The questions and preoccupations people have with hell are pretty obvious: Does it exist? Is it just a possibility required by free will? Is anybody in it? Is it eternal? How do you square its existence with that of a loving God, or with the will of God that all should be saved?

These are some of the standard issues for most people, but there’s one that may still be for the most part unacknowledged.  Sociologically, hell is a belief in substantial decline. It once functioned as a serious form of moral sanction.

If belief in hell has waned – and I am not sure that religiously the situation is much different - where are we today socially regarding such sanction? Is a moral society possible without it? If not, where does or should such sanction come from?

The notion of hell has several historical precedents. In fact, hell can be viewed as the end of a long evolution with these precedents all making their contribution.

Judaism initially believed in Sheol, a shadowy place to which all the dead went – not an afterlife in any real sense. The Greek (Septuagint) translation of Sheol was Hades, the name for the underworld in Greek mythology. This was similarly not hell in any substantial sense, but simply the abode of the unconscious dead.

In the New Testament, Hades is retained, with an evolved distinction between the fates of the righteous and the unrighteous. There is also the expression, Gehenna, which is a one-storeyed abode, and closer to the standard description of hell.

The word derives from the Hebrew Ge-Hinnon, the gorge or valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, originally a location in which human sacrifices were offered to an idol called Moloch.

Gehenna was later used as a landfill, a very unsanitary and unpleasant place, filled with mountains of rotting garbage, set aflame to avoid pestilence, and burning for weeks, even months. It became a vivid, ready-to-hand, metaphor for the pains and torments of the damned. 

The traditional imagery of Hell also owes much to non-Biblical sources, especially Virgil and Dante. From Dante, in particular, we inherited a hell with torture exquisitely correlated with sin and with correspondingly deeper and deeper levels of descent into the abyss, and with fire.

Fire, in fact, came to be the essential feature of hell’s topography, a conviction reinforced in the last century by testimony from the visionaries of Fatima.

A vision of hell was the substance of the “first secret:” “Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire …(with) demons and souls…like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration… and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair.”

The witness of private revelation like this has a particular status in Catholic tradition. It is never mandated to “the obedience of faith,” but recommended as “worthy of belief,” which leaves the issue to individual choice.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of so called private revelation, to underline that revelation, properly speaking, is always public. Private revelation issues via the psychological make-up and consciousness of private individuals. It would have been most unusual, for instance, for the children of Fatima to have come up with different imagery concerning hell.

Their picture was the standard one ingrained into all Catholics well into this century. A good example of this widespread inculcation is the famous sermon in chapter three of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This sermon remains perhaps the most memorable evocation of hell in modern literature.

Pope John Paul reminded us that even “the images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”

This is, of course, a re-statement of the traditional doctrine that the true pain of hell is not physical pain but the pain of loss.

From the moral point or view, hell represents the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God, though unrepented mortal sin. Hell is thus not a matter of external imposition, but a condition entailed by choices against God of particular gravity.

Choices against God of particular gravity would hardly include infractions like missing Mass on Sunday. It strains credulity to think of this as killing the soul - the classic definition of mortal - and thus deserving of hell.

Many years ago, the Dutch theologian, Piet Schoonenberg proposed a threefold division of sin into venial sin, grave sin, and sin unto death (1 John 5:16).

It was an attempt to rescue mortal sin from trivialisation, and at the same time to incorporate into the understanding of sin the Biblical perspective of a state of sin equivalent to spiritual death, which the sinner may end in.

In other words, the sin unto death (the sin which is mortal) is not so much an act as a terminus. Of course, one act finally gets you there, in the same way that it finally takes just one drink to turn the drinker from being someone who likes his or her grog into being an alcoholic.

Schoonenberg’s position also has psychological merit. We are never wholly in any single one of our acts. We become our acts – our character is shaped by what we do - over time. Our acts incline us in a particular direction till that direction becomes our settled mode of being. Even then, it’s difficult to say if and when the light of goodness is completely extinguished, and all that’s left is evil.

Can a bad person do a good act? This is one way this dilemma is ordinarily posed, and the only answer is: it depends on how bad the person is. A person of completely disordered intention and will cannot do a good deed. Identifying such persons is the issue.

This is one reason why I think that while the Church canonises saints, and has a calendar of names of persons who are, it asserts, in heaven, it has no corresponding official process for designating those who are in hell, and no corresponding calendar of the damned.

Yet, hell remains a threat in Scripture, in other words, a dire moral possibility. It must be affirmed because of the nature of human freedom. The issue here is that we are beings who are free to reject our highest good – or to choose it. In creating human beings, God did not create robots. But human freedom is deeply paradoxical, as Augustine said so well.

I am freest when I choose my highest good, which is God – but I am also free not to do so. In other words, I can freely choose to disabuse the reason and point of my freedom. Hell is the possibility that results from this contradiction.

It’s inappropriate then to oppose freedom to God’s will that all should be saved. Salvation is not an imposition. Human beings are always free to reject it.

Finally, a word about an interesting theory relating not to the possibility of hell, but to its finality, which deserves to be mentioned. Based on 1 Cor 15:28, Acts 3:20-21 (and a few other texts) and referred to as apokatastasis, or the doctrine of restoration, there was historically a fairly influential belief  that everyone, humans and devils alike, will eventually be saved.

Only at that point would God be all in all. Several of the Church Fathers supported the doctrine, St Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Ambrose, St Gregory of Nazianzus etc.

For these Fathers the fire of hell was (like Purgatory) a purifying, not a punishing fire. Restoration represented the most daring hope in the love and mercy of God.

From the sixth century the theory was regarded as unorthodox by the Church, but it has refused to die. It survived way into the last century among other Christian denominations.