Writing like hell
Mar 27, 2007 Faith and Works
I”ll be damned if I can make heads or tails out of this:
Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, Pope Benedict XVI has said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, the Pope said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation – the inferno”. . . .
He had wanted to reinforce the new Catholic catechism, which holds that hell is a “state of eternal separation from God”, to be understood “symbolically rather than physically”.
Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, a church historian, said the Pope was “right to remind us that hell is not something to be put on one side” as an inconvenient or embarrassing aspect of belief.
Please, I’m sorry. Under Catholic doctrine, hell is to be understood symbolically rather than physically, but is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol?
Salvation sought. Dawn?!
UPDATE: St. Dawn the Dutiful takes a break from her book-promotion duties to respond to my email inquiry:
Dear Ron, Good question. I’m not a theologian, but I’d hesitate before accepting a reporter’s parsing of the Pope’s message (re “symbolically”). For one thing, the Pope wasn’t likely speaking in English, plus the context is lost.
The Catechism does not use the word “symbolic” — see here:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p123a12.htm#IV
I think what the Pope was saying had to do with the fact that the Catechism does say that hell is a state of self-exclusion from God, so there is not a physical place with a lake of fire — it’s not like, “make a left on Hollywood, a right on Vine, and three doors down to where you smell brimstone.” What actually exists for a soul that refuses to align itself with God after death could in fact be worse than what we would picture as eternal fire, but fire may be the best possible analogy for it. That would be my guess.
Best,
Dawn
Naturally the reporter, or his editor, blew this. It’s important because people love to mock orthodox religious belief, and it helps if that belief is presented incoherently.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
This has little or nothing to do the the point of your post but what do you think of this quote from the linked story:
‘”The problem is not only that our sense of sin has declined, but also that the world wars and totalitarianisms of the 20th century created a Hell on Earth as bad as anything we can imagine in the afterlife,” Professor Bagliani said.’
That may be a throwaway line made with little thought, or maybe he really believes that. I don’t. If Barbara Tuchman is to be believed– and of course she must– the world was a pretty crappy place for lots of folks in the 14th century, too. And at all other times.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
It was a pretty miserable existence in the 14th century, Craig, but the degree of mass murder, terror and pain man could inflict on man was merely pikerly compared to modern times.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Oh, no doubt. But do you think the decline in the west, at least, of religious faith is because of that?
March 28th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
I think Dawn’s comment is likely to be correct.
March 28th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Craig — no, on the contrary, I think the decline of religious faith is largely a result of our wealth, not our misery.
Jordan — that’s why I asked Dawn! I have heard Jewish approaches to Dawn’s formulation, and also the one you emailed from Gil Bailie, that urges the great degree of spiritual pain that comes from a true understanding of the distance or separation between one’s soul and one’s Creator as a result of sin. But is that really what the Pope was saying here?
March 28th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
This probably isn’t any help, but the Catholic News Service story on this homily doesn’t say anything about hell having to be understood as symbolic:
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0701686.htm
March 28th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Well, is “symbolic” something different, really, from the formulation Dawn and Bailie used? What’s a “real place” that still isn’t a “place”?
March 28th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
If God transcends time and space, having created both, why is it so hard to understand that hell, aka the inferno, can also be something other than a physical place and still exist. It’s not that it has to be somewhere or it’s all in our minds. God isn’t in a place nor is he just in our minds. For Him, as opposed to us, location is a construct of His mind. Given that “mind” has any meaning when applied to God. Seems to me, the paper went looking for controversy and, not finding any, cobbled it together by assigning words meanings that would bring it about and blamed their work on the Pope.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
It’s not hard. In fact to our sophisticated thinking what’s hard to understand is how anyone could have thought hell and heaven were locations on a map. You could be right, though, Mike — could just be, as I said, damnable writing!
March 29th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
If you are interested I went into how the media got this all wrong and even appears to have made up quotes. I also wnet into what the Church teaches and how the media is getting that wrong
http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/messagetopic.asp?p=4269472
THe above link might be purged after 30 days i repeated the same here on Catholic Anwer forum
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=142187
Start at response 5
March 29th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
There is no bigger target among the media than the Catholic Church. Even Sean Hannity gets in on the act.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Is there an onto-theology to spatialize and temporalize meaning? why do the affected boundaries of the ontic survive creations of reason, or the created reason?
Why does the associated meaning and the affected state in existing space deciphered time be ontic to be affected?