I am obsessed by Hell. Or, perhaps it is better to say, by the concept of Hell. As the most repugnant Christian doctrine, both to logic and common sense, as well as to the doctrine of God’s love, Hell presents a challenge to my theological speculation. Hell provides a foil for my theological imagination, where the most extreme concepts, the greatest absolutes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, love and justice, free-will and determinism, time and eternity, all have a part to play. Hell has it all. If we must accept the doctrine of Hell, as much as Paradise, we have a lot of explaining to do. The world is not what it was when these concepts were born, developed and became defined by the Church in her all-encompassing world-view. Hell used to be a place, under the Earth, as Heaven was a place above the Earth, out past the stars, God’s immoveable Throne. Hell was underground, far under the immobile Earth – Hades, Tartarus, where rivers of fire flowed. The greatest proof of the existence of Hell was when Volcanoes erupted, spewing forth rivers of molten lava from the subterranean Hell. This lava itself was tangible evidence of the rivers of fire. Or again the mouth of Hell was where Christ placed it, the valley of Gehenna outside Jerusalem, again a place of burning. For Christians before the scientific revolution, Hell and Heaven were not simply metaphorical, moral places – they had literal, geographical position, if incredibly distant. Hell-believing Christians who have relinquished this simplistic view, in the face of science, shouldn’t be too proud – although they have accepted an not-so-literal, metaphorical Hell in place of a geographically precise one, in all of our childish imaginations our pictures of it are still informed by these grotesquely literal images. The most vociferously pro-Hell Christians say Hell is “real”, even that is “literal”, but it isn’t actually a place in space, there is no date one can fix for its inception. Can these formulations actually mean anything? How can something be real if it doesn’t exist in space or time? Where is Hell? The Church used to know. It was deep, deep underground – as far away from Heaven as possible in the opposite direction. The Church’s reaction against scientific pursuits like Copernicus’ or Galileo’s was based on the pure and correct instinct that without the geocentric theory and the old Ptolemaic cosmos, and with a moving, orbiting, Earth, there was no place in the cosmos for Hell or Heaven any longer. When there was no absolute “up” or “down”, how could Heaven and Hell be conceived on the cosmological-soteriological map? These questions were actually rather implicit than directly challenging to any specific Church doctrine. The Church had never really, explicitly stated dogmatically that Hell was one million miles under the earth or anything like that, or that lava really was the fires of Hell leaking out a bit – so the threat of science was more to a world-view the Church implicitly relied on to bring its message home. Over time, however, the Churches have come to realize that people don’t need a literal geographical Hell to find fear in it. They are comfortable believing literally in a Hell of purely moral dimension. So while relinquishing explanatory dominance in the scientific, physical realm, the Church has come to realize that it can still dominate minds and dictate reality in the moral realm. So the typical stance in dogmatic theological writings is to affirm that Hell is real, but not literally real, in the physical sense – it is “realer than real”, in an emotional, moral sense. So how can this be? Is there a “moral dimension” that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, or the rules of mathematics? Since science doesn’t have a big say in this moral dimension, the Churches have seized this area as their own. But in the old cosmology, Heaven and Hell fit right in with all the realms of knowledge, and they did indeed obey the rules, they were the ultimate extension of them in fact, to the power of infinity. It was a harmonious, integrated cosmos. There was only one dimension, the real one, and even though they were almost inconceivably far away, Heaven and Hell had a precise geographical place. Yet the Church and its members have long ago relinquished this certainty, in the face of the undeniable and incontestable truth of the scientific world-view. They have retreated into the moral realm, the realm of the conscience, where science has no dominion, no explanatory power that can sweep away the antique images. But where is the conscience, if not in the mind? Is Hell in our own minds? Or God’s mind? Or somebody’s mind, but not exactly real? Where is Hell? Or Heaven for that matter? The Churches really can’t say. If Hell is no longer “under” the Earth, and Heaven is not at least billions of light years away, where are they? Clearly, it is a mystery that no council has yet defined – can the soul travel faster than light to reach Heaven? Or is Heaven hiding behind some nebula, not quite so distant? The Church has not always taught that such literalism is silly. But mature minds take for granted today that the old stories really are merely metaphors, intimations of a much realer reality than the obsolete multi-tiered but very physical cosmos. Without having a clear picture of Hell or Heaven, we are still asked to believe in their very literal reality – “Everything is possible with God”. Yes, but that is not what you used to say. You used to just point to a diagram with Hell below and Heaven above, and to use very graphic depictions of suffering that we were supposed to take literally. If these things are no longer true, when did they change, and where have you, the Churches, explained the true understanding of it? If these things exist, as they must, only in the moral dimension, then Heaven and Hell only exist in the realm of the soul and in the mind of God. And that is a mystery no human mind can fathom. As such, it is arrogant and preposterous to pretend to preach Hell for sinners, with the certainty that comes from knowledge rather than the hope that comes from faith. And if anyone hopes Hell, they must hope it for someone else. And this is what makes the doctrine repugnant. If Hell only exists in a timeless, eternal, moral realm – not the realm of physical space and time – then strident assertions of Hell are not only unwarranted, they are cruel. Because some, in fact many, people believe they deserve punishment, and feel unloved and unlovable, that they were created only for pain. If Hell exists only in the perfect realm, which can only be the realm of the mind of God, then the only proper response to this mystery is humility, not bold preaching of hell-fire and damnation. The Churches might dismiss this question of the literal, geographic place of Hell as preposterous, relying now on the modern common-sense understanding as much as they once relied on the ancient common-sense understanding that saw Heaven up beyond the stars and Hell underneath the surface of the Earth. Without strictly defining how it can be real, the dogmaticians assert that is very real, but not exactly literal. Well, what kind of place is it then? Is it inconceivable? If it is an inconceivable mystery which isn’t to be taken literally, why is it preached and used to scare people, or make promises, with such certainty? How can I listen to you when you don’t know what you’re talking about? Some theologians, largely mavericks working against the tide, have tried to solve the age-old paradoxes and dilemmas, accepting the reality of the scientific and relativistic world-view. But overall, theology still hasn’t caught up with science. The Churches, and the vast majority of people who trust their teaching, certainly haven’t. And as long as they keep sending people to places that don’t literally exist, they never will. MY ANSWER, of course, is mysticism. The path of the soul deals with these absolutes, unites contradictions, lives in the timeless realm. It is here that the old poetic images work, and where the old pre-scientific world-view has constructed a permanent home. This ancient world-view was a human conception, a moral conception, and it made the universe a moral expression, an expression of perfection in harmony. This mysticism is far from the flailing half-literalism of the Heaven and Hell of popular belief. 500 years ago, people believed in these things, Hell was below and Heaven above – they knew where they were. Now people still believe in these things, and the Churches doggedly teach them with the same firm confidence, but no one knows where they are. Mar Gregory