Literature, Damnation and the Final Death

Writing about damnation, the second death, comes easy to fallen humanity. Even our ideas about utopia when put into practice can become earthly damnation, living hells. All of earth's dictators have and still do envision for their peoples paradise and instead give them a broken tortured world. But that is for my next post.

Literature is full of pictures and concepts of a hellish after life. Of course Dante's Inferno comes to mind first. One of the most horrific pictures in literature is Dante's Lucifer stuck forever in ice at the bottom of the final circle of hell. With torment he chews forever on three traitors, one, of course, being Judas.

How cold I grew, how faint with fearfulness,

Ask me not, Reader; I shall not waste breath

Telling what words are powerless to express;

This was not life, and yet it was not death;

if thou hast wit to think how I might fare

Bereft of both, let fancy aid thy faith.

The Emperor of the sorrowful realm was there,

Out of the girding ice he stood breast-high...

If he was once as fair as now he's foul,

and dared outface his Maker in rebellion,

Well may he be the fount of all our dole.

(Canto XXXIV)

Soren Kierkegaard on the other hand writes of the person who lives in despair not acknowledging their despair, even clinging to their despair and not bringing it before God. He writes of the "millions" in all states of life:

"...eternity asks of thee and of every individual among these million millions only one question, whether thou wast in despair in a such a way that thou didst not know thou wast in despair, or in such a way that thou didst hiddenly carry this sickness in thine inward parts as thy gnawing secret, carry it under thy heart as the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that thou, a horror to others, didst rave in despair. And so, if thou hast lived in despair (whether for the rest thou didst win or lose), then for thee all is lost, eternity knows thee not, it never knew thee, or (even more dreadful) it knows thee as thou art known, it puts thee under arrest by thyself in despair."

(The Sickness unto Death)

Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist, Sartre on the other hand was an atheist existentialist and his book No Exit is truly an atheist's picture of hell. I will not quote from it.

Perhaps the most biblical picture of hell is by a Christian Pastor and author, Walter Wangerin, Jr. In 1978 Wangerin wrote The Book of the Dun Cow. The inside cover of the 1979 edition states:

"Once Upon a Distant Time,

When Ultimate Evil Still lay imprisoned

in the Earth, and in their

Innocence and Might the Beasts

Were Keepers of the Gate, the

World's Greatest Battle Began ..."

But this is not his picture of hell it is rather about the glory and fallenness of humanity as seen in these creatures. But in Mourning into Dancing, a book he wrote for one of his daughters he describes both hell and redemption. I will end this posting with his picture of the unregenerate lost in the last death. But in my next posting I will write about heaven and redemption and make my final quote Wangerin's picture of the resurrection and life everlasting.

Here is his quote about eternal lostness:

"The fourth death is the only death that deserves our deepest dread. It is to be distinguished from the third. ...

Hear, then of the death those who trust in Jesus shall not die. Hear and tremble and give thanks to God.

It is the Dying Absolute. It is the sundering of every relationship for good, forever, and for all. It is more than the cutting of earthly relationships, for it is the experience of eternal, irrevocable solitude. It is perpetual exile from God. From love. It is perhaps (though I do not understand this) the death that knows it is dead. Now, finally, one knows what love is, though one is severed forever from loving and being loved. Now one knows God both in goodness and in glory, and fears him, and honors him, and would even believe in him, but cannot, for God has departed from that one eternally. This is the death of every holy alternative: what is, must be the same forever.

It is a divine and solemn irony, for God hath finally granted the sinner, now in his fourth death, what he took from God in the first: complete independence, a perfect autonomy, a singularity like unto nothing in all possibilities--except the singularity of God before he began to create. But he who has died the fourth death is not God; he could never create, and now he can accomplish nothing. He is the god of a little realm that admits one god only, his impotent self. He can only know despair. He is lost, and 'lost' is all he may say of himself forever, no attribute, no other characteristic, no past nor future, that single thing. 'I perish.' Apollumai

The utter state of solitude is the Dying Absolute. Outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Throughout the generations, its common name has been Hell."