CHAPTER IX.
HELL: ITS DELUSIONS AND MISERIES.
WE now approach that dark and doleful world which is the opposite of heaven; where love is turned into hatred and wisdom into folly; light into darkness and pleasure into pain; which the Scriptures symbolize to us as a "bottomless pit" or the "lake burning with brimstone and fire," and which men have in all ages imagined to be a fearful prison-house down, down deep in the caverns of the earth, or far beyond the faintest ray of sun or star in the darkness of the outermost abyss.
What is it? Where is it? How came it? What will become of it?
Anxious, startling, but not irreverent questions! They have been partially answered. The veil has been lifted from this portion of the spiritual world also. We have new light, new knowledge to displace our old errors and crude notions. We have more terrible conceptions of the nature of sin, and a clearer vindication of the character of God.
We must rid ourselves of certain false ideas commonly entertained on this subject before we can see the truth unfolded by Swedenborg in all its beauty and grandeur. We will state these fundamental errors as we consider them, enter our protest against them, and beg the reader to dismiss them from his mind, until he sees them rationally disproved by the counter-statement of the truth itself.
Hell is not a place created by God for the punishment of sin. On the contrary it is the heaven of the wicked, created by themselves. They rush into it and abide in it of their own accord.
There is no attribute of God which calls for the punishment of sin or which could receive the least satisfaction from such punishment, any farther than it may be made a means of reforming and blessing the sinner. God is infinite love. His anger is a false inference drawn by the sensual man from his own state of evil and misery. God wills the same love, wisdom, peace, joy, to all in hell that he wills to all in heaven. He is the I Am, the sole-existing, the unchangeable.
There were no angels who fell from heaven and became devils; but all angels and all devils were once men or women on some earth in the physical universe.
There is no great Evil Spirit, the Devil, who concentrates about himself all the powers of hell and wars with the Almighty for the mastery of the universe. How the idea of the personality of the devil originated, will be explained in its proper place.
The same universal truths which unfolded the mysteries of heaven, will reveal to us also the dreadful secrets of hell. These universal truths or keys are the doctrines of Influx, Free Agency. Degrees and Correspondence.
God is the sole life of the universe. He does not create life but gives it. It is uncreated. We live by his life; not by a force, derived perhaps from Him, but now fully our own and independent of Him; but by life from moment to moment flowing from Him and received into our spirit. This is influx. There is not, therefore, one God in heaven and another or a different one in hell; one law in heaven and an opposite in hell; an economy of grace in one and an economy of wrath in the other. The entire universe is held together by one breath, one life, one law.
What, then, is our own? Our will, our volition; the power of turning our spiritual bodies as we please—to or from God; the power of determining our affections and thoughts, which are the spiritual substances of the soul, so that they shall present one form or another to the inflowing life of God; this is free-agency, never violated by God, because it is the fundamental distinction between man and God. If man were not a free agent he would be a material part of God, moved like a machine; and pantheism would be true.
The divine influx is always the same. The form determines how it shall be outwardly manifested. This is the atomic arrangement of the spiritual world corresponding to what we see daily in the natural world. The same influx of the sun produces the beautiful and the hideous in nature, the nutritious and the poisonous; the golden flower, emblem of sweetest thought, and the repulsive weed, fit only to be trodden under foot. The atomic arrangement of the vegetable and animal cells, all at first inspection undistinguishable from each other, determines what forms shall appear, whether it shall be a silver lily or a livid fungus; a scaly serpent or a burnished dove. The same law prevails in heaven and in hell and upon earth.
Hell, therefore, is created just as heaven is created. It is first an organic state of the soul, and then an external place or world produced in correspondence with that state. There are three hells opposite to the three heavens; for the three degrees which exist in the human soul, natural, spiritual and celestial, open after death into the heaven or the hell which man has chosen for himself by his life in the world.
The primal cause of heaven and all its phenomena was shown to be the God-in-the-heart of the angels—that is, the love to God and the charity to the neighbor which engaged and exercised their supreme affections. This is the cause of all their light or wisdom, and of the glorious and beautiful objective world spread out before them, representing in living symbolism the spiritual mysteries of the kingdom of God within them.
It is obedience to the Divine will, making the angel like God, the finite image and likeness of God, which permits the influent life of God to pass forth into such resplendent external forms, and to make the glory and beauty and peace and joy of heaven. Disobedience to the Divine will, unlikeness to God, hideous moral deformity is, on the same principle, the cause of hell. It is a question of media. Angelic media, organized forms of love and charity, produce heaven. Infernal media, organized forms of hatred and falsity, produce hell.
Love is the life of heaven; hatred, the life of hell. The hatred of hell is the outward manifestation of a life which has been changed into its opposite by its passage through an utterly selfish form. The common spirit of all the hells, their connecting bond, is hatred to God and the neighbor. This hatred is the legitimate result of the love of self, when it rises from the place it was designed to occupy—the last and lowest—and absorbs and governs the whole soul.
The madness, the insanity of self-love cannot be seen in this world, while the subject of it, the selfish, avaricious or ambitious man, is surrounded by external restraints, such as the fear of the law or of the loss of life or reputation. After death, when the spirit acts from the ruling love alone without such external bonds, it rushes headlong into the wildest excesses, desires to possess all things, to rule over all things, even heaven and God himself, and burns with hatred and revenge against every object which stands or seems to stand in the way of its inordinate lusts.
The hatred of evil spirits against the angels, against little children, against the good and the true in any other spirit, and especially against the Divine Word and the sphere of the Lord, is intense and almost incredible. Swedenborg frequently saw it exhibited as a blind, insensate but impotent fury. The cause of it is the interior antagonism between evil and good, so that the sphere of love and wisdom produces severe pain in the wicked.
"Art thou come hither to torment us?" exclaimed the evil ones to Jesus of Nazareth.
This fire of self-love in the heart, engendering pride, hatred, contempt, scorn, menace, revenge, malice, cruelty and all evil passions, is the hell-fire which torments the wicked for ever and ever.
The heat and light of the spiritual world correspond to the love and wisdom of those there, or to their opposites. The mind of an angel is radiant with intelligence, because his heart is glowing with love. The mind of a devil is dark with falsity, because his heart burns with hate. His thoughts correspond to his affections. The ignorance, the stupidity, the hallucinations, the malicious cunning, the absurd opinions, the monstrous conceptions, the ridiculous fantasies, the vituperative argumentation from false premises to false conclusions, which prevail continually in every society in hell, and which produce a representative sound like snarling, or gnashing of teeth, heard by those approaching from a distance; all these things have no analogies upon earth except what may be found in some vast insane asylum, where men bereft of reason are congregated in every stage of madness—from the raving maniac to the drivelling imbecile.
Wisdom is light; its absence is darkness. Heaven is a world of light; hell, a world of darkness. Think of a kingdom of darkness! a world without the silvery or golden rays of a sun, but lit by flames as from burning coals or sulphureous vapors, or by the wandering ignes fatui and ghastly blue lights of swamps and wildernesses. Such is hell. Some evil spirits are at times plunged in total darkness. Even comparatively good spirits, undergoing vastation or judgment in the world of spirits or intermediate state, are sometimes kept for a long time in utter darkness.
Is not the fear of the dark, which children and even grown persons instinctively feel, a correspondence?—an involuntary shrinking of the soul from what represents the evil and the false?
These poor souls in hell cannot be visited by the light of heaven. Its accompanying heat would torture them by being turned into intense cold, and its light would not be seen by them at all, but would obliterate what little light of their own they were enjoying in their sad, painful, pitiable way. The reason is that the light of heaven and the light of hell, although coming originally from the same source, flow through different media, and do not accord or correspond. An analogous phenomenon is seen on earth. Two waves of light, not according or corresponding, but coming into collision, produce darkness. Two rays of heat can also be made to produce cold or a fall in the thermometer; and two waves of sound may result, not in a sound of double intensity, but in absolute silence.
Heaven is concealed from the spirits in hell; for they cannot feel its heat nor see its light nor breathe its atmosphere. They deny its existence, they scoff at the idea of God, rave against the name of Christ and the Word, and attribute all things to nature as stoutly as the most inveterate scientific infidels of our own day. They can be brought back, however, into their earthly states of thought, and then adjoined to the intellectual sphere of the angels, so that they can think from their standpoint, and thus see all the wonders of heaven and understand all the truths of the Lord's spiritual kingdom. But when they return into the state of thought which corresponds with their own emotional life (and they cannot rest permanently in any other), they forget everything they had seen or heard, and regard the wisdom of heaven with intense aversion.
What bodies have they? The spiritual body being the effigy of the soul, that which effigies a hateful and false nature must necessarily be hideous and ugly. The devils are therefore deformed and monstrous, fierce and cruel in aspect, hairy, black, filthy, a horrible mixture of man and beast. Their faces are sometimes lurid, sometimes like those of corpses, always fearful and disgusting. The sound of their voice is harsh and grating; the tones full of subtlety, malice, hatred and revenge. The stench that exhales from them is intolerable, differing with every society and every individual. All these external horrors are in strict correspondence with their interior states.
Yet such is the infinite self-conceit and delirious intellectual fantasies of these unhappy creatures, that they seem to each other to be men and women, wise and accomplished and enjoying a fair share of personal attractions! "This is of the Lord's mercy," says Swedenborg, "lest they should seem as filthy, one to another, as they appear before the angels."
The abodes of these evil spirits and the objective world about them are also produced, as in the case of angels, from their own affections and thoughts.
Behold how they appeared to an eye-witness who lived consciously in both worlds at the same time:
"The hells appear, some like dens and caverns, some like great chasms and whirlpools, some like bogs and others like lakes of water. They are not opened except when evil spirits (once men) from the world of spirits are cast in thither. When they are opened, there is an exhalation from them, either like that of fire and smoke, such as appears in the air from buildings on fire, or like mists and thick clouds. I have been told that the infernal spirits neither see those things nor are sensible of them, because they are in their own atmosphere and thus in the delight of their own life."
"Some hells appeared like caverns in rocks tending inward and downward; some like dens which wild beasts inhabit in forests; some like arched caverns and holes such as are seen in mines.
"There are also thick forests in which the infernal spirits wander like wild beasts, and where also are subterranean dens into which those can flee who are pursued by others. There are also deserts where everything is barren and sandy. Into these are cast those who in the world have been more cunning than others in practicing deceit."
"In some hells there is an appearance as of ruins of houses and cities after fires, in which ruins the infernal spirits dwell and conceal themselves. In the milder hells there is an appearance of rude cottages, in some cases contiguous, having the aspect of a city with lanes and streets. Within the houses are infernal spirits engaged in continual quarrels, enmities, blows, and fightings; in the streets and lanes robberies and depredations are committed."
This weird region of fantasy and shadow, where the light is lurid and ghastly, and the fierce alternations of heat and cold are terrible, is haunted also, by correspondence with the evil shades of its inhabitants, by innumerable species of birds and beasts of prey and myriads of hideous and venomous reptiles, which represent outwardly in form and character the evil lusts and cruelties of the heart which is utterly alienated from God and for ever divorced from heaven.
This fearful portion of the spiritual world must have been photographed upon the mind of the great poet when he conceived the following lines of the Paradise Lost:
"Through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,
A universe of death, . . .
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived,
Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire."
The poet imagines this hell; Swedenborg explains it. The devils have rejected that divine love and wisdom which create through angelic souls the lovely and beautiful things in heaven; therefore they see no cheering and golden sun which represents the Lord, no blue ethereal dome, no rosy clouds, no rainbows in the air, no flowers upon the earth, no verdure in the fields,
No mountain-altars tipped with azure fire,
No far-off glimmer of the emerald seas.
And now comes what seems to the mind trained in the current theology the strangest assertion of all. This hell is the heaven of evil spirits. These direful surroundings to them are beautiful; these horrible associations to them are pleasant; this awful life is the one they have chosen for themselves. They would not, if they could, exchange their lot for the light of heaven and the bowers of bliss. When let alone, when they let others alone, when they are not engaged in torturing each other, they are happy. It is, however, the happiness of the beast in his lair, of the bat in his cave, of the serpent in his slime. Such is the lot of those who make their bed in hell.
These are not punishments. God does not punish the sinner. The sun never goes down on his wrath. He forgives every sin as soon as it is committed. The punishment of sin lies in the organic law that in sinning you become evil. The wages of sin is death—spiritual death. After that, no love to God and the neighbor, no knowledge of truth, no yearnings for good, no possibility of heaven.
These evil spirits are not tortured by remorse of conscience. Conscience implies faith in God, respect for his laws, pain at their violation, retrospection, contrition. So long as a particle of conscience remains, so long as conviction of sin and feelings of remorse are possible, hell to that soul is impossible. Sin destroys the conscience, which is simply the pleading voice of God in the heart. The devils have no conscience. They deny God; they deny heaven; they deny sin. They call evil good, the false true. They delight in their wicked lusts and passions. They find an infernal delight in their hatred, contentions and cruelties. Their misery results from the restraints to which their inordinate desires are necessarily subjected.
The same inflowing life from God which tends to organize everything upon the spiritual principles involved in the structure of the Human Form, operates in hell as well as in heaven. Evil spirits, as well as good ones, are organized into societies related in their spiritual functions or uses to the corresponding organs and functions in man. Some member of the society speaks for all the rest, so that many appear as one devil—"My name is Legion, for we are many." The infernal society is a deformed Man—a monster. All the hells together appear to the Lord, who alone can occupy the infinite standpoint from which they are visible, under the form of a vast monster, the opposite of the perfect and sublime Grand Man by which the whole heaven is figured.
This Grand Man of hell, this One representing all, was the Devil who tempted our Lord. This is the Devil or Satan always meant in the Word of God, which in its spiritual sense describes everything from a divine standpoint. Devils are innumerable. The Devil, as a single evil spirit supreme over all others, does not exist. He is a shadow, a symbol, a representative figure projected in front of us from innumerable similar figures invisible behind us. This view furnishes a solution to one of the strangest mysteries rising from the literal sense of the Scriptures, viz., the doctrine of a personal Devil, "archangel ruined," so vast and powerful as to contend with the Supreme Being for the throne of the universe.
In what occupations are devils, spiritual forms of evil and falsity, likely to engage? The will ever strives to go forth into act. The delight of life is to do and to be what one loves. The delight of heaven is to obey the Lord and to do good to the neighbor. The delight of hell is the gratification of an evil selfhood and supremacy over the neighbor. Harmony is the spirit of heaven. Discord is the spirit of hell. The word Satan in its original means enemy, adversary; devil in the original is he that sets at variance. Heavenly love unites all for noble uses. Infernal love scatters and repels. All the angels turn to the Lord as a common centre; every evil spirit turns to himself as the centre of the universe and would be ruler of all.
In hell, therefore, no one applies himself to any good and useful labor for the benefit of others, except under dire compulsion. Each one endeavors to prey upon others and make them subservient to his own ends. Each one despises others in comparison with himself. Strange as it may appear, evil spirits delight to inflict sufferings and punishments upon all they meet. Their cunning, subtlety, cruelty, hatred and spirit of revenge are almost incredible. They make war upon each other and upon men in the flesh, and would if they could destroy the order and peace of heaven itself.
The evil we see upon earth, at which the cheek pales and the heart bleeds, is the breath of these spirits in hell who flow into the wills and understandings of men, infusing their own hatred and false persuasions into all who receive them. The wicked man is a kind of automaton moved from within by spirits more wicked than himself, spirits who cunningly make a vile slave of him and who delight in the tortures they inflict upon him, and through him upon others. All scenes of drunkenness, theft, obscenity, murder, war and cruelty, are places of high revel to these invisible demons, who scent from afar the sphere of such things with exquisite delight.
When a good spirit enters heaven he is attracted by the force of spiritual affinity to the society which is engaged in the performance of the uses that he loves best. He is received with joy and tender affection. All hearts flow toward him; all minds instruct him; all hands are ready to help him. He is clad in beautiful garments; conducted to a resplendent home; escorted to feasts of charity and love; and, bound to all by the sweet ties of brotherhood, he is gradually settled into that niche of loving use and joy which he is destined to occupy for ever.
Let Swedenborg tell in his plain and graphic manner, the reception which a sinner meets when he reaches at last his own place in hell:
"From every hell there exhales a sphere of the lusts in which its inhabitants are. When this sphere is perceived by one who is in similar lust he is affected at heart, and is filled with delight; for lust and the delight of it are one, since whatever a man lusts after is delightful to him. The spirit, therefore, turns himself toward the hell whence the sphere proceeds, and from delight of heart longs to go thither. As yet he knows nothing of the torments which exist there; and, if he did know, he would still desire to go; for in the spiritual world no one can resist his own lust, for it belongs to his nature, and every one there acts according to his nature."
"When, therefore, a spirit of his own accord or from his own freedom, directs his course to his own hell and enters it, he is at first received in a friendly manner, and is thus led to believe that he is among friends. This, however, continues only for a few hours. In the mean time he is examined with a view to discover the degree of his cunning, and thence of his power. When this is ascertained they begin to infest him; and this they do in various ways, and with gradually-increasing violence and severity. This is done by introducing him more interiorly and deeply into hell; for the spirits are more malignant in proportion as the hell they inhabit is more interior and deep."
"After the first infestations they begin to torture him with cruel punishments, which they continue until he is reduced to the condition of a slave. But because rebellious commotions continually exist there, for every one in hell desires to be greatest and burns with hatred toward others, fresh outrages occur. Thus one miserable scene is changed into another. They who are made slaves are taken out of their thraldom to assist some new devil in subjugating others; when they who refuse to submit and to yield implicit obedience are again tormented in various ways. And this goes on perpetually."
This is a sad picture; but far more terrible pictures may be drawn from the pages of Swedenborg. They are fearful, painful, but necessary revelations. They are not given to frighten men into righteousness. They are truths which make part of a universal psychology, or science of the soul. They give us the morbid anatomy or pathology of that diseased spiritual state produced by sin. They show us what self-love is and what it leads to. They make us tremble and look inwardly at ourselves, then upward to God.
Disastrous levity and unbelief prevail in the world in regard to the fate of the unregenerate soul. Men excuse themselves for their bad passions and rest so contentedly in their false persuasions, that it is hard to convict them of sin at the bar of their own consciences, and to make them sensible of the awful fact, that their affections and thoughts, so far as they are evil and false, are already in hell, and felt and shared by the infernal spirits or the invisible world. The utter incredulity as to the everlasting fire threatened in the literal sense of the Scriptures, and the vague hope that a God of infinite mercy and power will some how or other finally save them from the consequences of sin, have produced a most culpable indifference on the whole subject. There is no point in spiritual philosophy on which the old theology is so dark and unsatisfactory, and which so urgently needs the clear, thorough, convincing and instructive light of a new dispensation of truth.
Great, indeed, are the miseries inflicted by evil spirits upon each other.
"Their highest satisfaction," says Swedenborg, "consists in the ability to punish, torture and torment one another, which they effect by artifices entirely unknown in the world, exciting exquisitely painful, and, as it were, corporeal sensations, and also dire and horrible fantasies, as well as extreme alarm and terror, with many other torments. In this the diabolical crew perceive so much pleasure, that were it possible for them infinitely to increase and augment these pangs and torments, they would still be dissatisfied and burn with a desire to extend them; the Lord, however, frustrates their efforts and mitigates the anguish they inflict."
Few or none upon earth are capable of such extreme cruelty. Some touch of nature, some voice of a better angel, some buried instinct of tenderness will make the most degraded beings pause before reaching such depths of diabolism. The heavens are never utterly closed to men. In hell, however, such things are not only possible but inevitable, because no one goes to hell until he has been divested of all the truth and goodness he had known or felt on earth, and until he is utterly separated from angels and their holy spheres. This process is effected by the exploration and judgment of the soul in the world of spirits. The nature of that judgment and the reason of it are so important in a system of theological truth that its consideration is reserved for a separate chapter.
The hells of different kinds of criminals differ as widely from each other as the societies of heaven differ. Each infernal society is placed opposite to some heavenly society, of which its life is the specific corruption or perversion. When the hells are in great fermentation they react against the governing powers in heaven so forcibly that the light and peace of the angels would be sensibly diminished, and their influences upon men in the world vastly weakened, if the evil spirits were not reduced to submission and a kind of dormant state by intense suffering and fear. This is meant by "the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence." The punishment is effected by the mere approach of the angelic spheres.
The miseries of hell are therefore threefold. First, the self-inflicted miseries which flow from the organic state of the soul itself, so that its surroundings are necessarily wretched and loathsome, by the spiritual law of correspondential creation. Second, the miseries inflicted by some upon others in a thousand subtile and astonishing ways. Third, the miseries inflicted by the visitation of angelic spheres when it becomes necessary to maintain that degree of order and equilibrium upon which the stability of the universe depends.
Observe that these are not the punishments of the sins committed in the flesh, but the punishment of sins continually being committed on account of the organically evil state of the soul. No spirit is ever punished for what he did in the world, but only for what he is now doing to afflict and destroy others. He has indeed acquired by his life in the world the peculiar spiritual constitution, the conformations of heart and mind that continually impel him to the commission of the evil which precipitates him into suffering and punishment.
A great theological consequence flows from this rational and philosophical view of the punishment of sin. Christ did not undergo the punishment of sin. His work was not to deliver us from the effects of sin, but from its power and bondage. Effects are only removed by removing their causes. Sin is always punished, by the loss of spiritual vitality, by the weakening of conscience, by the receding of angelic spheres, by the enveloping tyranny of evil. The infliction of pain, physical or mental, cannot atone for sin, cannot satisfy the offended majesty of the law. This revenge, for it is nothing else, is altogether abhorrent to God and angels, who instantly forgive every evil thing done against them and pity the doer. The small part of the miseries of hell for which God may be considered responsible, viz., those induced by the visitation of angelic spheres, is never permitted except for the defence of the innocent, the reformation of the offender so far as may be possible, and the repression of evil; and never, never in the sense of a satisfaction to divine justice for outrages committed against it.
In every soul which has a just idea of the love, wisdom and power of God, there is an instinctive outcry and revolt against the existence of hell, and especially against its perpetuity. The traditional Church which imposes its incomprehensible dogmas upon men as sacred mysteries of faith, gives no satisfactory answer to the questioning soul. What has the New Church to say on the subject? It professes to have a thorough, scientific and philosophical basis, and to see truth by its own light. It is especially bound to give a reason for hell and its miseries, as it teaches a most miserable and fearful doom of the unregenerate; a hell of utterable darkness and horror, of excruciating bodily torments, of hideous shapes and fantasies, of painful alternations of heat and cold, of serpents swarming around the terrified spirits and biting them as the people were bitten by the serpents in the wilderness; and a thousand other fearful modes of suffering.
Why does God permit these things to exist?
The old theology does not question his power; it questions his will. He could, if he chose, it tacitly says, put an end to all the miseries of hell, release the wretched inmates, forgive their sins, illumine their minds, purify their hearts and elevate them to heaven. Why does He not do so? Oh, they have sinned away their day of grace, and must endure for ever the fearful punishment of sin. Their sentence is just, their sufferings are merited, the justice of God is vindicated, and his glory is as clearly manifested in the eternal misery of the sinner as in the eternal felicity of the saint.
The New Church, repudiating these doctrines as irrational and unscriptural, would rescue theology from their baleful influence. It affirms that God has no justice which can be outraged and insulted by a violation of his laws, and which demands a retribution in shape of punishment for sin. Spiritual laws are organic. They are expressions or modes of life and are not created. They exist in the nature of things, by primal necessity, coincidently with God himself. God is law. He creates and governs man by the laws of his own being. There is not one law for God and another for man, but the same for both.
When man violates the divine commandments which are the laws of God's life, he does not incur God's displeasure, but excites his pity. He suffers a dreadful organic change in his own spiritual nature which entails upon him eternal and painful consequences; but they are not legal punishments of sin, but necessary effects of a cause which he himself has put into operation, viz., the turning himself away from God so as to receive the influx of his life into a perverted and disorderly form. Hell is only punishment of sin as a burn is the punishment for putting your hand in the fire.
Hell, therefore, is not created by God at all, but by man, and it is created through his violations of the divine laws. Hell is not governed by any other laws or with any other spirit than the laws and spirit which prevail in heaven. The miseries of hell flow from the influx and operation of the laws and spirit of heaven into perverted and disorderly forms. Man changes; God is unchangeable. God gives his bread to all alike, but evil spirits turn it into a stone; fish, but they change it into a serpent; flowers, but in evil hands they become poisonous weeds.
If God is not responsible for hell, even in a legal sense, why does he not change, suppress, or destroy it?
If the hearts of all the devils could be changed and turned in faith and love toward God, hell and its wretchedness would disappear. The life and laws and forms of heaven would become objective there and it would be another heaven. Why does God not accomplish this? Because He cannot. He cannot forcibly change or compel the will, the life, the love, the selfhood of man or spirit. That would be to destroy his free-agency, his identity, his individuality. At the moment of his creation, of his differentiation from God, man acquires this free-agency, this spiritual impenetrability, and it can never be taken from him.
Why, then, does God not withdraw his sustaining life from the hells and let them perish?
Because He cannot. He cannot change, for that would be to cease to be God. He cannot lie; He cannot violate the laws of His own being; He cannot defraud; He Cannot commit an act of folly; He cannot cease to love nor to create. The life, the breath, the power which flow from Him through the universe are one. He cannot divide them, giving a little here and a little there, infusing or withdrawing as He may choose. He gives all to all; the difference in result is not due to partiality of influx, but to differences of reception. He cannot withhold life from one sphere and give it to another. He would then be present in one and not in the other; He would cease to be omnipresent. In fine, God could not destroy hell without at the same moment destroying heaven and earth. The whole universe is bound together in the same infinite, indissoluble web of life and law.
Why, then, does not God, infinite in wisdom and resources, institute measures for the instruction, discipline, reformation and final regeneration of evil spirits? His bounty and mercies are lavished upon the earth? Why do they not penetrate the awful shadows of the spiritual abyss?
The rational mind fails to see why a short probationary period here, although neglected and despised, should be followed by such a direful and irrevocable hell. It demands reasons, not metaphysical reasons, not theological fictions, but organic reasons for such a result. Organic reasons are those which connect the result with all the universal laws of life, showing that it is no arbitrary enactment, or part of a scheme or plan, but a necessary and inevitable effect of universal and eternal causes.
How can God communicate with the hells?
The spirit of God cannot enter into a devil and fill him with the divine presence so that He can speak through him as the Angel of Jehovah did to the children of Israel. This mode of revelation and instruction is not available, for the divine sphere would instantly throw the evil spirit into such agony that thought would be impossible. Instead of being an inspired oracle he would be at the best a raving maniac.
Divine truth, descending by interior influx and dictation into the minds of evil spirits, is turned into its opposite falsity. Swedenborg saw this fact experimentally proven. The Word of God thus passed through the minds of those in hell would be written out externally in opposite characters, making it the Book of Hell, as full of hatred and falsehood as it really is of love and wisdom. Teaching by inspiration is then impossible also.
Why not send the loving and shining angels to them as missionaries of light and peace? The sphere of the angels is abhorrent to the devils. They would be inflamed with direful animosity at their approach, as a den of serpents would rear their heads and writhe and hiss and strike at the advance of a little child toward them. The influx of heavenly light throws them into total darkness; the influx of heavenly love excites their evil passions into fearful activity. These things are not accidental or imaginary, but real and organic; flowing from laws as fixed and positive as those of chemistry or physics.
Suppose the evil spirits to be made quiescent and to listen to what the angels had to say; what impression could be thus made upon them? The angels could speak nothing but spiritual truth, for they know nothing else. If this were not changed into the opposite, as it would be if flowing into their minds by the interior way, it would at least be utterly unintelligible. Evil spirits in hell are thoroughly sensual. The celestial, spiritual and even the rational degrees of the soul are totally closed. They think and feel from a standpoint far lower than that of men upon the earth. They are veritably wild beasts in human form, inaccessible to truth, reason and mercy.
The Word of God interpreted in its lowest and most sensuous manner might possibly still reach and influence them; but the literal meaning of the Word of God with its sensuous appearances of truth, which the natural man takes for real truth, is limited to nature, to a world of time and space. It was written in nature and in natural forms; it cannot be elevated above nature. It cannot be presented in its literal text to beings who are living in a state, where time and space have no fixed externeity, but change with the changes of the soul.
The inhabitants of hell are, therefore, plainly out of the reach of the saving influences of God, and of the Word of God either spiritual or literal, and of the angels and good spirits. They cannot receive truth; they cannot be drawn by love. They can only be controlled by fear, and by fear excited by terrible suffering.
Is this state to be eternal?
In the spiritual world there are no times and spaces such as in ours; no archives of government, no record of events, no historical evolutions. Spirits know nothing of time. The spiritual idea of eternity is not an idea of an interminable succession of events, but an idea of fixity or perpetuity of state. The question then resolves itself into this; can the state of evil spirits be changed so as to be brought into harmony with the laws of heaven?
In despair of such a result, seeing no causes at work likely to produce it, the benevolent mind, intolerant of an eternal hell, indulges the hope that the sufferings of the wicked will be terminated by a process of gradual annihilation. Swedenborg does not teach this doctrine, although some of his statements invest it with a little plausibility. He says that some spirits are so far deprived of their own evil life by long-continued sufferings, they lose their memory and their reflective faculties to such an extent, that they do not know they are men or that they ever were men. They appear imbecile and almost lifeless; sometimes as skeletons sitting solitary in sandy wastes or among stony ruins; sometimes as almost formless masses, mere ghosts in our view, flickering in dark caverns or gliding along the forest shades. It seems that a step farther, and they would cease to be.
Another and more cheering view of this subject, not distinctly stated by Swedenborg, but clearly deducible from his writings, is, that hell, by means of punishment, suffering and discipline, will be reduced to such thorough external order and submission, that its evils shall become fairly quiescent, and its life made to correspond with the sensual-corporeal sphere of human life, when it is compelled to live and act in severe subordination to the higher faculties.
In this state the devils will be under a perfect but salutary despotism, compelled to useful labors or excited to them by rewards and all the selfish motives which animate unregenerate men. They will be bound by their own lusts and interests, which are those of self and the world, to order, peace and useful employments, remaining, however, thoroughly unspiritual.
The possibility of utilizing the utter selfishness of the spirit for the public good, is apparent from the history of the human race. Men are quite willing, for the honors and high places of the world, for the delights and pleasures of sense, to control their evil passions so far as to display an outward civility and apparent good feeling for the neighbor. Splendid civilizations indeed may be built up, even churches may be made to flourish, with no basis of motive for the whole work but utter selfishness, intense ambition and the love of glory or power.
That acute and original thinker, Henry James, was evidently contemplating such an amelioration of the hells when he penned the following paragraph:
"I have not the slightest idea of hell as a transitory implication of human destiny, as an exhausted element of human progress. On the contrary, I conceive that the vital need of human freedom exacts its eternal perpetuity. I admit, nay I insist, that the devil is fast becoming and will one day be a perfect gentleman; that he will wholly unlearn his nasty tricks of vice and crime, and become a model of sound morality, infusing an unwonted energy into the police department, and inflating public worship with an unprecedented pomp and magnificence. Otherwise I cannot understand how the Lord, with a full knowledge of the character and tendencies of Judas Iscariot, yet chose him into the number of the sacred twelve, and entrusted him with the provision of his and their material welfare. But the gentleman is infinitely short of the MAN; and however gentlemanly the devil will infallibly grow, there he will stop, and leave the sacred heights of manhood unattained."
Hell, even at its worst, exercises a vast use to men, a most important and direct aid in our regeneration. Our own evil loves, hereditary and acquired, connect us organically with its deepest recesses. We cannot be extricated from this spiritual abyss, unless we are made conscious of our being there; unless we see ourselves as interiorly evil and corrupt; and unless we are driven to the Lord and the Word by strong conviction of sin, a fearful sense of its overwhelming power over us, and of our own utter helplessness against its direful assaults. This is effected by the influx of hell into our interiors, when our secret evil and falsehood are stirred up and made active, when we are led into dreadful temptation, and spiritual doubt and despair, out of which we are finally delivered by the Lord. Our heavenly Father thus utilizes the devils to the utmost, and turns to some good use every evil thing they inflict upon us.
This amelioration of the hells can only be possible after the thorough regeneration of men upon earth. When all men in the flesh react against evil spirits just as the angels do in heaven, the powers of hell will have no corresponding ultimate upon earth; and they must either be annihilated, or reduced into external correspondence with the lowest sphere of human life, which is neither spiritual nor rational, but sensual and corporeal. There they may find rest and peace.
It is a happy and ennobling thought, that he who performs a single good deed from a pure motive, contributes his little mite, not only to the salvation of his own soul, but to the order and beauty of the world, to the strength and glory of heaven, to the amelioration and repose of hell, and to the final reign of eternal peace!