Well, is he? For those who believe in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God and believe in Hell, especially a literal one, is God there? I don't think it matters if Hell is literal or figurative. It's a place where condemned and punished souls are sent by God. Even if Hell is separation from God, where do the souls go? Is God not there also. Please explain the seeming paradox to me. How can an omnipotent and omnipresent God not be somewhere. To me, that negates God’s omni-everything. So, given that God is everywhere, as we were taught by Sister Mary Discipline of the Sisters of No Mercy, is God in Hell along with the tortured souls he sentenced there? Does he exist there?
"Even though the eagle, king of birds, can with his powerful sight gaze steadfastly upon the brightness of the sun; yet do the weaker eyes of the bat fail and falter in the same"
(Blessed John of Ruysbroeck (The Twelve Beguines, XII), 1363)
To me, the above is a good description of how both heaven and hell can be understood as states of being in the Presence of God, albeit experienced differently by the heavenly and the hellish based upon the condition of their souls. The fault is in their soul (the 'eyes'), which determines whether they experience His Presence and Love after death
like the 'eagle' whose good eyes steadfastly face His Brightness with joy
or like the 'bat' whose bad eyes fail and falter at the same sight (i.e. a heavenly or hellish state).
I do believe in the omnipresence of God and therefore accept He must be present even in the state of Hell. Your question is an important one to chew on, since denial of God's presence from anywhere would seem to be a real contradiction in terms and imply some kind of limitation to His '
reach'. A limited God is not an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent one.
A particularly striking argument to this effect, that God is present even in Hell no less than in Heaven, can be found in the works of
St. Angela of Foligno , (1248 - 1309), an Italian mystic of the Catholic Church:
In a vision I beheld the fullness of God in which I beheld and comprehended the whole creation, that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else. And in everything that I saw, I could perceive nothing except the presence of the power of God, and in a manner totally indescribable. And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: "This world is pregnant with God!" ...
God presents himself in the inmost depths of my soul. I understand not only that he is present, but also how he is present in every creature and in everything that has being, in a devil and a good angel, in heaven and hell, in good deeds and in adultery or homicide, in all things, finally, which exist or have some degree of being, whether beautiful or ugly.
She further said: I also understand that he is no less present in a devil than a good angel. Therefore, while I am in this truth, I take no less delight in seeing or understanding his presence in a devil or in an act of adultery than I do in a good angel or in a good deed. This mode of divine presence in my soul has become almost habitual
(Paulist Press, 1993, pp. 212-213)
There's this modern Evangelical hymn I heard the other day, which contains the following lyric in its bridge: "
No matter how far I run, I run into Your love":
(bridge starts about 2:13 minutes into song)
Listening to it made me wonder if the worshippers singing the song had rendered that particular line the thoughtful contemplation it deserves. The theological implications of this statement would logically extend to 'hell', the furthest one could technically 'run', would they not?
“Hell” is not, to my mind, a state in which a person is conceivably be deprived of God’s love - and
ergo if He
is Love, then God Himself. The New Testament scriptures literally declare God to be "
Love" in His inmost Being and Nature: "
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" (
1 John 4:8). That's not an equivocal statement: on the contrary, it's about as unqualified a declaration of "what God is" as one is liable to find in group of sacred texts more comfortable with apophatic claims (i.e. "
no one has ever seen God" (John 1:18)). .
If this were at all possible - for God's full being and compassion to be entirely 'absent' from somewhere - then I think we'd seriously have to reconsider whether the Deity worshipped is really an All-Good, Omnipresent, Omniscient and All-loving Divine Spirit.
Saint Isaac the Syrian (a 7th century father, venerated as a saint in both the Catholic & Eastern Christian churches) speculated that heaven and hell were both postmortem encounters with the Love of God, albeit the Glorified experiencing it as joy on account of the condition of their souls whereas the Damned experienced it as a torment:
‘Those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and more violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to suppose that sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love.. is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion – remorse.’
[St. Isaac of Nineveh, ‘Ascetic Treatises’, p 326]
Nearer to our own time, this same theological interpretation of hell was put forth by
St. John Henry Cardinal Newman in an 1845 Sermon:
Newman Reader - Parochial & Plain Sermons 1 - Sermon 1
So far we are distinctly told, that that future life will be spent in God’s presence, in a sense which does not apply to our present life; so that it may be best described as an endless and uninterrupted worship of the Eternal Father, Son, and Spirit…Heaven then is not like this world…We see, then, that holiness, or inward separation from the world, is necessary to our admission into heaven, because heaven is not heaven, is not a place of happiness except to the holy.
There are bodily indispositions which affect the taste, so that the sweetest flavours become ungrateful to the palate; and indispositions which impair the sight, tinging the fair face of nature with some sickly hue. In like manner, there is a moral malady which disorders the inward sight and taste; and no man labouring under it is in a condition to enjoy what Scripture calls "the fulness of joy in God’s presence, and pleasures at His right hand for evermore.
Nay, I will venture to say more than this;—it is fearful, but it is right to say it;—that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man. We know how unhappy we are apt to feel at present, when alone in the midst of strangers, or of men of different tastes and habits from ourselves. How miserable, for example, would it be to have to live in a foreign land, among a people whose faces we never saw before, and whose language we could not learn. And this is but a faint illustration of the loneliness of a man of earthly dispositions and tastes, thrust into the society of saints and angels.
How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment.
God cannot change His nature. Holy He must ever be. But while He is holy, no unholy soul can be happy in heaven. Fire does not inflame iron, but it inflames straw. It would cease to be fire if it did not. And so heaven itself would be fire to those, who would fain escape across the great gulf from the torments of hell. The finger of Lazarus would but increase their thirst. The very “heaven that is over their head” will be “brass” to them