Fr. Rafail Noica: Hell is a Virtual Reality

Fr. Rafail Noica

In the Divine Comedy—not comedy in the sense that we understand it in our language today—it shows (I didn’t read the book but I was told about it) that an angel leads the book’s hero through different places and he reaches hell, and at hell’s gates it is written: “abandon all hope, all of you that are here.” Should we believe it, or should we not believe it? It is the voice of hell. But see that God has something else to tell us—something better. He says “and despair not.” And then what happens? When God grants us to experience this “and despair not” at the level which each of us are at, each person in his own way, tailored to us, to our spiritual size, if you’d like, when we experience this saying, then hell doesn’t exist. Hell is a virtual reality. This saying pulled the plug out of the socket and the whole fabrication disappeared. 

Where do I get the idea that hell doesn’t exist, that it is virtual? Look at how Christ describes the Final Judgement: “Come you blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” because you know the story. What does he tell the others? “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” It is not about inheriting something; He is not talking about inheriting something. It is not about the foundation of the world—the foundation of the world created by God. Who, then, prepared that fire? Well, the will to fall from God. And what is this fire? We say that God is a consuming fire. The fire of love. But also the creation of God, the rational creation of God, that is God’s image and potentially God’s likeness. And what is that creation? That creation is also fire. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but I see the presence of fire and then when it says “the fire prepared for you” it is not from the foundation of the world, He is not speaking about the foundation of the world—not “prepared for you,” “prepared for the devil and his angels”—I want to say, of course, the eternity of creation is fire; the consuming fire of God that is the dew of eternity, a fire that gives a cool breeze. Remember the Three Youths in the Babylonian furnace and the fire was turned into a cool breeze over dew by an angel of the Lord. Here is an example. Thus, bedewing, freshening, cooling but still fire. Or an undying, consuming fire. Why, how? I don’t know. But I see the presence of fire both up and down—one that is salvific, beneficent, that the soul never wants to lose, and the other is consuming in the painful sense of the word. 

So I say, hell is just a virtual reality. That is, a non-reality. And Father Sophrony says that pride refuses the reality created by God and lives in the reality created by it, pride. Humility receives life, reality as the beloved and loving Creator created it. Pride creates a reality of its own and lives in that reality, but if that reality is not created by God, it doesn’t exist. Thus, it is a virtual reality,  non-reality. So I suppose that at the end of created existence—now we can live in this non-reality. I imagine that it is good, bad, or all kinds of things. But after I finish my imagination, I go to dinner, to the cinema, maybe I go to Church, and I continue my life. But when life no longer has this external, materialistic context and we will live in the reality that is I—an I with God or an I without God. Without God, this reality will be seen as not existing and I will be a “non-being being,” and maybe this is one aspect of hell. And if I have not become the likeness of God—God says I Am that I Am, Being, Being par excellence, to be is Me, God. 

This is what the philosophical intuition “becoming into being” is—it is our life. All of our life, especially in the Church and monasticism, is becoming into being. We try to become into God and for God to become in us. But without the Church, in God’s mind, in the nature of things, man is in a state of becoming. We are not human beings, we are human beings in potential. Christ is the perfect human being. And we are thus a becoming, and so I understand hell as a becoming that is no longer becoming. You remain where, in what? And creation is still fire, consuming fire, the image of God. 

So if hell tells us “abandon all hope, all you that have come here,” we should not believe the voice of hell. 

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