In my favorite TV show Criminal Minds, a team of FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit agents is just getting familiar with a heinous crime that has a resembling of being related to an unknown satanic cult. Discussing the case files, agent Derek Morgan shares a note from his personal life: My mother took us to church every Sunday until I moved out. This whole devil thing doesn’t spook me at all. His colleague Spencer Reid immediately jumps in: Maybe that’s because you never truly bought the God part either. Defending his position, Morgan responds: No offense, kid, but you don’t know what I believe! Being a philosophically inclined person, Reid ends up their quick discussion by concluding with the following remark: Well, I mean, logic dictates that if you believe in the one you have to reconcile the existence of the other.

Both dimensions of Christianity are equally important in the understanding of creation, humanity, and salvation. Good and evil. God and Satan. Reward and punishment. The concepts of heaven and hell are at the core of Christian theology. From the beginning of the new religion, Christians were struggling with the complex issues of good and evil, reward and punishment. What happens to people after they die? What is the consequence of sin? It is obvious that a lot of people are not Christians. What will happen to them? What will be the destiny of those who purposely live without God? I’ve talked about the historical development of these concepts in earlier posts (see: here) so I won’t repeat myself. However, I would like to extract a particular aspect of the topos of Hell: the idea of eternal punishment.

Recently, I have been reading again St. Augustine’s masterpiece the City of God. He was indeed an intellectual par excellence. As a convert who found the Christian God by the way of reason and logic, St. Augustine became the most important Christian theologian in late antiquity. It is impossible to overestimate his influence on Christian theology, philosophy, and culture. Perhaps I could point out that Augustinian views about the limitation of human knowledge in the wake of the Fall gave a great impulse to the scientific revolution that happened centuries later. This is not some crazy Bible belt idea that I picked up from a priest or a pastor. Read the book by a renowned historian Peter Harrison entitled Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Anyways, being a busy intellectual, St. Augustine wrote on numerous religious and philosophical issues. One of these issues was related to the concepts of Hell and eternal torment. Before getting into details, I have to point out that the emphasis on the torture that awaits in the dark depths of hell was an important feature of early Christian writings. Early Christian literature is loaded with motifs of torture and punishment. From the Apocalypse of Peter written at the end of the 2nd century to the late fourth century Apocalypse of Paul probably known to Dante, Christian authors repeatedly warned others that Christ didn’t bring only the message of love and mercy. The emphasis on the topos of torture shouldn’t surprise us. After all, the main symbol of Christianity is a torture device. But, more than that, the fascination with torture continued to be an important part of religion during the first several centuries! Even the outsiders detected it! A pagan intellectual and a critic of Christianity Celsus (2nd century) noticed that Christians: invent a number of terrifying incentives. Above all, they have concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishments and rewards, exceeding anything the philosophers . . . could have imagined. In a nutshell, early Christians wanted everyone to know what will happen to those who defy and reject Jesus’ message. As Bishop Polycarp (2nd century) said in a response to a Roman proconsul who threatened him with the death penalty if he doesn’t abandon Christianity:

You threaten me with fire which burns for an hour, and after a little is extinguished, but are ignorant of the fire of the coming judgment and of eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly!

And, God knows, Christians were quite creative in expressing their visions of torture and punishment in hell. The agony of those punished, Bart Ehrman observed, was extensively illustrated with barely concealed voyeuristic glee. Roman historian Ramsay Macmullen has called these narratives the only sadistic literature I am aware of in the ancient world.

St. Augustine and the Fire salamander

Besides the creative ways in which early Christians envisaged the torments of sinners, the concept of everlasting punishment brought certain philosophical difficulties. As the belief in the last Judgment when those (body + soul) who defied and rejected God will be thrown into the forgotten pits of hell where they will be eternally tortured developed, Christian thinkers engaged in deep philosophical reflections on particular intellectual challenges that came along. One area of dispute was the notion of eternal punishment in hell. At the end of his great work The City of God, Augustine decided to discuss it. Needless to say, being a great theologian loyal to Church, he confirmed what had been long believed in mainstream Christian circles: there will be eternal punishment with serious pain for the wicked sinners who, of their own free will, rejected God and Jesus! Always wearing his “philosophical hat”, Augustine was interested in the conceptual (I would even say “logical”) problem that the idea of eternal punishment brings about! Is eternal punishment even possible? Wouldn’t it lead to death and annihilation of the object being punished? How can one imagine a body being tortured in fire forever? Wouldn’t the body cease to exist? It’s a simple, but important question. For Augustine, nature provides the answer:

If therefore, the salamander lives in the fire, as naturalists have recorded, and if certain famous mountains of Sicily have been continually on fire from the remotest antiquity until now, and yet remain entire, these are sufficiently convincing examples that everything which burns is not consumed.

Where did Augustine get the idea that salamanders can live in the fire? It turns out it was a common sense during the late antique and middle ages. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (1st century BCE) describes the magnificent power of salamanders whose bodies sustain fire without a problem. Today we know this to be a myth disproved by biology. The basis for this myth came from people who would throw logs on the fire and salamanders would scurry out of the logs. They thought the salamanders were born in the fire. Nobody realized that salamanders were actually existing in the logs before tossing them into the fire and that after that salamanders were just running for their lives! Anyways, St. Augustine thought that salamanders could live under fire and consequently chose this as an example in his argument in favor of eternal punishment. Another problem was the concept of justice. How can God be just in inflicting an eternal punishment on sins that were committed only for a brief time? Wouldn’t it be fair if punishment lasted as long as the sin? Ten, twenty, or forty years? Why, for God’s sake, eternity? For Augustine, this question seems absurd: As if any law ever regulated the duration of the punishment by the duration of the offense punished! Punishments will be everlasting, but they will, Augustine claims, be of varied degrees! In other words, all will burn, but it will hurt some more than others. Small comfort, if this could even be called a comfort!