This is the most terrible of the Christian mysteries. The pro gression of loneliness in sin and death and judgement reaches to the furthest limits of possibility in the awful loneliness of Hell. It has all the horrors of eternal solitary confinement; that is the real torment of Hell, though there are others. Dante and others before and after him have imagined for themselves a place of torture; they have set to work to describe what in the most frenzied of human thoughts such a life must be; they have bidden to their assistance all the known and the unknown horrors that the most morbid imagination can suppose. The effect has been at times, not terrible at all, but revolting: these writers who can imagine nothing save physical pain have often succeeded merely in giving one the idea that God gloated over the writhing bodies of His children. Very often the harm done by some so-called pious books is incalculable; the harrowing details given even suggest that the authors themselves have taken pleasure in describing these tortures, But all these accounts, whether by canonized writers or not, count for nothing, since they know no more of that after-life than we; they know only, as do we, that the real punishment of it is the loss of God. Our Lord Himself used the word "fire," so that this must, therefore, represent the best possible description of the torment of the damned. But no one can suppose that he can fully understand what was meant: the precise significance of the phrase is beyond us.
This, then, is all that we know - namely, that the essential pain of Hell is the loss of God to the soul, which at length knows what God means. Here, on earth, it is perfectly possible to go through life in more or less comfort while the thought of God is wholly absent from the soul; it is sometimes the easiest way, to forget and ignore God. But death brings with it a knowledge of things that our philosophy here ignores. It brings to the soul a knowledge of God and a realization that our nature was created for Him as the purpose of its existence. Hence the punishment of Hell is the utter and eternal and conscious frustration of the soul's crying need. It is as though in a flash we had at last understood what everything in life was for, discovered the meaning of everything that had befallen us, found the solution to all the perplexities that had worried us and then realized that our own previous ideas, and the practice that had followed them, had resulted in our complete inability to make use of life: a perfect nightmare in which one knew the use of everything, but could use nothing to its purpose. This torment, then, can come only to those who have died in revolt against God not those who seemingly die in sin, for in the last ebb of consciousness who knows what mercies God has in store? But if any such pass out from here hating God, in revolt against Him - then, flung out as they are into eternity (an unchanging Now), they must remain for ever hating and losing, and conscious of their incalculable loss.
Am I worried over this? Does it come to me as opposed to the idea that the New Testament gives me of the character and ways of God? Then, assuredly, there is this much to be granted, that I can never hope to adjust in abstract method the justice and mercy of God in perfect balance. I can never hope to understand, still less explain to others, how Hell is compatible with the Crucifixion. I may, indeed, see how the one does necessitate the other, how love alone could build up Hell; but that is but a fleeting vision which never wholly satisfies. I must be prepared, at any rate, to go through life unable to answer the questionings of my own soul, clinging only to His divine revelation, and gladly confident in His mercy towards all the children of men. If I have so much compassion on the most guilty wretch on earth that I cannot in my heart wish him so terrible an end, then God, whose love is infinite, must be still less willing to see men in such straits. Indeed, is not Calvary a sign of the extremes to which He would go in order to safeguard man from it? In the case of my own soul, of which alone I have real knowledge, I see that He has continuously restrained me by grace from the edges of the pit. For others, then, I am full of hope. But for myself? The thought of Hell should not be often in my mind, for, please God! I have no need of fear to lead me to His side. In times of overwhelming temptation, perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, I shall need to think of Hell; but in my daily trials let me rather, though reverent and believing in His word, try the path of Love.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.