Editing The Problem of Pain (section)

=== Hell ===
Lewis restates that allowing free will means that some people will choose rebellion and not all will be saved. He says that there was no other doctrine that he wished he could remove more, that it has the support of scripture, Jesus Christ himself, and reason. While some overdo it and tragedies have come from espousing the doctrine, Christians preach it because it is a terrible possibility and its horrors are worse.

Lewis then states the real problem: "so much mercy, yet still there is [[Hell]]". He first says that the doctrine is not tolerable but it is moral. Then lays out the ordinary objections and his responses to them.

1)	Many people, Lewis says, object to retributive punishment. He reminds readers of a previous chapter of how he showed a core of righteousness in punishment/pain and how it could lead to repentance. But what if the punishment didn’t lead there? He asks the reader if they could really allow a wicked person to go forever into eternity happy and thinking they had the last laugh? If a person wouldn’t allow that, then is that feeling their own wickedness or spite? Or does it reveal the conflict between Justice and Mercy? He quotes [[Aquinas]] and [[Aristotle]] who says that suffering and shame, respectively, are not good in and of themselves but as a means to an end. He finishes his response to this objection by saying "to condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good".

Before going to the next objection Lewis references Christ’s words about Hell. In addition to Hell being like a sentence given at a tribunal, Christ says that men prefer darkness to light and that men choose Hell as a final act of cutting themselves off from all things that are not themselves.

2)	The second objection Lewis responds to is the disproportion between eternal damnation and transitory sin: if hell is for eternity then it as a punishment far outweighs anything we could do on earth. Lewis responds by first saying that the idea of eternity as a mere prolongation of time is uncertain and offers his metaphor for what eternity might really look like. He also says that a finality of judgment must come some time and omniscience would know when.

3)	A third objection is the "fruitful intensity of the pains of hell" as depicted famously in medieval art and passages of scripture. Lewis says destruction implies the creation of something else, like ashes, gases, and heat after burning a log, so what if Hell is the ‘remains’ of souls? Then Lewis says, "What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’. To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man – to be an ex-man or ‘damned ghost’ – would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will." He then finishes off suggesting "hell is hell, not from its own point of view, but from the heavenly point of view".

4)	The fourth objection he states is that no "charitable man" blessed in heaven could stay there while even one human soul was in hell, and if so would he be more merciful than God? Lewis says that this objection assumes that heaven and hell "co-exist in unilinear time" like the histories of two countries. Lewis points to Christ who emphasizes not the point of duration but that of finality. He says that we know more about heaven than we do of hell "for heaven is the home of humanity… It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity".

5)	The final objection says that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. Lewis agrees that it does. He says that by creating beings with free will God submits to the possibility of such a defeat. Lewis calls this defeat a miracle, "for to make things which are not Itself and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all feats we attribute to a deity".

Lewis concludes the chapter by saying that all answers to objections of hell are themselves a question: "What are you asking God to do?" Whatever it is you would like God has already done. To forgive them? It is already done. To leave them alone? That is what He does. Also, Lewis reminds the reader that in discussing Hell we should not keep our friends and enemies before our eyes since both obscure reason, but to think of ourselves.