Tag Archives: St. Augustine

Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Hell

30 January 2026 By in Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is.”  Pope Francis, 14 January 2024.

Few utterances from the papal class have landed with more confusion than Pope Francis’s remark. It is muddled, misleading, and ultimately misconstrued, though with two thousand years of ecclesiastical history, one might find other contenders. To be fair, only two papal statements have ever been deemed infallible: Pius IX’s definition of the Immaculate Conception and Pius XII’s proclamation of the Assumption of Mary. Nearly everything else falls under the category of secular opinion. So secular opinion will have to stand along with my slightly pedantic philosophical flourish on the topic.

The trouble with Francis’s remark is not that it expresses hope in an infinitely merciful God. It does, and God is. Humans are extravagantly hopeful when it comes to their own stake in the hereafter. But the Pope’s phrasing seems to remove the ultimate incentive to live a moral life. If there is no hell, then there are no boundaries to one’s actions. On its surface, the statement reduces moral teaching and punishment for sin to negligible outcomes. Two millennia of urging humans to keep their souls pure dissipate in an instant. It treats hell as if it were a place one might stroll into and find as empty as a modern mall, then decide to shop elsewhere; Amazon, perhaps. It blurs the line between our desire to avoid suffering and the eschatological reality in which immorality and punishment are tied to free will. Judgment remains inevitable, for better or worse, and forever. The qualifier “I hope it is” reduces judgment to a wish for mercy rather than a real consequence of one’s actions. It also suggests that the Pope is worried not only about your soul but his own. A merciful God will save a repentant sinner, but hoping is an insecure measure of remorse.

In short, Francis managed an exceptionally muddled rendering of the Augustinian and Thomistic view that hell is the final state of a person who refuses the good and closes themselves off to God’s love. To be fair, clarity is difficult when the very word “hell” carries millennia of conflicting meanings, teachings, and eschatological traditions.

This confusion is inevitable because the Christian vocabulary of the afterlife is a translucent overlay of older worlds, cultures, and languages. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of Sheol, a shadowy realm of the dead with no inherent moral judgment, not a prison for the wicked, but simply the condition of being dead. In Christian theology, “[Jesus] was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell.” The “hell” in this line refers to Sheol (often rendered as Hades), the realm of the dead into which Christ entered. His descent breaks open the barrier between death and divine life. In Sheol, He liberates the righteous dead and inaugurates the post‑biblical landscape of heaven, purgatory, and the final hell of separation from God’s love. After this event, Sheol becomes vestigial in Christian thought, a name without a continuing function. Christianity judges the soul immediately and resurrects the body later, whereas Judaism gives the soul varied post‑death experiences but reserves final judgment for bodily resurrection.

In the ancient Greek world, Hades begins much like Sheol: a neutral underworld where all the dead reside. Only the exceptional are diverted: heroes to the Elysian Fields, mythic offenders to Tartarus. Plato’s Myth of Er overlays this older realm with Socratic soulfully infused moral vision: judgment, reward, punishment, and reincarnation. Over time, mythic Hades and Platonic moral Hades blend into a single, more complex vision. Early Judaism and early Greek religion both had neutral underworlds, but the Greeks moralized theirs first. Socrates’ preoccupation with the soul made him less a secular philosopher than a theological pioneer or prophet if you will.

Hell does not take on its later punitive shape until the New Testament’s use of Gehenna, a metaphor drawn from a real valley outside Jerusalem associated with corruption and divine judgment. In the Gospels, Gehenna is a warning, not a mapped realm. Jesus uses it as prophetic shorthand for the consequence of a life turned away from the good. A moral and relational judgment rather than the later imagery of fire, demons, or descending circles. Gehenna is not the fully developed hell of medieval imagination but a symbol of what becomes of a life that refuses the shape of love.

Augustine, in the 4th century, further develops hell as a condition rather than a location. Hell is self‑exclusion: the soul turns away from God and locks itself into disordered love. Suffering arises from the consequences of one’s own choice; separation from the source of all goodness. This state is eternal not because God withholds mercy but because the will can become fixed in refusal. Fire is both real and symbolic: suffering is real, though its mode lies beyond language and expression.

Aquinas in the 13th century builds on Augustine by grounding hell in Aristotelian metaphysics. Hell is the definitive state of a rational soul that dies in mortal sin. The soul’s refusal of God is not only moral failure but a failure of rational nature. Aquinas distinguishes poena damni (the pain of loss) and poena sensus (the pain of sense). At death, the soul’s direction becomes fixed; eternal destiny is determined not by divine wrath but by the soul’s own settled choice. At the resurrection, the body joins the soul in its suffering. William Blake captures this Thomistic vision in his illustration of Dante conversing with the heretic Farinata degli Uberti in the fiery tombs of the sixth circle.

Aquinas provided his near‑contemporary Dante with the moral architecture that allowed hell to shift from concept to vividly imagined landscape. In the Inferno, Dante transforms that architecture into a descending spiral of circles, each calibrated to a deeper distortion of the good and a harsher form of alienation. At the frozen center lies the absolute loss of God’s presence and love. Dante’s genius is giving spatial form to moral trajectory. Sin becomes architecture.

Modern Christians often imagine hell through Dante’s nine circles without realizing it. Levels, tailored punishments, structured descent, these are Dante’s inventions, not biblical categories. Yet his poetic vision has become the default mental picture of what it means to lose God’s love. His circles are not doctrine, but they express a truth the tradition affirms: the more a soul rejects the good, the more it collapses inward, freezing into itself; a thermodynamic loss not of heat but of God’s presence. Dante’s afterlife remains a symbolic map of the soul’s self‑chosen distance from God, shaping imagination long after its theology has been forgotten or more likely, ignored.

By the modern era, hell has traveled a long road: from Sheol and Hades, through Gehenna, into Augustine’s self‑chosen alienation, Aquinas’s metaphysical finality, and Dante’s architectural imagination. Each stage sharpens the moral stakes, but none claims to know the final census of the saved and the lost.

It is here that Hans Urs von Balthasar, the 20th‑century Swiss theologian, offers a different starting point: beauty as the mode of God’s self‑revelation. God becomes visible through form, radiance, and splendor; beauty is the shape of truth and goodness. For Balthasar, salvation is participation in God’s dramatic love: the drama in which God and humanity meet in freedom. Christ is the central actor whose obedience, self‑gift, and descent into the depths of human abandonment open the way for every person to enter divine life. Salvation is aesthetic: God is Beauty, Christ is Beauty made visible, and salvation is the soul learning again to see the Beauty that is God.

Balthasar insists that Christ’s descent into Sheol means no place remains where God is not. Hell remains a real possibility, but God’s love hopes for every person, even as human freedom is never overridden. Salvation is the soul being drawn freely, dramatically, and beautifully into the radiant self‑giving love of the Triune God.

Balthasar offers a final, chastened note: Christians may hope that all will be saved, but they may never presume it. Hope is a virtue; presumption a trespass. Hell remains real, possible, and bound to freedom, yet the Christian stance toward final judgment is not certainty but reverent uncertainty. We may hope that no soul ultimately refuses the good, but we may not claim to know the mind of God. This hope is not optimism; it is the trembling aspiration of the penitent, something beyond the insecure measure of remorse that opened this essay.

In the end, tradition leaves us with a paradox: hell is the consequence of free-will, yet hope is the proper response to divine mercy. Between those two poles, freedom and mercy, the human soul stands. And perhaps that is the only place it can stand: not in presumption, not in despair, but in the narrow space where hope remains possible without ever becoming a certainty. Perhaps this is what Pope Francis, in his inelegant phrasing, was reaching for.

By the time afterlife dogma and secular imagination knock on our modern door, “hell” is less a settled place or concept than a linguistic suitcase and atlas stuffed with conflicting contents and branching paths toward judgment. Hope without presumption is allowed; hiding never is.

Graphic: Chart of Hell by Sandro Botticelli, c1480. Vatican City. Public Domain.

Time not Time

21 December 2025 By in Philosophy, Physics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Time, life, and physics are inseparably intertwined. Remove time from our lives or our equations and we are left with a null set; a void where very little makes sense, and nothing moves forward or backwards. Birthdays, compound interest, and prison sentences lose their definitions. Einstein’s spacetime, relativity, and the absolute speed of particles all collapse if time is reduced to mere concept rather than a dimension woven into the fabric of the universe.

Time is real, yet not what we think. It is measurable, yet subjective. Physical, yet metaphysical. Created, yet transcended. It is time, and not time.

To confront this metaphysical and ontological puzzle, we must go back and consider how others have wrestled with it. In Book XI of Confessions, Augustine famously writes: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.” He knew time intimately yet could not articulate it; a paradox of intuitive knowledge that resists definition.

For Augustine, time is the tension of the soul: distentio animi, stretched between memory, perception, and anticipation. I would go further: time is the unease of the soul, the awareness that our life is not merely sequential but weighted. Each present moment becomes a record, a catalogue of change, where memory and expectation converge upon the ubiquitous now.

From this knotty discomfort, Augustine turns to consciousness. We do not measure existence as an external construct, nor as Einstein’s spacetime, but hold past, present, and future together in awareness. This is the soul’s way of ordering experience: a catalogue of change. An AI approaches memory similarly; not as a flowing timeline but as indexed facts retrievable when relevant. What for humans is the soul’s ledger of experience, for AI is a ledger of durable notes. And yet both remain finite catalogues.

Augustine presses further: God transcends even this. For us, awareness gathers past as memory and future as expectation, but God simply is: beyond sequence, beyond catalogue, beyond event. Time itself began with creation; sequence and change belong only to the created. God exists outside of it, the eternal source from which all temporal becoming flows.

Thomas Aquinas also saw time not as a substance but as a measure: the numbering of motion by before and after. Time, for him, comes into being with creation and is experienced only by mutable beings, for without change there is no succession, and without succession there is no time. Humanity lives within this flow: we need time to give shape to purpose, meaning, and becoming. But God is utterly immutable, without before or after. He does not move from past to future but exists in a timeless presence; eternity as the simultaneously whole possession of life. All times are present to Him at once, not as a sequence but as a single, perfect act of being.

Pope Benedict XVI, following Augustine and Aquinas, insisted that eternity is not endless time but timeless presence. To bind God within sequential time would reduce Him to a creature among creatures. God does not foresee as a prophet would; He simply is, in relation to all times.

This ‘eternal now,’ or what Boethius calls the ‘eternal present,’ expresses his argument that eternity is not infinite duration but the perfect simultaneity of divine presence. God’s knowledge is not ours extended indefinitely; it is categorically different. Thus, free will and an all‑knowing God are not contradictions. According to Boethius, “whatever lives in time lives only in the present,” whereas God lives in the eternal present: totum simul, the all‑at‑once‑ness of divine life.

Where Christian thought places God beyond time, the Greeks placed humanity within two modes of time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is quantitative time; measured, sequential, countable. It gives life structure, the frame by which we track change. Kairos is qualitative time; the opportune moment, the ripeness of action, the fullness of meaning. Chronos watches the clock; Kairos watches life. Chronos measures duration; Kairos measures significance.

Together they reveal that time is not merely a dimension we move through but a dual register of existence: one that counts our days and one that gives those days weight.

Time, from ancient philosophers and theologians to modern physicists, has evolved. Theology gives us a God of timeless presence. Newtonian time was absolute, measurable, and continuous. Einsteinian time became relative, elastic, and inseparable from space. Quantum time is probabilistic, discontinuous, sometimes irrelevant. Entanglement seems to ignore time altogether. The arc bends from time to not‑time. From time to timelessness.

If theology gives us the metaphysics of time, physics gives us its language; how time behaves, how it binds itself to matter, motion, and measurement.

The physical story begins with Newton, who imagined time as absolute: a universal river flowing uniformly for all observers. In Newton’s cosmos, time is the silent metronome of the universe, ticking identically everywhere, indifferent to motion or perspective. It is Chronos rendered into mathematics.

But Einstein suppressed that certainty. In special relativity, time is no longer absolute but elastic. It stretches and contracts depending on velocity. Two observers moving differently do not share the same “now.” Time becomes inseparable from space, fused into a four‑dimensional fabric: spacetime. Where motion through one dimension alters experience of the others. The universe no longer runs on a single clock; it runs on countless local clocks; each tied to its own frame of reference.

General relativity deepens the strangeness. Gravity is not a force but the curvature of spacetime itself. Massive objects bend the temporal dimension, slowing time in their vicinity. A clock on a mountaintop ticks faster than a clock at sea level. Time is not merely experienced; it is shaped by mass and speed. It bends under pressure. It is not the absolute we imagine.

If Newton’s time was a river, Einstein’s time is a landscape; warped, uneven, inseparable from the terrain of existence.

Yet even Einstein’s vision wanes at the smallest scales. Quantum mechanics introduces a world where time behaves less like a smooth dimension and more like a probabilistic backdrop. Particles do not trace continuous, classical arcs but inhabit shifting probability fields. Events unfold not deterministically but as clouds of possibility collapsing into actuality when observed.

And then comes entanglement; the phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Two particles, once linked, remain correlated no matter how far apart they travel. Their states are not merely synchronized; they are one system across space. Measurement of one instantaneously determines the other, as if the universe refuses to let them be separated by distance or by time.

Entanglement suggests that relation is woven deeper than sequence. The universe reveals patterns of connections that seem to operate under different temporal conditions altogether.

And this loosening of temporal order is not confined to the quantum scale; it appears again, in a different register, at the largest scales of the cosmos.

The universe’s expansion gives the appearance of faster‑than‑light recession, not because objects outrun light, but because spacetime itself stretches. And in the vast reaches where dark energy dominates, the very markers of time grow thin. Beyond the realm shaped by matter, time begins to lose its meaning; dark energy becomes a kind of luminous emptiness, a region where temporality itself seems to fade.

But the universe does not remain at its extremes; the very small and the very large fold back into the ordinary world we inhabit.

And yet, when these quantum strangenesses are averaged over countless particles, when probabilities smooth into certainties and fluctuations cancel out, the world resolves once more into Newton’s calm, reassuring, continuous order. The granular becomes smooth. The uncertain becomes predictable. The timeless hints collapse back into the familiar rhythm of clocks and orbits. Newton’s universe reappears not as the foundation of physics, but as its limit; the shape reality takes when the deeper layers approach infinity.

And it is precisely at this limit that physics brushes against theology. For if entangled particles share a state beyond temporal separation, then timelessness is not merely a divine abstraction but a feature of the universe’s foundational structure. Augustine’s claim that God exists outside time finds an unexpected shadow in quantum theory: the most fundamental connections in reality are not mediated by time at all.

Where theology speaks of God’s eternal now, quantum mechanics reveals systems that behave as if they participate in a kind of physical “now” that transcends sequence. Where theology insists that God is not bound by before and after, entanglement shows us correlations that ignore the very notion of before and after.

Physics does not prove theology. But it points toward a universe where timelessness is not only conceivable but woven into the fabric of existence: an image of everything at once: totum simul, a vision that dissolves the moment we try to picture it.

Life Goes On

10 October 2024 By in Biography, History, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Marcus Aurelius, the last Stoic, stays his fear of death by believing that life’s pauses and changes are preludes to death of which we should not fear. He stated in Book IX of his Meditations: “[as you] …pass to the ages of your life, boyhood for instance, youth, manhood, old age; for each change of these was a death; was there anything to be afraid of?”

This comes directly from Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher and influencer of the first Stoic: Zeno, stating that, “The living and the dead, the sleeper and the watcher, the young and the old are the same.”

St. Augustine in Confessions rephrases Marcus and Heraclitus with the joyful question; “And lo! My infancy died long since, and I am alive… Declare to me, your suppliant, did my infancy succeed to some age of mine that is also dead?”

Joseph Butler, Christian apologist and philosopher, carries the thought to its logical conclusion, writing: “We have passed undestroyed through those many and great resolutions of matter, so peculiarly appropriated to us ourselves; why should we imagine death will be so fatal to us?”

Butler’s argument is that if we’ve survived many transformations throughout our lives, there’s no reason to believe that death would be our ultimate end. His view is grounded in the belief that our continued existence after death is consistent with the enduring nature of our existence during life.

Source: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, edited by Farquharson. Graphic: The Last Judgement by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel. Public Domain.