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Putting hell first: cruelty, historicism, and the missing moral theory of damnation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2016

John Perry
John Perry*
Affiliation:
St Mary's College, University of St Andrews, South Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JU, [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent work on the morality of hell spans the various subdisciplines of theology, with the ironic exception of theological ethics. An adequate defence of hell requires a positive account of how God's eternally tormenting some humans is beautiful, just and worthy of worship. This suggests a short-term and long-term task. The short-term task, which this article pursues, tests whether an adequate moral theory is available by evaluating three possible candidates, the third of which is the most interesting, as it offers a historicist defence of hell: we believe hell is cruel only because of aversions to cruel and unusual punishment that emerged in modernity. Nonetheless, all three defences are inadequate, suggesting a longer term goal: we need either better moral theories or better accounts of hell, as well as greater analytic clarity regarding theological statements of the form, I want doctrine y to be true but believe doctrine x is true.

Keywords

helluniversalismethicspunishmentvoluntarismcrueltyAnselmhistory
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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13 Augustine, City of God 21.24.

14 Augustine, City of God 21.17–18; Augustine, Enchiridion 112.

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16 Ibid., p. 7.

17 Medieval and renaissance artists were allowed to depict hell so vividly and imaginatively because it is not as clearly depicted in the Bible as, say, the nativity or crucifixion. Thus they did not risk violating an authoritative definition of it. Cassidy, Brendan, ‘Laughing with Giotto at Sinners in Hell’, Viator 35 (2004), p. 356CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 Both Anselm and Augustine use aesthetic metaphors in regard to hell, though readers often miss this, focusing too much on forensic metaphors. See Brown, David, ‘Anselm on Atonement’, in Davies, Brian and Leftow, Brian (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Anselm (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)Google Scholar; Brown, Frank Burch, ‘The Beauty of Hell: Anselm on God's Eternal Design’, Journal of Religion 73/3 (1993), pp. 329–356CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, Stephen R., ‘The Upholding of Beauty: A Reading of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’, Scottish Journal of Theology 54/2 (2001), pp. 189–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sohn, Hohyun, ‘The Beauty of Hell? Augustine's Aesthetic Theodicy and Its Critics,’ Theology Today 64(2007), pp. 47–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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36 See Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain (London: HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 8Google Scholar; Lewis, C.S., The Great Divorce (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar.

37 McGowen, Randall, ‘Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England’, Journal of British Studies 33/3 (1994), p. 263CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Almond, Philip C., Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: CUP, 2008)Google Scholar; Walker, D. P., The Decline of Hell: 17th Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

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