Hell is absurd

Beyond classical metaphysics

The Ancient world and the Bible (the latter of course being written in the context of the former) associate the waters of the sea with chaos. The watery abyss is filled with unfathomable monsters, its waves crash back and forth without any concrete form, and its sudden storms can swallow ships and sailors without leaving so much as a trace behind. It is significant that Scripture refers to the Gentiles in oceanic language: they “roar” like the waves against God’s chosen people (Isaiah 17), they “overflow” the Promised Land like a flood (Jeremiah 47), they “rise from the sea” like great beasts (Daniel 7, Revelation 13). Thus, while the Israelites were primarily agriculturalists, protecting and tilling the Holy Land until God would harvest the Messiah, the Apostles are fishermen (Matthew 4) who move out into the chaotic seas to catch the Gentiles in their nets.

But, in Scripture, the seas are not simply associated with evil, idolatry, and rebellion. In themselves, the seas are neutral; they signify potentiality. Thus, the unformed earth that God later forms (or “actualizes”) into the diversity of earthly life is a deep sea. One of the “tenets of telosbound” is that the metaphysical term “actuality” refers to the actuality-of-communion, and potentiality is the potential-for-communion. The primordial deep is a state of pure potentiality, created so that God could work in and through it to “actualize” His will by creating plants, animals, and, ultimately, Man—His image, the one who will co-operate with Him in the “actualization” of His will (to incarnate in all things).

This means that sin, the rejection of God, is not simply an “actualization” of our potential in the wrong direction. This, I suggest, reifies evil into something more than, as the Fathers teach, a pure privation of the Good/Actual. It is, rather, the self-negating contradiction whereby the potential (for communion) is refused, leading to a truly absurd and paradoxical situation where we “enhypostatize” what has no nature, “falsely incarnate” non-being/that which has no logos. Sin is self-relation, and self-relation is self-negation. The ouroboros eats its own tail, but this is, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, a “quite unsatisfactory meal.”¹ The point I would make—as someone who affirms the traditional Christian teaching on eternal damnation (i.e., I am not an annihilationist or a universalist)—is that the end of the Serpent’s self-consumption is not annihilation. Rather, what remains at the end of the process is an empty mouth, a pure void of self-willing with no object that can satisfy it. I am reminded of the incoherent babbling mouth of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. Sin is, to borrow a term from Slavoj Žižek, “less than nothing”—the perversion of being. Sin does not simply “annihilate” being; it corrupts it into its opposite. Thus, through the misuse of our freedom, we become enslaved to sin; through the self-assertion of pride, our self fragments. Sin neither “actualizes” a reified “evil state” standing opposed to the Good, nor does it simply annihilate the person. Rather, sin is the refusal to become actualized, a tending towards non-being that can never achieve its self-asserted end.

God is the Creator, and we have no power to destroy His creation—even ourselves. If actuality is the actuality-of-communion and sin is the refusal of communion, then sin cannot but result in the lack of actuality. Sin is akin to falling down the “Ladder of Divine Ascent”—there are only two directions we can go; there is no “neutral” for us. What is neutral is simply unactualized potential, and sin is not unactualized potential—it is the refusal to actualize and thus the negation of potentiality; it is a “hardening” of the heart that is somehow beyond the classical dualism of potentiality and actuality. Thus, my friend Seraphim Hamilton says that sin/hell can only be understood through a sort of “reverse apophaticism,” since it has no concrete actuality from which we could derive meaningful predicates. Hence, the contradictory nature of Gehennic symbolism: both “darkness” and “fire,” a dry “pit” and a “lake,” an “eternal death.”

To refer back to our Biblical terms, sin is akin to embracing the primordial waters as God works to advance beyond them, leading not simply to a return to the primordial neutrality but an absurd perversion. Perhaps the most well-known Gehennic imagery in Scripture is the “lake of fire.” It is significant that John specifically chooses to refer to hell as a body of liquid, when he could have just as easily (and perhaps more naturally) referred to it as a “furnace.” The lake imagery calls to mind both the primordial sea and the chaos of the rebellious nations, while simultaneously going beyond both. Hell is, like the primordial waters, a lack of actuality. Hell is also, like the pagan nations, a place of rebellion and disorder. And yet, the waters of hell are not “water” at all—they are fire. What is fire? In Biblical symbolism and Orthodox theology, fire signifies the presence of God (Exodus 3, 1 Kings 18, Hebrews 12, etc.). Hell is, therefore, the antinomy of being separated from God (darkness) while being in His presence (fire). It is a sort of “actualized non-potential,” to continue with our (reverse) apophatic contradictions. Thus, the Fathers refer to the suffering of hell both as eternal alienation from God and as the torment of His all-consuming presence. Hell is the antinomic “point” where God’s presence touches the sinner, the creative “dialogue” reduced to its most absurd and incomplete form—God’s unrestrained calling forth and the creature’s stubborn refusal of reciprocation. St. Dumitru Staniloae will therefore speak of the radical asymmetry between the eternity of heaven and the eternity of hell: heaven is eternal as the epektasis (unending progress) of the divine-human dialogue (the fullness of mutual love), and hell is eternal as the refusal of the creature to participate in the dialogue (the absence of creaturely love).² This antinomy, I suggest, is expressed in the term “lake of fire.” The watery imagery serves the dual function of signifying the creature’s lack of actuality (communion) and its stubborn rebellion. The symbolism of “fire” refers to the God who makes Himself present even to those who despise Him. I have written elsewhere about how this same paradox can be observed in Christ’s description of hell’s torments as that of an “undying worm”—Christ Himself is the undying worm, the one who lovingly enters even those who hate Him, and thus becomes the One who torments them. The antinomy of hell consists in the fact that God is truly “all-in-all,” but it is precisely by being in “all” that those who are separated from Him suffer.

We can therefore see why Isaac the Syrian could speak of the suffering of hell as “the scourge of love.” The damned are not punished by some external instrument that God wields against them, as if His love were exhausted and replaced by wrath at the threshold of Gehenna; they are punished by the very love that, were they but to receive it, would be their beatitude. The same fire that warms the saints torments the damned, not because the fire has changed but because the creature has refused to become the kind of being that can receive it as warmth. And here we touch upon the deepest absurdity of sin: the damned soul does not finally hate some object “out there” we call “God”—it hates the very ground of its own being, the love without which it could not even sustain its rebellion. Hell is thus the creature’s impossible attempt to exist against the very condition of its existence, to drink from the well while cursing the water. The lake of fire is the perfect symbol of this antinomy: a body of liquid that does not quench, a depth that gives no rest, a presence that the rebel cannot escape and yet refuses to receive.

Sometime soon I’ll finally get around to completing my post that will better live up to the subtitle I used here—“beyond classical metaphysics.” Hell cannot be understood through the classical metaphysics of desire; it can only be approached through the psychoanalytic category of the “death drive.”

1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

2. See St. Dumitru’s “Eternity and Time” or our book Time: Crown of Eternity.