Inferno (c.1520) - Anonymous

Hell: A Philosophical Update

Beliefs in Hell and the Apocalypse have perplexed (and vexed) humanity for centuries, including our own. Hell, contrary to what some might think, is not a medieval superstition that has been retired to its own purgatory, but is still alive and well. In fact, Pope Francis and the Vatican backtracked when media reports claimed the Pope was doubting Hell’s existence after his conversation with a journalist friend. Moreover, contemporary theologians still argue for its existence, while, of course, hell (and its demonic inhabitants) have been alive and well in the mass media for years.

Can philosophy finally put this archaic belief to rest? Let us consider the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Does his philosophical project offer clarification to those bewitched by the language of hell, thus liberating them from those eschatological fly-bottles?

First, a reiteration of the salient points from Wittgenstein’s later writings and why they matter—  and why questions about the language of hell are relevant both at the emotional and intellectual level.

Wittgenstein was a thinker engaged in what historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy once called the modern revolt against dualism. As Tim Labron observed in his insightful study, Science and Religion in Wittgenstein’s Fly-Bottle, Wittgenstein in his later writings rejected Realism’s epistemological model of an existing independent reality ‘out there,’ separate from human language and logic, needing only to be decoded by investigating minds whether of a scientific, religious, or philosophical bent.

This anti-Realism, of course, has radical implications for religion; a theological realism that assumes that an independent Ultimate Reality—be it hell, heaven, or God—can be ‘discovered’ by theological minds independent of their forms of language is misconceived.  The terms and concepts of theology and religion operate within the rule matrices of particular language-games (embedded in broader cultural practices), not as mirrors of an external reality.

A rejection of theology as descriptive of a spiritual reality that is ‘out there’ (in imitation of the physical sciences that attempt to describe a material reality also ‘out there’) calls into question a fundamentalist theology that asserts that religious propositions refer to hell’s actual existence.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations offers useful critical tools for further examining this realist-literalist language of hell and apocalypse. He describes the power of linguistic images to emotionally control us:

A ‘picture’ held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. [PI, Sec 115]

Traditional religious beliefs are stories told in the form of images and pictures. As the historian James Carse observed in his book The Religious Case against Belief, the major world religions all are founded on a rich tradition of poetic language. Furthermore, these religions all conceive of salvation as a challenging journey, unfolding like the plot of a novel.  It is no coincidence that notable apologists for Christianity, such as Dante, John Bunyan, and C.S. Lewis, all were skilled storytellers, while Buddhism too recounts powerful, gruesome, sagas about its particular vision of hell. Literary imagery and narrative drama have been at the heart of religion and theology for centuries. They populate its language-game’s universe.

Jonathan Edwards, in the spirit of St. Augustine and Dante, used vivid pictorial language in his famous— or infamous—1741 sermon, a dramatic narrative of sinners being dangled over the pit of hell, a horrifying intimation of an afterlife of unending torment (“…a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God…”).

Such literary tropes emotionally captivate; gripped by this imaginative language, believers think that such narratives offer a universal body of truth about the meaning of the afterlife, but, in reality, they are merely “bewitched” by its terrifying, emotionally charged pictorial images— trapped in the Wittgensteinian Fly-Bottle.

And applying the anti-foundationalism of the later Wittgenstein—that language-games do not point beyond themselves to some ultimate ‘grounding’ in the external world—Jonathan Edwards’ frightening sermonic language is nothing more than a glorified horror tale, the nucleus of the latest film script about the hellish supernatural.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, schoolteacher, c. 1922

The doctrine of hell has been vigorously defended by 21st Century theologians and scholars. Though their exegetical commentary disagrees over what hell is like, they all agree that it actually exists; and while some downplay the ‘hellfire’ imagery, all tacitly assume the literalist-realist assumption that their theological propositions about hell, instead of being only integral to their respective language-games, actually refer to things and events (e.g. sinners going to a real destination known as “Hell”). However, by the lights of Wittgenstein’s critique, theology’s language-game uses images and tropes—emotionally powerful ‘Hell-words’— to refer to an afterlife that does not exist outside of theology’s dramatic narrative.

 Bertrand Russell knew well that these emotionally charged theologies of hell can have unsettling ramifications that go well beyond conceptual confusions. In his discussion (pp.362–-363) in his History of Western Philosophy of the theology of the Elect,  which logically entailed the damnation to Hell of unbaptized infants, Russell observed that it was no wonder that succeeding generations, influenced by such a doctrine, were cruel and superstitious.

From Socrates onward, philosophy’s project of clear, critical thinking, following the argument where it leads, has invariably caused a tension with received beliefs and doctrines based on the uncritical acceptance of authority and tradition, which have been inexorably repeated to us down through the ages.

The language of hell, as well as its apocalyptic embellishments, is the quintessential example of the power of emotionally charged tradition to bewitch human emotions, which explains why this belief still lives, in some form or fashion, in the contemporary world.

Thomas White is a Wiley Journal contributing author, and a previous contributor to Undercurrent Philosophy, Aeon, The Philosopher’s Eye, and other journals. He is also a poet and speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in print and online in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. The Encyclopedia Britannica selected one of his previously published philosophical essays on Hannah Arendt, Adolph Eichmann, and the “Banality of Evil” for reprinting on its website, Britannica.com. 

Further reading:

Why is there ‘Something Evil’ rather than ‘Nothing Evil’? Thomas White

The Question of Evil and the Non-human – Thomas White

Hell | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy  – C. P. Ragland

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