on hell

"Destruction, we should naturally assume, means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if the 'annihilation' of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log and you have gases, heat, and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If souls can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is that not, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation?...To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. 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. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature - already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins rather than a sinner - would be like...

But I notice that Our Lord, while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity, usually emphasizes the idea not of duration but of finality. Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story -- not as the beginning of a new story. That the lost soul is eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt: but whether this eternal fixity implies endless duration {of pain} - or duration at all - we cannot say. Dr. Edwyn Bevan has some interesting speculations on this point. We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life: but hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is 'the darkness outside', the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity...

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man 'wishes' to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more free."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain