Pope Francis has recently caused a stir by allegedly claiming there to be no Hell and even possibly once claiming there to be no Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven. See Francis, Spin Doctor To Himself. His Latest Exploits.
I also have speculated there be no Hell and tend strongly to that view, but I’m a firm believer that the purpose of Creation is to to provide brothers and sisters to share the life of the Lord Jesus Christ for time without end—in the world of the resurrected or Heaven, if you prefer. I’m also a firm believer in the need to be properly prepared to share that divine life and, thus Purgatory is necessary for some (many?) of us. Sharing the life of the Son of God would undoubtedly be so intense as to require a properly matured human being.
Before I’d thought this through in the context of an evolving human race within a universe of evolutionary and developmental processes, I’d already questioned the existence of Hell because of my reading of the Bible. First of all, the Old Testament vision of Hell seems to be little different from that of the Greek pagan view. Hell is a dreary place of the `souls’ of all men separated from the bodies which had allowed them to experience the pleasures of this universe; the afterlife was a matter of dread to ancient Greeks and Romans and Semites. Second, references to Hell in the Gospels occur mostly (entirely?) in parables meant to teach (usually moral) lessons and not meant to be taken literally in all details anymore than we take Aesop’s fables to be literal statements about talking hares and tortoises. Third, Jesus Christ does sometimes talk more explicitly about the afterlife, especially in the context of the Eucharist, the most definitive statement in my opinion being: “For this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees to Son and believes in Him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” [John 6:40] The general thrust of the discourses of John is: eternal life is not something inherent to human beings but rather something God can give us if we respond properly to Him, especially through His Son. Only those who are saved are resurrected, though it’s logical and not at all inconsistent with the statement of Christ just quoted that there be a place where some might be punished in a purging sense and others `re-educated’.
For me, this line of thought eventually lead to exploration of modern knowledge of human being as a physical embodiment within the realm of biology, not as a pasting together of body and soul as was believed by ancient men who recognized the special nature of human being but had no appreciation, for example, of the dynamic and responsive nature of mortal flesh. In fact, they generally couldn’t understand dynamic events in the material world and posited spirits to do all the moving; the later, `higher’ pagans reduced the population of this spirit-world which surrounds us but never totally denied it to my knowledge. In any case, the fears of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that the brain was inert and not capable of engaging in abstract reasoning were proven wrong by modern understandings of cells and DNA and neurons and brain-structures at various levels and so on.
God is a competent Creator and didn’t need to shim here with an immaterial soul or brace up things with an immaterial mind. What He created, what can be observed and measured in some very important ways, is sufficient for producing a species with a body suited to the needs of the incarnate Son of God.
So, we should be asking—if we have the faith and courage: at what point did some finite group of ancestors become part of some covenanted relationship with God that they could have damned all their descendants by breaking that relationship? By the time that human beings existed with the abstract reasoning ability to understand in a coherent way the possibilities of one or more beings transcending this world of `mere’ matter, by the time they could even understand moral relationships in a human way, there were almost certainly multiple family lines separated from each other but also introgressing to some extent into each other; it even seems that we have genes from Neanderthals and—in the case of some ethnic groups—from very primitive human species. There was no Adam and no Eve who could have contingently damned us and there were many human beings who simply never responded to God or His Creation, never rose above the state of being a human animal perhaps out of choice and perhaps because it was beyond their capabilities or the capabilities of their communities. It would seem most plausible to think that `mere’ human animals would have the same fate as canine animals or chimpanzee animals or shark animals: the end of their mortal life is the end of their existence. On the other hand, there is the possibility of many who never form a personal relationship with God being saved because of membership in one or more communities of human beings who have such a personal relationship. This latter possibility has been badly reduced in scope in the modern West though it is frightening to think of the share we all have in national or other communities which have committed great crimes in recent years—such as the American invasion of Iraq.
I could be wrong, but not entirely. God is a competent Creator and there must be coherence between what we know of man empirically and what we know of man through his only inborn transcendental property: being capable of acknowledging and responding to a transcendent God. But, it be not clear to me if this transcendental property is truly inborn with all human beings—individual or communal. No less than the scribes and pharisees, modern defenders of Christianity strain at gnats and swallow camels. They worry about souls and angels and demons—our problematical inheritance from our pagan ancestors; they slide over the problems and opportunities of our relationships with the God of Jesus Christ, all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving; they defend angels against the likelihood that Biblical angels are manifestations of God’s presence rather than independent creatures as if it be better to be visited by angels than by God.
This points to another problem with human beings, one which might require some re-training and remedial education institutes in purgatory: most people, even those with high IQs and capable of learning difficult material, have minds which seem to form once and then harden like instantly cured concrete. They become incapable of honestly and intelligently questioning what they were taught in second-grade Sunday School or seventh-grade CCD or tenth-grade American history class, they become incapable of responding to ongoing natural revelations from the Creator, they become incapable of responding to information indicating our understanding of the Bible or of the Creed is imperfect or is incomplete given new possibilities raised by modern thought, they become incapable of supplementing their idealistic high-school images of the United States without everything breaking with intellectual and moral chaos coming to reign.
At the same time, many modern men and women of the West—including Pope Francis—seem quite capable of somehow adopting parts, maybe many parts, of the dominant thought of their day, currently liberal secularism. I think their liberal secular thoughts and attitudes to be channeled through concrete ducts formed during their early education as Christians, but that is very much speculative and doesn’t change matters too much. In any case, they can sometimes pick up some good ideas about history or human biology or the nature of logical and mathematical truth, though distorted in most cases. Liberal secularists also have such rigid minds and aren’t any more comfortable with empirical fields of knowledge than are religious believers with rigid minds—or those who trust in the words of priests and ministers and writers who have rigid minds. Those religious believers with rigid minds wish to reduce empirical knowledge to a state of submission to their particular schemes for understanding life, the universe, and everything—which schemes include, nowadays, a lot of empirical knowledge circa 1800 or so. Secular liberals seem to have heads cleared of ideas and filled with a lot of policy goals; in the United States, they are those who have minds so open that their brains have fallen out; that sad state is not due to their own decision but rather to the moral irresponsibility of their parents and clergymen who retreated in front of the profit-seekers of Hollywood and the publishing companies as well as the ideological evil of those who set educational and cultural policies in the United States. Other countries, especially in the developed West, are in similar conditions.
Yet, Pope Francis starts out right if he’s acting on the intuition that the Christian churches and other institutions, as well as authors and other individuals, have failed to deal with the discrepancy between traditional understandings and ways of life and newer possibilities. Some of those possibilities are no more than modern statements of ancient desires for freedom from the constraints of mortal human being. Some of those possibilities arise because of better knowledge and understanding of Creation, including even the revelations found in Holy Scripture. Some of those possibilities arise from the creation of new forms of human being, especially communal human being, as human populations have grown so large and human relationships and activities have grown so complex.
We need more serious creative thinkers addressing the issues, thinkers also with serious knowledge of tradition and respect for tradition, not an ignorant, weak-minded group which seems to be so progressive as to imagine they can jump to something resembling Heaven on Earth without bothering with inconvenient knowledge from the Bible or other sources of traditions, without bothering with the flesh-and-blood nature of fundamental human communities, without bothering with the constraints of the evolutionary and developmental processes which God Himself uses in Creation once modern science or pseudo-science has been used to beat Christian believers into submission.