The other day I posted a thread from Facebook that led me to the brink of despair.
Here's one that proves that Facebook can be a source of light as well as darkness. A friend of mine, Paul from Pluto (Pluto, Mississippi), writes the post, and Cory Dupont and I share some thoughts as comments ...
THE POST: ... if hell is eternal punishment for evil, and evil is according to classical metaphysics non-being, then how can hell be any kind of entity at all?
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Cory Dupont likes this.
Cory Dupont Why not expand your scope?
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Kevin O'Brien In C. S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce", hell is impossible to see from heaven because it's so small. "The difficulty of hell," explains Macdonald, "Is that it's almost nearly nothing."
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Kevin O'Brien There are lots of souls there, but it's hard to pinpoint from heaven.
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Cory Dupont There is a long tradition in Eastern Christian thought that says "hell is heaven experienced differently" by those who have, of their own free-will, rejected the love and mercy of God. In contrast to, say, Lewis and others like him who are clearly working from a Western Medieval point of observation, the Eastern Church has never really felt comfortable or pressed to locate and/or define Hell. Instead, the Church does feel it necessary to show us how to avoid such a destiny, and this lays greater emphasis upon Hell as a state-of-being-towards-God, rather than a peripheral blot on a celestial map. Then again, there may be good cause to question this position, as many of the Latin and Greek Fathers feel quite comfortable defining Hell as a condition of punishment and divine retribution. I'm thinking primarily of exegetes such as St. Chrysostom. In a dogmatic sense, however, it's tough to find a single Church Father, with the exceptions of Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Augustine, who spent any considerable thought on the matter.
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Cory Dupont Any observation made on the matter of eschatology was never done so outside of the early Church's continuous battles over Christology. I only say this because later reflection upon Hell, such as that of the Medieval Schoolmen, was frequently far too abstract and at times somewhat irrelevant in relation to the mysterium fidei.
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Kevin O'Brien Actually, Cory Dupont, Lewis does not locate or define hell in "The Great Divorce". The narrator tries to, but is frustrated in his attempts. Even in Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus", written in Elizabethan England, the demon Mephistopheles says, "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self-place; but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven."
So I don't think you're quite right that Western Christianity has tended to localize hell.
My question for Paul - is there a state of absolute zero, and if so, can you go there without a jacket?
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Kevin O'Brien Compare Our Lord's statement in Luke where He says you cannot say of the Kingdom, "Here it is" or "there it is".
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Cory Dupont Fair enough, but I wouldn't so hastily make Lewis the arbiter of the entire Western Christian tradition.
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Kevin O'Brien No, but neither is Marlowe - and yet he too refuses to have his demon character localize hell. In fact, he shows Faustus as being foolish and materialistic for trying to do so.
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