Perspectives on Hell

Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore

 

Dante, Inferno

 

From the gravity of hell we must infer the grandeur of man.

 

Frithjof Schuon

 

 

Having already on several occasions spoken about the Divine Mercy, or the ‘right Pillar’ of divine attributes more generally, we want to briefly turn our attention to the ‘left Pillar’, namely to that of ‘Severity’ or ‘Judgement’ (which according to Böhme even ‘precedes’ that of divine Love!), and talk about the notion of Hell, the existence of which (although denied today by all kinds of modernists on purely sentimental grounds) is clearly testified by Holy Tradition and the Divine Oracles.

 

Since the topic of Hell is notoriously a difficult one (for “to pass beyond the human state is not to be described in words”, Paradiso I.70) and one not often fully understood, it seems prudent to start with some preliminary remarks to clarify a few important points.

 

First let it be clear that noone, not even the greatest Saint to ever walk this earth, is in any way ‘owed’ salvation. We are strictu sensu ‘nothing’ and as such are owed absolutely nothing. If we had even the slightest idea of the infinite Holiness of the Lord and could see our own wretchedness for what it really is, we should quickly realize that in fact we all deserve to be thrown into the lake “that burns with fire and sulfur” (Rev. 20:10), which is “prepared for the Devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41). Salvation is always a pure gift of the infinite Mercy of God*, a gift that He who is Goodness itself offers to every single one of us, even the most wretched of sinners, but which none of us deserve, for “all have sinned in Adam” (Rom. 5:12).

 

*[This is already indicated by the fact that His ‘Judgement’ (which, kabbalistically speaking, is Din or Geburah, as the ‘left arm’ of Adam Kadmon) pertains to the ‘left Pillar’, the left hand denoting ‘passivity’ in all traditional cultures, whereas the ‘right hand’, His ‘Mercy’, which is also the “strong right arm of YHWH” the prophets talk about (cf. for example Ps. 44:3, 981:1, 118:16, or Is. 41:10, 63:12) pertains to the ‘active’ aspect. We could say that it is the right hand that ‘gathers’, that ‘raises up’ and ‘blesses’ and the left hand that ‘scatters’ and ‘strikes down’ (a notion that is likewise found in the iconographies of most world religions). “He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. And He will say to those on His left: Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire” (Matt. 25:31, 41). This symbolism is also present in almost all depictions of the Last Judgement (we need only to point to the famous piece by Van der Weyden, where above the ‘raised’ right hand is shown the ‘laurel of immortality’ and above the ‘lowered’ left hand the ‘sword of judgement’). In short: it is in fact His Mercy which corresponds to the active intervention on the side of God, whereas ‘damnation’ is the (un-)natural state of man ever since the fall, meaning also that ultimately everyone judges themselves (“for God did not sent His Son to judge the world but to save it”, Joh. 12:47)]

 

Having said this, we should also clarify what ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ even are.  Now, it needs to be stressed emphatically that ‘sin’ (just as ‘virtue’)^[2] is not be conceived of as a purely ‘moral’ affair (as if God would somehow take ‘moral offense’ at our trespasses and, turning his nose, deny us entry into His eternal Kingdom simply on ‘ethical grounds’). This is a common conception found in Protestantism and western Christianity in general, especially ever since the (soi-disant) “Enlightenment” not seldom succeeded in hollowing out religion to a matter of ‘morality’ alone, which simply amounts to a humanistic distortion, the effects of which are felt to this day. God is not a bourgeois, neither is He a moralist and sin is thus not be conceived of as merely an ‘ethical’ but rather an ontological reality, meaning it is ultimately not something that we ‘do’, but something we are. This is also why it profits nothing to “just be a good person” in order to attain salvation; an idea much repeated today, but which is really nothing but naturalism plain and simple. As St. Seraphim reminds us:

 

Mark my words, only good deeds done for Christ's sake brings us the fruits of the Holy Spirit. All that is not done for Christ's sake, even though it be good, brings neither reward in the future life nor the grace of God in this life. That is why our Lord Jesus Christ said: ‘He who does not gather with Me scatters’ … Acquiring the Spirit of God is the true aim of our Christian life, while prayer, fasting, almsgiving and other good works done for Christ's sake are merely means for acquiring the Spirit of God

Some say that the lack of oil in the lamps of the foolish virgins (cf. Matt. 25) means a lack of good deeds in their lifetime. Such an interpretation is not quite correct … These virgins practiced the virtues, but in their spiritual ignorance they supposed that the Christian life consisted merely in doing good works. By doing a good deed they thought they were doing the work of God, but they cared little whether they acquired the grace of God's Spirit. These ways of life, based merely on doing good, without carefully testing whether they bring the grace of the Spirit of God, are mentioned in the patristic books: ‘There is another way which is deemed good in the beginning, but ends at the bottom of Hell’ (On Acquisition of the Holy Spirit).

 

“Accumulate capital from the superabundance of God's grace and deposit it in God's eternal bank”, the Saint tells us, and he who does not acquire this “eternal, inexhaustible treasure, which is priceless” will forever stay a beggar. If we do not have the Spirit in us and don’t unite all our works to God we are truly the poorest of men: “Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders work in vain” (Ps. 127). What is needed is théôsis, not just being a “good person” but to enter into communion with the Good itself (auto to Agathon), for the Father knows only His beloved Son and if He isn’t found it us we will not be able to stand in the sigh of God – “Depart from me, I know ye not!” (Matt. 7:23). [3]  

 

Now the notion of Hell obviously cannot be understood apart from the notion of sin and since the ‘last things’ are inextricably linked with the ‘beginning’, we have to start, as it were, in principio, by elaborating a bit on the very ‘first sin’, that ‘primordial crime’ without which there could not be any talk of ‘Judgement’ whatsoever.

 

St. Thomas Aquinas once stated that whatever we believe about creation determines what we believe about God (“for errors concerning creation spill over into false opinions about God”, Contra Gentiles, II.3.6). This applies not only to our idea of God as ‘Creator’ (which is why all kinds of ‘theistic evolutionisms’ have to be rejected) but also to that of God as ‘Judge’, and while we thus have to fully agree with St. Thomas on this assessment, we nevertheless have to note that the teachings of the Common Doctor on the topic of creation (which often diverge quite substantially from the teachings handed down to us by the Holy Fathers, being not seldom tainted by an excessive Aristotelianism) have not contributed little to usher in the kind of naturalism that has consequentially also led to distorted conceptions of Hell and Judgement.

 

Many have accused St. Thomas of an all too absolutizing separation of ‘nature’ and ‘super-nature’, however it seems as if the notion of ‘pure nature’ (pura natura) which lies at the heart of all these discussions, is not so much to blame on St. Thomas himself, but more so on his early modern commentators who not seldom mixed the wine of sound doctrine with the poisoned water of Scotist nominalism and other falsities, eventually leading to such aberrations as Cartesian dualism.[4]

 

Nevertheless the roots of this are undoubtedly present in Thomas’ teachings on creation itself; we need only to mention his idea that (animal) death existed before the Fall, yea, that man himself was created “naturally corruptible” only being preserved from death by a “supernatural grace given by God” (cf. S.Th. I.98), which is a doctrine not only universally rejected by all of the Holy Fathers, but Holy Scripture as well, which unanimously proclaims that “man was created incorruptible” (Wis. 2:23) and that “death came with the Fall” (cf. Gen. 2:16-17, 3:19-22, Rom. 5:12-21, and 1. Cor. 15).

 

Against all such ‘naturalistic’ notions we have to hold, in accordance with not only the Holy Fathers but also true gnostics like Erigena and Böhme, that the world as it is now is not as it was in its primordial state, and that (what we perceive as) ‘nature’, the nature which feeds on death and decay (Stirb und Werde!) and which is prone to all kinds of corruption, is in fact unnatural.

 

Sexual propagation in the manner of the irrational beasts; bodily increase and decrease; all the diseases to which the body is heir, including its final dissolution; also the irrational impulses to which the rational soul is subject, and which, deriving from matter, revolve about it. None of these things are part of the primal creation of man, but originate from his general sin (Periphyseon, V.940).

 

Sin is not merely a ‘stripping away’ of something that was ‘added’ (super) to nature but indeed the fall away from nature itself, an utter corruption of the natural order (vulnerata non deleta!). It is like a universal disease; a cancer that, through man, entered all of creation and changed it in a profound (ontological) manner (“This whole world is on fire”, says the Buddha).^[5]

 

Thus for example Böhme and Erigena tell us, that not only death, but even ‘gross’ materiality or the ‘elemental world’ (and with it the whole of ‘time and space’ as we experience it now) is a result of the Fall. Likewise some of the Holy Fathers taught that man had been created with an incorruptible, spiritual (or rather: ‘subtle’) body, and that in illo tempore even all the animals were herbivores and thus not subjected to the ‘samsaric’ cycle of death and becoming (“the panthers and the lions were nourished by fruits”, says St. Basil in his Hexaemeron, “and the vultures were not yet hovering over the earth, for nothing in existence had yet died, and there were no carcasses for them to eat”).

 

Now of course these are only ‘images’, for we cannot imagine what creation in its natural state was really like, but they nevertheless give us an idea of the severity of sin and the profound effects it had on all of creation; as such they help us to at least begin to understood the ‘abyss’ that sin really; an abyss that is hardly fathomable for us sinful creatures, but the depth of which is ‘revealed’ to us by the skándalon of the Cross: Sin is the death of God, His crucifixion, an utter denial of His infinite Goodness.

 

Yea, even on the chance of sounding heretical, we might say that is so radical a negation of God that it even ‘limits’ His Omnipotence. God has no power over sin, for He is the One-who-is, the Good itself, and sin is (according to perennial Church Tradition) the pure privation of being, a mere absence of good, a complete and utter nothingness and as such His ultimate antithesis (and what stronger testimony to this fact than the bloody sweat of Gethsemane? The cry of Him-who-is, confronted with the abyss of non-being – “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”).

 

This is not be understood as positing a kind of Manichean dualism, for evil being simply a pure nothing, it cannot be in any way an ‘opposing principle’ which would of course be ridiculous. Even the Devil stands under the dominion of the Almighty One, he is “on a leash”, as the Saints tell us, but not insofar as he ‘evil’, but only insofar he is, retaining yet his ‘substantial’ goodness in which he was originally created. Everything that is is good, and if the Devil were ‘pure evil’ he simply would not be, for evil has no substantial being whatsoever, but is a mere corruption, a ‘parasite’, that always needs a ‘host’ to sustain and manifest itself [6]. God has power over all the “principalities and powers” (Eph. 6:12) no matter how corrupted, but He cannot have any power of ‘evil’ itself, for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist.

 

Thus, in his treatise De divina praedestinatione, Erigena even goes so far as to state that God, the Omniscient One, “does not know evil”. He doesn’t know evil because it doesn’t exist, being only the corruption of good; and God, being infinite Goodness itself, not (fore-)knowing evil, likewise means that He does not ‘predestine’ anyone to Hell properly speaking – “Sin, death, and punishment are a deficiency of justice, life, and happiness; therefore they are not for Him who is” (ibid. XV). ^[7]

 

This does not however mean that the sinner is totally removed from the knowledge of God, which would be simply impossible, because if he wouldn’t be ‘known’ by God he simply wouldn’t ‘be’, esse est percipi (likewise, if evil was ‘known’ by God, it would by necessity possess some kind of being for suum intelligere est suum esse).

 

He knows their substances, and everything which He created in them, and which subsists in Him. But He is altogether ignorant of what is added as a result of their perverse motions, which is accidental to that nature which takes its substance from Him. For whatsoever He did not create is wholly alien to His knowledge (Periphyseon. V.926).

 

God doesn’t know sin because He is not the creator of evil; it is in a sense ‘uncaused’, originating entirely in the ‘perverse motions’ of the creaturely will, and this is also why, according to St. Maximus, God has to become man to mend this ontological schism by ‘rectifying’ human will (Non mea voluntas sed tua fiat!), thus reconciling Creator and creature and bridging the chasm that was thrown open by sin.

 

Sin is an abyss, a radical negativity, and as such it is not for Him who is the purissima affirmatio and it seems we’re also catching a glimpse here into the mystery of the Cross; why Gethsemane and Golgotha were not only ‘fitting’ but indeed necessary. For is not this the whole logic of the redemptive work of Christ? To defeat sin God has to know sin, and to know sin God has to become man (“He was made sin for us, who knew no sin”, 2. Cor. 5:21); to defeat the devil He has to resist him in the desert and to defeat death He has Himself to die, which is the ‘death of death’ leading to eternal life (O vita, mors mortis!) – “O death, where is thy sting? O hell, where is thy victory?” (1. Cor. 15:55).

 

For God, to know is to be and to be is to know. To know sin is therefore to bring it to its conclusion, to realize it in all of its negativity, to lead it to its objective that is death. From the beginning of time this cup waited to be drunk, and it had to be drunk to the dregs. All men have drenched their lips, but none have drunk to the last drop. The Passion of Jesus Christ is the truth of sin (Borella, La Charité profanée, XXI.3.2).

 

God doesn’t know evil, we’ve said, because it originates in the ‘perverse will’ of the creature; and this is also why we say that ‘God has no power of evil’, for our will is radically free; so free in fact, that we can choose to separate us eternally from Him who has “loved from before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

 

“God desires the salvation of all” (1. Tim. 2:4), but salvation (like love) does not depend on God alone (which is also why God cannot just ‘snap his finger’ to forgive all sins), but always requires the accordance of two wills^[8], human and divine (hence why monothelitism was justly condemned as a Christological heresy) and anyone that earnestly desires to be saved shall certainly not be lost (“Wer immer strebend sich bemüht / Den können wir erlösen”, sing the angels during Faust’s apotheosis).

 

It is not God (who is “as close the Devil as to the highest Seraphim”, as Silesius writes) that turns away from the sinner but rather the sinner turning his back unto God, such that there is always hope for him who lives ad orientem (or versus Deum).

“Hell is locked from the insight”, C.S. Lewis famously said, and if we chose to close the door on which He knocks unceasingly, even God and with His Omnipotence cannot open it. He is the humblest of beggars, that constantly holds out His hand for us to grab it, but it is us who spit in His face and walk off into the ‘pit that we have dug ourselves’. He is the ‘Vine of Life’ yet it is us who willingly ‘cut of the branch on which we sit’.

 

God cannot force anyone to love Him who is Love itself; for love that is not freely chosen is simply not love at all; and this being the case, it is simply a fact that Hell does not exist ‘despite’ God being Love but precisely because He is Love. For love presupposes free will and free will always necessitates the possibility of rejection.

 

In so far as the world is different from God, it has, as it were, its roots in nothingness; it necessarily includes a God-denying element, and the boundless extent of Divine Love is revealed precisely in the fact that it even permits this denying of God and grants it existence. Thus the existence of the infernal possibilities depends upon Divine Love, while at the same time these possibilities are judged through Divine Justice as the negation that indeed they are (Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect, V).

 

This is why Dante is right in stating that Hell was not only made by ‘Justice’, but also by “supreme Wisdom and primordial Love” (la somma sapienza e ’l primo amore): Hell is because God is Love.

 

Because God is Love He creates (bonum est diffusivum sui), pouring out His infinite Goodness to share Himself with an ‘other’, but the existence of any ‘other’ insofar it is ‘other’ (in possession of its own will, radically autonomous from God) existence always entails the possibility of Hell (or of ‘evil’, ‘sin’, ‘death’, ‘punishment’ etc. which, according to Erigena, are ultimately all the exact same thing).

 

“Noone is good but God alone” (Mk. 10:18); God alone is absolutely perfect, every contingent being, no matter how exalted, must by necessity contain the possibility of imperfection.^[9] Only God is One and everything in existence is necessarily ‘double’^[10] (essence/existence, potentia/actus, hyle/morphe etc.), every creature is “tainted by the shadow of nothingness” as Meister Eckhart says [11], and it if weren’t at least potentially so it simply could not ‘exist’ at all.

 

Any world in time and space, or that could be described in words or by mathematical symbols, must be one of contraries, both quantitative and qualitative … and even if it could be otherwise, a world without these opposites would be one from which all possibility of choice, and of procedure from potentiality to act, would be excluded (A.K. Coomaraswamy, Who is ‘Satan’?).[12] 

 

This virtual possibility of imperfection or ‘evil’ (the ‘backside’ of creation, if you will), of ‘fractured unity’ (or duality) is symbolized in Scripture by the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ and there is a Tree of Knowledge in every possible paradise – Omnes vita a verme.^[13]

 

Under one aspect the ‘Tree of Life’ corresponds to the vertical axis and the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ to the periphery. This is also indicated to us in holy Scripture itself, for the gematric sum of the “Tree of Life” (Etz ha-Chaim) is 233, whereas that of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” (Etz ha-Daath tow Wera) is 932, these standing in an exact relation of 1:4 (233x4 = 932), the four (4) representing, as we have pointed out before (cf. here), the furthest ‘development’ of the one (1) according to traditional numerology.^[14]

 

This ‘development’ of the possibilities contained in primordial oneness is really what the sin of Adam essentially is. He wanted to ‘taste’ multiplicity, to know good and evil, and to see what it’d be like for the paradisiacal unity to become differentiated, thus turning away from God unto the ten thousand things of this world. As Böhme tells us:

 

The soul (of Adam) was smitten with (vergaffte sich) the Creation of the formed Word in its Divisibility (Schiedlichkeit) and became aware of its own Power (or ‘Possibility’) to Divisibility,  so that it rose up in a longing after this divisibility and distinction … For the soul wanted to taste what it would be like if the Temperature became differentiated, viz. how heat and cold, as also dry and moist, hard and soft, harsh and sweet, bitter and soul, and all the other qualities would relish, which yet God had forbidden to him (De Electione, VI.33, III.34).

 

We might use the image of a periphery radiating outwards from the primordial point to describe this ‘explication’, the ‘unleashing’ of the ‘infernal possibilities’ upon all of creation caused by a separation from the Supernal Principle.^[15] Adam’s desire to ‘develop’ ends with his Fall away from the One and into dispersion and fragmentation, an indefinite spiraling outwards towards the ‘outer darkness’, and in this distancing from the Good itself, ‘evil’ emerges as its ‘shadow’ (i.e. as a function of the alienation from the ‘Divine Sun’ and the corresponding ‘diminution’ of its luminous rays). Having thus lost his ‘centre’, Adam is doomed to circle indefinitely around the circumference (bhâvachakra, the ‘round of existence’) if not for a spiritual metanoia (and we could say that, whereas God has been described as the “sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere”, Hell appears here as the indefinite ‘periphery without centre’).

 

However this image of original sin as explicatio is not without risk of conflating creation and Fall like already the so-called gnostics did. Every manifestation is ‘peripheral’ from the point of view of the Supreme Principle, however (as the pre-lapsian state of creation testifies) not every manifestation is inherently evil (in fact as could be argued every ‘point’ requires such a periphery as its perfection and outward ‘glory’). The Fall should thus not so much be conceived of as the explication of a periphery but rather as a ‘loss of Centre’, the separation of manifestation from its Principle (‘sin’ = ‘rending asunder’).

 

It was Adam, the vertical/central being, who, by virtue of his theomorphic nature, had hitherto ‘bound back’ the Edenic plane to God. Being positioned at the “still point of the turning world”, he acted as “a little god in his own world” (Leibniz), the chakravartin (‘turner of the wheel’) who kept all peripheral points in in a harmonious equilibrium, assigning to each being its intended place or situs (“Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field”, Gen. 2:20). [16]

 

For every being is ‘posited’ by God (even Being itself is posited by Non-being as its affirmation or its positivity), meaning to every being is assigned a specific ‘position’ in the universal order of things as established in the Divine Wisdom, and this ‘position’ (Setzung) is also the ‘law’ (Gesetz) of each being and only in fulfilling this ‘law’, i.e. in conforming to its ordained situs, can a being be what it ‘really is’ (i.e. fully actualize the potential inherent in its essence).

 

Thus actus is dependent on its situs and situs on actus, meaning also that Adam can only occupy his central position by ‘acting out’ his mediatory ministry and vice versa (the breakdown of this dynamism being the genesis of ‘inertia’). [17] Once he ‘breaks the law’ and falls away from this office, not only is he displaced from his central situs (at least ‘existentially’, for ‘essentially’ the imago Dei can obviously never be effaced from human nature as such) to a peripheral (dis-)position , but also all peripheral points, having lost their centre, fall ‘out of temperature’ into atomistic dispersion (like the whole building collapses once the key-stone is removed or like a bundle of sticks becoming dispersed into individuality and separation once the uniting ‘band’ has been cut), each becoming its own illusory centre thus inaugurating the bellum omnium contra omnes.^[18]

 

Here too the saying that si pater in filio, filio in matre holds true, for as long as Adam is obedient or ‘submissive’ (untergeordnet, i.e ‘ordered under’ God) to his Father, his mother (the ‘earth’ and by extension all creatures taken from the adâmâh) will be submissive to him, from which we also see how man, the ‘king of creation’, becomes the ‘playing ball of nature’ once he sins against his Principle. As St. John Damascene tells us:

 

At that time (when all was still in harmonious mediation by the Adamic centre) the earth brought forth of itself fruits for the use of the animals that were subject to man, and there was neither violent rains upon the earth nor wintry storms. But after the Fall, ‘when he was compared to senseless beasts and was become like them’ (i.e. when Adam fell away from his central state so that equilibrium was lost and the autonomous centres diverged into violent conflict with each other) … then the creation subject to him rose up against his ruler appointed by the Creator” (De fide, II.10).

 

Instead of binding the periphery of the ‘duplicitous’ world back to its unitive Centre (1-2-1), he detached it from it, thereby throwing it into dispersion (1-2-4).

 

All evil appears thus to be the result of a ‘displacement’ (dérangement or metastasis) of things out of their natural order, an inversion of the existential hierarchy (Verkehrtheit), which inhibits from actualizing their natural perfection (this lack or ‘deficiency’ of actualitas being of course how the medieval schoolmen define evil as such) – motus in loco placidus, extra locum turbidus (or as Baader says: Bösesein ist nur eine Verrückung aus dem rechten Orte). [19]

 

The notion that Adam’s ‘sublimity’ (Erhabenheit) over creation depends on his ‘submissiveness’ (Demut) to God already points us to an alternative (albeit not contradictory) reading of the two paradisiacal Trees, according to which it is actually both Trees that corresponds to the vertical axis (for, as Scripture tells us, even the Tree of Knowledge is located “at the centre of the garden”; Gen. 2:9).^[20]

 

The Tree of Life thus represents the ‘ascending’ axis, the ‘upwards’ movement of obedience and adoration (or ‘admiration’), the Tree of Knowledge the ‘descending’ one corresponding to the ‘downwards’ movement of revolt and disobedience (i.e. towards the quantitative pole of dispersion). [21]  According to this perspective then, by ‘eating of the Tree’ Adam actualizes this descending aspect of axis mundi, thereby opening the ‘gates of hell’ (the janua inferni, the ‘reversion’ of which is Mary as janua coeli, who is “conceived without sin”: Sumens illud ‘Ave’, mutans Evae nomen).

 

As we have seen ‘evil’ or ‘sin’ amounts to a total privation or ‘failure’ of being and thus an actualization or ‘revealing’ (entbergen) of the nothingness eternally concealed at the very bottom of creation, the ‘outer darkness’ out of which all is drawn and which everything is in constant in danger of collapsing back into, if not perpetually ‘flung out of non-being’ (jaillir hors du néant) by God in the creatio continua.  

 

As soon as the dike of being had been breached by the act of the Fall, nonbeing poured into the world and flooded all that exists: death became the universal and last enemy (Bulgakov, Unfading Light, II.2.4).

 

This ‘stooping down’ or ‘succumbing’ to malefic verticality (which is exactly what Baader calls Niedertracht as the original sin of Adam) can also be interpreted as an movement away from the Infinite (the qualitative pole of essence) towards the ‘lower waters’ of quantity, a ‘turning away’ from the radiant Face of the Lord towards the ‘backside’ of creation, and in this turning away Adam, who was called to be a mirror (passive receptivity) and channel (active receptivity) of the divine Light, is stripped naked off his ‘luminous garments’ and falls into darkness, plunging the whole cosmos down with him.

 

This ‘mirror’ is also the intellect and in fact what is this ‘actualization’ of the dark, mute foundation of existence other than an act of knowing. Such is the ‘fruit’ that grew on that fateful Tree, the knowledge of this ‘nothingness’, ‘limitation’, or potentia, that lies at the backside of each creature, i.e. its finiteness.

 

This is of course not to say that finitude is inherently bad, for as we said above, it is in fact the very condition for the existence of all created goods and as such even constitutive for their perfection (the perfection of a square lies precisely in its limitation by four equal sides; an ‘infinite square’ is an absurdity, just as an ‘infinite creature’ is a contradictio in adjecto). However this knowledge of the finite is (for the pre-lapsarian Adam) as it were ‘transfigured’, veiled and redeemed by the divine Light (cf. also Borella, Problèmes de Gnose, XXII). He looks ‘up’ to the radiant Face of the Holy One and knows himself and creation qua participation in the Divine Knowing in which he is clothed with the ‘garments of light’ that cover his nakedness. Only the perfect Gnosis of God can know the finite without ‘falling’, for in it the finitude of the finite is infinitely surpassed (or aufgehoben). As St. Dionysius tells us:

 

In knowing Itself the Divine Wisdom knows all material things after an immaterial mode, and all divided things after an indivisible mode, and the many as One, knowing all things and bringing them forth in Himself, Who is One (De Div. Nom. VII).

 

Thus God’s knowledge of the finite (of the ‘backside’ of things), His ‘stooping down’ to creation, is also the very knowledge by which He creates, a knowledge that is as such proper to God alone and, as it were, ‘veiled’ from the creature. Evil does not coincide with finiteness per se (as many soi-disants gnostics both ancient and modern liked to think) but with knowing the finite ‘after a finite mode’, i.e. as separated from God, for in the Divine Knowing the finitude of creation is not in any way opposed to the supreme Goodness (“And God saw that it was good!”). [22]

 

“The principle of evil is the abstraction from the Oneness of God”, says Baader, and this abstract, ‘closed-off’ knowledge which wants to possess its object for itself alone is exactly the ‘fruit’ the old serpent tempts Eve with. Alas! “man has  become like Us, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22), but the knowledge of duality leads not to his deification (as the serpent promised) but rather to his falling away from the One and into animal nature.

 

However this ‘closing off’ can never be complete; the mirror of intellect is ‘darkened’ by its fall into the psyche but not destroyed. In fact all knowledge of the finite as such presupposes a certain participation in the infinite, an ‘opening’ (spiraculum vitae) of the creature towards God. Such is the very nature of the ‘limit’, for every limit can only be known a position of its own transcendence, which is also why is Baader rightly in saying that if man wasn’t created for Eternity, he wouldn’t be aware of time (“time is metastasis”) and if the intellect wasn’t created for knowing God (visio beatifica) it wouldn’t know the limitation of the finite.

 

In turning to the ‘backside’ of creation, Adam is seduced into knowing the ‘inside’ of things, into ‘developing’ their indefinite possibilities (or ‘instantiations’), and this indefinitude – the finite’s potential for seeing itself as possessing infinite power – is exactly the big lie which lies at the heart of sin.[23]

 

For the indefinite is analytically inexhaustible. The smallest segment of a straight line, however finite, is indefinitely divisible and will never be exhausted by such a division. And this is true for the totality of created things. Sin consists precisely in involving humanity in this analytical grasp of the created, by which it pretends to discover in finite beings this false infinity of the indefinite (Borella, Sense of the Supernatural, IX).

 

And this is also one way to understand the perpetuity of Hell, as an indefinite plunge into the infernal abyss (Condamné à la fausse infinite; C’est là l’enfer même, Weil), a descent towards an empty and indeterminate ‘lowest point’ that can never be ‘grasped’ (Ad nihilum nil posse reverti), for nothing that was brought forth by the eternal Word can ever fully perish.^[24]

 

In no way can it ever get to the end, i.e. to full realization, for all the forces of the world cannot eradicate the creative Fiat which rests on each creature … We have the roots of our being in eternity and it does not life in our power to tear them out (Bulgakov, Op. cit).

 

God does not take back his words, not a single one (even the devils in the lowest hell still participate in His Being: “If I make my bed in Hades, lo! Thou art there”, Ps. 139), for He is the ‘good shepherd’ who even sends His Word into this fallen world, into the lowest pits (descendit ad infernos), the very ‘edge of being’, to save His lost sheep out of the maws of nothingness.

 

Only God can redeem us from this vanity, only He who alone is the Infinite can exhaust the indefinite and truly ‘fulfill’ the finite (“Come to Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest”, Matt. 11:28).

 

It seems we are approaching here a conception of Hell as an indefinite fall into the ‘infraformal’ states, towards the pole of non-being, a fall that can never be fully terminated (for “non-being is not”), like the indefinite convergence of hyperbola and asymptote

 

The torments of Hell (Tantalusqualen) are thus essentially ‘privation’, a maximal distancing from Him who is Goodness, Being and Bliss itself,  “the punishment of perpetual destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might” (2. Thess. 1:9), bound in the “chains of gloomy darkness” (2. Pet. 2:4).

 

This conception seems to bear some similarities with that of the Eastern Traditions in which Hell (or rather: the ‘hells’, for there are many, just as there are many different ‘heavens’; “My Father's house has many rooms”, Joh. 14:2) corresponds to the ‘lower states’ or ‘realms’ of the being (bhavachakra), the ‘human state’ (which is “hard to attain”, according to the Buddha) being conceived of as a ‘central state’, from which ascension to the ‘higher realms’ (heavens) or even ‘liberation’ (moksha, nirvana) is possible. 

 

While the amount of time potentially spent in these ‘hells’  adds up to “a really long time” (incomprehensibly long in fact, we might even say ‘indefinite’) it is not strictly speaking ‘eternal’, for, belonging to the realm ‘manifestation’ (samsâra), they are necessarily ‘relative’ and can never be truly ‘ultimate’. As such it is said, that even the lowest hell contains a ‘drop’ (bindu) of heaven and that the highest heaven is likewise not totally empty of hell. In a sense heaven and hell being part of creation (in which omnia duplica), they presuppose one another like ying and yang, and the one couldn’t be without the other.

 

We find a similar notion in Islam, especially among the Sufis, who hold that “the fires of Hell will one day grow cold”, as one hadîth tells us, for “everything is perishable except the Face of Allah” (Quran 28:88); an idea also present in some of the early Fathers, most notably Origen.

 

This is also where the notion of the ‘two Paradises’ comes into play; the first Paradise (the Brahma-loka of the Hindus) pertaining to manifestation (and which is “a prison for the gnostic”, according to a Sufi saying) and the second one, the ‘Paradise of Essence’ (Jannat adh-Dhât), corresponding to moksha or nirvana (which amounts to an ‘extinguishing’ of all individual and ‘formal’ states).

 

Even if Hell is seen here as somehow ‘indefinite’, it is not strictly speaking ‘eternal’ (eternality only pertaining to God alone, hence why also many Christian theologians have spoken of a ‘derived eternity’), and there is certainly the possibility of taking the “everlasting fires” (pyr to aiônion) which Christ speaks of, in this way, i.e. as only pertaining to this ‘age’ (aiôn) or ‘cycle of manifestation’, but, at the ‘end of times’, when the “age to come” (tô aiôni tô erchomenô, or zôên aiônion) will be ushered in, even the fires of hell will ‘grow cold’.

 

Thus for example St. Gregory of Nyssa argued, that once “heaven and earth shall pass away”, meaning that all things will be ‘reintegrated’ into their Principle (apokatastasis), and God will truly be “all in all” (1. Cor. 15:28), ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ too, being pure privations (which obviously cannot be introduced into God), must likewise perish.

 

For if God will be in all things that exist, then vice, clearly, will not be among these things that exist, for if any one were to suppose that it too would exist, how shall God’s existence in all things be safeguarded? (De anima, VII.21).

 

Only the Divine Goodness is infinite and as such evil, even if ‘indefinite’, has to cease once the “final symphony of the universe with the Good” (ibid. X.25) is achieved, from which also seems to follow that (there being nothing ‘outside’ of God) Hell too must eventually ‘pass away’.

 

Now certainly ‘Hell’ (as well as ‘Heaven’) conceived of as a ‘state’ pertaining to manifestation would indeed have to cease in such an apokatastasis of all things into their ‘primordial causes’ (or exemplars), so that we too might speak of  ‘two Paradises’; the one corresponding to the posthumous states at the ‘upper pole’ of manifestation (the ‘heavens’ of Ptolemaic cosmology, through which Dante journeys on his path to the Empyreum) and the ‘Paradise of Essence’ (the visio beatifica) which is attained after the final Parousia (the ‘Resurrection’), when even the “heavens are rolled together like a scroll” (Rev. 6:14).

 

However Revelation speaks to us not only of a “new heaven and a new earth” and the beatitude of the Communio Sanctorum, but also of that dreaded “lake of fire” and the final vanquishing of the Enemy.

 

What then of Hell? Are we likewise to conceive of ‘two Hells’?, the dark pit of the lower waters and an ‘Inferno of Essence’, if we dare say so (for as St. John tells us, even “Death and Hades shall be thrown into the lake of fire, which is the second death”; Rev. 20:14)?^[25]

 

This would of course mean that ‘eternal Hell’ is ultimately nothing else than God Himself, who is after all “a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24); a notion which is most radically developed by Böhme, for whom ‘evil’ is not simply a mere ‘privation’ or ‘deficiency’, but, in a sense, a ‘quality’ of God Himself, the dark ‘wrath fire’ of the first Principle which is the very ‘root-principle’ of everything!  

 

II

 

Now, to be clear, in God this ‘Wrath’ is eternally overcome (aufgehoben) by His infinite Love and Goodness and Böhme tells us again and again that “God is Light and there is no darkness in Him” (1. Joh. 1:5). This is a point that cannot be stressed enough to immediately refute all those who want to make Böhme into a belated Manichean or a proto-Hegelian. According to the Teutonic philosopher, what we call ‘evil’ stems entirely from the rebellious will of the creature, for “there is no contrary Will in God” and “in Him all the spirits (viz. qualities) triumph as one spirit, and one spirit always mitigates and loves the other, and so there is nothing but mere joy and delight” (cf. Aurora, X). It is only once these ‘spirits’ become separated (or ‘abstracted’) from the Unity of God that they express themselves as malefic way. Of course God in se is never divided (“God is Love and Goodness and there is no wrathful Thought in Him”, Tribus Prin. X.25), but only appears so quoad nos, i.e. to the sinful creature that has separated itself from this Unity; it is the ‘perverted will’ of the creature that sparks off the wrath fire, for the Holy One cannot assume what is unholy (and what He cannot assume that He consumes).

 

While it is very well true that God calls Himself also an angry and zealous God, this is not so to be understood as if God was angry in Himself, but in the spirit of the creature which kindles itself; and then God burns in the first Principle therein, and the spirit of the creature suffers pain, and not God (Tribus Prin. I.6)

 

While evil is thus not understood as a ‘negation’ or ‘privation’ (in the scholastic sense) it is certainly a negativity (the eternal No separated from the Yes), i.e. an ‘abstraction’. However this negativity is not evil in itself but even necessary for the purissima affirmatio that God is, the dark matrix from which the Divine Sun is born, a ‘darkness’ which in divinis is eternally transfigured by His more-than-luminous Light and only ‘becomes’ dark once it is detached from it (“What remains of the Fire”, asks Böhme, “if I take away the Light or Sheen? Nothing but an arid Hunger and a Darkness, a Nothing and a mere Abyss”; De Incarn. I.5.14).

 

We have thus to be adamant that the sophistic adage that “there must also be evil” for the good to exist would’ve been firmly rejected by Böhme. Evil ‘is’ not necessarily, it could’ve eternally lain dormant (‘in potency’, as it were) and the same is true likewise for Hell.

 

As such Böhme tells us that while “the foundation of Hell was from eternity” it was “not manifest, but hidden (like the night in the day or like fire is latent in a tree) until it became awakened” (Quaes. Theo. XV.1). This ‘awakening’ is caused by the primordial crime of Lucifer, the highest of the angels. In his pride there arises in Lucifer the desire to create himself. We might say that, dazzled by own glory (which he had yet received from God) he forgets that he is himself a creature, thus opening the ‘dark matrix’ of the centrum naturae out of which everything was born in principio (i.e. the ‘creative knowledge’ reserved for God alone and which no creature can know without falling).

 

Lucifer saw creation and knew its foundation. Thereupon he also wanted to be a god, and to rule in all things by the power of fire. He wanted to bring into form his own thoughts, and not that which the Creator desired. Thus he became an enemy of God, and desired to destroy what was formed by the action of God for the purpose of putting in its place his own effects and figurations (Quaes. Theo. X.1.)

 

By awakening the wrath of God, darkness intrudes on the light of the angelic world and the fire that had been lying dormant from the foundations of the world is first enkindled. And this is also the origin of ‘Hell’ properly so called, as the dark fiery world into which Lucifer and his legions are banished after being cast down from Heaven by Michael, the ‘Hero of God’ (der Held im Streite).   

 

God did not create a Hell or a special state of suffering wherein to torment the creatures that deserted Him; but as soon as the devils went out of the light and attempted to rule by the power of fire over the beatitude in the Heart of God, in the same moment they were outside of God and in the four lower qualities of eternal Nature. Thereby they were kept imprisoned in the abyss of Hell (Trip. Vita, II.53).

 

The four lower Qualities are of course the ‘dark ternary’ of the eternal Birth which Lucifer awakens in himself: “The harsh desire (1) moved in Lucifer, awakening the sting (2) and the desire of anguish (3). Thus the beautiful star was overshadowed its own light and perished, and its legions acted as he did” (Mys. Mag. IX.10). The fourth Quality however is the dreadful Lightning (Blitz or Schrack), which stands at the centre of the ‘Birth-wheel’ as a fiery wall separating Light from Darkness.

 

As we have laid out before (cf. [26] Of course in God left and right ‘Pillar’ are eternally in union, so that there can be absolutely no talk of ‘two Gods’; it is rather the same divine Fire experienced differently by saint and sinner (“and this is the meaning where it is written: with the saints Thou art holy, and with the perverted art Thou perverted”, Mys. Magn. IX.44).

 

For the God in the holy World and the God in the dark World are not two Gods; He is one simple God and He is Himself all Being (Wesen), good and evil, heaven and hell, light and darkness, eternity and time, beginning and end; but where His Love is concealed, there His Wrath stands revealed (Mys. Mag. VIII.24)

 

What is true of for the ‘Birth of God’ is likewise true for the ‘spiritual birth’ of every single creature; it too must pass through the abyss of existential freedom and, by ‘denying itself’ (abneget semetipsum) and surrendering its own will to God, negate its own negation, thereby being infinitely affirmed (or aufgehoben) by Him; to become all that it is, it has first to become nothing:

 

In the Principle of Fire is the turning-point. There the will may move in whatever direction he chooses. If it desires the ‘Nothing’, i.e. Freedom, it must sacrifice itself to the fire, and sink in the death of that Principle. Then the Father, the eternal Will to Nature, will put it into the Will of the Son; where for the great deal which that being has given, it will receive all; but not to its own honour, but for the glorification and power of God. When this is accomplished, God in such a man is his will and his doing, and his fire becomes a light and a clear mirror (Sex puncta, VII.6).

 

Confronted by the ‘Shock’ (Schrack) of the Fire it has to choose whether to follow the path of Lucifer by choosing its own ‘selfhood’ and desiring into the ‘alone-ness’ of dark Nature (the principle of multiplicity and separation), to ‘turn around’ towards the Wrath of God like Lot’s wife and become petrified in the harsh desire, or to reject its own self-will by surrendering into the ‘all-oneness’ of the Light, to find itself by losing itself.

 

Now for us fallen creature the choice is already made. Due to the crime of Adam we are always already posited outside of the Light-world and exiled into the world of death and generation (the third Principle).[27] But here we see once more the time is not only the fall but also the mercy of Eternity, for it is through time that we are able to ‘imagine’ back into the lost Paradise and to become ‘reborn in God’ (a possibility Lucifer and his host have lost). We are given the chance to ‘recreate ourselves’ in this life, and it is on us whether we makes ourselves a devil or an angel; a state already present in the soul during life, and which is then ‘revealed’ upon death.

 

For once the ‘garments of skin’ binding us to this world fall away we too enter into the Flash and “what the Lightning can’t enlighten that it devours” (cf. Baader, Über den Blitz). If the soul has put on the “armor of Christ” (Eph. 6) and there is found it in true humility (the ‘waters of meekness’) “then it passeth direct as a knight through the turba, viz. the Wrath of God, and goes straight through death and enters into God’s Being (Wesen)” and into eternal Beatitude (Vera Psych. XXI.2). However if it imagined into the Wrath and awakened in itself the fire-will “then it becomes a dark fire, burning in great anguish and terror … like a furiously rotating wheel, seeking continually to rise and continually sinking down on the other side … turning perpetually around itself in a terrible anguish” (ibid. XVIII.14). A fate out of which, for Böhme, there is no more salvation – ex inferno nulla redemptio, such is the perriculum vitae (Baader on the other hand, who adapts large parts of the Böhmean system, conceives of the fires of Hell as merely ‘purgative’).[28]

 

Hell is eternal because the Devil will never repent; he cannot, for having awakened his fire-will, he does not desire to enter back into the Light, but only to rage fiercer and fiercer in his consuming wrath, without ever finding fulfilment (and as long as the demons do not want to return into the Light there musts be darkness). The devils (as well as the damned) are like a thistle or nettle, “the more light and power they receive from the (divine) Sun, the more stings will they produce” (De Electione, IV.37), whereas in Heaven all are like flowers feasting on the divine Light.

 

To destroy Hell would mean destroying eternal Nature itself, which would also be the end of Heaven (for which it is the foundation), so that here too we could say that Heaven and Hell are like yin and yang, reciprocally positing each other (all the while remembering that Hell as such is not necessarily manifested).

 

The hellish essence having an eternal foundation, the will cannot perish, unless the whole of creation would cease to exist and eternal Nature in her own loveliness be extinguished. But in this case the Kingdom of Joy would be equally lost (Quaes. Theo. V.3).

 

“Hell must serve for the light-manifestation of Heaven”, says Baader, “like the obscure face of a mirror serves the reflection of images; a Church Father says: every scream of anguish in Hell makes a cry of joy in Heaven” (Privatvorlesungen über Böhme’s Lehre, XV).[29] The light-manifestation of the divine World (what we might call, analogically, the kosmos noetos) is eternally born from the ‘dark matrix’ of the eternal Nature like intelligible fire burning from an unintelligible darkness as its ‘root’ (or ‘coal’)[30] and so our archetype (as a ‘spark’ in this fire) stands in both Principles and while it is our common destiny to ‘flow back’ into this origin, it is on us from which ‘side’ we shall experience it, i.e. whether we have to serve the light-manifestation malgré-nous (as an ‘instrument’) on the ‘obscure side’ of the mirror or whether we are manifested (as a ‘co-worker’) in the divine Glory and once more attain to the ‘pearl of Wisdom’ (i.e. our imago Dei), reunited with our celestial Birde (the Virgin Sophia). Either way (whether as adversary or adjutor) we all have to serve in the manifestation of God’s Glory – Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt.

 

Now the reality of a ‘dark principle’, as it were, ‘in God’, might be a hard saying for many (although denying His Wrath or Justice, as is done so often today, amounts to a denial of His Mercy as well, for the one supposes the other). We thus have to ask if the notion of a Hell that is properly speaking ‘eternal’, is even conceivable within the frame of traditional orthodoxy, with its notion of malum as causa deficiens or privatio boni.

 

Scotus Erigena certainly thought so. Contrary to St. Gregory, he held that even if ‘evil’, ‘sin’ and ‘death’ must necessarily perish in the final apokatastasis, this does not mean that punishment for sin would likewise have to cease, since God doesn’t punish ‘human nature’ (which shall be restored to its primordial perfection), but the disordered will alone.

 

While sin and the occasion for sin shall be totally abolished from nature, the phantasies of those temporal things by which imperfect souls are seduced while they live in the flesh shall remain and be subjected to the everlasting fires of punishment, so that in them may be tormented the evil desires of evil men … Nothing will be left for him (the sinner) but the vague intangible elusive shadow of the things he had hoped to gain! Ever desiring to seize it, and never being able to do so, for it is nothing: that will be his eternal punishment (Periphyseon, 961C, 949D).

 

Eternal suffering does thus not persist ‘despite’ the absence of evil but it is precisely the absence of the evil which the sinner loved (to which he ‘orientated his will’) in via that will become his punishment in patria. Yea, we could even say that the damned is not punished ‘for’, but rather by a particular sin,  ‘sin’ and ‘punishment for sin’ being really but one reality (and we may remark in passing that this is also how one could understand the notion of contrapasso). As Erigena says, “there is no sin which does not punish itself” and, according to St. Ambrose, “each man is the author of his own punishment”. In a sense the sinner is thus not punished by God (as an exterior will) but by his own (interior) will; being tormented in the ‘prison of his conscience’ by the “worm that dieth not” (Mk. 9:44).

 

He (the sinner) is tormented by himself within himself … For indeed he is set on fire within himself by the torches of his own disobedience before the Master from outside adds any torments to the sum of the punishment … Of the two who at the same time look at the sun, the one with ordered gaze is illuminated, the disordered one is stricken by darkness (De div. praed. XVIII).

 

The Sun shines on all equally, “on the evil and the good alike” (Matt. 5:45), however only those ‘plants’ who are firmly rooted in God and imbued with the heavenly water can draw life from His rays, the others (the ‘thistles’ and ‘nettles’) are withered and killed by the heat (Die Sonn’ erweicht das Wachs und machete hart den Koth / So wirkt auch Gott nach dir das Leben und den Tod, Angelus Silesius). For, as we read in Apocalypsis, the river flowing forth from Christ is a luminous ‘sea of glass’ (Rev. 22:1) on the upper end and the ‘lake of fire’ on the lower, these being but one river, viz. the “fire flowing from the throne of God” (cf. Dan. 7), as beheld by the blessed and the damned respectively.

 

If anyone glances into the midday sun and his eyes are repelled and dazzled it is not because either sun or eyes are evil, but evil is the disordered glance [that is: the ‘disordered will’], and likewise the consequent disturbance; there will not be evil when the eyes are restored and gaze in proper order at the light (St. Augustine, De vera religione, XI).

 

Thus, in the final ‘unveiling’ (apocalypsis), all shall be revealed and God shall be ‘all in all’ and once the Supernal Sun rises over all of creation and “draw all things to itself” (Joh. 12:32), all “eyes will be opened” (Is. 35:5) and, confronted with Truth itself, the sinner shall see the ‘falsehood’ that he is (for only the just can gaze into the uncreated Light without being struck blind); the torments of hell are the truth of sin revealed.

 

Then the Truth will shine forth through all in all, and shall reveal without any obscurity or doubt the secrets of all nature. For in the time to come the Truth itself shall shine through all things, not only upon those who in this life are righteous and duly seek after the Truth, but also upon the unrighteous and the wicked who are corrupted by their evil ways and hate the light and flee from it. And all shall see the glory of God … But when we are suffering from a disease of the eyes, we cannot enjoy the light, but wish to flee from it and seek to hide ourselves in darkness, not because we do not know what light is and how useful it is to those who can look upon it, but plead the weakness of our eyes as the reason for avoiding its radiance. In the same way the impious too when they are condemned to punishment attribute their hatred of Truth to their impiety, and suffer the unavailing pangs of tardy remorse (Periphyseon, V.967D, 968A).

 

It should be noted however that Erigena (following most of the greek Fathers) conceives of the ‘beatific vision’ as pertaining to the Divine Energies alone; it is thus still a ‘theophany’, for the ineffable Ousia shall never be known, and it is this ‘theophanic vision’, which “each shall behold in his own way”, meaning that for the damned the ‘theophany’ will manifest as a kind of phatasma, like an unending nightmare, produced ultimately by themselves.[31]

 

Thus St. Maximus tells us that the damned “make to themselves in the affectation of their minds a substance of that which is not, and thus become themselves in all things like the phantasies they invent” and that they “shall be subject to the phantasies and memories from below and from without of those temporal and transitory things which infect them in this life” (Ambigua, XVI); an idea also echoed by St. Augustine who states that “they shall suffer true punishments in false images” and “real terror in the consuming fire of their thoughts”.

 

Now according to the Latins the visio beatifica consists in a deifying intellection of the One Essence itself, meaning what will be ‘unveiled’ in illo tempore is not a mere ‘theophany’, but truly the Divine Nature denudata. There is thus the conviction that we shall truly “see Him as He is” (1. Joh. 3:2), not “through a glass darkly” but “face to face” as the Apostle says (1. Cor. 13:12), and (since “intellect becomes what it knows”) in in this fullness of Divine Knowledge ‘knower and known are one’ (omnia in Deo Deus).

 

Not only can there obviously be no talk of ‘absence’ or ‘privation’ in any meaningful way here, but it is likewise hard to imagine that this unmediated vision (adaequatio rei et intellectus) of God in all His ‘nudity’ even allows for ‘phantasms’ or ‘false image’ properly speaking – All’alta fantasia qui mancò possa! (Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII.142).

 

But again, it must be noted that (contrary to the opinion of some overly hasty ‘gnostics’), what is commonly referred to as the ‘immortal soul’, is not merely comprised of ‘intellect’ but of ‘will’ also (esse, scire, velle as imago Trinitatis, according to St. Augustine), which too could be said to relate to each other like the ‘obscure’ and the ‘reflecting’ side of a mirror (yin and yang); for while intellect, as the ‘ray of light’ that connects the soul to the Divine Sun itself (lumen de lumine, or lumen derivatum a Deo, as St. Thomas says) comes ‘from above’, from the “Father of lights” (Jam. 1:17), the will could be said to come ‘from below’, out of the nothingness that lies at the root of creation, and as such even ‘outside’ of the power of God: “The freedom of the creature rests on nothing as its basis: having called nothing into being, divine power limited itself and yielded place to the freedom of the creature” (Bulgakov, Unfading Light, II.1.5).

 

As St. Theresa of Avila recounts, in one of our visions it was shown to her that the soul is like mirror and when it plunges into mortal sin it is “covered as with a dense fog and becomes pitch black, so that the Lord can neither present Himself in it nor be seen, even though He is always present to us by giving us being” (Vita, XL) – the Light shines into the darkness and yet “the darkness comprehendeth it not” (Joh. 1:5).  For what else is sin than a ‘turning away’ from God, ‘obscuring’ oneself to the divine Light (and when the Light finds to mirror to reflect itself on it cannot become manifest). 

 

“Truth is primarily in the intellect”, says Aquinas (“in Your Light we see the light”, Ps. 36), but obedience lies in the will. Intellect perceives the Truth but the will can always refuse to accept and subject itself to it. It seems that we must thus ascribe to the human will a real capacity for the ‘negation of God’ even in this ultimate confrontation, to somehow reject this ‘infusion’ of Divine Knowing and to persist in its sin even when seeing the Truth, as it were, ‘face to face’.^[32]

 

Following Böhme we venture to say that ‘will’ is in a sense more primordial than ‘intellect’ (even in divinis) such that will (or ‘desire’) becomes the principle of knowing (or, to speak scholastically, the principle of passing from potency to act) and when the intellect could be called a ‘divine spark’ (“a lamp of God”, Prov. 20:27), the disordered or ‘inverted’ (verkehrt) will could be referred to as the ‘spark of Satan’, the ‘fire-worm’ which tortures the damned in their wicked imaginings.

 

Interestingly a similar notion can be found in Dante, who tells us that the damned “have lost their intellect” (Inf. III.8); alienated from the very ‘centre of their being’ ^[33] by the centrifugal dispersion of the passions (L’affetto l’intelletto lega), they have utterly destroyed (or ‘blinded’) in them the capacity to adequately ‘recognize’ the Divine Goodness: tenebrae lucem non conprehenderunt. Not being able to bear the sight of Truth, they avert their gaze from Him who is ‘all in all’ and try to flee the Light that “lighteth every man” (Fugit impius nemine persequente, Ps. 28). Their ‘disordered’, God-rejecting will having become their ‘central’ impulse, Hell is what they want: “Those who die in the wrath of God cross over Acheron quickly since Divine justice spurs them on, so that fear is turned into desire” (Inf. III) and “just as it once inclined towards sin, their will is now directed towards punishment” (Purg. XXX).

 

Heaven and Hell, liberation and bondage, lie thus in the will (Der Will’ macht dich verlohr’n, der Will’ macht dich gefunden; der Will’ der macht dich frei, gefesselt und gebunden, Silesius), for, as Baader points out, the will of God is not only done “in earth as it is in Heaven” but also in Hell (the only difference being that in the former it is done ‘with’ and in the latter ‘despite’ the creaturely will: volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt).

 

In the sinner, will conditions the degree of knowledge (or the ‘actualization of intellect’), whereas in the blessed will flows from knowledge, the created will being fully submitted to divine (fiat voluntas tua), which is nothing less than the supreme freedom. As Piccarda Donati tells us, “the essence of beatitude is to exist in harmony with the divine Will, so that our own wills themselves become one” (cf. Par. III.70-87), and it is only once Dante’s will is fully surrendered and his “desire has become as a wheel that turns regularly”, driven by l’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle (Par. XXXIII), that he attains to the highest vision, in which knowledge and Truth, will and divine Love are one – In la sua volontade è nostra pace.

 

Thus only the “pure of heart” shall truly “see God” (Matt. 5:8), for it is the deposition of will towards Truth that constitutes ‘essential knowledge’. The ‘blinding will’ that distorts this recognition is, at its most fundamental level, the ‘will to self’: “The fire that burneth in hell is self-will”, says St. Bernard (so vividly described by Böhme as a ‘contractive’, self-devouring ‘hunger’ or ‘bitterness’; an image that could be lifted straight out of Dante).^[34]

 

Locked up in this state of ‘contraction’ (this ‘centering in self’ being at the same time a dispersion away from the ‘True Center’), the Infinite Love that God essentially is becomes the torment of the sinner; for God must love and “He cannot deny Himself” (2. Tim. 2:13), not even to the most wretched of sinners. “Those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of Love”, says St. Isaac ^[35]; thus the ‘everlasting fires’ of Hell are truly made from the Love of God, and these flames will certainly never grow cold (for “everything passes but Love”, 1. Cor. 13:8). Hell then truly is the naked ‘Face of God’ as seen by the sinner, and in the eschatological Pentecost the ‘Spirit of Love’ becomes, for the wicked, a ‘consuming fire’.

 

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

 

Amen.