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Being evil by nature we ought nevertheless to become good; and so we can. Kant's philosophy is supposed to give us grounds for hope in an “afterlife”, when we can be good, or at least better, and when happiness will be proportioned to virtue as the highest good. Yet it remains unclear how to understand the temporal relation of this present, sensible life and the afterlife. Some of Kant's reflections suggest that heaven and hell may belong to the intelligible world we already occupy. Because the world would have been created for a moral purpose, and because the highest good is a just reward, we have rational grounds for hope in an afterlife.

This chapter defends two venerable but largely ignored concepts in the general area of atonement: the wrath of God and the blood of Christ. The first is important because it constitutes a barrier against any sort of general moral or religious relativism. The second is important because it is always costly to rectify a terribly wrong situation. Contrary to the theory that Jesus’ life and death was essentially a fine moral example to emulate, some sort of robust atonement, like the death of the Son of God, is necessary. It is also argued that hell is compatible with the love of God.

This chapter discusses the debate about purgatory. To normal Latin view immediately on death souls received their reward, the damned to hell, the just to paradise, the imperfect to purification in Purgatory. Discussions and its circulation precipitated reactions on the subject of disagreement between Latin and Greek churches. The report of the debate about purgatory which survived from the Otranto meeting gives the Greek side, but a Latin account went at once to Rome.

The Dantean hell was ordered, even hierarchical. The hell of the Catholic Counter‐Reformation, as well as most Protestant versions of hell, gave up that order in the interests of the psychological drama of damnation, with millions of the damned crushed promiscuously together, with a revolting stench. The chapter examines some Jesuit versions of hell, including one whose fearsome picture of the eternal and unspeakable sufferings of the damned bears a remarkable resemblance to the sermons on hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of James Joyce. It traces an English tradition of empirical speculation about the exact nature of hell, the composition of its fires, and where it might be located in the universe (in the sun, for instance), and the gradual rise in a sentiment hostile to the idea of everlasting punishment.

Sartre’s No Exit is a conscientiously trite play that explores some profound truths about what Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) calls Being-for-Others. No Exit presents us with three perverse characters in Hell who are forced to spend eternity together. The play explores the nature of human relationships, how people deceive one another and deceive themselves. Sartre’s conclusion is “Hell is other people”.

Religion is a form of risk management in human lives and in religious groups. Pascal’s Wager famously illustrates the calculation of loss and benefit in religious belief. But there are other economic models for how religion deals with uncertainty, and this chapter looks at three. First is insurance against risk, with its byproduct of “moral hazard. Second is the need to verify the reliability of religious “goods,” which economists call “credence goods.” Religions, like businesses, seek to assure consumers of reliability. Finally, consumers search for reliable information, which in religion means explanations about the gods, the afterlife, and ultimate religious consequences, such as hell. Typically, monotheistic faiths are deemed “high risk” religions because of their belief in ultimate consequences. But all religions have this feature to some extent, speaking to the human incentive to avoid risk.

The subject of this chapter is the growing popularity of Christian alternatives to Halloween haunted houses. The most famous of these is Keenan Roberts's Hell House, a multiscene morality play that uses the techniques of horror entertainment to illustrate both a general and a specific narrative of social and political decline. These phenomena became very popular — attracting the attention of both supporters and critics — and explicitly engage the hot‐button political issues central to New Christian Right activism and organizing. Hell Houses' individual scenes illustrate to adolescents the harms (such as abortion, gay weddings, and school shootings) awaiting them in a society that — nominally committed to tolerance and social harmony — has unwittingly drawn them toward hellfire.

This chapter considers the highly paradoxical position occupied by ancient pagans, who are considered genuinely and outstandingly virtuous and yet at the same are condemned to Hell. This paradox is discussed in detail before the chapter goes on to explain Dante's position in this paradox, by looking at Dante's attitude to pagan wisdom and its relation to Christianity, especially his adoption, but transformation, of the position of limited relativism which strictly separates the spheres of philosophical enquiry and Christian doctrine. The damnation of virtuous pagans turns out to be the price required by this approach, which remains deliberately paradoxical, despite Dante's innovation of placing them in a special part of Hell, where there are no physical torments. Furthermore, the chapter looks at another aspect of Dante's discussion of paganism — his treatment of Epicurus and his followers — and links it to a comparison with his great admirer and commentator, Boccaccio.

This chapter examines the role of punishment in correction as discussed by early Christian authors and the Roman elite as a way of understanding how punishment became associated with both hell and purgatory. It examines metaphors of paternal power and slavery. It suggests that the idea that the elect, too, must suffer violence in the afterlife arose from discussions about original sin at a time when the Roman elite were increasingly anxious about the erosion of legal immunities that had traditionally protected them from judicial torture. It highlights the ongoing importance of the metaphor of slavery to the way corporeal punishment was described in the afterlife, particularly in the Vision of Paul, and it considers notions of retributive justice and the fear of hell.

This chapter examines the emergence of Arminianism and other challenges to absolute predestination in 18th‐century America. Much of the early opposition to the old Puritan synthesis came from Anglican missionaries bent on bringing their wayward brethren back into England's established church. Colonial figures such as Samuel Johnson of Connecticut derided Calvinist predestination as antithetical to biblical truth. Many Anglicans were motivated by high‐church sacramentalism, and this outlook influenced the young John Wesley, the Methodist founder and the most famous Arminian in American history. Wesley came to blows with more Calvinistic revivalists such as George Whitefield over predestination, and the resulting rift persists in evangelicalism to this day. Because the 18th century was also the age of Enlightenment, it bequeathed to American culture an enduring strain of rationalism regarding predestination and the associated doctrines of hell and providence. The chapter shows how these emergent doubts altered popular thinking about divine sovereignty.

This chapter explores the evaporation, in effect, of real assent to beliefs in the afterlife, especially in hell. Starting from the author's personal experiences of Catholicism before Vatican II, it goes on to consider whether in the modern world such beliefs are inevitably entertained with ironic overtones. The hell sermons in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are of exceptional interest here, for Joyce is able to deploy irony toward a boy's belief in hell, and the Catholic traditions that stand behind it, while holding back from satire.

The Aristotelian background to Dante, and Dante's expressing in poetic terms the theology and philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas is explored. Like Swift, Dante presents what Aristotle called “probable impossibilities,” and shows sinners punished less by an external agency than by their own obsessive immersion in their vices—hence a chosen eternity of suffering. The structure of Inferno: sins against charity, in increasing gravity, lead to images of spirits in ice, removed as far as possible from the light and warmth of the good, which is God. The precision and concreteness of the moral and spiritual geography of Dante, and the paradox that love created hell, are explored.

Explicates the message of another pair of parables, focusing in particular on the word holon, “all,” in the parable of the Leaven (“till it was all leavened”). The chapter argues that the parable conveys, in a somewhat veiled form, a hope, if not a promise, of universal salvation, and thus is not compatible with an idea of an everlasting objective “hell.” It is argued that part of the intended message can be formulated, in universal concepts, as follows:

God wants all people to live with God

many people think: this cannot happen

I say: it can happen, God wants it to happen

The chapter discusses the meaning of the images of hiddenness, transformation, smallness, and the promise of the final “victory of God.”