on hell
‘Keep your mind in hell and despair not’, a phrase I encountered first in Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, is as close as I possess to a personal mantra. ‘The tradition is far kinder,’ she writes, ‘in its understanding that to lie, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, forever and ever. Keep your mind in hell and despair not.’ She takes it from St Silouan, who received the phrase by revelation; it reoccurs in her final notebooks. Her final written words, before her deathbed conversion to Anglicanism:
1. I turn to Christ
2. Repent of thy sin
3. I renouncethem allevil
Baptismdespairing and sans r
Keep your mind in hell and d N
Keep your mind in hell: refuse comfort, refuse illusion, refuse both avoidance and condemnation. Recognise the violence and terror of this life because to deny them is to refuse their flipside: ‘existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it deprived of its agon… If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love’s work.’ Enter the martyrial arena with no hope for safety; do not despair at the executioner’s sword.
By hell, I think Rose means something like reality: only by taking the depths of worldly evil seriously can we hope to wrestle with it, transcend it in a way that matters. The path to heaven must go through hell: a harrowing. We skip over Holy Saturday in our Easter observances; Christ’s descent into Hell appears in the Apostle’s Creed, familiar to habitual rosary-sayers, but not in the Nicene Creed of Sunday observance. But the Harrowing of Hell is essential to soteriology: we come to resurrection through hell, an infernal pilgrimage, a peregrinatio. Poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
In All That Shall Be Saved, David Bentley Hart writes:
We were born in bondage, in the house of a cruel master to whom we had been sold as slaves before we could choose for ourselves; we were born, moreover, not guilty or damable in God's eyes, but nonetheless corrupted and enchained by mortality, and so destined to sin through a congenital debility of will; we were ill, impaired, lost, dying; we were in hell already.
Universalism is often seen as a mark of liberal Christianity — a misguided, happy-go-lucky denial of evil from those who don’t understand the stakes of faith. But this idea is neither liberal nor modern, and takes seriously the depth of the world’s fallenness through original sin. Cinematic flames and Boschian torture devices: is any of this really worse than the evil we encounter and inflict in this world? This is our exile; salvation is the process of getting out of hell.
Grace is not a warm hug but a nuclear force, often intolerable. Otherworldly love: unconditional, undeserved, entirely different from the conditionality of mortal love. Nobody loves like God — so that God’s love sometimes feels more like violence than love. Whoever shall lose his life will save it, and whoever shall save his life will lose it. This is love as crucifixion. Who could do this for us but God?
A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Augustine: ‘Through freedom man came to be in sin, but the corruption which followed as punishment turned freedom into necessity.’ It isn’t merely that we have the freedom to choose evil, but that will itself — investment of will, making an icon of will — alienates us from each other, traps us in a hell of our own creation. When I did Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, one of the distress tolerance skills we learnt involved acting with willingness rather than willfulness. As you might expect from a self-involved twenty-something, I am particularly given to pride and railed against my therapists. Why should I accept the will of another, why abandon my own judgement, which was obviously correct in all situations? In her book Building a Life Worth Living, Marsha Linehan — the creator of DBT — discusses the spiritual background of these skills. Brought up Catholic and very devout in her early life (so much so that she became a lay religious, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience), she trained as a Zen Master and forged the dialectic between these traditions: acceptance and repentance. At the time of the book’s completion, she was attending a Lutheran church, which seems to me unsurprising given the clear Augustinian resonances of her work. I mention her because of the role hell plays in her therapeutic practice: she refers to DBT not as a treatment for people with borderline personality disorder, but rather a ‘population of people who experience their lives as being in hell, so miserable that death seems to them a reasonable alternative.’ The development of DBT began with a vow made as a patient in a psychiatric ward: ‘I made a promise to God, a vow, that I would get myself out of hell—and that once I did, I would find a way to get others out of hell, too.’
Keep your mind in hell; get out of hell: the dialectic (Gillian Rose’s Hegelianism meets Linehan’s Zen Catholicism).
Marcuse: ‘It makes no sense to talk about liberation to free men and we are free if we do not belong to the oppressed minority. And it makes no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before. But the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the earth into hell.’
How to escape from hell? For Marcuse, eros: ‘Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.’ (It is worth reading Eros & Civilisation alongside Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus caritas est, on the necessary union of eros and agape.) For Mark Fisher, the exit comes via psychedelic reason: ‘auto-effect[ing] your brain into a state of ecstasy.’ This is the vibe shift as eschatology: the Kingdom of God breaking through into this world, pulling us out of hell. If this world is a kind of purgatory — because what is purgation but the pain of accepting love, encountering the true nature of your soul and abandoning the false self which you’ve built to deny your capacity for evil? — then exit can be conceptualised as the eternal, inexorable process of being drawn into God’s love. (Inexorable because an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God will go on patiently battering the heart of each beloved child until we choose to lower our pale defences.) This is work we can have a hand in if we, in the words of an eminent philosopher, face God and walk backwards into Hell. This is the work of the Kingdom.
Gillian Rose again: ‘I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing [ed: initially typed this as reposting] — in this sin of language and lips.’
When writing about the work of Edith Stein (Carmelite nun and philosopher), Fanny Howe asks, "Can you build a vocabulary of faith out of a rhetoric first made of dread and then stand behind this new language? Is faith created by a shift in rhetoric, one that can be consciously constructed, or must there be a shattering experience, one that trashes the old words for things?" (The Wedding Dress, 59). What you're talking about here, about keeping hell ever-present in one's mind, sounds like some combination of these two--a rhetoric shift and a shattering. Our words for our faith must change (or vibe-shift) because "the violence and terror of this life" cannot be afforded to be ignored, and therefore must be incorporated into our faith.
It strikes me that faith persists when it becomes inherently tied to contingency. I grew up in the church, went to a Christian college, and most of the people my age that I met in these places either venomously reject Christianity or have simply decided that faith is "no longer for them." I don't blame them--most of what we were taught about faith was the earnest-yet-insecure certainty of American Evangelicalism, the posture of which might be best represented in the Nicene creed with its conspicuous omissions, as you mentioned, and which was often captured by culture war, not practice. All of their problems with Christianity were also my problems with Christianity, but my faith persisted/persists by this exact process you're talking about, by seeing the abyss as a necessary part of the sacred. This became particularly important when my wife was diagnosed with epilepsy. Her seizures were hell. "It is like watching hell run through someone's body," I would tell people. Until then, I don't think I truly understood what C.S. Lewis meant, in "A Grief Observed," when he wrote, " I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?...What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?" (29). Lewis suggests that the answer is to "Set Christ against" all the countervailing evidence, but admits that this answer is still unsatisfactory. Christ's embodiment, his death, his final words, "Why have You forsaken me?", suggest that Christ was subject to the same trap and the same uncertainty of life. But in this unsatisfactory answer is the only hope. Christ deifies our suffering by suffering it. By committing himself to the contingency of human life, Christ became the contingency.
From Christian Wiman's "My Bright Abyss": "If Christianity is going to mean anything at all for us now, then the humanity of God can be no half measure. He can't float over the chaos of pain and particles in which we're mired, and we can't think of him gliding among our ancestors like some shiny, sinless superhero...No, God is given over to matter, to the ultimate Uncertainty Principal. There's no release from reality, no "outside" or "beyond" from which some transforming touch might come. But what a relief it can be to befriend contingency, to meet God right here in the havoc of chance, to feel enduring love like a stroke of pure luck" (17).
Loved this post.