The City of God by Augustine - 21 - On Hell and Eternal Punishment
Book Twenty-One
Quote
📝 Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.
Notes
🔥 After the Day of Judgment, says Augustine in his interpretation of the Bible, bad people will go to hell for eternity where there will be "wailing and gnashing of teeth."
🔥 Some skeptics question about how the body can go on eternally. Don't our bodies eventually decay, especially if it's enduring brutal punishment? Fair question.
🔥 Augustine says that feeling and life from the body are really in the soul, and the soul is eternal. "The first death drives the soul from the body against her will: the second death holds the soul in the body against her will."
🔥 But can a soul suffer? Augustine argues yes, anything that can experience desire can also suffer by not getting what it desires. A spirit/soul can have desires, so it can suffer.
🔥 But, as he's mentioned before, our minds are small. Reason can't account for everything in nature that we observe. Therefore, just because you can't explain how hell works by reason doesn't mean it's false. Creation (also discussed before) is the greatest miracle of all. So when it comes to these other seemingly irrational things that go against nature as we observe it, we should keep that in mind.
🔥 Jesus said, if your hand causes you to sin, you should cut it off, and for good reason. Hell is eternal.
🔥 But how is it just to receive eternal punishment for a crime that only lasted a limited amount of time? Our lives are finite. Augustine responds to this question by saying that "equal time" is not a principle we apply in other types of punishment. A person can be banished from their community for their whole lives over a crime they committed in one day.
🔥 We don't have a proper understanding of the gravity of original sin. It's a big deal and so the punishment is proportionate, Augustine argues. And "the very life we mortals lead is itself all punishment, for it is all temptation."
🔥 But God in his mercy took upon our nature that we might be saved through him. The suffering we endure in this life is at least lightened by our hope in Jesus.
🔥 Some believe no one is punished eternally, but only for fixed and limited periods. And that maybe is more consistent with God's mercy and grace, which is much bigger than any crime we can commit, and much bigger than his sense of anger or desire for punishment. Others think God will forgive people who do good deeds and who forgive others. Augustine believes this is all wrong.
🔥 He cites the Bible to say that just as the saved will have eternal life, the damned will have eternal punishment. That's just the way it is. It's what the Bible says. There is no intercession for the damned after they die. You can only turn things around in this life.
🔥 There are no loopholes for getting out of hell. Even if you give money to the church to try to buy forgiveness, God cares about the spirit of our actions, not just the actions themselves.
Reflection
💬 I wonder if Augustine placing so much focus on the life to come after judgment day is a helpful one for living life in that city right now? He does argue that having our minds set on the eternal helps us endure the sufferings in this life and puts things in perspective in a way that keeps us humble and maybe leads to more cooperation. At the same time, there are some pretty obscure issues he's dealing with here - how can a body endure eternal punishment, or how can demons who are immaterial be burned by fire? A lot of this feels like a distraction from the more core questions about life in the city of God, and part of Augustine placing so much emphasis trying to show that the Bible makes rational sense. Though he does concede that reason can't account for everything in life.