Waiting in Hades

So all souls are shut up in Hades. Do you admit it? It is true whether you say yes or no. And more than that: punishments and comforts are already being felt there, and there you have your poor man and your rich man. There are one or two odds and ends I have been holding back for this part of the book; I will take them up here, where they belong, and then bring the whole thing to a close. [a]

Why, then, can you not suppose that the soul goes through punishment and comfort in Hades in the interval, while it waits for the judgment to fall one way or the other, and gets a certain foretaste of gloom or of glory? Your answer is that in God’s judgment the case ought to be kept whole and untouched, with no hint given in advance of the sentence he will award; and also that the soul ought first to be clothed again in the flesh, which shared its actions and so ought to share what it is paid.

Then what is to happen in that interval? Are we to sleep? But souls do not sleep even while people are alive. Sleeping is the body’s business — and so is death itself, no less than sleep, which is death’s mirror and counterfeit. Or will you have it that nothing whatever is done in the place the whole human race is drawn to, the place where everything a person expects is put away for safe keeping? Do you take this state to be a foretaste of the judgment, or the actual start of it? An early trespass on it, or the first course of the full serving?

Come now: would it not be the very height of injustice, even in Hades, if things went on being well with the guilty there and were still not well with the righteous? What — would you have hope thrown into worse confusion after death than before it? Would you have it go on mocking us with an expectation that stays uncertain? Or shall hope now become a review of the life behind us and a setting in order of the judgment, with the trembling fear that must come with that?

But then again: must the soul always wait for the body before it can feel sorrow or joy? Is it not equal on its own to feeling either one? How often, with no pain to the body at all, is the soul tortured all by itself — by bad temper, by anger, by weariness — and very often without even knowing it? And how often, on the other hand, in the middle of bodily suffering, does the soul go looking for some stolen joy of its own and slip away for a moment from the body’s insistent company? I am much mistaken if the soul is not in the habit of doing exactly that: alone, by itself, rejoicing and glorying over the very tortures of the body.

Look at the soul of Mucius Scaevola while he melts his right hand away in the fire. Look at Zeno’s, while the torments of Dionysius pass over it. Bites from wild animals are a young hero’s glory, the way the bear’s scars were on Cyrus. So the soul knows perfectly well how to rejoice and to grieve in Hades without the body, since while it is in the flesh it feels pain when it chooses, though the body is untouched, and feels joy when it chooses, though the body is in pain. And if such feelings come at its own will during life, how much more may they come after death, by the judicial appointment of God!

Besides, the soul does not carry out all its business with the flesh to help it, and God’s judgment goes after bare thoughts and the barest acts of will. “Anyone who looks at a woman to crave her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” So for this reason too it is entirely fitting that the soul should not wait for the flesh at all, but be punished for what it did without the flesh as its partner. And on the same principle, for the devout and kindly thoughts in which it had no help from the flesh, it will receive its comfort without the flesh.

What is more, even in things done through the flesh, the soul is the first to conceive them, the first to arrange them, the first to authorize them, the first to push them out into act. And even when it is unwilling to act, it is still the first to handle the thing it means to bring about with the body’s help. In no case at all can a finished deed come before the mind’s own awareness of it. It fits this order of things, then, that the part of us which came first should be the first to have the repayment and the reward owed to it for coming first.

In short: we understand “the prison” the Gospel points to as Hades, and we take “the last quadrans” to mean the very smallest offense, which has to be paid off there before the resurrection. So nobody will hesitate to believe that the soul goes through some discipline in Hades by way of payment — without prejudice to the full process of the resurrection, when the repayment will be administered through the flesh as well. The Paraclete too has pressed this on us in warning after warning, whenever any of us has taken the force of his words from knowing the spiritual disclosures he promised.

And now at last, having met, I believe, every human opinion about the soul, and having tested each one by what our holy faith teaches, we have satisfied the curiosity that is merely reasonable and necessary. As for the extravagant and idle kind, it will always be as short of information as it has been excessive and self-willed in its inquiries.