What the hell?

The problem of evil is one that has exercised great minds down the centuries.  It enters theological consideration in the very first pages of the Bible.  For some, all of human history is about the battle between good and evil.

The reality of evil in our world gets driven home day after day in our news reports.  No image more forcefully speaks to me of how real evil is than that of 5 boys executing ISIS prisoners in Syria.  I don't impute the evil personally to the boys, hardly old enough to be responsible for their actions.  Rather the evil is the Jihadist culture/perverted religion/monstrous inhumanity that surrounds them, indoctrinates them, and incites them to such perverse actions.  Their boyhood is stolen from them, their humanity is destroyed.

Ultimately such evil must be seen as only possible because of the reality of free will (still hotly debated by philosophers and denied by rationalists and secularists).  The human person has the ability to choose: and that means one can choose actions that are of themselves evil or have consequences that are evil.  But why?  Psychologists suggest that such choice is possible because one somehow sees what we consider evil to be in fact for them in some way "good".  Which again points to a concept of evil that transcends individual choices, which poisons the mind and perverts one's choices.  And yet we cannot abandon the concept of individual responsibility for all that.

Which raises the question of hell.  To deny its existence is both fashionable and understandable.  It does not sit easily with the concept of an all-merciful God.  And yet the idea that the Jihadists actually are embraced into heavenly bliss as they blow themselves and countless other innocents into eternity is surely unacceptable.  "Judge not", I am reminded.  Yes, it is impossible to know the mind and responsibility of those who perpetrate even the most horrific crimes.  But it is just too much to imagine Mother Teresa welcoming Osama bin Laden for a heavenly morning tea.  

Enter the much maligned and overlooked Catholic doctrine of purgatory.  Can it be that after death an all-merciful God actually gives even the most depraved of his creation an opportunity to purge themselves, to reshape their personality and will, to slowly and painfully come to a realisation of how wrong they have been and to embrace the good they so rejected in this life?  (Romano Guardini wrote insightfully on this.)  But in the end there must remain the possibility that one could reject even such a second chance and freely will to remain eternally in one's evil mindset.  A hell of some sort can't be wished away.