THE INFALLIBLE CHURCH ON FUTURE SUFFERING.
IN the December number of the Nineteenth Century, Mr. St. George Mivart publishes an interesting paper which he calls " Happiness in Hell." His object is to reconcile the teaching of the Catholic Church as to the horror and hope- lessness of the place of punishment, with the craving of the modern world for a benignant view of the divine purposes and decrees. He takes as his motto Dante's superscription on the Inferno, " Leave every hope behind, all ye who enter here," and proceeds to show that this only means, Leave behind every hope of the highest kind of bliss for which the nature of man can be adapted ; ' indeed, he makes it ultimately equivalent to, Hope for diminishing suffering, hope even for increasing happiness, hope, if you will, for happiness far higher than any you have experienced on earth, so long as you do not hope for that infinite and unsurpassed beatitude of which we have hardly a glimpse here, and which is afforded only by the vision of the perfect and supreme blessedness.' Mr. Mivart's contention is that as the object of the Church was to convey to men the sense of infinite and intolerable loss implied by losing the hope of Heaven, and as it is impos- sible to convey what such a loss really involves to beings who have never had a glimpse of what Heaven really is, the best Tay of giving man some true conception of what he does lose by forfeiting Heaven, is to blacken as much as possible the darker alternative. This will render the contrast between it and the unimaginable bliss of the brighter alternative, as near as may be to the truth. All perception in this world, says Mr. Mivart, is relative. When an artist tries to convey to the spectator the effect of a brilliant light, without having any sunlight in which to plunge his canvas, what he does is to darken his background to the utmost, in order that the con- trast between that and the whiteness of his canvas may be as great as he can make it. And so he obtains what is as near to relative truth as it is in his power to attain. So, too, the Church, having no means of conveying to the natural heart of man any true symbol of the unimaginable bliss of com- munion with God, was driven to express its sense of the infinite loss of the soul which loses Heaven, in the only way it could, by piling up the agony of Hell. Pile as it would, it could never succeed in conveying any adequate picture of the infinite, the immeasurable, distance between any state which excludes the beatific vision and the state which includes it. No picture which can be imagined of human torture, however exquisite on the one hand, and of natural happiness, however immense and perfect on the other, would convey the dimmest notion of the awful contrast between even the highest con- ceivable form of natural happiness, and the boundless blessed- ness of supernatural communion with God. Relatively, at least to human powers of conception, the meaning of damnation might be better conveyed, Mr. Mivart thinks, by enormously exaggerating the positive tortures of the penal state, ar.d
contrasting them with the highest conceptions of earthly blessedness, than it could by any other expedient of the human imagination. It is not heretical, says Mr. Mivart, to hold that there are very great and progressive alleviations in the state of punishment. It is not even heretical to hold that, for those who have not wilfully turned their backs on God, or indulged themselves in personal hatred of the supreme righteousness, there may be a much higher state of happiness open in the condition to which supernatural bliss is nevertheless eternally denied, than any happiness of which the natural man on earth has had experience. Hell, in the theological sense, involves essentially, nothing but priva- tion of the beatific vision, the loss of all chance of super- natural beatitude. But it may include any amount of natural happiness, inclusive even of the blessing of that sort of faith in God and worship of him, for which our nature, without the special infusion of divine grace, is fitted. Hence the state of damnation,—which means strictly the state in which the bliss and glory of supernatural communion with God is abso- lutely denied,—includes all degrees of natural suffering and natural happiness, from the highest anguish of a gnawing remorse to the highest gladness of a light and grateful and serene heart which has every conceivable joy except that most inconceivable of all joys which has been limited by God's will to the lot of those who have enjoyed the sacrament of Baptism and have died in a state of grace.
Such is Mr. Mivart's reading of the state of damnation as Catholics understand it. It may be a state of intense suffering ; it may be, we understand, a state of eternal anguish,—though probably alleviated from time to time, and especially at periods closely associated with Christ's work of redemption. It may be, again, a state of progressively alleviated suffering, growing lighter through the ages. It may be,—and is, in the case of unbaptised infants,—a state of exquisite natural happiness and goodness, rising to any point, however elevated, not involving that special supernatural bliss which the direct vision of God confers. But what- ever its sufferings, those sufferings are always knowingly and voluntarily incurred. There is no such thing as keen suffering of which the sufferer has not had full and fair warning, and ample liberty to avoid if he would. And though deprivation of the beatific vision is the most infinite of all deprivations, yet, in the case of those who incur it without responsibility, like unbaptised infants, there is no dream even of what they have lost, so that their natural happiness may be perfect, even though the will of God does not open to them the super- natural and inconceivable joy which is the gift, under specially assigned conditions, of grace alone.
Now, if Mr. Mivart states the Catholic doctrine, so far as it has as yet been developed by his Church, accurately, it is certainly not open to the objections to which a vast number of Catholic preachers of missions, have exposed their teaching, of ex- pounding a theology that is cruel, indiscriminate, and tyranni- cal, and utterly irreconcilable with the infinite love and mercy of God. But surely, if it represents not only what it is permissible to teach, but what it is right to teach, the Church has a great deal to answer for in allowing its priests to publish, "permissu superiorum," such very grim and horrible teaching as it not only has published on this subject, bat continues to publish, without any sort of veto from above. The present writer, for instance, read some years ago a little book, published for use in Irish Catholic schools, with the imprimatur "permissu superiorum," in which the tortures of hell, even for a child of seven just capable of " mortal sin," if it died without repentance and absolution after telling its parents (say) a lie, which it knew to be a lie, were described with a hideous realism that was almost sufficient to make atheists of Catholic children. We remember the statement that if such a child died without repentance and absolution, its suffering,—lasting, too, through all eternity,—would be infi- nitely and inconceivably worse than is the suffering of being baked or roasted alive during the short time that that process could take. But if Mr. St. George Mivart's teaching be justi- fied by Catholic theologians, it is, to our minds, no excuse at all to say, as Mr. Mivart says, that by these fearful and coarse exaggerations of the horrors of the penal state, some approach is made to describing truly the relative loss suffered through the forfeiture of the hope of perfect beatitude. For, as Mr. Mivart admits, the children who are taught these doctrines concerning Hell do not in the least understand, or even approximate to understanding, what the infinite bliss which they are forfeiting is, while they do approximately understand, and shudder throughout their whole frame at, the thought of being roasted or baked with all the suffering which that kind of burning inflicts, for endless ages compared with whose dura- tion the worst sufferings they have ever endured were mere momentary flashes. The effect of these enormous exaggera- tions of the sufferings of Hell, on the excuse that you cannot otherwise convey at all the relative superiority of the bliss of Heaven, is not to give a much more gracious and glorious conception of the higher state, but a much more frightful and revolting conception of the lower state ; in other words, to multiply indefinitely the paralysing power of fear, without increasing at all the fascinating force of divine love. Is that what Catholic theologians really mean by conveying relative truth P Suppose you succeed, as far as human limitation can succeed, in indicating the degree in which Heaven is to be preferred to Hell, but succeed only at the cost of overwhelming the mind with the dread of torture, is there the slightest pretence for saying that that even tends to fill it with the love of God ? God is conceived as the author of all these tortures, and conceived very much more vividly from that point of view than he can be as the author of a kind of rigidly conditional bliss, of which those who are to be attracted by it have never even had a foretaste. It would be as true to say that a gloomy pessimist like Schopenbaner appreciated as accurately the relative difference between hell and heaven as the highest saint, because, though he had no insight into spiritual felicity, he rebelled with far more passionate heart against earthly misery, as to say that by dwelling with redundant emphasis on the sufferings of the penal state, you educate children into a fairly true relative appreciation of the chasm which divides that state from the wholly unappreciated and unappreciable bliss of the beatific vision. To our minds, the net result of this blackening of the penal background, in order to throw out more powerfully the attractiveness of the state of bliss, is to render all but impos- sible that grateful flooding of the heart which would be needed to appreciate heavenly bliss. Mr. St. George Mivart does not seem to us at all successful in his apology for the exaggera- tions of the revivalists, and, indeed, of the ordinary Catholic teachers of every age preceding our own, on the subject of Hell. It seems to us that the infallible Church has suddenly awakened to the impression that her teaching needs modi- fication if she is to win this generation. But, surely, infallibility should have interfered sooner with the mis- chievous extravagances of the spiritual terrorists, and not waited for the spirit of the age to show the way. We do not doubt at all that Mr. Mivart represents with perfect truth the scattered indications of theological dissatisfaction felt—in other ages as well as in this—at the great emphasis laid on the religion of fear by the ordinary teachers of the Catholic Church. But we do hold, with some confidence, that the authority of the Church has never been invoked to curb this disposition to frighten men into the path of life, or to qualify those dark conceptions of divine government which her average teachers have disseminated. It is somewhat late now to hedge against the consequences of ages of hardly relieved, or, at all events, seldom relieved, spiritual menace.
Again, surely there is some difficulty in reconciling even the negative teaching of the most lenient school of Catholic theology with the teaching of revelation as to the love of God. Mr. Mivart insists that without baptism by water or martyrdom, or, at all events, without the fixed desire for baptism, which is evidently possible only to the more or less mature, no one can enjoy the bliss of the beatific vision. All who die as infants, though they may never have com- mitted actual sin, and though they may learn to love God, with what be calls the highest love of natural religion, can never be admitted to that highest bliss. But it is very difficult to reconcile the teaching of Christ and his Apostles as to the infinite love of God for all his children who do not reject his rule, with this formal exclusion of pure and noble natures from the highest of all bliss for want of an external cere- mony for which they had no chance of asking. St. Paul says, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him." Surely that is a most distinct reference to the highest bliss ; and yet, according to Mr. Mivart at least, those who love God, and love him ardently, but only with a natural
human love, are to have no share in this inconceivable bliss if they have never had the grace of baptism. When did the Church first begin to put forth this kind of teaching ? Cer- tainly not in the Apostles' time, still less in their Master's. Is not this a theology which looks as if it had been developed for the very purpose of heightening the importance of the sacrament of baptism, rather than for that of deepening the love of man for God? It is not easy to conceive that a being of infinite love, whose love is earnestly returned by his children, should fetter himself by imposing voluntary limits on his own power of conferring on them the highest conceiv- able blessing, even when they desire, so far, at least, as un- assisted nature can desire, the gift of that grace which would entitle them to such blessing. We do not think that Mr. Mivart's paper will increase the willingness of man- kind to consider his Church infallible in her exposition of the conditions of the immortal life.
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