The Levels of Hell

 

Dante's inferno.

The traditional view of Hell is as a place of many torments. Dante imagined it as having levels, with the punishments growing more severe to fit the crime.

Yet Catholic doctrine seems to make hell an up or down thing. There is really only one sin that sends you to hell. That is a willful turning away from God. This seems to imply that one punishment fits all, and that punishment is eternal separation from God.

However—justice seems to demand that, on top of this, there must be just retribution for harm caused to others.  And the story of the rich man and Lazarus speaks of undying thirst, and of fire.

The damned may eternally crave, like Tantalus in the Greek underworld. They crave because this is their nature: always seeking to satisfy their urges in life, they come to exist only as an enormous appetite thatcan never be satisfied. This is the essence of what we now call narcissism, and which the Greeks called hubris: a desire to possess or devour everything. This is an appetite that can never, in principle, be satisfied, and so it endures eternally. Buddhism, too, speaks of “hungry ghosts,” and sees the necessity of ending all cravings.

Heaven and God, by contrast, is living water, living bread, which if eaten once one can never hunger or thirst again.

As for the image of fire: perhaps this is the fire of desire, an automatic metaphor. The wicked cannot rest.

Isaiah 57:

Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death. But you--come here, you sons of a sorceress, you offspring of adulterers and prostitutes!

… You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags.

… But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud.