Hence the great Jesuit Theologian Petau, though not himself sharing this view, can declare: “Concerning such a breathing-time (respiratio) of lost souls, nothing certain has as yet been decreed by the Catholic Church, so that this opinion of most holy Fathers should not temerariously be rejected as absurd, even though it be foreign to the common opinion of Catholics in our time.”[240] And the Abbé Emery, that great Catholic Christian, the second founder of St. Sulpice, who died in 1811, showed, in a treatise On the Mitigation of the Pains of the Damned, that this view had also been held by certain Scholastic Theologians, and had been defended, without any opposition, by Mark of Ephesus, in the Sessions of the Council of Florence (A.D. 1439); and concluded that this doctrine was not contrary to the Catholic Faith and did not deserve any censure. The most learned Theologians in Rome found nothing reprehensible in this treatise, and Pope Pius VII caused his Theologian, the Barnabite General, Padre Fontana, to thank M. Emery for the copy sent by him to the Holy Father.[241]
Catherine herself cannot well have been thinking of anything but some such Mitigation when she so emphatically teaches that God’s mercy extends even into Hell. Indeed, even the continuation of this great saying in the present Vita-text formally teaches such Mitigation, yet practically withdraws it, by making it consist in a rebate and change, from an infinitude in degree and duration into a finitude in degree though not in duration.[242] But, as we have already found, this highly schematic statement is doubtless one of the later glosses, in which case her true meaning must have been substantially that of the Fathers referred to, viz. that the suffering, taken as anyhow finite in its degree, gets mercifully mitigated for these souls.—And, if she was here also faithful to her general principles, she will have conceived the mitigation, not as simply sporadic and arbitrary, but as more or less progressive, and connected with the presence in these souls of those various degrees of semi-voluntary good inclinations and wishes, required by her other saying. Even if these wishings could slowly and slightly increase, and the sufferings could similarly decrease, this would in nowise imply or require a final full rectification of the deliberate will itself, and hence not a complete extinction of the resultant suffering. Hell would still remain essentially distinct from Purgatory; for in Purgatory the deliberate, active will is good from the first, and only the various semi-volitions and old habits are imperfect, but are being gradually brought into full harmony with that will, by the now complete willing of the soul; and hence this state has an end; whereas in Hell the deliberate, active will is bad from the first, and only various partially deliberate wishes and tendencies are good, but cannot be brought to fruition in a full virtuous determination of the dominant character of the soul, and hence this state has no end.
4. The Endlessness of Hell.
And lastly, as to the Endlessness of this condition of the Lost, it is, of course, plain that Catherine held this defined doctrine; and again, that “the chief weight, in the Church-teaching as to Hell, rests upon Hell’s Eternity.”[243]
Here I would suggest five groups of considerations:
(1) Precisely this Eternity appears to be the feature of all others which is ever increasingly decried by contemporary philosophy and liberal theology as impossible and revolting. Thus it is frequently argued as though, not the indiscriminateness nor the materiality nor the forensic externality nor the complete fixity of the sufferings, nor again the complete malignity of the lost were incredible, and hence the unendingness of such conditions were impossible of acceptance; but, on the contrary, as though,—be the degree and nature of those sufferings conceived as ever so discriminated, spiritual, interior, and relatively mobile, and as occasioned and accompanied by a disposition in which semi-voluntary good is present,—the simple assumption of anything unending or final about them, at once renders the whole doctrine impossible to believe. It is true that Tennyson and Browning take the doctrine simply in its popular Calvinistic form, and then reject it; and even John Stuart Mill and Frederick Denison Maurice hardly consider the eternity separately. But certainly that thoughtful and religious-minded writer, Mr. W. R. Greg, brings forward the eternity-doctrine as, already in itself, “a curiosa infelicitas which is almost stupidity on the part of the Church.”[244]
(2) Yet it is plain how strongly, even in Mr. Greg’s case, the supposed (local, physical, indiscriminate, etc.) nature of the state affects the writer’s judgment as to the possibility of its unendingness,—as indeed is inevitable. And it is even clearer, I think, that precisely this eternity-doctrine stands for a truth which is but an ever-present mysterious corollary to every deeply ethical or spiritual, and, above all, every specifically Christian view of life. For every such view comes, surely, into hopeless collision with its own inalienable requirements if it will hold that the deepest ethical and spiritual acts and conditions are,—avowedly performed though they be in time and space—simply temporary in their inmost nature and effects; whereas every vigorously ethical religion, in so far as it has reached a definite personal-immortality doctrine at all, cannot admit that the soul’s deliberate character remains without any strictly final and permanent results. The fact is that we get here to a profound ethical and spiritual postulate, which cannot be adequately set aside on the ground that it is the product of barbarous ages and vindictive minds, since this objection applies only to the physical picturings, the indiscriminateness, non-mitigation, and utter reprobation; or on the ground that a long, keen purification, hence a temporally finite suffering, would do as well, since, when all this has completely passed away, there would be an entire obliteration of all difference in the consequences of right and wrong; or that acts and dispositions built up in time cannot have other than finite consequences, since this is to naturalize radically the deepest things of life; or finally that “Evil,” as the Areopagite would have it, “is not,”[245] since thus the very existence of the conviction as to free-will and sin becomes more inexplicable than the theoretical difficulties against Libertarianism are insoluble.—Against this deep requirement of the most alert and complete ethical and spiritual life the wave of any Apocatastasis-doctrine or -emotion will, in the long run, ever break itself in vain.
(3) The doctrine of Conditional Immortality has, I think, many undeniable advantages over every kind of Origenism. This view does not, as is often imputed to it, believe in the annihilation by Omnipotence of the naturally immortal souls of impenitent grave sinners; but simply holds that human souls begin with the capacity of acquiring, with the help of God’s Spirit, a spiritual personality, built up out of the mere possibilities and partial tendencies of their highly mixed natures, which, if left uncultivated and untranscended, become definitely fixed at the first, phenomenal, merely individual level,—so that spiritual personality alone deserves to live on and does so, whilst this animal individuality does not deserve and does not do so. The soul is thus not simply born as, but can become more and more, that “inner man” who alone persists, indeed who “is renewed day by day, even though our outward man perish.”[246]
This conception thus fully retains, indeed increases, the profound ultimate difference between the results of spiritual and personal, and of animal and simply individual life respectively,—standing, as it does, at the antipodes to Origenism; it eliminates all unmoralized, unspiritualized elements from the ultimate world, without keeping souls in an apparently fruitless suffering; and it gives full emphasis to a supremely important, though continually forgotten fact,—the profoundly expensive, creative, positive process and nature of spiritual character. No wonder, then, that great thinkers and scholars, such as Goethe, Richard Rothe, Heinrich Holtzmann, and some Frenchmen and Englishmen have held this view.[247]
Yet the objections against this view, taken in its strictness, are surely conclusive. For how can an originally simply mortal substance, force, or entity become immortal, and a phenomenal nature be leavened by a spiritual principle which, ex hypothesi, is not present within it? And how misleadingly hyperbolical, according to this, would be the greatest spiritual exhortations, beginning with those of Our Lord Himself!