Interesting topic.
I would have to go with a differentiated or individuated afterlife based upon "
the sum of one's action and behaviors", although it must be said that everyone will be in the same
form: namely that of a disembodied immortal soul or consciousness until the general resurrection, as the creedal dogma insists, when God creates a new universe (i.e. "
new heavens and earth") and becomes "
all in all" (
1 Corinthians 15:28).
Catholic doctrine is obviously wedded to the traditional, tripartite division of
heaven, purgatory and
hell, which everybody is familiar with. These are spiritual states of being, as opposed to places, that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “
aeviternity”.
This entails a mode of existence which is a form of “
participated eternity". It lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true.
St. Thomas Aquinas explained it all thus in his
Summa Theologica:
newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article3
In this way time has “before” and “after”; aeviternity in itself has no “before” and “after,” which can, however, be annexed to it; while eternity has neither “before” nor “after,” nor is it compatible with such at all.
There isn't really any succession of moments in aeveternity, as we would understand it. Here is how a Church approved mystic, Blessed Henry Suso, described this state of being from alleged direct, mystical experience (a foretaste of eternity):
"…Eternity is life that is beyond time but includes within itself all time but without a before or after. And whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no ‘before or after’.
Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken within a thousand years ago…
Now these people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing…"
- Blessed Henry Suso (c. 1296-1366), German Catholic mystic & Dominican priest (The Little Book of Truth). p320
We don't claim to know
if any individual person
is or ever
will be in hell. It is simply a possibility, whereby one is "
separated from God forever by their own free choice" in a "
state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed" (CCC 1033).
One can expect that most human beings will first undergo
purgatory after death, since it seems apparent to the majority of theologians that a sizeable chunk of humanity is neither wilfully evil nor particularly saintly. So I anticipate purgatory for myself.
Terrestrial “time” is not part of the doctrine of Purgatory either. Here is what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 1988 (before he became Pope Benedict XVI):
“…The transforming ‘moment’ of this encounter [Purgatory] cannot be quantified by the measurements of earthly time. It is, indeed, not eternal but a transition, and yet trying to qualify it as of ‘short’ or ‘long’ duration on the basis of temporal measurements derived from physics would be naive and unproductive. The ‘temporal measure’ of this encounter lies in the unsoundable depths of existence, in a passing-over where we are burned ere we are transformed. To measure such Existenzzeit, such an ‘existential time,’ in terms of the time of this world would be to ignore the specificity of the human spirit in its simultaneous relationship with, and differentation from, the world…”
(Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 230)
His Holiness reiterated the same point in his 2007 encyclical
Spe Salvi:
Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire of Purgatory which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away…
It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace…
46. With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.
46. Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.
So yah, I think that is what's in store for yours truly and in fact the majority of the human race. Purgatory, that most democratic and conspicuously unique of Catholic innovations in religious thought.