Is Hell Empty?

1750 words, 8 minute read

Dante’s Inferno is like Tokyo at rush hour. Souls are stacked across 9 levels as if God had followed the blue prints for a modern Supermax…and as usual there’s a long queue at the River Styx, souls patiently waiting for their chance to ‘abandon all hope’. 

Does this sound like Theater of the Absurd? Something from Ionesco perhaps? Or Beckett? And BTW, Estragon, what’s your rush? Eternity isn’t going anywhere; it’ll still be waiting, whenever you get there. 

According to a popular eschatological model, the souls of the departed appear before a heavenly tribunal where their past sins are reviewed and rewarded (or not) as appropriate. That is not Dante’s vision! Dante subscribed to the views of Thomas Aquinas: each soul effectively chooses its own fate.

All sin is idolatry – the placing of something ahead of God. We’re all guilty of it from time to time. We cut a corner, put ourselves ahead of a neighbor, seek joy in overindulgence. What’s your Higher Power? Is it God  (Beauty, Truth, Justice)? Or Mammon (Wealth, Power, Fame, Lust)? When all else has failed, where do you turn? What’s your last resort? What’s your ultimate concern? (Tillich)

According to Dante & Aquinas, anyone living may choose to follow a new Higher Power at any time. Death bed? No problem! ‘St. Dostoevsky.’ Once dead, however, that plasticity is gone and you are bolted to the choices you made during your lifetime, not as punishment but as a projection of who you’ve chosen to become. You are exactly the person you always wanted to be. Congrats on that, BTW!

***

In Hades’ Supermax each tier is associated with a particular subset of sin. For example, Tier 4 is reserved for the greedy. Very thoughtful of God! This arrangement ensures that inmates will have things in common with their neighbors. I mean, Paradise isn’t Paradise unless you can share the experience with someone else (just ask any Parrott Head) and Hades is Paradise for those entombed there. 

During your lifetime you rejected communion with God (a foretaste of Paradise) in deference to lust, gluttony or… Therefore in Hell, you will find yourself in the cell block that affords the most faithful realization of your highest value. Imagine a Hogwarts where ‘student choice’ replaces the Sorting Hat. 

Dante stated poetically and masterfully what I will now attempt to describe clumsily  and in prose (apologies in advance): 

Being is Information. “It from bit.” (Wheeler) “A difference that makes a difference.” (Bateson) The Universe consists of information and information is encoded in patterns. “It’s patterns all the way down, Dr. Hawking.”

Each quantum of Being, each ‘event’, has a unique pattern associated with it. Think QR code. That’s it’s handle…forever, and it encodes whatever values the event instantiates. 

God is an event, a quantum of Being, the quantum of Being that is key to decoding all other quanta. God is the universal Rosetta Stone. God is Good. Primordially, all possible patterns reside in potentia in God…but only to the extent that those patterns are consistent with God’s Nature, i.e. with the Good.

You are a ‘society of events’ (Whitehead), events related to one another according to a particular logos that constitutes your identity, your persona. 

Each event encodes its own specific mix of values. To the extent that those values form a pattern that resonates with patterns encoded in God’s Primordial Nature, sympathetic vibration transfers that pattern from our mortal plane to God’s eternal realm. The values we instantiate ‘on earth’ are substantiated ‘in heaven’. (Lord’s Prayer)

Whatever we do in spacetime we do eternally, provided it is consistent with God’s values – i.e. the building blocks of Paradise. Dedicated followers of Aletheia Today will recognize this phenomenon as a ‘Rondeau Time Crystal’, a quantum of being that includes both a spatiotemporal and an eternal aspect in a single event. 

***

Imagine the heavenly tribunal (above): The soul of the departed approaches St. Peter, trembling (that’s the soul trembling, not the saint).

“Relax, you have nothing to fear. You’re in charge here.” Peter can be very reassuring as he escorts you into the hermetically sealed projection booth. 

“I’m going to show you two versions of Eternity. The first (A) includes all your contributions, all your actions; the second (B) erases those actions from the record. 

Now let’s be clear. Your actions had consequences IRL, some intended, most unintended, some known, most unknown. This is not about them; they remain the same under either option. It is just your actions per se that are subject to review here, not their effects. You can’t change the flow of history, but you do have one last chance to determine the role you play in that history.

“Examine both scenarios, take all the time you need, then you decide, and whatever you decide, that will be so. Just please remember two things: (1) whichever option you choose, you are choosing that option, not just for yourself today, but forever and for everyone; and (2) if you choose Option B, it will be as if you had never existed, i.e. you will have never existed! Effectively, you will be expunging yourself from the universal record, from Being itself…but the choice is yours. Like I said, you’re in charge.”

***

I interviewed St. Peter for this article. He explained that he was proud to have processed his 100 billionth human soul. “So,” I ventured jokingly, “Has anyone ever chosen Option B?” Peter looked up at me in amazement: “Everyone chooses Option B!”

You could have knocked me over with a fly swatter and, obviously, Peter noticed. “When they see how glorious the world is without them in it and compare it with the horror of their actions in the world with them, they cannot bear to immortalize the latter. Invariably, they take the hit.

“Often times they’ll add an explanation: e.g. ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world I’d lived in’, or ‘when I see who I could have been and what I could have done and the mess I made of the opportunity, I see now that Option B is the only just scenario’.”

“Everyone enters the world with a determination to create Beauty, to discover Truth, and to institute Justice: that’s God’s universal gift; but not everyone follows through. When a soul realizes that it has destroyed Beauty, concealed Truth, and corrupted Justice, the revulsion is overwhelming.” 

“So,” sez me, trying to recover a bit of standing in Peter’s eyes, “Then heaven’s empty.” I paused for effect, “Every soul’s in Hell.” 

Again, Peter is disbelieving. Could I possibly be this clueless? Or was I just pulling his leg? I can see he’s considering a sarcastic response but his better angels triumph and he decides on civility instead:

“A decision by a soul,” he begins slowly, speaking in measured tones, controlled and without affect. “A decision by a soul to self-immolate is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, of charity, of love. It constitutes a ‘perfect act of contrition’ and reflects obedience to the Great Commandment: Love God…and your neighbor as yourself.

“How could any soul capable of such an act be anywhere other than in Paradise with God? No, my friend, Heaven’s not empty, Hell is.”

***

Ok, so now I get it, I think, at last, maybe: “No one is so evil as to wish himself on others.” Sartre famously said that Hell is other people (No Exit); he was wrong. Hell is not ‘other people’, it’s ourselves.

My conversation with St. Peter caught me by surprise…but it shouldn’t have. Herman Melville (Moby Dick) pointed out that this is precisely the message of the Old Testament Book of Jonah. Jonah is tapped by God to save the sinful city of Nineveh by calling its citizens to repent. 

Jonah refuses and books passage on a ship bound for Gibraltar. Jonah resorts to the ‘geographic gambit’ in his chess match with God…but to no avail. God catches up with Jonah just east of Tarshish. He threatens to destroy the ship and drown its crew.

Knowing that the crew’s fate is in his hands, Jonah offers himself as a sacrifice. With surprising reluctance, the crew assents and Jonah is cast into the sea. But God notes his repentance and his sacrifice, forgives him and saves him in the belly of a whale until he can be coughed up onto friendly shores. 

The example of Jonah, who had no expectation of salvation, should give us faith that we will make the same decision when it’s our turn (and make no mistake about it, it will be our turn). 

Salvation is a Catch 22…inverted! We all sin but faced with the reality of inflicting the consequences of that sin on others, we invariably get cold feet, proving beyond doubt that a spark of Good (i.e. God) remains in each of us: that spark (Shekinah) precludes us from entering Hell. Sorry, Charon. 

So hop on the Express Train bound for Glory! But wait, we’ve got to shed some baggage first. In your case, a hat box; in my case a semi. As Peter explains, “You have to leave your sins behind. Sin does not resonate with any of the patterns that reside in potentia in God’s nature. Therefore, nothing sinful can cross the body-spirit barrier into Paradise. But you, i.e. whatever’s left of you, are most welcome.” 

Whatever’s left of me? Hmm, I knew it was too good to be true! Now let’s just hope I have been associated with enough good in my life for it to be worth saving. Turns out, you can take it with you after all…but only insofar as you have it in the first place, i.e. only insofar as it is good.

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 Rothko’s Black on Maroon evokes a vision of hell not through flames or demons, but through a suffocating atmosphere where color itself becomes a form of spiritual confinement. The dark, hovering rectangles feel like thresholds that never open, suggesting a state of eternal suspension or inward collapse. In this reading, hell becomes an emotional condition—an endless, silent room where the weight of darkness presses in from all sides.