THE HELL

The hell is essentially the condition of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and with the blessed. The term “hell” is the translation of the Latin “infernus”, which corresponds to the Greek ᾅδης (transliterated: “hades”) and the Hebrew שָׁאוּל (transliterated: “sheol”), and means “that lies below”. It therefore indicates the stay of the dead, that is, the pit in which the corpses are buried (Psalms 6,6; Ecclesiastes 9,10). The term “hell” also has a spiritual meaning, and this is the use that Jesus makes of it when he speaks of the fate of the rich man: “One day the rich man died and was buried. He ended up in hell, where he was in torment.” (Luke 16:22-23) In the Bible we have two categories of “dead”: those according to the flesh, and those according to the spirit, that is, the lukewarm. The latter are those who are separated from communion with God (Revelation 3:16). An example of the distinction between these two categories of “dead” is found in Jesus’ words: “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matthew 8:22), where the first occurrence of “dead” is a reference to the lukewarm. One can be separated from communion with God already in this world, due to mortal sin. But it is in the other world that this separation can become definitive. In this sense, Jesus speaks of hell, that is, of the sojourn of those who are definitively separated from God. The New Testament writers indicate this condition by making use of the image of Gehenna (Matthew 10:28; Mark 9:43), of eternal fire (Matthew 18:8; 25:41; Jude 7), of darkness (Matthew 22:13; 25:30), of the fiery furnace (Matthew 13:49-50) and of the lake of fire and sulfur (Revelation 21:8). In one of his catecheses, the then Pope John Paul II taught that hell “indicates more than a place, the situation in which those who freely and definitively distance themselves from God, source of life and joy, find themselves.” (Catechesis of July 28, 1999) The image of eternal fire indicates unmitigated suffering, and the impossibility of this condition ceasing to exist.