1003- Is the duration of the sufferings of the guilty in the future life arbitrary or subordinate to some law?
“God never acts capriciously and everything in the universe is ruled by laws that reveal the divine wisdom and goodness.”
1004- What determines the duration of the sufferings of the guilty?
“The length of time required for their improvement. Since the state of suffering or happiness is in proportion to a spirit’s degree of purification, the duration and nature of its sufferings depend on the time it takes to improve itself. As the spirit progresses and its sentiments become purer, its sufferings diminish and are changed to the same extent.”
St. Louis
1005- Does time for a suffering spirit seem longer or shorter than when it was incarnate?
“It seems longer because sleep does not exist. It is only for spirits who have reached a certain degree of purification that time is effaced, so to speak, in the face of the infinite.” (See no. 240)
1006- Can the duration of a spirit’s suffering be eternal?
“Of course, if it were to remain eternally evil; that is to say, if it were never to repent or improve itself, it would then suffer eternally. However, God has not created beings eternally devoted to evil. They were only created simple and ignorant, and all of them must progress over a longer or shorter period of time according to their own free will. This will can be belated to various degrees, just as there are children who are precocious to various degrees. Sooner or later, however, it will manifest itself by the irresistible need the spirit feels to leave its state of imperfection and to be happy. The law that governs the duration of suffering is therefore eminently wise and beneficent. It subordinates that duration to the spirit’s own efforts, never depriving it of its free will. If it makes a bad use of it, it will have to bear the consequences.”
St. Louis
1007- Are there spirits who never repent?
“There are spirits who put off their repentance, but supposing that they will never improve would be to deny the law of progress and to assert that the child will never become an adult.”
St. Louis
1008- Does the duration of punishments always depend on the spirit’s own will or are there punishments that are imposed on it for a specific length of time?
“There are punishments that can be imposed on it for a specific length of time, but God, who wills only the good for God’s creatures, always welcomes its repentance. The spirit’s desire to improve is never fruitless.”
St. Louis
1009- Accordingly, the punishments imposed are never eternal?
“Consult your own common sense and reason, and ask yourselves whether an eternal condemnation for a few moments of error would not be a negation of God’s goodness. In fact, what is the duration of a life, even if it were to last a hundred years, in comparison to eternity? Eternity! Can you understand that word? Suffering and torture without end and without hope for only a few wrongs! Doesn’t your reason reject such an idea? That the ancients saw in the Master of the Universe a terrible, jealous and vindictive God is understandable. In their ignorance, they attributed the human passions to the deity, but that is not the God of the Christians, who extols love, charity, mercy and the forgetfulness of offenses as the highest virtues. Wouldn’t God have the qualities that God demands as a duty? Isn’t there a contradiction in attributing to God both infinite goodness and infinite vengeance? You say that above all God is just and that humans do not understand the divine justice. Justice, however, does not exclude kindness, and God would not be kind in condemning most creatures to a horrible and everlasting punishment. Could God make justice obligatory for everyone if they were not given the means to comprehend it? Besides, isn’t justice sublime when, allied with goodness, it makes the duration of punishment depend on the efforts of the guilty to improve themselves? Therein you will find the truth of the precept ‘to each according to his deeds.’”
St. Augustine
“Through all the means within your reach, strive to combat and to eradicate the idea of eternal punishment, a blasphemous notion against the justice and goodness of God and the most abundant source of the incredulity, materialism, and indifference that have pervaded the masses from the time their intelligence began to develop.
The spirit who has just left the state of ignorance or is about to become enlightened quickly comprehends this monstrous injustice. Its reason rejects it, and then more often than not, the spirit equates the eternal punishment that it rejects with the God to whom it attributes this condemnation. From this arise the innumerable ills that have fallen upon you, and whose remedy we have come to bring you. The task we have pointed out will be much easier to accomplish, since the authorities from whom the defenders of this belief have sought support have avoided a formal pronouncement on this regard. Neither the Councils nor the Church Fathers tackled this serious question. Following the Evangelists themselves and taking Christ’s allegorical words literally, if Christ did in fact threaten the guilty with unquenchable, eternal fire, there is absolutely nothing in Christ’s words that proves they are condemned for all eternity.
“Poor lost sheep, learn to behold the Good Shepherd, who approaches you and who, far from wanting to banish you forever from his presence, comes to find you in order to lead you back to the fold. Prodigal children, leave your willful exile. Turn your path toward the Father, who opens his arms to you and who is always ready to celebrate your return to his family.”
Lamennais
“Wars of words! Wars of words! Haven’t you shed enough blood? Are the inquisitional fires to be rekindled once again? You argue over expressions such as ‘eternal suffering’ and ‘eternal punishment’. Don’t you know that what you understand today by eternity was not understood in the same way by the ancients? Let theologians consult the sources and like you they will discover that the Hebrew text does not give the word the same meaning that the Greek, the Latin, and modern translations have rendered as everlasting and unpardonable punishment. The ‘eternity’ of the punishment corresponds to the evil that has occurred. Yes, so long as evil exists among humans, punishments will continue. It is in this relative sense that the sacred texts should be interpreted. Eternal punishment is therefore relative and not absolute. A day will come when all humans will don the garments of innocence through repentance, and on that day there will be no more groaning or gnashing of teeth. It is true that your intelligence is limited, but even at this stage it is still a gift from God, and with the help of reason there will not be one single human of good faith who could possibly understand eternal punishment in any different way. Eternal punishment! How could that be? Only if we believed that evil was also eternal! But only God is eternal and God could not have created eternal evil. If such were the case, we would have to deny one of the most beautiful divine attributes: supreme power, for God would cease to be supremely powerful the moment God introduced a destructive element into creation. Humanity! Humanity! No longer immerse your somber glance in the depths of the earth, searching for these punishments. Weep, hope, expiate and take comfort in the thought of a God who is infinitely good, absolutely powerful and essentially just.”
Plato
“The objective of humankind is to gravitate toward divine unity. For divine unity to occur, three things are necessary: justice, love and knowledge. There are three things that are contrary to and oppose this unity: ignorance, hatred and injustice. I must tell you that you lie about these fundamental principles when you compromise the idea of God by exaggerating God’s severity. Furthermore, you doubly compromise it when you allow the spirit of the creature to think that the creature itself possesses more clemency, gentleness, love, and true justice than you attribute to the Infinite Being. You destroy the very idea of hell by rendering it as ridiculous and unacceptable to your minds as the horrendous spectacle of the executions, the burnings at the stake and the tortures of the Middle Ages is to your hearts! How can the idea of hell be sustained at a time when blind reprisals have been banished from human laws? Believe me, brothers and sisters in God and in Jesus Christ; believe me and either resign yourselves to letting all the dogmas you hold to be unalterable perish in your hands, or breathe new life into them by opening them up to the benevolent explanations good spirits are now giving concerning them. The idea of a hell with its glowing furnaces and boiling cauldrons might be tolerated or admissible in a mythological age. In the nineteenth century, however, it is nothing more than an empty phantom that only serves to frighten little children, who will no longer believe in it once they have grown up. If you persist in such a frightening mythology, you will engender disbelief, the origin of every sort of social upheaval. I tremble at the idea of an entire social order shaken and crumbling upon its very foundations for lack of a penal sanction. People of ardent and living faith, vanguards of the day of the light, let us join efforts, not to maintain old fables that are now discredited, but to revitalize the true penal sanction under forms that correspond to your customs, your sentiments and the enlightenment of your era.
“Who in fact are the guilty? Those who through a transgression, through a wrong impulse of the soul have distanced themselves from the objective of their creation, which consists in the desire for goodness and beauty as idealized by the human embodiment of perfection, the divine model: Jesus Christ.
“What is punishment? It is the natural consequence of that wrong impulse, the amount of pain necessary for the guilty through the trials of suffering due to their transgression. Punishment is the goad that arouses the soul through its affliction to turn toward itself, to return to the path of salvation. The objective of punishment is none other than rehabilitation and redemption. Wanting punishment to be eternal for a wrong which is not eternal is to deprive it of its reason to exist.
“Truly I say to you, stop comparing eternity in terms of the good, which is the essence of the Creator, with evil, which is the essence of the creature – an approach that ends up creating unjustifiable penalties. Rather, affirm the gradual diminution of punishments and penalties through successive reincarnations and you will consecrate divine unity through reason and sentiment.”
Paul, The Apostle
Humans are stimulated to morality and turned from evil by the lure of reward and the fear of punishment, but if such punishment is represented in a way that defies reason, it will yield no influence. Rather, it will be rejected in its totality – form and foundation. However, if the future is presented under a logical form, it will not be rejected. Spiritism provides such an explanation.
The doctrine of eternal punishment in its absolute sense makes the Supreme Being an implacable God. Would it be logical to say that a king is very good, very benevolent and very indulgent, that he only wants the happiness of all around him, but that he is at the same time jealous, vindictive, inflexibly severe and that he punishes three quarters of his subjects with the maximum penalty for any offense or infraction of his laws, even when they have broken them without having been aware of them? Wouldn’t that be a contradiction? How could God be less than what a human would be?
Another contradiction is presented in this case. Since God knows everything, then God knew while creating a soul that it would fail, that from its formation it was destined to eternal unhappiness. Is this possible? Is it rational? With the doctrine of relative punishment everything is set right. God undoubtedly knew that the soul would fail, but gave it the means of enlightening itself through its own experience and through its own errors. It would have to expiate such errors in order to establish itself in the good, but the door of hope would never be closed against it. God made the moment of its liberation depend on the efforts it makes to attain it. This is something that all can understand and the most meticulous logic can accept. If future punishment had been presented in this way, there would be a lot fewer skeptics.
The word eternal is almost always employed figuratively in common language to designate something of a long period of duration, of which the end is not foreseen, although it is very well known that there will in fact be an end. We speak of the eternal snows of the high mountains and the poles, for instance, although we know, on the one hand, that the physical world could come to an end, and on the other hand, that the state of those regions could be modified by a shift in the earth’s axis or some other cataclysm. The word eternal, in this case, does not mean infinite duration. When we suffer some long-term illness we say that it is eternal. So why wonder when spirits who have suffered for many years, centuries, and even thousands of years speak of it as being eternal? Above all, we must not forget that their imperfection does not allow them to see the end of their afflictions; they believe they will suffer forever, which is in itself a punishment for them.
Furthermore, the doctrine of physical fire, of furnaces, and tortures borrowed from the Tartarus 60 of paganism has been completely abandoned nowadays by liberal theology. Only in certain schools are such terrifying allegorical images still presented as literal truths by some individuals who are more fanatical than enlightened. This is all very wrong, because young imaginations, once past the terror, will most likely become skeptical. Today, theology recognizes that the word fire is employed figuratively and should be understood as mental suffering (see no.974). Those who, like us, have followed the incidents of the life and sufferings beyond the grave through Spiritist communications have been convinced that though not physical, they are no less poignant. Even regarding their duration, some theologians are beginning to accept the restrictive meaning indicated above, and in fact, they think that the word eternal could refer to the penalties per se, as the consequence of an immutable law, and not to its application to each individual. On the day when religion accepts such an interpretation, as well as others that are also the consequence of the progress of enlightenment, it will bring back many lost sheep into its fold.
60 Tartarus was a section of Hades, the underground abode of the dead in Greek mythology which was reserved for punishing the worst offenders – Tr.
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