Venerable Louis of Granada describes the eternal miseries:
“the punishment of the wicked is an universal evil, containing in itself all other evils…As the wicked have employed all their members, and all their senses to offend God, and as there is nothing in them which they have not made instrumental to sin, so it is very just that every one of these parts should receive its proper punishment…their punishments continue with God’s eternity, the continuance of their miseries equals the duration of God’s glory; as long as God shall live, they shall die, nor shall they cease to be what they are, till God also ceases to be what he is. O dying life! O immortal death! How shall I name thee? Shall I call thee life or death? If thou art life, how dost thou kill? If thou art death, how canst thou endure? I will term thee neither the one nor the other, because both in the one and the other there is some good; in life there is some rest, in death there is an end, which is a great ease to our afflicions: but there being in thee neither rest nor end, what canst thou be? Thou art all that is bad both in life and death: for thou hast the torments of death, and not the end which it gives; thouh hast the continuance of life, and not the enjoyment it brings.”
A rather “beautiful-ugly” description of the eternal miseries, don’t you think?
(The quote was taken from Venerable Louis of Granada’s book Memorial of the Christian Life (Memorial de la vida cristiana).
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September 1, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Neither life nor death– vivid point!
C.S. Lewis speculated that souls in Hell are not really living souls any more but just the residue of something that’s been destroyed, and that therefore in Hell there isn’t active suffering by a living intelligent consciousness. I eagerly embraced this idea till I became Catholic and had to give it up. Authority was on the side of Hell being just what Jesus described it as: eternal torment.
But I think I won’t comprehend till I reach eternity how it is more loving or just to sustain in existence a soul that didn’t ask to be created, that it might be tormented forever.
I don’t doubt the orthodox teaching for a moment; I absolutely believe it. I just don’t understand it. But I trust God.
September 2, 2008 at 10:46 pm
OK, so this is Fray Luis de Granada? I didn’t know he had been beatified. I have read some of his writings such as El Simbolo de la Fe.
Of course there is the other Luis, the Agustinian Fray Luis de León, whose name comes up in the same breath with Luis de Granada, what with the Humanism and Erasmist underpinnings of both thinkers.