COMMENTARY: The key to our escaping from so doleful a state will depend on our willingness to accept the truth of our creation.
What are the two most important moments in a human life? Two absolutely determinative events that we need to reckon with in order to understand our place in the universe?
Indeed, there are none more necessary, nor more humbling, if we are to make our way home in a world we did not make but are free to receive as pure gift from Another. The first is the moment before which we did not exist. And the second is that relentlessly approaching moment after which we will cease to exist.
Thus there are two dates we need to keep in mind here: the one on which it all began, followed by the one on which it will all end. And while we certainly know the first as a matter of plain historical fact, it is that other and far more elusive event that we simply cannot know. There are no actuarial tables to predict with any exactitude whatsoever the date of anyone’s death.
Which is why it is good always to remain ready, always attentive to the end, however distant it may appear to those of us who, as the poet Eliot puts it in “Four Quartets,” “like to think / That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood.”
In other words, it makes all the difference in the world, to quote Pascal, “if it is certain that we shall not be here for long, and uncertain whether we shall be here even one hour.”
Respice finem, as the ancients would say. Remember your end because it is that toward which you are moving from the moment you have first begun to be. Think, therefore, on the nothingness you were before birth, followed by the nothingness you fear you may become after death.
Are these not, after all, the two fixed points between which all that is human necessarily happens? How seldom we think of these things! The two absolutely defining moments on which everything human depends, and no one’s paying any attention.
“Humankind,” says Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.”
And why is that? Perhaps it is as much a failure of imagination as it is of nerve. In any case, one tends to shrink from giving the matter too close an inspection. But not Pascal, who did not hesitate to look into the abyss, giving eloquent expression to all that he saw: “When I consider the brief span of my life,” he tells us in the Pensées, his unfinished masterpiece in defense of the Christian faith, “absorbed into the eternity that comes before and after,” he feels himself rather like a guest in a life that will not last very long.
And seeing, he says, “the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there …”
What terrifies him, of course, and not only Pascal — who, unlike the rest of us, possessed the expressive power to put our primal fears into words — is the fact that there is simply no reason to account for why any of us are here as opposed to there, or that we should be alive now rather than at some other time.
“Who put me here? By whose command and act,” he wants to know, “were this time and place allotted to me?”
It is the great and persisting mystery of our being — “the everlasting mystery of our being!” exclaimed Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s foremost poet after Dante — that while reason can give no answer to the question, none of us can go on living unless there is an answer. However much we may anesthetize ourselves — “running heedlessly into the abyss,” says Pascal, “after putting something in front of us to prevent our seeing it” — we cannot hang fire forever. Unless, of course, we choose to take ourselves straight into the fires of Hell, which burn red hot and without end.
And what is Hell? It is being alone, shorn of that companionship with God and neighbor for which we were created. “Every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind,” writes C.S. Lewis, “is, in the end, Hell.”
Even were God himself to knock upon the door of your soul, unless you agree to open that door to allow God in, you shall have consigned yourself to a state of unending isolation, a condition no creature was made to endure. “The only hope, or else despair,” writes Eliot,
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
The implication here is perfectly plain, which is that we have each been destined by Almighty God to experience either the fire of the Holy Ghost, whose flaming Pentecostal descent inspires the soul with the love of God and neighbor; or else we are fated for that most hellish and devouring fire of all, the self-centered self, fed by the sum of its own sins, setting the soul ablaze with the unending torment of its own self-willed rejection of God.
The damned are not to be thought of as having been thrown by God into the sea of unquenchable fire; it is rather their own sins that fill the sea, each a seething cauldron of self-inflicted enmity and pain.
“At a certain point,” writes Origen, the great Church Father of the early third century, “in a soul that has accumulated all sorts of evil deeds and sins, this mixture catches fire and begins, in punishment of the soul, to burn.” It will not have been a vindictive God who has done this, but the soul itself, says Origen, “will be its own accuser and witness.
Just as the violent separation of our limbs and the dislocation of the joints of our body cause enormous pains, so the soul that finds itself outside of the order and harmony for which it was created by God will itself suffer the pain and punishment of its transgressions and inconstancies and disobedience.
The key to our escaping from so doleful a state will depend on our willingness to accept the truth of our creation, which is that we live and move between that nothingness out of which we were first drawn, and the nothingness into which we fear that we shall most certainly return upon our death. But for the grace of God who longs to free us from every loss.
“Just as they have their source in nothingness, so created being could sink back into nothingness if that were pleasing to God …” —St. Thomas Aquinas
