I have a problem with hell that goes beyond squeamishness. The problem is one of inserting the damned into God’s endgame, his final fix—creation brought to its triumphant completion. Doesn’t the presence of everlasting torment put a damper on the success story?
I went to Aquinas for comfort, only to find the difficulty accentuated. Aquinas describes sin as a disturbance of the divine order, in which “so long as the disturbance of the order remains, the debt of punishment must remain also.” Hell lasts forever because the disturbance of sin lasts forever. Aquinas makes this explicit when he argues that God “is forever unappeased by the punishment of the wicked.” From this we must conclude that the cosmic finale, the perfected universe in which all things are made new, could very well be described as the eternally disturbed order of an eternally unappeased God. However slight the imperfection, it exists. Beyond our feelings of pity for this or that tormented soul, there still lingers the question of whether God is really so victorious if, at the end of the day, his order must endure this perpetual disturbance.
Some claim to answer the question. Paul Macdonald Jr., in a recent essay for the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, argues that “a world populated in the end by saints and sinners is a better cosmic whole than a world that contains only saints, because in the former world, where God brings at least some human beings to glory, and eternally as well as justly punishes the rest, God is able to manifest his goodness the most clearly and fully.” To me, this seems to miss the point. The damned are a “disturbance of the divine order meriting punishment.” What harmony can there be between an order and a disturbance of that same order? How can the problem of hell be resolved by its place in the “cosmic whole” if hell is precisely a disturbance of that cosmic whole? Do we not, rather, have an infinite, agonizing tension of willed evil and divine punishment that triumphs over evil, but does not eliminate it?