The Myth of the Spiteful God and the  Necesity of Hell David Elliot Originally published in Issue I of Vulgata,  October, 2001.

We have only to mention the idea of Hell to a person of modern sensitivities if we wish our listener to either scowl at us for our mythological blindness or let out a hearty roar of laughter. At the other extreme we find those who believe in Hell but who see it simply as a hallucinogenic nightmare leering at us from afar in order to frighten us out of sin and into a strict regimen of good behaviour. The latter is a potentially fatal scruple which may inevitably hedge the soul into despair, since trust in God and not dread of Him, gives us the grace to act well.

The very idea of everlasting punishment and separation from God seems so vexatious and counter-intuitive to us, that a chorus of indignant queries are immediately raised when the question of Hell is brought up. "How can a God Who loves us so much that He sent His only Son to die for us then turn around and condemn us to eternal torment?  Can this be the just dessert of even the worst sinner, given God's omnibenevolence? Would He not rather wish us to be redeemed, even after death, and so give us a second chance instead of the cold shoulder?" Since these questions arise from concern for the salvation of souls they are of course valid, however they begin with a false premise: they assume that it is God who sends us to Hell. The idea of God personally punishing us is inaccurate. Hell is nothing other than the freely willed removal of ourselves from God's presence, and the punishment of which it consists is nothing more than the absence of God, which we ourselves have caused.  Both the sentence and the punishment are therefore the responsibility of every man who chooses against God.

Although most people consider the existence of Hell to be antithetical to the sovereignty and good will of an all-loving God, we might, in fact, say that Hell exists precisely because the presence of infinite love makes it necessary. The participation in love requires the consent of free will. No one can be made to love involuntarily - they might be made to imitate the outer limbs and flourishes of love, but that is not the same as truly loving. It follows, therefore, that since God is Love itself, and He alone is the source of love, the refusal to embrace divine charity necessarily results in a state of utter lovelessness. This state is, of course, nothing more nor less than Hell itself.

Hell is spoken of as the total absence of God, but we see a seeming contradiction in this when the Psalmist prays: "If I make my bed in Hades, behold, Thou art there".  Does this mean that God is present in Hell after all?  How then can Hell be the absence of God?  And did not Christ, Who is God, descend into it?  The answer, I believe, is that the absence of God is one of directed consciousness, not of location per se.  Thus we say of someone who is daydreaming that "He is not all there".  The absence of God is therefore one of personal relationship rather than absolute presence, and thus we preserve the universality of divine omnipresence while maintaining the essential characteristic of Hell.

Given this, we might in the end actually discover that the very fire which lights up Heaven is the same fire that burns in Hell, only in Heaven the fire is love itself, and because the blessed have embraced it, to them it is eternally sweet and relieving.  In Hell the fire is also love, but because the souls there have rejected it, to them it will be forever bitter and repugnant, but it cannot be escaped, since God, Who is love, is omnipresent and unlike the damned, never hypocritical.
While the reality of Heaven entails the presence of all good things which provide us with everlasting bliss, the characteristic of a lost soul, as Von Hugel says, is "their rejection of everything that is simply not themselves".  Here we see why Christ is so insistent upon humility, saying  that "whoever humbles himself will be exalted and whoever exalts himself will be humbled".  The secret is that love itself demands a certain element of self-forgetfulness to operate according to the nature of what it is.  The action of love is to will the good of another, but the contemplation of love is to be selflessly absorbed in the beloved. If a man is truly in love with a woman, he will have completely forgotten himself and will be preoccupied not so much by anything particular which she does but by the very fact of beauty which she is.  Love for God, which is our eternal vocation, also demands something of this (which can only be consummated in Heaven) and therefore it requires humility, that is, a self-forgetfulness that leads to transparency of ego, through which the clean light of Heaven can stream.

The existence of Hell leads, paradoxically, to the ultimate message of hope. Because the Father sent the Son to rekindle in humanity the embers of charity, He has designed to raise us all up to a sanctity and heroism that will shake Hell to it's very foundations and bring sweet rejoicing to the City of God.  We need not fear God, only ourselves.  This does not mean that God does not pronounce judgment upon every human being, but simply that it is we who answer definitively the question:  "For whom do you serve?" from which God's judgment follows.  So long as we have been made into a new creation in Christ, we journey homeward to our heavenly mother Jerusalem in the spirit of joy. We walk, not in fear, but in the inexhaustible hope vouchsafed by God, that we may enjoy ineffable bliss with Him for the whole of the eternal Sabbath.