The development of the doctrine of hell in the Abrahamic faiths is extremely complicated, far more so than the popular understanding entails. I am also led to believe (please correct me of wrong) that the Dvaita philosopher Sri Madhva believed in eternal damnation as a possible afterlife state, involving a purgatory of neverending reincarnations (i.e. never being free from samsara)?
As an example of the nuance of early Christian thought on this doctrine, consider the church father Origen of Alexandria (c. 184 – c. 253) writing in his De Principiis (Book II).
For him, hell is a psycho-spiritual state of ignorance and its attendant consequences upon the soul, rather than a judgement imposed externally by God involving literal hellfire or tortures:
CHURCH FATHERS: De Principiis, Book II (Origen)
4. We find in the prophet Isaiah, that the fire with which each one is punished is described as his own; for he says, Walk in the light of your own fire, and in the flame which you have kindled. By these words it seems to be indicated that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into some fire which has been already kindled by another, or was in existence before himself. Of this fire the fuel and food are our sins, which are called by the Apostle Paul wood, and hay, and stubble.
And I think that, as abundance of food, and provisions of a contrary kind and amount, breed fevers in the body, and fevers, too, of different sorts and duration, according to the proportion in which the collected poison supplies material and fuel for disease (the quality of this material, gathered together from different poisons, proving the causes either of a more acute or more lingering disease); so, when the soul has gathered together a multitude of evil works, and an abundance of sins against itself, at a suitable time all that assembly of evils boils up to punishment, and is set on fire to chastisements; when the mind itself, or conscience, receiving by divine power into the memory all those things of which it had stamped on itself certain signs and forms at the moment of sinning, will see a kind of history, as it were, of all the foul, and shameful, and unholy deeds which it has done, exposed before its eyes: then is the conscience itself harassed, and, pierced by its own goads, becomes an accuser and a witness against itself.
And this, I think, was the opinion of the Apostle Paul himself, when he said, Their thoughts mutually accusing or excusing them in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my Gospel. From which it is understood that around the substance of the soul certain tortures are produced by the hurtful affections of sins themselves.
8. But the outer darkness, in my judgment, is to be understood not so much of some dark atmosphere without any light, as of those persons who, being plunged in the darkness of profound ignorance, have been placed beyond the reach of any light of the understanding...
And I think that, as abundance of food, and provisions of a contrary kind and amount, breed fevers in the body, and fevers, too, of different sorts and duration, according to the proportion in which the collected poison supplies material and fuel for disease (the quality of this material, gathered together from different poisons, proving the causes either of a more acute or more lingering disease); so, when the soul has gathered together a multitude of evil works, and an abundance of sins against itself, at a suitable time all that assembly of evils boils up to punishment, and is set on fire to chastisements; when the mind itself, or conscience, receiving by divine power into the memory all those things of which it had stamped on itself certain signs and forms at the moment of sinning, will see a kind of history, as it were, of all the foul, and shameful, and unholy deeds which it has done, exposed before its eyes: then is the conscience itself harassed, and, pierced by its own goads, becomes an accuser and a witness against itself.
And this, I think, was the opinion of the Apostle Paul himself, when he said, Their thoughts mutually accusing or excusing them in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my Gospel. From which it is understood that around the substance of the soul certain tortures are produced by the hurtful affections of sins themselves.
8. But the outer darkness, in my judgment, is to be understood not so much of some dark atmosphere without any light, as of those persons who, being plunged in the darkness of profound ignorance, have been placed beyond the reach of any light of the understanding...
This ancient Alexandrian Christian understanding of the metaphorical nature of hellfire and the 'outer darkness' as a state of being, characterised by ignorance and the pain of conscience wrestling with one's mistakes in life, was complemented by the near-contemporary Eastern Christian belief expressed by the Syriac Church Father Saint Isaac the Syrian (a 7th century father, venerated as a saint in both the Catholic & Eastern Christian churches) that heaven and hell are both postmortem encounters with the Love of God, albeit experienced differently as a result of the different conditions of souls:
‘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]
[St. Isaac of Nineveh, ‘Ascetic Treatises’, p 326]
If we consider the collections of books in Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (remember - they are a 'library', not a synthesised dogmatic framework as later theologies became) a variety of afterlife doctrines are posited.
The traditional Hebraic understanding (pre-Second Temple) had been closer to that voiced by Koheleth in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Greek Epicureans who were contemporaries in the Hellenistic world: there was a God of Israel who created the universe, He was eternal and had revealed the Torah, but human beings simply lived short, mutable lives in which meaning was to be found through more fleshly, corporal means and earthly happiness (like long life, food, wine, cheer, marriage, the festivals, the pursuit of wisdom and learning from the sages) and most importantly the survival of Israel itself, and it's continuing faithfulness to the Torah from generation to generation.
There was, as yet, no clear notion of an eternal afterlife existence of some immutable consciousness within each person or of any resurrection of the dead - only of a kind of obscure sheol (grave, underworld) where the shadows of the people that had been in life (shades, the rephaim) lingered.
As Isaiah informs us in the Nevi'im: "For Sheol (the abode of the dead, the grave) does not thank you; death does not praise you; those who go down to the pit do not hope for your faithfulness." (Isaiah 38:18). Nothing, as Koheleth writes in Ecclesiastes: "For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten" (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
We get hints every now and then of a hope - in the Psalms, in Isaiah - of there just maybe being something beyond sheol, like ransom from it or a continued consciousness after death, but it all remains rather agnostic and eminently pragmatic.
In the Book of Acts in the New Testament we learn: "The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three." (Acts 23:8) These were two competing sects of Judaism in the time of Jesus - one, the Sadducean priestly class, committed to a 'materialist' view of the soul (in which it is merely a spark of reason and dies with the body) and the Pharisees who acknowledge all three afterlife doctrines, including the immortality of the soul.
Of the former sect, Josephus likewise says in his Antiquities XVIII, 11-17:
But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with the bodies. Nor do they regard as obligatory the observance of anything besides what the law enjoins them
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