Separation from God.
Beyond that, I try to not think about it.
"Separation from God"
And yet we read in the Psalm, "Where can I go from Your Presence?" "If I make my bed in She'ol, see,
You are there" (Psalm 139).
This is why the Orthodox have actually, tended, contrary to the Western view, viewed hell not as a separation from God's presence, but an experience of God's presence. St. Isaac the Syrian being tremendously influential here, argued that God's love is inescapable and unavoidable; and what makes hell hellish is the same thing that makes heaven heavenly: being in the presence of the loving God who made all things. Why it is hellish or heavenly depends not on location, but persuasion.
So am I saying "separation from God" is inaccurate? No. I think that it's actually still a good way of talking about hell--and yet the question: How is it possible to be where God is not when God is everywhere? How can one be outside of the scope of God's love when God
is love?
When I ask myself these questions I'm reminded of how, apart from Christ, I am a stranger to God; not because I am somehow able to escape God's presence as He is everywhere; or that I am somehow outside of His love. But that I am, as the Apostle St. Paul reminds us, without Christ, at enmity with God. In my natural, carnal man--my old sinful Adam--someone who hates and loathes God. And so I am at enmity and a stranger; but in Christ I have been brought out of darkness into light; brought near through Christ and I have become child and heir.
I can't help but consider that, in some sense, hell is what it means to be outside of that Communion with God which is found only in Christ, through the redemption in Him--and that hell is the fruit of existence without the Life-Giving, Infinite, Loving God who draws all things to Himself through His Son. It's death continued, sin continued, this estrangement continued. St. John speaks of that lake of fire and brimstone as "the Second Death" where even Death and Hades are cast.
If hell truly were just the cartoonish fiery pit where devils prod sinners with pitchforks, then we might be able to laugh it off as comically absurd; but hell as, what N.T. Wright describes as our "progressive de-humanization" is a far more horrifying prospect. Or what C.S. Lewis, in parable, describes as an overwhelmingly vast dull grey city in The Great Divorce.
I think of those moments in this life where I am most alone, most angry, most confused, most despaired--and it's in that existential loneliness that I can't help but wonder is a infernal foretaste of what an eternity without Christ is like. Not in being boiled in oil by impish devils for eternity, but left alone in myself without so much as the spark of hope that comes from living: for to be alive is a gift, and eternal life is life made full; and to reject that gift so thoroughly as to be dead beyond death in the dull dark and grey of my own innermost self is a hell I wouldn't wish on the worst kind of person.
