by Brian Griffith.
With the rise of belief that the conscious spirit survives death, people began judging deeds less by their immediate effects, and more by their expected consequences in the next world. So the Roman poet Virgil portrayed dead souls facing a fork in the road, with one path leading down to Hades and the other upward to the heavenly fields of Elysium. This Hades was no longer a dark realm of endless nothingness, but a place of punishment where guilty souls “must pay for their old offenses … some are plunged in the rushing floods—their stains, their crimes scoured off or scorched way by fire …” (Aeneid 6, 854–855). In Elysium, Romulus (the heroic founder of Rome) enjoyed his heavenly fruits of victory forever. Meanwhile his lover Queen Dido suffered endlessly in Hades, punished for tempting Romulus to stay with her in Carthage, rather than leave to establish the eternal city.
At first, the Jesus movement’s leaders endorsed the old Jewish belief that dead people lie in their graves until judgment day. But as decades passed without the Lord’s return, they began claiming that the deceased faced judgement immediately after death, and received their just deserts from that point forward. Although the Jewish scriptures had usually described eternal punishment as simply death without hope of resurrection, Christians increasingly portrayed it as endless torture. It would be like burning without being consumed, so that the agony would continue forever. However, many Christians reasoned that, as some sins were worse than others, a just God would make the punishment fit the crime. As a second-century text called the “Apocalypse of Peter” predicted, “the torment of every one shall be forever according to his works.” In this text’s vision of the afterlife, blasphemers against God were suspended by their tongues over unquenchable fires. Women who seduced men were hung by their hair over fires. Men who indulged in fornication were hung by their testicles. Women who aborted a foetus were buried to their necks in excrement, while flashes of lightning pierced their eyes. Tertullian (d. 240 CE) claimed there were also gradations of afterlife reward. The saved would be resurrected in phases, “sooner or later according to their deserts.” Martyrs for Christ would go straight to paradise, and others would wait in the underworld until the day of God’s judgement.
In his City of God, Augustine considered the question of why afterlife punishments should be eternal. He reported being asked, if a person had sinned for 20 years, wouldn’t a just God decree 20 years in hell as the penalty? In response, Augustine asked if the punishment for robbery or murder should be limited to the time it took to commit the crime. He also argued that a crime against God’s law was a crime against the eternal, so that only an eternal punishment could pay for it. As Alan Segal explained the prevailing logic, “once the soul was immortal and all souls survived forever, then punishment had to be eternal as well, otherwise sinners would appear to get away with their dastardly deeds.”
Evidently however, Augustine had second thoughts: perhaps some crimes deserved lesser penalties, which would end when the debts were paid or the lessons learned. He considered it likely that “some shall in the last judgment suffer some kind of purgatorial punishments” (City of God 21:26). Furthermore, he proposed that the saved in heaven would receive different “degrees of honor and glory … awarded to the various degrees of merit” (22:30). To some extent, things would be in heaven as they are on earth. Still, it took the church centuries to incorporate such reasoning into its official doctrines. Only in the 1100s did Catholic theologians coin the term “purgatory.” Then the Second Council of Lyons (in 1274) formally endorsed the belief that people who died with unatoned minor sins could pay for their wrongs in purgatory. After their debts to God were paid, they would join the saved in paradise.
Some early church theologians, including Origen, Basilides of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyasa, and Pope Vigilius (d. 555 CE) discussed or endorsed theories of reincarnation, in which people could pay moral debts or earn merit over a series of lives. However, the church eventually rejected such ideas, partly because they diminished the sense of moral urgency. In 553 CE, the Second Council of Constantinople formally denounced the notion of reincarnation. In general, the church’s leaders insisted that Jesus’s message came with a threat: people had only one chance to earn eternal bliss, or else face suffering forever.
Basically, eternalized punishment was the worst threat that people could imagine. Ancient villagers generally imposed limited, temporary penalties on most offenders. Only the most serious offenses merited the permanent penalties of death or expulsion from the community. Expulsion was like a living death, with the rejected becoming “out castes” or “out laws.” In Jewish communities, the worst punishment of all was to be expelled from membership in God’s community, excluded from any synagogue, refused burial in any Jewish cemetery, and denied any chance of resurrection. That was roughly equivalent to the Christian notion of “excommunication.” Excommunication was like a foretaste of damnation in this life. People excluded from God’s community could still be readmitted if they made suitably severe penances. But any who died in the state of excommunication were exiled from God forever.
As the church grew firmly established, its leading clerics endorsed the doctrine that all humans were born in a state of sin, and destined for hell unless saved by God’s grace, through ministrations of the true church. But many early Christians felt it inconceivable that God would condemn innocent babies who died before committing any sin, just for lacking the chance to receive Christ’s sacraments. Later theologians such as John Scotus Eriugena (d. 877 CE) proposed that children who died without sin would reside in “limbo”—a place between heaven and hell. There they would face no hardships, as they had done no wrong. Thomas Aquinas proposed that babies in limbo did not suffer, but simply experienced the absence of grace. As they were not absolved from original sin, they could never be admitted to paradise.
Rev. Gretta Vosper considered the effects of such beliefs regarding the afterlife on people’s behavior: “Suppose you believe in an afterlife in which you are going to get back twelve times the pain and injury you inflict on anyone in this life. You’d probably be much more careful about what you do to whom … while you’re still this side of the great abyss.” Also, “If you believe in reincarnation and that the quality of your future lives depends on how well you learn from present experiences, perhaps you will strive to learn every day.” On one hand, such teachings about afterlife consequences made accountability seem inescapable. On the other hand, they offered hope of an ultimate deliverance from injustice. So across the world, people of many traditions have firmly believed that all souls will get what they deserve after death. And if justice will come in the afterlife, then perhaps it is less urgent to achieve it in this life.
[From a working draft of How to Qualify for Immortality, by Brian Griffith.]