Why not annihilation?

Another post on hell?  Will this series never end?  Never fear, dear reader.  As Elaine Benes would say, it only feels like an eternity.  We’ll get on to another topic before long.

Hell itself never ends, though.  But why not?  A critic might agree that the damned essentially choose to go to hell, and that it is just for God to inflict a punishment proportionate to this evil choice.  The critic might still wonder, though, why the punishment has to be perpetual.  Couldn’t God simply annihilate the damned person after some period of suffering?  Wouldn’t this be not only more merciful, but also more just?  

Suppose Hitler and Stalin merit millions of lifetimes worth of suffering given the number of people they killed, and that this punishment ought to be inflicted simply for the sake of retributive justice, since deterrence, rehabilitation, and protection are purposes of punishment that no longer apply after death.  Wouldn’t a punishment of many millions of years suffice?  Why would it have to go on forever?  Why not a prolonged period of great misery following by nothingness?

On reflection, however, this annihilationist position doesn’t make sense, for several reasons.  Begin with a consideration that does involve deterrence.  In The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, Fr. Charles Arminjon argues that if the sufferings of hell were temporary, they would be insufficient to deter at least some wrongdoing.  At least some people might judge certain sins to be so attractive that they would be willing to suffer temporarily, even if horribly and for a long time, for the sake of committing them.  They might even thumb their noses at God, knowing that however grave are the evils they commit, they will only ever have to suffer finitely for them.  They will see their eventual annihilation as a means of ultimately escaping divine justice and “getting away with” doing what they wanted to do.

Now, I think this is plausible, though it would be a mistake to take deterrence to be the fundamental consideration here.  For deterrence value is not a sufficient condition for just punishment.  An offender must in the first place deserve a certain punishment before we can go on to consider whether inflicting it would also have value as a way of deterring others.  However, given what has been said in my previous posts on this subject, it is clear that an offender can deserve everlasting punishment.  For (as I have argued, following Aquinas) those who are damned perpetually will to do what is evil, never repenting of it.  They are perpetually in a state that merits punishment, and thus God perpetually ensures that they receive the punishment they merit.  If such an offender adds to his intention to do this evil the further intention of “getting away with it” by virtue of being annihilated, that only adds to the reasons why he must be punished perpetually rather than annihilated. 

Annihilationism and this response to it take for granted, though, that the person who is damned wants to be annihilated, and as Jerry Walls argues, that is open to question.  Annihilationism also assumes that it would be good and indeed more merciful to annihilate the damned person, assumptions challenged by Jonathan Kvanvig and Eleonore Stump.  As Stump points out, from a Thomistic point of view, being and goodness are convertible, so that to keep a soul in being rather than annihilating it is as such to bring about good rather than bad.  As Kvanvig points out, just as capital punishment is a harsher penalty than life imprisonment, annihilation is plausibly, by analogy, a harsher punishment than perpetual confinement in hell.  And as Walls points out, a soul that is damned may prefer to persist forever willing the evil it has chosen, even though this involves unhappiness.

Keep in mind that, as I have suggested in earlier posts, it is a mistake to begin reflection on the subject of hell by calling to mind stereotypical and simplistic specific examples of sins and punishments.  The skeptic who starts by imagining someone being roasted over a pit and punctured with pitchforks over and over forever for the minor crime of stealing a candy bar is, naturally, going to find it hard to believe that anyone would choose to keep this sort of thing up eternally rather than being annihilated.  After all, people often choose suicide over lesser tortures than that.  But that is, again, precisely the wrong way to begin the inquiry.

The right way is to begin with the most relevant general metaphysical and moral principles, then work through concrete examples that most clearly illustrate those principles, and only after that to proceed to all the less clear and more controversial questions about whether this or that particular sin would merit eternal punishment and whether this or that particular sort of punishment would be fitting for someone to suffer eternally.  Hence in previous posts I started by setting out considerations concerning the fixed nature of the will of a disembodied soul, the nature and justification of punishment in general, and so forth.

Where the question of annihilation is concerned, among the general principles we have to keep in mind is Aquinas’s dictum that “every substance seeks the preservation of its own being, according to its nature” (Summa Theologiae I-II.94.2).  This is true even of the suicidal person, who will spontaneously duck if your throw a knife at him, struggle at least initially if you start to choke him, and so forth.  Preserving himself in being is his natural tendency.  It can be resisted (as it is when someone actually commits or attempts suicide), but self-preservation is a thing’s default position.

A second general Thomistic principle to keep in mind is that, as John Lamont emphasizes in an excellent article on Aquinas’s understanding of hell, the choice to do good or evil is (whether or not we always consciously think of it this way) fundamentally a choice for a certain kind of life – a choice for being a certain kind of person, for having a certain kind of character -- rather than merely for a certain specific action.  And a third general Thomistic principle to keep in mind is that we always choose what we take to be in some way good, even when what we choose is in fact bad and even when we know it to be in some respects bad.

So, take some way of life X that is in fact bad and leads to misery but which many people nevertheless take to be good and actively pursue even when they know it is making them miserable.  X might be a life of cruel domination over others, or of the greedy pursuit of wealth at all costs, or of the envious tearing down of others, or of sexual debauchery, or of drunkenness or drug addiction, or of immersion in endless trivial distractions, or of self-glorification.  The specific example doesn’t matter for present purposes (though it might be a salutary exercise to think in terms of whatever sin it is you personally find the most appealing or difficult to resist).  

Now, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of people who live lives of one of these sorts, and who are miserable as a result but who nevertheless stubbornly refuse to change their ways.  They love the evil to which they have become habituated more than they hate the misery it causes them.  They may also love defying those who urge them to change.  They insist that there is nothing wrong with them, that their unhappiness is due to others rather than to themselves, that it is in any case better to live on their own terms than to concede anything to those criticize them, etc.  They do not wish for death.  On the contrary, they perversely relish their unhappy lives, focusing their attention on the good they think they perceive in the end they have chosen, trying not to dwell on its bad fruits, and being firmly intent on proving wrong those who criticize them.  They manifest the sort irrationality often said to be paradigmatic of insanity, viz. doing the same foolish thing over and over and hoping for a different result. 

The right way to begin thinking about the person who is damned is, I would suggest, to imagine someone like this, but who persists in this particular kind of irrationality in perpetuity.  The damned person is the person whose will is fixed at death on the end of being a person of type X.  That is to say (to apply the general Thomistic principles referred to above), it is fixed on something taken to be good (however mistakenly), and thus on something desired; it is fixed on an overall way of life, and not merely on some momentary act; and it is fixed on being or existing as a person who lives that way of life.  What the damned person is “locked onto” at death is precisely a way of being, rather than on annihilation. 

In refraining from annihilating the person who is damned, then, God is precisely letting that person have what he wants.  As C. S. Lewis puts it, the saved are those who say to God “Thy will be done,” and the damned are those to whom God says “Thy will be done.”

But wouldn’t the damned change their minds?  Wouldn’t buyer’s remorse set in after a season in hell, leading them to say “Whoa, on second thought, I’ll go for annihilation!”  No, because, for the reasons set out in my first post in this series, the soul after death cannot change its basic orientation, cannot alter the fundamental end onto which it is locked.  And opting for annihilation would require such a change.  Hence the soul that is damned, I am suggesting, perpetually wills to exist despite being perpetually miserable.  If this seems insane, that is because it is.  But again, we are familiar with something like this kind of perverse thinking even in this life, in the example of miserable people who refuse even to try to reform but also have no desire to stop living.

Now, we often feel sorry for such people.  So wouldn’t those in heaven feel sorry for the damned – especially if some of their own loved ones are among the damned?  Wouldn’t God therefore annihilate the damned for the sake of the saved, even if not for their own sakes? 

No, and here too, as John Lamont points out in the article linked to above, we can be misled by the examples we take as our models for the damned.  In particular, we might think of that person we know who is habituated to a certain bad way of life, who is miserable as a result, but who might still reform if given enough time and who also has certain good traits.  We might imagine that this person, when in hell, would be essentially like he is now.  And we might then think: “He has such good in him too!  Wouldn’t that lead him to change his ways eventually?  And doesn’t it merit him some happiness, even if he has to be punished for his sins?”  And the problem is that in imagining this, we are, as Lamont points out, attributing to the person in hell traits which he has now but which do not and cannot exist any longer in the afterlife.  For the reason people in this life are mixtures of good and evil is that they are still embodied, and thus not absolutely fixed on either good or evil.  And after death, this is no longer the case.  (Again, see my first post in this series.) 

Hence the good that was in the evil person in this life has completely dropped away after death.  What is left in the lost soul is nothing soft, nothing kind, nothing merciful or wanting mercy, nothing that could generate in the saved the slightest sympathy.  There is only perpetual irrational malice.  If you want an image of the damned, imagine human faces on which there is written only blind, defiant, miserable rage and hatred forever and ever.  Basically, a non-stop Occupy Hell rally.  To which the saved can only shrug and say: “Whatever.  Knock yourselves out, guys.”