, a penalty so utterly repugnant to their spiritual nature and its natural rights and dignity, as to cause the keenest anguish. For it is unnatural, as he says, that a spiritual being should be so imprisoned in anything material as to be cut off from all enjoyment of its natural freedom, and the torment of the penal fire is due to this power of imprisoning the soul, a power conferred on it by God as the instrument of His justice.

But whatever opinion we may hold as to the nature of the fire, it is surely sufficient for us that our Blessed Lord, who could not and would not exaggerate, repeatedly alludes to it as a very terrible suffering; and yet, after all, as a spiritual writer well says, once we put aside the thought of the loss of God, we are speaking of Hell with the hell left out; so we may pass on to consider one or two of the many objections put forward with such assurance by modern "thinkers."

The objections themselves are not modern. St. Thomas discussed them and replied to them more than six centuries ago, but they reappear from time to time in a new garb and with a fresh flourish of trumpets, as though they were the special intellectual product of each particular age. They are based, as indeed are all objections against revealed truth, on a more or less voluntary misconception and misstatement of the dogma they assail, and though the manner of attack may differ, its groundwork is ever the same. They protest against the doctrine of eternal punishment because they consider it to be altogether repugnant to God's justice and God's love. It is repugnant, they say, to God's justice. St. Thomas thus formulates their objection:

No sin can deserve eternal punishment, because there must be some proportion between the punishment and the offence for which it is inflicted. But what proportion is there between the act of a moment and an eternal hell?

The Angelic Doctor, in reply, points out first of all that this argument, taken literally, would be fatal to all justice, human and divine, for we constantly see crimes that were committed in a moment punished by years of imprisonment, or even death, which is the human equivalent of eternal punishment; the obvious explanation being that the proportion between the crime and its punishment is never based on the duration of the act, but on its malice and gravity. It is quite true that, at first sight, there seems to be a terrible disproportion between the momentary act of sin and eternal reprobation, but we have to take into account what that momentary act involves. It is not easy, and indeed it would be presumptuous to judge of individual acts that come under our notice, but looking at the matter in the abstract, and taking mortal sin to be what we have explained it to be, the willful, deliberate, eternal rejection of God, we are bound to admit that it deserves an eternal Hell. For the soul that consents to such an act does so with full knowledge of the consequences. It is not taken by surprise; it has every chance. It has been sealed with the image of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, crowned with the most wonderful gifts and graces, and yet it deliberately refuses to listen to the dictates of its own reason, it defaces and destroys as far as it can the beauty of the divine likeness, it willfully abuses and flings away its graces and its gifts, it tramples under foot the blood of its Savior, and then, rebellious to the last, it passes out of this world. It has literally chosen sin for its last end, and therefore, as St. Thomas says, it has the will to sin eternally.

But, it might be urged, may it not repent after death? Even Holy Scripture seems to imply this when it represents sinners in Hell, "repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit," and saying:

We have erred from the way of truth, and the light of justice hath not shined unto us, and the sun of understanding hath not risen upon us. We wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction, and have walked through hard ways, but the ways of the Lord we have not known. (Wisdom 5:3; 6-7)

Dante and Virgil in Hell
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

Is not this something very like repentance, and if so, is it altogether useless? It most certainly is useless, for the simple reason that the time for repentance has passed away. God has given us the day of this life as the time of merit, and He bids us "work whilst we have the day, because the night cometh when no man can work." If He had promised us a second chance in eternity, how should we employ the time of this life? If so many lead careless and wicked lives now, what would it be like under such conditions? Common sense obliges us to see the reasonableness of a fixed time of probation, to be followed by just rewards and punishments. But, after all, is this "repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit," which Holy Writ attributes to the reprobate,true and sincere repentance? Is it repentance at all? According to St. Thomas, repentance or contrition implies a sorrow of heart which is based on the love of God, inspired therefore by His grace, and meritorious in His sight. But it is manifest from what we have said that however real the grief of the reprobate may be, it is certainly not prompted by the love of God. The free will of the reprobate soul is turned away from God, seeing that he loves the wickedness for which he is punished, and would indulge in it again if he could, though he hates the punishment which is its consequence. His grief, therefore, is based on the hatred of punishment rather than on the hatred of sin. And in another place the Angelic Doctor says:

The repentance of the lost is useless, because their wills are confirmed in wickedness. They have no regret what ever for the malice of sin, but only for the punishment it has entailed; and hence, instead of suggesting any hope of forgiveness, their grief only fills them with despair.

Evidently, then, God's justice is not at fault, and so an appeal is made to His love as an argument against eternal punishment; but this objection is even more unreasonable. It is precisely because God is infinite love that there is such a place as an eternal Hell. To quote Dante once more:

To rear me was the task of Power Divine,

Supremest Wisdom, and Primeval Love.

Notice the words "primeval love" - primo amore. Not love such as we know it, full of countless imperfections even at its best; but primo amore - the first, the best, the most perfect, most patient, most generous love: love, in fine, which is infinite and eternal, and when such a love is willfully, deliberately and persistently rejected, and rejected with contempt, it is at last withdrawn, and its absence creates an eternal Hell.

The dogma of everlasting punishment is a standing rebuke to man's self-worship. It is a perpetual reminder of his littleness, his ignorance and his dependence on God, and that is why it is such a stumbling block in the way of those whose only creed seems to be the exaltation of self, the glorification of fallen humanity. It is not that they cannot believe it, the evidence for it is too convincing; but they will not, and no amount of evidence can overcome that obstacle. Our Lord Himself has said it, and as a fitting conclusion we may listen to His words:

There was a certain rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and who feasted sumptuously every day. And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, who lay at his gate, full of sores, desiring to be filled with the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table. But no man gave unto him; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom; the rich man also died, and he was buried in Hell. And lifting up his eyes when he was in torments, he saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said: "Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water to cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame." And Abraham said to him: "Son, remember that thou didst receive good things in thy life-time, and Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted and thou art tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is fixed a great abyss, so that they who would pass from hence to you cannot, nor from thence come hither." And he said: "Then, father, I beseech thee that thou wouldst send him to my father's house, for I have five brethren, that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torments." And Abraham said to him: "They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them." But he said: "Nay, father, but if one went to them from the dead they will do penance." And he said to him: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if one rise again from the dead." (Luke 16)

Purgatory: The Prison-House of Grace

Sixth in a Series on the Life of Grace

 by

 Fr. Raphael M. Moss, O.P.

When we speak of the Communion of Saints, we sum up one of the most important dogmas revealed to us by our holy Catholic faith. It is at the same time one of the most comprehensive and most interesting, and, we may add, perhaps one of the least understood. It seems to say so very little, whilst it implies so much. It is the consequence of our redemption and sanctification, the fruit of Christ's passion and the life of grace to which we have been raised. For, by this most glorious gift of grace, purchased for us by the sufferings and death of the incarnate Son of God, we are all made members of His mystical Body, and by mutual help, mutual support, and mutual sanctification, we are meant to carry on His divine work, looking forward to the day when that work shall be made perfect and complete by the gathering together of all the elect in the kingdom of heaven. Hence, to souls bound together by this supernatural chain of faith and hope and love, time is as though it were not, and real separation is impossible. Life passes away swiftly enough, and, sooner or later, death must come to all of us, but even death, to souls in grace, is but a passing change, and when we mourn for those whom it has taken from us, we "sorrow not as others, that have no hope." On the contrary, we may truly say that human affection finds in death its surest triumph, for whereas the many troubles that surround us and the weaknesses of our own frail nature must necessarily make the strongest love rejoice with trembling, death, viewed as grace would have us view it, puts an end to all these dangers, and gives to earthly love the immortality for which it craves, making it at once unchanging and eternal. "True love," says the inspired writer, "is strong as death," and therefore "many waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods drown it;" it builds a bridge across that dark abyss, so terrifying to our weakness, and that bridge is the "Communion of Saints." Our God, as Jesus Christ Himself reminds us, is not the God of the dead but of the living, and therefore those of His creatures who die in grace are never dead to Him. Underneath them are the everlasting arms, as surely as they are beneath us, and in this firm faith the loneliest soul can always find abundant light and consolation. The task before us is to contemplate this life of grace in the world to come, to see and understand, as far as possible, all that our faith can tell us of the dead who die in the Lord, and therefore are so truly blessed.

Our thoughts go up at once to that great multitude which no man can number, standing before the throne with palms in their hands, forever reigning with Christ on high, but even as that glorious vision seems to pass before our minds, the consciousness of sin and imperfection strikes us down and bids us realize our deep unworthiness. He who tells us of that white-robed multitude tells us also they are sine macula, spotless and unstained, and therefore we must first of all direct our thoughts towards that other world revealed to us by faith and reason as the dwelling-place of all those souls, who, though God's friends, are yet unworthy of a place amongst His saints. We call it Purgatory, and we speak of those abiding there as the souls of the faithful departed. We could not justly claim to be the children of the Church, were we unmindful of those for whom the Church is so solicitous. She never forgets them. Morning by morning the sacrifice of Calvary is renewed in her midst; morning by morning the divine Victim is offered up on her altars, and following closely on the loving welcome with which she greets His sacramental presence is a prayer of supplication for the dead:

Memento Domine - Be mindful, Lord, of Thy servants who have gone before us.

It is an indication of the spirit she would foster in our hearts, for the same thought concludes all her prayers:

May the divine assistance remain always with us, and may the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

We believe then, as Catholics, that there exists a place of waiting, a place of trial and most keen suffering, created by an infinitely wise and loving God for such souls as depart out of this life in a state of grace, but yet in some way debtors to His justice. It is a dogma of our faith, which hardly seems to stand in need of proof, so strongly does it appeal to reason and conscience, so manifestly does it fit in with all we know of God. If we believe that heaven is the home of absolute purity and perfection, and that nothing which is in any way defiled can pass its gates, if we believe hell to be the prison-house of those who die in grievous sin, rejecting God's most patient love and hating Him until the last, we must admit the existence of a middle state for those who are not pure enough to see God face to face, and yet have not deserved eternal banishment from Him. To deny this consequence would be to lower our idea of heaven, until it ceased to be a motive for our hopes and longings, or to create a hell so cruelly unjust as to be unreasonable and impossible. Even the heathens could not be so foolish, and Plato graphically describes a future state of punishment for those who have done evil, where some must suffer hopelessly because so hopelessly corrupted, but where others, on the contrary, find a real good in what they have to undergo, since by it they are freed from all their stains. It would surely, therefore, be a matter for astonishment were we not to find some traces of this same belief amongst the Jews, but, instead of traces only, we have the dogma put before us in its fullness, by no less an authority than the inspired word of God. In the Second Book of the Machabees (12:46) we read how Judas sent an offering to Jerusalem that sacrifices might be offered for the souls of the soldiers who had fallen in battle, since "it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be freed from sins." Yet it was not until the so-called "reformers" of the sixteenth century had ventured to assail this well-nigh universal belief that the Church confirmed it by a solemn definition, and declared it to be the divinely revealed dogma of our faith.

But if, as we have said, it is a doctrine which in every way accords with what we know of human nature, its weaknesses and capabilities, no less does it accord with what we know of God. Without it, faith in God would be impossible. True, there are many who profess belief in God and yet deny this doctrine, but a little thought would show us that their God is not the infinitely perfect Being who is our last end, but a counterfeit deity formed and fashioned by their own poor darkened minds.

Infinite perfection implies the possession of all perfections in an infinite degree. God is just, and His justice, therefore, is infinite; yet at the same time He is merciful, and His mercy is equally limitless. But because He is infinitely just, He must necessarily banish from His presence any creature in whom His all-seeing eye discerns the faintest shadow of an imperfection, and because He is infinitely merciful, He is ready to forgive the worst of sinners. How can we reconcile these two most glorious attributes of God except by Purgatory?

Think what sin is and what are its consequences. Broadly speaking, sin is the aversion of the will from God, and the immediate consequences of this are twofold, for it inflicts a stain upon the soul, and at the same time makes it a debtor to God's justice. The soul of man is pleasing in God's sight because of the bright, shining light of reason, and that glorious participation of the divine light which we call grace; but when man's will consents to sin, it violates the order of right reason as well as the order of grace, and withdrawing itself, as it were, from these refulgent sources of brightness and spiritual loveliness, it buries itself in what is vile and earthly, and so incurs the stain of sin. Moreover, by that same act it violates the order of divine justice, and thereby lays itself under the obligation of restitution by making itself God's debtor. In other words, the unlawful self-indulgence, which we call sin, must be expiated by voluntary or involuntary punishment, and this holds good even when the stain of sin may have been blotted out by sorrow and repentance and the return of the will to God. So David sinned, and repented of his sin on hearing Nathan's parable. "I have sinned against the Lord," he cried; and Nathan said: "The Lord hath taken away thy sin." But though the sin was forgiven, atonement had to be made, and a heavy punishment was inflicted.

How many there are like David, who may have sinned grievously, and like him also have wept bitter tears for their sin, crying out with him in the anguish of a truly contrite heart:

Peccatum meum contra me est semper - My sin is always before me.

And this although many years may have passed away since that dark hour when first they fell from grace. For who can measure the debt incurred by such a fall, quite apart from all those constantly recurring minor faults and sinful inclinations which are its miserable fruits? And how will such souls stand when death comes to weigh them in the scale of the awful exacting justice of Almighty God?

Then there are others who, though perhaps they never have rejected God so utterly, have nevertheless learnt by sad experience the weakness of our human nature in those daily falls and imperfections of which we think so little, but of which God necessarily thinks so much, and who may perhaps have suddenly been called away, without a moment for repentance. How must God treat them? If we except the little child who passes from this world in all the beauty of unsullied innocence, or the brave martyr who pours out his blood in one supreme and generous sacrifice, what must be the state of nearly every soul that quits this life in friendship and union with its Maker. It stands before His judgment seat, and for the first time realizes justice which is infinite. It sees the many follies of its life on earth, the countless faults and imperfections for which it never even grieved, the many others, sorrowed for it may be, and yet not fully expiated, the divine likeness in its being, which is its only claim to glory, so miserably disfigured and defaced. What fate could it expect save instant and eternal banishment, were justice only to be heard?

But mercy speaks as well, for in all God s works, says the Angelic Doctor, mercy and truth go hand in hand, or, as the inspired writer expresses it:

Mercy and truth are met together, justice and peace have kissed each other.

The soul passes from this world into the world of Purgatory, its stains are burnt away, its debts are fully paid, and the beauty of God's image is marvelously restored. Truly we have here a wonderful revelation of God and His attributes, and it is no exaggeration to say that without this dogma of our faith, belief in God would seem impossible. For not only does the teaching of the Church on this point reconcile these two grand attributes apparently so contradictory, but it goes further, and explains them in the fullest way.

We have already considered the light it throws upon God's justice, and its dealing with us, but as a revelation of God's mercy it is so wonderful that we may look upon it as its very masterpiece. For when we contemplate the world in which we live, and see and note the well-nigh universal triumph of the powers of evil; when, day by day, in a thousand different ways we are brought face to face with moral failure, and so realize - though ever so faintly - the utter forgetfulness of God in which the vast majority of His creatures seem to live, the sight of all this, the knowledge of all this, would surely extinguish our faith in God as the Almighty Ruler, our hope in Him as the Savior of mankind, our love of Him as a most tender Father, were it not for this creation of His mercy, where justice and mercy are so wonderfully blended. Purgatory is the solution of this most terrifying mystery. There, God wins back all that He seemed to lose in life, and the many defeats of time are more than compensated for by the great victory of eternity. There must be millions of souls who during life have wandered far from God, and yet have ever kept alive that little twinkling light of faith and reason which, even at the last hour, can show them how to find Him once again, and what we call a death-bed repentance, though always a miracle of mercy, must be a frequent source of joy to the angels of God. An old English writer expresses this very vividly in the well-known lines:

Between the stirrup and the ground
I mercy asked, I mercy found.

And it would not be just to call this a mere poetic exaggeration, for all that God wants is the beginning of the great work of grace, the conversion of the will, and purgatory will do the rest. We could not easily believe that one little act of contrition, imperfect perhaps in many ways, would have sufficient power to carry the sinner's soul into the glory of God's presence, but we can believe it strong enough to break the chains of sin, and make the soul God's friend, and then, in that mysterious world where sin becomes impossible, and grace triumphant, God repairs His handiwork, and fits it for a place in His eternal kingdom.

Souls must be saved, and the saved multiplied, and the heavenly banquet crowded, even if the constraints of fire be needed to anneal the hastier works of grace. Therefore is it that the vast realms of Purgatory are lighted up with the flames of vindictive love. Thus a huge amount of imperfect charity shall bring forth its thousands and its tens of thousands for heaven. Redemption shall cover the whole earth and be plentiful indeed, and the very unworthinesses and shortcomings of the creature shall only still more provoke the prodigality of the Blood of the Creator. Oh, the mercy of those cleansing fires! What could have devised them but a love that was almost beside itself for expedients?

And again, appealing to the very sufferings of Purgatory as a proof of God's wondrous mercy, the same writer continues:

The extreme severity of the punishments of Purgatory is a consideration which leads the mind to contemplate the immense multitude of the saved, and of those saved with very imperfect dispositions, as the only solution of these chastisements. Purgatory goes as near to the unriddling the riddle of the world as any one ordinance of God which can be named. [...] Now, does it come natural to us to look at all this system, this terrible eighth sacrament of fire, which is the home of those souls whom the seven real sacraments of earth have not been allowed to purify completely; does it come natural to us to look at it all as simply a penal machinery? [...] Does not the view at once recommend itself to us that it was an invention of God to multiply the fruit of our Savior's passion, that it was intended for the great multitudes who die in charity with God, but in imperfect charity, and therefore that it is, as it were, the continuance of death-bed mercies beyond the grave?

Let us, then, go down in spirit to that land of patient suffering, and contemplate the state of those most holy souls - holy, because incapable of sin, because so patient and resigned, because so precious in God's sight. It is quite possible, probable even, that many of them are bound to us by ties of blood and kindred, or the yet tenderer ties of love and friendship; once, perhaps, they shared the joys and sorrows of our lives, and helped us by their sympathy; for many reasons, therefore, we ought to feel compelled to do our best to find out all our faith can tell us of their state. Two things only has the Church defined in this most interesting subject, firstly, that there is a Purgatory, and secondly, that the souls therein detained are helped by our prayers and good works, but this implies enough to satisfy the most anxious inquirer, and with it as our groundwork, we may listen to what the Saints and Doctors of the Church can say by way of explanation.

It is quite true that, as a rule, the revelations of the Saints cannot be put forward as an argument, but the teaching of St. Catherine of Genoa on this subject is so solidly theological that we may be pardoned if we quote it here. In purgatory, she tells us, there is the extremity of suffering and the extremity of joy. The suffering is so great that no tongue can tell it, no mind can understand it, and on the other hand the joy is so abounding that there is nothing to compare with it, save the happiness of heaven. Moreover, it is a joy which is ever on the increase, as the separation between the soul and God is gradually destroyed. But this contentment does not take away the pain, for it is the retarding of love from the possession of its object which causes the pain, and the pain is greater according to the greater perfection of love, of which God has made the soul capable. Thus, the souls in purgatory have at once the greatest contentment and the greatest suffering, and the one in no way hinders the other.

A very little thought will show us how profoundly true and theological is this teaching. It puts before us joys and sorrows well-nigh unspeakable, and without appealing to the example of St. Paul and other Saints of God, who superabounded with joy in all their tribulations, our own little experience is sufficient to convince us of the possibility of a union of the two. We will take the sorrows first, because in our minds, the idea of suffering is always uppermost when we think of purgatory.

These holy souls suffer, and suffer most grievously. They are banished from God's presence at the very moment when, for the first time, they appreciate Him as He deserves. The heart of man was made for God, and God alone can satisfy its boundless power of love. In this life, many things combine to lead it far astray, and make it seek elsewhere the good for which it was created; but when death comes, and, for the first time, all created things must stand aside, the soul sees the truth, and with a passionate longing craves for that union which alone can make it blessed. But there is a barrier in the way. With that first mighty act of love there comes the realization of sin, the bitterness of separation which it involves, and the anguish of that "hope deferred, which maketh the heart sick." St. Thomas maintains that this suffering is far beyond all that we can feel or imagine in this life. It is, he explains, of a twofold nature, the pain of loss, which is the postponement of the sight of God, and the pain of sense, by which we understand the punishment of fire, and in both respects, says the Angelic Doctor, the least pain of purgatory exceeds the sharpest pain we could be called on to endure in this life. For the more intensely we long for anything, the more keenly do we feel its loss; and because the longing of these holy souls for Him who is their highest good is most intense, since the time for enjoying it has come, and there is nothing to distract the mind in any way, the anguish of their disappointment is unspeakable. So also with regard to what we call the pain of sense. It is altogether dependent on, and in proportion to, our sensibility, and hence it is that mental sufferings are worse than bodily, and any pain which acts directly on the soul itself, the source and cause of all sensibility, must of necessity be the keenest pain of all. Once we understand the two-fold cause of purgatory - the loving torment of unsatisfied desire for God, and the vivid realization of the horror of sin - we need say no more about the intensity of its sufferings. Cardinal Newman most perfectly and most beautifully expresses the same teaching in his Dream of Gerontius:

When then - if such thy lot - thou seest thy Judge,

The sight of Him will kindle in thy heart

All tender, gracious, reverential thoughts.

Thou wilt be sick with love, and yearn for Him,

And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself, for though

Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinned

As never thou didst feel, and wilt desire

To slink away and hide thee from His sight,

And yet will have a longing aye to dwell

Within the beauty of His countenance.

And these two pains, so counter and so keen,

The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not,

The shame of self at thought of seeing Him,

Wilt be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory.

So the work of expiation is gradually accomplished. How long it takes, God only knows; but with fixed, unwavering patience, the holy souls endure it all, lonely, though in the midst of such a multitude, in intensest silence, since their thoughts are not for words to utter, incapable of forgetfulness, or even of one poor solitary distraction, their whole being throbbing and pulsating with the fiery burning of a longing love, compared with which all other fire is but a painted imitation, ever waiting for the hour when suffering shall have done its cleansing work, and God's angels come to call them to their home of everlasting rest.

And this leads us to the joys of Purgatory, for, as we said, it is a land where joy goes hand in hand with sorrow, and the first and most abundant source of joy is to be found in this sure hope and certain knowledge of their final deliverance. For when the waiting seems most wearisome, when the keen fire thrills them through and through with anguish, when their whole being seems upon the point of being drowned in bitterness, there sounds within their souls the music of an angel's whisper:

Confortetur cor tuum, et sustine Dominum - Let thy heart be comforted, and wait for the Lord.

These words are the conclusion of the twenty-sixth Psalm, and seem to come as an inspired answer to the beautiful acts of hope of which the psalm is full, so that we might almost call it the Psalm of the Holy Souls:

The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the protector of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?

My enemies that troubled me have themselves been weakened and are fallen.

One thing have I asked of the Lord, this will I seek after,

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

My heart hath said to Thee, my face hath sought Thee, Thy face, O Lord, will I seek.

Hide not Thy face from me, and turn not away in anger from Thy servant.

Be Thou my helper, forsake me not, do not Thou despise me, God my Saviour.

I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.

And oh, the flood of joy and happiness unspeakable which sweeps through these sorely tried souls at this thought:

Credo videre bona Domini - I believe, I know, that I shall see the good things of the Lord!

The certainty of heaven! Could any suffering neutralize a joy like that? But there is another joy to be found in the sufferings themselves, because of the clear understanding the holy souls have of them, their knowledge of their work and purpose, and the loving resignation with which they accept them. They are the means ordained by God for the breaking down of the barriers sin has raised, by them they are enabled to pay back the debt they have incurred, even to the very last farthing, and hence they submit to them most willingly. St. Catherine of Genoa writes:

When the soul, separated from the body, finds itself wanting in requisite purity, and sees in itself an impediment which cannot be taken away except by purgatory, it at once throws itself into it with right good will. Nay, if it did not find this ordinance of purgatory, aptly contrived for the removal of this hindrance, there would instantly be born in it a hell far worse than purgatory, inasmuch as it would see that because of this impediment, it could never get to God, who is its End. Wherefore, if the soul could find another purgatory fiercer than this, in which it could the sooner get rid of this impediment it would speedily plunge itself therein, because of the impetuosity of the love it bears to God.

Here again we may turn to the beautiful poem of Newman above quoted, and in the exquisite lines in which he expresses the feeling of the soul at the judgment seat, we may trace once more the marvelous identity of thought between the Italian saint and the great English cardinal:

Take me away, and, in the lowest deep,

There let me be.

And there, in hope, the lone night watches keep,

Told out for me.

There, motionless and happy in my pain,

Lone, not forlorn,

There will I sing my sad perpetual strain

Until the morn.

There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast,

Which ne'er can cease

To throb and pine and languish, till possess'd

Of its sole peace!

There will I sing my absent Lord and Love.

Take me away,

That sooner I may rise and go above,

And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.

Each moment, as we have said, sees the sufferings lessen and the joys increase. The brightest jewel in the world, to borrow a striking comparison from St. Catherine, cannot reflect the sunlight, if it be hidden beneath a coating of impurities, but as these are cleansed away, it manifests its brightness more and more, until at last we see it in its perfect beauty. So is it with the soul in the cleansing fires of purgatory. Its earthly stains are gradually destroyed, and when at last the work is done, God draws it to Himself, and being brought face to face with Him it is made like to Him and shines with the brightness of His glory.

Such then is the dogma of Purgatory, most beautiful, most reasonable and most consoling. For us it has a practical conclusion which we must not overlook, for the Church has also defined that these most holy souls are helped by our prayers, and we cannot refuse that help unless we are utterly wanting in generous love of our neighbor, in zeal for God's glory, and in care for our own interests. We have seen how they are suffering, and how God longs to give them rest, eternal rest, and justice bars the way. Therefore He turns to us, and placing in our hands the boundless treasures of His atonement, He begs us, out of love for Him and pity for those souls, to pay their many debts. That is our share in the beautiful Communion of Saints, and its reward is something hard to put in words, though faith can well imagine it, the unending gratitude of a ransomed soul. Hush for a while the many noises and distractions of a sinful, disappointing world, and with ears quickened by faith, listen to the grand harmonious song for ever going up before the throne of God from all His children, the hymn of the Communion of Saints: the voice of the Church Suffering, patient and pleading:

Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath touched me.

The voice of the Church Militant, tender and compassionate:

Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

The voice of the Church Triumphant, ringing with gratitude and conscious power: 

Vouchsafe, Lord, for Thy name's sake, to reward with eternal life all them that have done us good.