St. Isaac, Dickens and Eating Away Gehenna

It is difficult for some of us who were raised on a theology of substitutionary atonement, those of us Protestant converts to holy Orthodoxy, it is difficult for us to accept that our final judgement will involve anything more than the forgiveness of sins. But the Church teaches us otherwise. Parables such as the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Separation of the Sheep and the Goats play a huge role in the hymnology of the Orthodox Church and in its understanding of what our judgement before God will look like. That is, judgement before God is not merely about forgiveness of sin. But rather, the judgement of the Age to Come is also about comfort and torment; or as Christ puts it in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Father Abraham speaking to the Rich Man who is in torment), “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented.”

A significant aspect of the torment of the Age to Come is connected to how we have reveled in comfort while those around us have suffered. Yes, forgiveness is part of it.  Christ is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world, St. John tells us in his first Epistle (2:3), and while we might debate the role of faith or acceptance in the experience of the forgiveness of our sins, one thing is certain: the problem is not on God’s side. God has forgiven all. And yet, though we are forgiven, there there may still torment.

Certainly, some of this torment of the Age to Come—a torment that begins in this life, just as eternal Life begins in this life and continues into the Age to Come—some of this torment has to do with struggling to accept that God has forgiven us for our sins, that the abyss of our sins is not greater than the ocean of God's love. However, another aspect of the torment of the Age to Come has to do with what we have left undone: the good we could have done but didn’t, the help we could have given but held back, the good life we enjoyed (materially, socially, spiritually) refusing to reach out to and love those suffering from want of material blessings, from want of functional family or social support, or for want of a healthy church community and sound (Orthodox) teaching about the nature of God, man and the universe. Some of the suffering of the age to come will have to do with our failure to love.

One of the best depictions in English Literature of this torment over what is left undone, this refusal to care about those around us, and how it might be experienced in the Age to Come is found in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. After the ghost of Jacob Marley shakes up Ebenezer Scrooge and warns him of the three Christmas ghosts who will visit him, Marley’s ghost leads Scrooge to the window where Scrooge sees “the air…filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below on a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

The night is bitterly cold, we are told earlier in the story, and this poor woman is huddled on a doorstep with her infant trying not to freeze. And Scrooge’s departed friend, with an iron safe chained to his ankle, now wants to help, now wants to use the wealth of his resources, what is now bound to him as a burden, to help this poor woman and her baby. And this is the torment of the Age to Come. These are the flames and the gnashing of teeth and the worms that do not cease of the Age to Come. Freed from the voluntarily chosen blindness caused by sin, the old ghost in the white waste coat now feels human compassion, now loves the sister and brother whom he had for a lifetime ignored, now he cares, but now it is too late. Now he can do nothing.

And of course this torment isn’t merely about money and how it might have been better used to help others. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the torment of the Age to Come has nothing directly to do with money. It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with love. It has to do with seeing other people, seeing their pain, loving them and suffering in some small way with them, in some small way lessening your own comfort for the sake of someone else. And you don’t need to spend a dollar to do this. Who do you sit with at lunch break at school that others don’t want to sit with? Who do you hang out with at a party? Do you look for someone who would otherwise be standing alone? Who do you talk to on a bus? Are you willing to listen politely to an old man or woman who is desperate to talk to anyone? Who are you willing to see that you would rather not see? Who is hard to love whom you could try a little harder to love? You don’t have to have any money to love, to care, or to see. You just need to be willing to be a little uncomfortable, to feel a little compassion, to weep a little with those who weep.

I find it interesting that twice in the book of Revelation (chapters 7 and 21) it speaks of God wiping the tears from from every eye. In both contexts, the texts seems to be talking about saints who are already in heaven, already experiencing the blessing of the Age to Come. So here’s the question: where do these tears come from that God wipes away? I don’t know, but I wonder if those tears have something to do with this sudden awareness in the Age to Come of the people we refused to see and of the suffering in others that we did not allow ourselves to share. But as I said at the beginning, it is hard for some of us to conceive of a world to come in which one does not experience either Paradise and only Paradise or Gehenna and only Gehenna. But St. Isaac the Syrian suggests that the experience of the Age to Come may not be as segregated as we suspect.  

St. Isaac emphasizes that there is no middle place between Paradise and Gehenna, there is no Limbo or “lesser heaven” or “higher hell.” However, for St. Isaac, both heaven and hell, Paradise and Gehenna, can be experienced in the human heart, in the same human heart. For St. Isaac, and some, perhaps many, Church Fathers, hell or heaven are referred to as places only metaphorically, in a way that makes sense in this current age of time and space as we know it. However, more precisely heaven and hell refer to experiences, or better, they refer to how one experiences continued existence in the Age to Come. The great gulf fixed between the Rich Man and Lazarus spoken of in the parable does not refer to a literal amount of space (as though it could be measured with a long-enough ruler).  What it exactly refers to we do not know, for it is part of the mystery of the Age to Come. However, I suspect that the great gulf has something to do with the life lived and that is now over, a lifetime on earth that cannot be changed for it has been lived, it is what it is and it’s over, just as I cannot change yesterday for it is gone: a great gulf is fixed.

But so long as I continue to live in this world, change is possible. I cannot do anything about yesterday, but I can love today, right now. I can open my eyes now and see the Lazarus at my gates, the poor, the lonely, the stranger, the hard to love. And St. Isaac says (in Homily 32), that one who suffers to love others, as one is “chastised” or suffers in his or her struggle to love God and neighbor and to avoid sin, as one suffers now for righteousness sake, for the sake of mercy and love, St. Isaac says, “He who is chastised here eats away his own Gehenna.” For St. Isaac, there is no contradiction between the experience of heavenly rest and the experience of punishment for pleasures that we allow ourselves through sinful and selfish licentiousness. These are experienced by each of us now, in time and space as we know it, generally sequentially: “Every rest is followed by hardship, and every hardship endured for God is followed by rest.”  

How hardship and rest, Gehenna and Paradise, may be experienced in the Age to Come, we don’t know; but St. Isaac assures us that the rest (or perhaps what we would more likely call peace) that we experience as a gift from God now is only an earning that “does not eat away its own capital.” That is, when God grants us peace, comfort and encouragement now in this age, it takes nothing away from the peace, comfort and encouragement of the heavenly reward. It’s just a foretaste, a bit of interest paid out that in no way diminishes the capital of the heavenly blessing God has stored up for those who love Him. But suffering for Christ’s sake, suffering to avoid sin or to love our neighbour, suffering for righteousness sake is actually a gift of God’s “rich mercies” because suffering now “eats away” the Gehenna, the suffering that may await us in the Age to Come, especially those of us like me who love God with only part of my heart, part of my soul, part of my mind and part of my strength. 

This is not a theology of works righteousness, not exactly.  Past sins cannot be undone. Only God forgives sin.  However, that I recognize that I have sinned against God and my neighbor (which, by the way, is the same thing) and that I attempt to do something about it to the extent that I willingly suffer somewhat for love, for righteousness sake, this is a great gift to my own conscience.   

As I have said before, some of what St. Isaac writes is controversial, mostly because he is not a systematic theologian. He is a mystical theologian who speaks of what he has experienced and known in his relationship with God, who speaks in a way that has for more than a thousand years helped millions of holy men and women (mostly Orthodox monastics) grow in prayer and the knowledge of God. St. Isaac did not write to be systematized, he wrote to help men and women meet God. He writes in paradox and parable about the actual experience of a life in God, what the Orthodox Church often calls theology, but nothing like the rational explanations you find in academic books, what popularly passes for theology. Therefore, it would be a mistake to hear anything I write as I reflect on St. Isaac’s homilies as a challenge to Orthodox dogma. Everything St. Isaac says assumes Orthodox dogma. Everything he says fits squarely in the teaching of the Orthodox faith—even if sometimes it is a fit that cannot be rationally squared. It is a mystical fit, a fit that mystically resonates in the hearts of millions of holy men and women who have come to actually know God within the Orthodox Church.

St. Isaac, Gehenna and Hope

Probably the most controversial teaching of St. Isaac the Syrian is his teaching on Gehenna, or hell.  Homily 27 begins with the following statement and explanation of St. Isaac’s thoughts on sin, Gehenna and death:

Sin, Gehenna and death do not exist at all with God, for they are effects [or acts], not substances.  Sin is the fruit of the will; there was a time when sin did not exist, and there will be a time when it will not exist.  Gehenna is the fruit of sin; at some point in time it received a beginning, but its end is not known.  Death, however, is a dispensation of the wisdom of the Creator; it will have power over nature only for a time; then it will be totally abolished.

For St. Isaac, all suffering and torment is therapeutic, not vengeful or requisite from the perspective of God.  God allows or causes suffering for sin so that the sinner may be healed.  Even the curse at the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden was therapeutic.  The sufferings associated with the curse were instituted not as retributive punishment, although the language of the biblical text does read that way.  Rather, read through the revelation of the Cross, all apparent retributive action on the part of God in the Old Testament is now understood as redemptive.  That is, God was not looking back at past sins to punish Adam and Eve and their descendants,  but rather God was looking forward to prepare all human beings for redemption.  God uses the painful results or consequences of sinful human actions as a means to heal the very root of sin in human beings.  The sufferings associated with the adamic curse were to turn us to God by revealing to us our finitude.  And even death itself is to be understood as the doorway into the resurrection.  For St. Isaac, the biblical injunction, “mercy triumphs over justice,” is the interpretive principle when it comes to understanding eternal judgement.  In the End, all will somehow be reconciled with God.  

Now, I understand that the fifth Ecumenical Council condemned Origin and his protology (his theory of preexisting souls) and condemned the form of universalism based on his protology.  However, a few other Church fathers also held something like a universalist understanding of salvation, but not based on the preexistence of souls.  Most notably among these is St. Gregory of Nyssa--whom (I believe it was) the second Ecumenical Council proclaimed as the Father of the Fathers.   But to be sure, those who hold such universalist-like opinions are in the minority.  And if we are going to be honest in reading St. Isaac, we have to admit that he is part of that minority.  St. Isaac is a universalist of sorts.  

Of course, a lot depends on what you mean by universalist.  For St. Isaac, at least, that every creature will eventually be reconciled with God does not mean that there is no hell, nor that hell is not relatively eternal.  I say “relatively” because what we mean by “eternal” depends on what we are talking about.  Can any created thing be eternal in the same sense that God Himself is eternal?  Certainly not.  For example, in the Old Testament, God speaks of an “eternal covenant” with the biological descendants of Abraham, but St. Paul tells us (Heb. 8: 7-13) that the old covenant was faulty and was replaced by a new covenant.  Eternity is a relative thing when God is involved.

Some have said that St. Isaac’s understanding of Gehenna is somewhat like the Roman Catholic understanding of Purgatory, but with some significant differences.  Unlike the Roman Catholic understanding of Purgatory, Gehenna, according to St. Isaac, has nothing to do with retribution or payment for past sins.  Gehenna is a place of torment in which suffering as a consequence of our sins (which does not mean the same thing as a recompense for our sins) somehow changes us, somehow turns our will so that every human being, and indeed for St. Isaac every creature, can be reconciled with God.  

St. Isaac is very specific about the nature of the suffering in Gehenna.  It is not punishment in the sense that God is balancing a scale or paying people back for what they did, as though God were somehow under compulsion to a sense of justice greater than Himself, greater than Love.  Rather, St. Isaac says that “those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourges of love.”  That is, they suffer because they now know and cannot escape or distract themselves from the love of God, and the torment they experience has to do with their realization that they have sinned against this great love of God.

Gods love works in two ways in the age to come, according to St. Isaac: 

It torments those who have played the fool, even as happens here when a friend suffers from a friend; but it becomes a source of joy for those who have observed its duties.  Thus I say that this is the torment of Gehenna: bitter regret.  But love inebriates the souls of the sons of Heaven by its delectability. 

So for St. Isaac, Heaven and Hell are not different places, but rather different experiences of the same love of God.  Those who “have played the fool,” those who have spent a lifetime turning away from God will experience torment when they are plunged into the fiery lake of the Love of God, love that they can no longer ignore or distract themselves from, love that forces them to confront themselves as they really are, not as they have spent their lifetime on earth pretending to be.  This will be torment to some.  Others, those who have turned to God, those who have seen their own wickedness, hated it, but nonetheless confessed it as their own, those who have longed to know the love of God, these will experience the same overwhelming love of God as bliss, as heaven, as the fulfillment of their longing.  

But those who experience torment will do so because of sin.  And because sin is not eternal, neither can its consequences be--or so posits St. Isaac.  St. Isaac tells us that Gehenna is the “fruit of sin” and that “at some point in time it received a beginning, but its end is not known.”  Gehenna will have an end, for when the tree dies, the fruit will eventually pass away.  But the end of Gehenna is unknown St. Isaac tells us.  The end of Gehenna is really only posited, or assumed, based on its contingent reality--or rather based on the fact that Gehenna is not actually a reality at all, but an effect, a response, or an experience derived from sin, which itself (sin) is merely an effect and has no reality in itself, no substance, no being.  Sin is merely the perversion or twisting of being.  And so if the cause (sin) is not an eternal thing, then the result (Gehenna) can neither be eternal—at least not eternal in the same sense as a being that was actually created: sin has no being, so neither has its result.

St. Isaac’s understanding of Gehenna as the “scourges of love” and his understanding of the eventual reconciliation of all creation with the Creator is a minority opinion among the Fathers of the Church.  Therefore, it would be inappropriate to say that St. Isaac’s understanding of Gehenna represents the Orthodox understanding.  It is, however, an Orthodox understanding.  I think the Orthodox teaching on Gehenna is that it is a mystery, that we do not really know much at all about it except this: there really is such a thing, or place or experience as Gehenna.  How it exists, what it does, and the exact experience of those who enter it is unknown to us--except that it is very unpleasant and that it is eternal.  

But we must be careful with words like “eternal.”  When we speak of eternal life, for example, we are not speaking of life as we know it without end.  Rather, we are talking about a different quality or kind of life, the life of the Age to Come.  “Eternal” is often a quality word in the bible and in the writing of the Fathers, not a quantity word.  And even when it is referring to duration, we must remember that time itself is a category of a certain created order.  What has no limits from the perspective of the creature within a particular age or epoch (the biological descendants of Abraham before the Incarnation of Christ, for example), may indeed be finite from God’s perspective or even from the perspective of creatures in another age--such as the saints and angels in heaven.  We just don't know what phrases like "eternal condemnation" or "eternal fire" or "the worm never ceases" actually mean in terms of duration especially from the perspective of the Creator who works according to kairos time even though chronos time as we know it will pass away.

Metropolitan Kalistos Ware says that at best the hope that all will be reconciled with God is nothing more than just that, a hope, not a dogma of the Orthodox Church.  St. Isaac could be completely missing it on this one--or we could be completely misunderstanding him.  Or, as I hope is the case, the majority of the Church Fathers could be missing it and the minority report is the correct one.  It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the Church when the majority missed the mark and only a later generation recognized the the truth in the minority report.  It has happened before, just not very often.  

Still, in the mean time, I think I would rather err on the side of hope, on the side that hopes that no suffering whatsoever, not even the suffering of Gehenna is vendictive punishment on God’s part, but rather that the God who came and suffered both with and for us has himself entered all suffering and redeemed it so that nothing is lost, nothing is wasted, no one is thrown away.  This is my hope, because, like Moses, I don’t think I could bear to enter the promised land without all the people.  But who am I to know anything about such mysteries.  I only hope in the Love of God.

I Am Not Afraid Of Hell...

"I am not afraid of hell, and I don't think about Paradise.  I just ask God to be merciful to the entire world and to myself."
St. Porphyrios

Shedding the Fear of God's Wrath

Sister Vassa in her post on the Sunday of the Last Judgement says that the fear of God, when it is healthy, is manifest in us by the fear of disregarding our own conscience; for, as St. Isaac the Syrian says, our conscience is the voice of God within us. Many people struggle, however, with a different understanding of the fear of God. For them, fear of God refers to a fear that God will punish them. This false understanding of the fear of God often comes with the assumption that God is angry—angry in the same way that we have experienced angry human beings, especially authority figures, who in our lives have in anger punished us or withheld love, or threatened to punish us or withhold love.

It is difficult to come to God when you are afraid of being punished. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, we feel an impulse to hide, to cover ourselves, and to blame others. We have listened to the lies of the serpent, and so we have forgotten the loving care of our Father.

Of course, the anthropomorphisms of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, do not help much in this regard. The Bible is full of references to God's anger and wrath, and for people who have been raised in a 'Bible only' theological tradition, it is distressing to conceptualize a divine Father figure of whom it is said, on the one hand, that he loves us, and on the other hand, that his wrath burns hotly against us. What is particularly terrifying about this picture for many of us is that we have known earthly fathers or other authority figures who, due to alcoholism or other mental illnesses, have been loving towards us one day and inexplicably angry and wrathful towards us another day.   Too many of us have learned from experience not to trust the love of an authority figure because we have experienced also his or her wrath.

I have found it helpful, both in my own life and in trying to help others who struggle with this false understanding of God, to begin with the theological premise that God does not change. God does not get angry. There is with God, as it says in the book of Hebrews, no shadow of turning. God has no dark side. God is truth. God is light. And darkness, wherever it is found, is only a shadow that we have created for ourselves, a bit of unreality that we sustain by hiding from God. This is the darkness that the world is in, and it is a darkness that many of us have gotten used to and perhaps even enjoy: a reality of our own creation, even if that reality isn't really real, but exists only in our minds, nonetheless it is our reality and we have come to like it. And perhaps one of the reasons why we like our darkness is that we don't have to see what we don't want to see.

But God is Light, God is the real reality. And just as light drives shadows out of a dark place revealing what is hidden, so God Himself delivers us from our false realities—a deliverance we may find painful. But God comes to us as a friend, as a doctor, to heal our sickness. And we, like a child who has fallen—even if she had not been careful and it was her fault, we, like a child who has fallen, run to God as to our Father for comfort.

Elder, now Saint, Porphyrios says the following:

We should regard Christ as our friend. He is our friend. He asserts this Himself when he says, "you are my friends." Let us stretch out to Him and approach Him as a friend. Do we fall? Do we sin? With familiarity, love and trust let us run to Him—not with fear that He will punish us, but with the confidence which we derive from the sense of being with a friend. We can say to Him, "I have fallen, forgive me." At the same time, however, let us have the sense that He loves us and that He receives us with tenderness and love and forgives us. Don't let sin separate us from Christ. When we believe that He loves us and we love Him, we don't feel [like] strangers and distanced from Him, even when we sin. We have secured His love, and however we behave, we know that He loves us. 

Wounded by Love p 105 

I must admit that I have a little insecurity in me. Such a pure parental love, I'm afraid, might be taken by some as licence to misbehaviour, but what am I afraid of? Is good behaviour our goal, or is it relationship with God and transformation? Perhaps misbehaviour is what is needed in some cases, if love for God is genuinely lacking, if love for God is merely a pleasant delusion. Perhaps, sometimes, one needs to fall hard and far in order to see what is truly in his or her heart. Perhaps a messy reality is better than a neat unreality. But of course, a heart guided by genuine love of God is the best of all.

St. Porphyrios then goes on to talk about hell and the fear of hell. He says, "Certainly the Gospel tells us in a symbolic language that the unjust man will find himself in a place where there is 'grinding and gnashing of teeth'—because that is what it is like to be far from God." Notice that the Saint calls this symbolic language. Hell is not a place as we understand place in the world of time and space as we now know it. After all, how can we talk about place when we have no bodies? Just as Adam and Eve were tormenting themselves as they attempted to hide from God, although God was never far from them, so also the language of torment and of God being far from someone is not a reference to any physical reality, but a reference to a heart turned away from God. And the weeping and gnashing of teeth refers to the torment one goes through as one's false world is confronted with reality, when light shines in places we want to remain dark. 

But why does the Church use this language at all? Why do we talk about hell as a "place of eternal torment" if what we actually believe is something much more nuanced. The answer is didactic. That is, at different stages of our moral development, some images work better than others to move us into the Light. After all, the reality of the Age to Come is such that it cannot be expressed at all in the language and concept of the present age except by metaphor, parable and allegory.  But what cannot be directly expressed in the language and concepts of this age can nevertheless be experienced. We can experience a foretaste of the Light, Life and Love of God, the Paradise of the Age to Come—or even the torment of the Age to Come—even now while we are still citizens of this world. And because God loves us and wants all human beings to be saved, Christ has given us many parables and metaphors to help us draw near to Him in our hearts no matter were we are on our journey.  

St. Porphyrios puts it this way:

Everything has its meaning, its time and its place. The concept of fear is good in the initial stages. It is for beginners, those in whom our ancestral fallen nature lives on. The beginner, whose sensibility has not yet been refined, is held back from evil by fear. And fear is essential since we are men of flesh and blood and earth-bound. But that is a stage, a low level of relationship with the divine. We think in terms of a business deal in order to win Paradise or escape hell. But if we examine the matter more closely we see that it is governed by self-interest. That's not something that appeals to me. When someone progresses and enters into the love of God, what need does he have for fear? Whatever he does, he does out of love, and that is of infinitely greater value. For someone to become good out of fear of God and not out of love is not of such value.  

As we progress, the Gospel leads us to understand that Christ is joy and truth, that Christ is Paradise. Saint John the Evangelist says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. The person who fears is not perfected in love." As we exert ourselves out of fear, we gradually enter into the love of God. Then the torment of hell, fear and death all disappear. We are interested only in the love of God. We do everything for this love, as the bridegroom does for the bride.

And so we are told that fear and hell are tools, tools to help moral beginners, tools that spur us in the right direction when our hearts are very dark and turned away from God. However, they are tools that lead us to love, tools that are laid aside as we turn away from our own darkness and toward God's Light, as we repent. And perhaps those of us who have come to love God, but are still tormented by a fear of punishment, perhaps what we need to do is just let go. What may have served a useful role in our spiritual life at one point, is no longer useful—in fact, it is getting in the way. It's time to grow up in God, to love our Heavenly Father just because He loves us.

Here is a story that I think might be helpful. When I was in high school and college, I hated writing. In my mind, I associated writing with red marks telling me everything I had done wrong and seeming to ignore what I was actually trying to say. Now, red marks correcting spelling and punctuation may indeed serve a useful purpose in helping someone learn to write, but there comes a point when one has to overcome the fear of making a mistake by the desire to communicate. This overcoming did not happen to me until graduate school. The best marks I ever got in my undergraduate writing courses were C- . I hated writing. It was a mine field. I wrote to avoid mistakes, not necessarily to say anything. But something happened in graduate school. I was allowed to use an editor. I was allowed to hire a typist (personal computers, alas, were still a decade away). The professors were interested in what I had to say. Suddenly, I was writing A papers. I was writing to say something, not to avoid mistakes.  

I think a similar transition has to happen in our relationship with God. Sooner or later we just have to shed the fear of making mistakes, and just love God.

Eclectic Orthodoxy and Hell

A couple of friends have asked me to comment on a post by Fr. Aiden Kimel on his eclectic orthodoxy blog entitled "What is Orthodox Hell?" It is, in my opinion, an excellent article naming one of the proverbial elephants in the Orthodox living room. Namely, it has become common in the last half century or so in many Orthodox Christian circles to refer to a particular way of talking about hell as the Orthodox teaching on the matter. However, this is clearly not the case.  

The hell-is-heaven-experienced-differently explanation of hell is actually a minority opinion--if we are just looking at the numbers. The majority of significant Orthodox writers throughout history have spoken of hell in much more painfully tactile and even retributive terms. Fr. Aiden quotes two long passages from St. John Chrysostom to drive his point home. St. John's description of the torment of hell is nothing less than frightening, and taken by itself it could paint a picture of God as vindictive and cruel. But Orthodox Christians do not take it by itself.

That's an important point: any depiction of hell must be understood within a wider cultural and theological context. More specifically, I mean that if one holds the retributive justice philosophy that undergirds the substitutionary atonement soteriology of many contemporary Christians, St. John's words will indeed be interpreted as describing the retribution of God through the eternal, inescapable punishing torture of human beings.   However, such a soteriology in Orthodoxy is a (very small) minority opinion. The majority of Orthodox writers speak about salvation in very different terms.  

Since it is Pascal season, we should call to mind the Pascal troparion, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." In other places, the hymns of the Church speak of Christ "bursting the bonds of hell." Such a depiction of Christ's saving action through His death and resurrection causes us to read St. John's words in a light very different from that shed by a retributive justice metaphor. And this "Cristus Victor" way of speaking is not the only way the Fathers of the Church speak of Christ's saving work: Christ as teacher, Christ as example, Christ as exchange (bride and groom imagery is often used), Christ as sacrifice, Christ as ransom and ransoming. All of these ways of speaking about Christ's saving work are true, yet none is exactly it: for the exact nature of Christ's saving work is an ineffable mystery. 

[I am purposely avoiding the word "model," as if the Father's envisioned distinct models of salvation--rather I view these different ways of speaking as just that: different and equally acceptable metaphors to speak of a known yet ineffable spiritual reality.]

And if the means of our salvation is an ineffable reality, certainly the nature of the afterlife, whether we speak of heaven or hell, is also ineffable. Nevertheless, within the Orthodox Tradition certain language, certain metaphors are common when the Fathers speak of hell, even though some are apparently contradictory. Why might that be?  I have a theory--and it is just that, a guess.

Perhaps in St. John Chrysostom's world, a world just beginning to be christianized (and in many similar contexts throughout history), the pagan concepts of the afterlife made vivid imagery of suffering and retribution a suitable metaphor for the ineffable reality of those who in the age to come are "shut out of the bridal chamber." And perhaps, in a world of extreme material/spiritual dualism, a hell-is-heaven-experienced-differently is a more meaningful metaphor than the fire and brimstone image for the same ineffable reality.

I can hear some of my readers screaming: "But which one is true?"  

They are, in my opinion, both true and both false. They both point to an ineffable reality, a real, true reality that cannot be reduced to concepts and words.  It is a reality that can be known and experienced even in this life, but it is a reality that cannot be squeezed into any particular concept, metaphor or vocabulary of this age. It is just like St. Paul's experience of the "third heaven" where he heard words that are "unlawful" for a human being to utter. Heaven and hell are mysteries: they are known realities that in this age can only be hinted at, pointed towards or suggested in parables and metaphors, some of which may even appear contradictory. 

In an on-line conversation about Fr. Thomas Hopko's Ancient Faith Radio podcasts about the wrath of God, Fr. Aiden makes the following comment which seems to me to put excellent perspective into this whole matter.  He writes: 

I very much appreciate Fr Thomas’s effort to salvage the wrath of God. One of my concerns about Kalomiros’s “River of Fire” is its virtual nullification of the divine wrath, thus making it impossible for pastors to preach huge portions of the Holy Scriptures, both Old Testament and New Testaments. Clearly the divine wrath poses a difficulty for us, but it is a difficulty that is posed to us by the Word of God. Fr Thomas reminds us that we should not too quickly retreat to abstraction, but rather we need to dwell in the biblical story and allow the Scriptures to teach us the meaning of the divine love and wrath. We may end with St Isaac of Syria but perhaps we should not begin with him.

It's the last line the really speaks to this matter. St. Isaac of Syria may indeed offer the quintessential Orthodox Christian expression of the mystery of heaven and hell, but we should not rush in our minds too quickly there. It may do us good to struggle through the violent metaphors and frightening language of the Bible and many of the Church Fathers. St. Isaac spent decades in ascetic prayer to see things the way he does and to discover the metaphors that he offers. As is often the case in our spiritual life, process here may be more important than product.  

But if the process is too frightening for we weak ones, at least let us hold both images for a while, one in each hand, and feel the discomfort of trying to imagine what is unimaginable. Let us learn to love and trust in God, even when we don't understand--which, in my experience, is often the beginning of understanding.

Stepping Back From Hell

We are constantly tempted to focus on the disharmony between us and those with whom we live and work. Focusing on our fellows' mistakes is a recipe for judgment and anger; focusing on our own, a recipe for despair. If only we took a step or two back, we would hear the greater harmony that eludes our ears most of the time. 

Mother Melania

Mother Melania's words about harmony and disharmony remind me of the advice of Elder Sophrony who said that when we find ourselves gazing over the precipice into hell, we should take a couple of steps back and have tea.

There is much in life that leads to hellish experiences. There can be the hell of judgementalism, tormented by what's wrong with others. There can be the hell of despair, tormented by what is wrong with yourself. There is also the hell of impotence, the seeming inability to do anything to help others, especially those we love. There is the hell of confusion, not knowing what is right, who to turn to, what to trust. There are lots of ways hell is a part of our life in this fallen world.

However, whatever form of hell one encounters, I think the words of Elder Sophrony and Mother Melania provide the only practical and (in my experience) effective strategy to find hope. We find hope by taking a couple of steps back. We step back from the edge; we step back from the intense focus on the problem. We step back and we have tea: we chill out, we trust God--if for no other reason than that we know we are powerless to change anything ourselves.

The hell does not go away, but we change. Both thieves crucified with Jesus experienced the hell of crucifixion, but only one also experienced Paradise. Christ descends into our hell transforming us so that even in and through the midst of hellish experience we enter Paradise: the peace that passes understanding, the knowledge of God that surpasses knowledge, the comfort that sustains us through and despite the deepest pain.

And here's the hope: if I, even I the most miserable and uncooperative, can be touched by the Saviour and experience a teeny bit of Paradise in my hell, then certainly God is able to reach and touch and help those I am worried about, those whose meaningless pain or foolishness or recalcitrance concerns me most. If God can touch one thief, he knows how to touch another--even if it may take a bit longer, a bit more suffering, a bit more hell.  

Now, how all of this plays out in eternity, I don't know. But that's not what I'm talking about now. What I am saying now is that the only way we can help others escape hell (now and later) is to escape it ourselves now (and later). How do we escape hell? We escape hell by walking away a little bit and (in our mind) sitting down, trusting God, having tea. Martin Luther put it this way, he said that faith in God is like learning to float in the middle of the deepest ocean: you just roll over on your back and trust God. And breathe. Don't forget to breathe. And with each breath say a little prayer: Lord have mercy.

I admit that I am not yet ready for the deepest ocean, but at least I can start working on floating in the little tub of my life.

What is worth living for ? A response

You have really asked the fundamental question: What is worth living for? You are right that an external constraint to be good only proves to be a burden that eventually produces some form of mental illness either because of guilt because you ignore the “rules” or fundamentalistic self-righteousness and condemnation of others because you deceive yourself into thinking that you are keeping the “rules.” Why bother? Of course, libertinism only produces more suffering. Suffering is a symptom of our sickness and of the sickness we impose on each other and the world. Suicide may take us out of this world, but it doesn’t change us. At least from an Orthodox perspective, heaven and hell are ways to experience existence, and you don’t have to die to begin experiencing either. I know people whose life is hell and I know a few who already taste heaven. As for me, I experience hellish periods (some last moments, some days); but I smell, sometimes, the roses of heaven, and I try to follow that fragrance.
I think the problem lies in a religious milieu that tends to posit knowledge of God as either emotional high or as ridged conformity to rules. This of course is no one’s dogma, but it is the experience and practice of many, many Christians of all stripes. Finding God, if you really find and know Him, makes suffering through life worth it: suffering has meaning in Christ. The problem is how to find, really find, Christ and know Him.
Genuine life in Christ is full of paradox. I think it begins with hope, even the faintest wish that the Creator cares about me. But this care is not like the Baalim, the gods of the world, who in exchange for sacrifices and offerings of various types promise material happiness and power. This care is rather that of a conscientious doctor who desires to heal the patient, not pander to the patient’s delusions. We are very confused children, sick in our minds and hearts; and if we can begin in hope to trust the Physician—because like physiotherapy the healing process is somewhat painful—the small “deaths” we experience through forgiving ourselves and others and turning away from ways that we hurt others begins to produce a kind of resurrection in our minds and hearts. There are no rules outside our heart, but then again our hearts are sick. We need guidance, a spiritual mother or father to help us along the way. But we live in a day in which reliable spiritual fathers and mothers are rare, and most of us stubble along through trial and error, gleaning bits of wisdom from wise people here and there.
And yet hope shines like a little light in a very dark room. We take small steps toward the Light, toward the True, the Beautiful, the Simple. Along the way we learn about ourselves, how sick we really are, what’s real and what’s delusion, what’s love and what isn’t. And part of the paradox is that the less we care about our healing and health, the more clearly we see ourselves and act and think in healthy ways. The more we look at ourselves, the less we see and the more deluded we become. And so we look to a model outside ourselves: “Looking to Jesus, the Author and finisher of our faith.” I’m not talking about the Jesus of Sunday School and of nine year olds. I’m talking about the Jesus who entered the insane world of a woman who had had five husbands. The Jesus who touched the raving maniac and calmed him. The Jesus who called religious hypocrites vipers and white-washed tombs.