Jerry Walls: Hell: The Logic of Damnation
5. Hell and Human Freedom
Both compatibilism and libertarianism pose their own particular problems for the doctrine of hell. If compatibilism is true, God chooses our choices; how then can anyone end up in hell if God is perfectly good? But if libertarianism is true, we are forced to ask, ‘why would anyone choose to go to hell if he could do otherwise’? Walls flags two distinct issues that need to be addressed: firstly, ‘What could it possibly mean to choose damnation?’; secondly, ‘Can any motive make any sense of the claim that evil can be chosen decisively?’
Walls commences his answer to the first question by exploring the Kierkegaardian notion of becoming a ‘self’ and the concept of a ‘continuity forming in the life of each person’. There is one sort of continuity established ‘in those who are willing to becomes selves as God intends’, and another sort that is the ‘consistency of sin’, and ‘just as a good man who wants to maintain his integrity and consistency will resist all thought of evil, so an evil man may protect his consistency by guarding against any impulse toward good’. ‘He has given up the good in despair’, explains Kierkegaard, ‘it could not help him anyway, he says, but it might well disturb him, make it impossible for him ever again to acquire the full momentum of consistency, make him weak. Only in the continuation of sin he is himself’. And the choice of evil is ‘decisive’ when it has become ‘fully consistent’. Thinking of a person as a hierarchy of ordered desires (a desire to eat cake, for example, is of the first order, and the desire not to desire that is of the second), someone ‘who had chosen evil decisively would be a person who consistently wanted evil at all levels of desire’. An example of a second-order desire conforming a first is offered by Goebbel’s momentary wavering in his wish to destroy Poland, and his self-confessed determination to harden his heart. He guards himself ‘against the “temptation” to good, preserving the ‘strength and power which accompanies consistency’. Walls suggests, however, that not all evil people possess this strength; many are defined by the consistency of evil simply by yielding, as a matter of course, to their strongest desire. Walls is thus able to characterise ‘weak evil persons as those who have allowed their second-order desires to be conformed to their evil first-order desires’ and ‘strong evil persons [as] those who have managed to bring all their first-order desires into line with their evil second-order desires’. And it is this consistency which makes it intelligible why some people never choose to return to the good. They have ‘closed off every apparent avenue by which good may enter’ and thereby made themselves ‘immune to the grace of God’.
Turning to the second question of motive, Walls considers the claim that, whilst people may have the power to choose damnation, the choice is psychologically impossible. Denying that assertion, Walls concludes that ‘there must be something about the subjective experience of choosing evil which can account for why some prefer it to goodness’, and hence, like Milton’s Satan, judge that it is “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n”. Meditating on the example of a character in C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, Walls suggests that ‘those in hell approximate happiness in some sense because they get what they want’. Whilst they do not ‘experience even a shred of genuine happiness… perhaps they experience a certain perverse sense of satisfaction, a distorted sort of pleasure’. Lewis’s character, for example, wants to hold onto his feelings that he has been treated unfairly. The choice of hell, for many, may be a matter of preserving a posture of moral superiority and self-righteous indignation – at some earthly distress that has been suffered, for example – holding out against repentance ‘in order to maintain’ their protest. Reflection on one of Christ’s parables suggests ‘the tendency of the damned to justify themselves by holding to their claim of righteousness’. Wall’s conclusion, in the end, is that ‘hell may afford its inhabitants a kind of gratification which motivates the choice to go there. In each case, the choice of evil is somehow justified or rationalised’. Intriguingly, he suggests that ‘hell is a sort of distorted mirror image of heaven… It can offer no true righteousness, but it does offer the alternative attraction of self-righteousness. It holds no genuine happiness’, but provides ‘a deformed sense of satisfaction which faintly resembles real happiness’.
Of course, this implies that those who choose hell are deceived about what is good, in which case, have they really chosen ‘consciously and willingly’? Walls concedes their deception, but qualifies it: they are self-deceived. In their desire to justify their choice of evil, they have persuaded themselves that they are right; the ‘ability to deceive ourselves may be an essential component of moral freedom’. Whilst optimal grace involves ‘being fully informed about Christian faith and teaching’, and this entails the knowledge that God is the source of happiness, and sin the cause of misery, this does not preclude the possibility of self-deception, which, as Walls explains, ‘is not a matter of lacking information, but rather a matter of not attending to what one knows, or of suppressing and refusing to act on it’. The ability to deceive oneself entails the ability to avoid the clear perception of God’s relation to happiness; such knowledge is only ‘acquired in its fully clarity… through free response to God’s grace”.
Followers
Fans
