Q. The Catholic Church teaches that hell is eternal. How is that consistent with an all-loving God who wants the best for us? If you’re an unrepentant sinner for 50, 60, 70 years or more, does that warrant spending eternity in hell without any hope of “parole?” Even after a couple hundred thousand years, wouldn't even the most hardened sort feel repentant?

A. The idea of an everlasting hell is troubling, to say the least. How can an all-loving God, who “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), allow some to be lost forever? Isn’t eternal punishment incompatible with God’s infinite mercy?  

The two may at first seem incompatible, but when we look at the problem in the light of human freedom, we see they are not. God truly desires that all come to know and love him, but he has made us free to choose — and that includes the freedom to reject him. A creature unable to choose freely could not love. Although God invites us and enables us to love him, he never compels us, for coerced love is not love.

Freedom and Self-Determination

To understand why hell is everlasting, we need first to understand the self-determining effects of free choice. The self that we are when we stand before God at judgment is the self we have become as a result of our free choices. For it is through our choices that we not only bring about things outside of ourselves, but we also shape ourselves. 

Recall the words of St. John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth): “Human acts … determine the goodness or evil of the individual who performs them. … To the extent that they are deliberate choices, they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits.”

Heaven is first and foremost an intimate communion of persons, human and divine. To be in heaven, we need to be capable of living in such communion. When in this life we act in accord with charity and selflessness — in accord with what is good — we become more capable of living in communion with God and others. When we act out of selfishness and pride — when we do evil — we become less capable of such communion. 

Hell is not so much the result of a divine decree as the tragic result of the misuse of our freedom. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses it this way: 

To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell’ (1033).

We exclude ourselves from communion when we sin mortally. Sin deforms us, closes us in on ourselves and makes us unfit for communion. 

Sin is real. We may rarely have complete clarity about what we are doing. But we do have the capacity to achieve sufficient knowledge that certain acts that have some appeal to us are seriously wrong. This is true not only for Christians, but for those without faith. To deny this is to deny the reality of human freedom. The possibility of hell, therefore, arises not from God’s cruelty but from his respect for our freedom.

Why the Damned Can No Longer Repent

But why must hell’s separation be everlasting? Couldn’t God accomplish his just punishment by subjecting mortal sinners to long ages of separation with a view to reconciling them in the end? Wouldn’t even the most hardened sinner after long ages turn back to God and ask forgiveness? And wouldn’t God’s mercy be ready to forgive? Does eternal alienation not make mercy itself seem defeated?

To hold such a view is to fall into the heresy of universalism — the claim that in the end, all men will be saved — and many Christians today are tempted to adopt its logic. But not only has the everlasting nature of hell been authoritatively taught by an ecumenical council: “The wicked will receive a perpetual punishment with the devil” (Lateran IV), universalism also badly misunderstands the nature of free choice. 

All throughout one’s life, one is shaping one’s identity for better or worse. One does so most radically for the worse by committing mortal sin and most radically for the better by repenting of it in the sacrament of confession. But as stated above, with every free choice we make ourselves a little more or less fit for the communion of the Kingdom. C.S. Lewis famously writes, in Mere Christianity: 

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you … into something a little different from what it was before … into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.  … Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.

At death, one’s identity becomes fixed, not by arbitrary decree, but because the temporal process of self-determination ends. Our capacity for interpersonal communion at that point is what it is. In this life, because we are not entirely integrated around either our good or bad choices, we are able to change them. 

People in the state of grace are able to commit mortal sin, and those in mortal sin, assisted by the grace of the sacraments, are able to repent. This is possible because their entire selves are not yet definitively determined — there is something left in them that can be appealed to that makes a different self-determining choice possible. But at death, we are the persons we have made ourselves to be.

If in this life we have turned our will away from loving communion and remain turned away at death, then we are no longer capable of living in communion with God and others. There remains no openness to the kind of life that characterizes the kingdom, a life of fullness of communion with God and with others. We have made ourselves that way. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain, the doors of hell are “locked on the inside.”

We must keep firmly in mind that when we sin seriously, we know what we are doing. That pertains to the very meaning of mortal sin; it is required by the principle of sufficient reflection. We know we are acting against what is good and what is sacred; we know we are acting in a way that excludes ourselves or others from the good. 

We choose in a way that excludes human communion. If at death, we have fixed ourselves in that exclusionary state of self-determination, we make ourselves incapable of communion with God and others.

Perpetuity and the State of the Soul

Hell’s perpetuity then describes the unchangeable state of the soul after death, when earthly time and the process of moral development and growth have ceased. Just as the souls of the blessed enjoy unending communion with God and others, so those who have rejected the good suffer the unending absence of that communion, perpetual separation from it. Perpetuity here signifies completeness — the finality of the person’s chosen orientation.

When you ask why damned souls “after a couple hundred thousand years” can’t feel repentant, you presume that souls after death are still capable of moral development. But the teaching of the Church, supported by sound moral reasoning, makes it clear that the capacity to change belongs to our earthly condition.

The Love That Respects Freedom

If hell is understood as our freely willed self-exclusion from human and divine communion, it appears not so much as a contradiction of God’s love but as an affirmation that he will never contradict truth or freedom. 

For God to bring into the Kingdom one who had chosen in a way so as to exclude himself from heavenly communion, God would have to erase the effects of one’s free choices. But the effects of our free choice are not separate from ourselves. As morally self-determined beings, they are ourselves. 

So God would have to erase what we are and replace it with what we are not. Far from being consistent with a proper understanding of heaven, this kind of erasing of our true self and reconstituting it as something other than we have made ourselves to be is a kind of puppet-creating.

Hell does not reveal to us any limits on divine mercy. Rather, it reveals to us the limitlessness of God’s divine respect for our freedom. Even though his universal salvific will is for all to be one with him, he accepts the fact that some will break communion with him, cut themselves off from the joy of heavenly communion. 

As John Paul II taught, “[H]ell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”

Living in the Light of Eternity

How then should we respond to the Church’s teaching on hell? Not with fear, but with seriousness. The fact that we can be separated from God for eternity testifies to the stakes of human freedom. 

Every choice matters. Every choice for good over selfishness, for truth over falsehood, for forgiveness over bitterness, for unity over enmity — with each such choice we create ourselves into beings more fit for the Kingdom. Because God’s grace is always there to assist us with such acts, and always there to forgive us when we repent of any choice to the contrary, it should give rise to gratitude rather than despair.

Although everyone should have a salutary fear of hell, we can’t rely on this alone for our motivation for living the Christian life. It is not primarily the fear of hell, but a desire for the splendor of heavenly communion in God’s kingdom that should motivate Christians to persevere in the face of temptation, and to repent when they fall.

The doctrine of hell is not a threat from a vengeful deity, but a truth told by a loving father: your choices matter, because you matter. 

God made us to be in communion with him and with each other. He gave us human freedom so we could choose such communion. Heaven and hell alike bear witness to these truths: Freedom is real; love is real; in God’s justice and mercy, he has created persons capable of both.