After the consideration of death and of judgment, it is expedient to ponder most attentively also the torments of hell and the joys of paradise. For these are the two last things, one of which, Christ being judge, will fall to the lot of each of us; and these two are so contrary to one another that the one must render us most miserable and the other most happy. But since we have written of both in the book On the Ascent of the Mind to God, near the end of that book; and have written again of the joys of paradise in the whole book On the Eternal Happiness of the Saints, and of the torments of hell in the second book of On the Groaning of the Dove; and finally of all four last things in the Latin sermons that then came to mind, which we both delivered to the people and left in writing: it has seemed good in this place briefly to touch upon the chief points, so that the reader may have matter in which he may profitably exercise himself in attentive consideration, while he awaits death and prepares to receive it with joy.
Concerning, then, the most unhappy state of those damned to hell, we undertake to consider briefly three things: the place, the time, and the manner. The place is the depth; the time, eternity; the manner, punishment without bounds. The place, I say, is the depth: for reprobate men, on account of their enormous crimes of high treason against the divine Majesty, will have their prison in the deepest part of the world, which is farthest removed from the royal house that is in heaven; for it was fitting that the pride of the Devil and of proud men should be punished in this way. For the Devil said: I will ascend into heaven, above the stars of God I will exalt my throne, I will be like the Most High (Isa. 14); but the answer was given him: you shall be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit — and the same will befall all men who are children of pride.
Now from this first misery of the reprobate three others will follow: darkness, narrowness, and want. For since hell is at the center of the earth, a place to which the rays of the sun, and of the moon, and of the stars cannot penetrate, there can be no light in it except such as can issue from the sulphurous fire, which will increase, not diminish, the punishment. For by that light they will see the demons, their most cruel enemies; they will also see those men, whether friends or kinsfolk, who were the cause of their perdition; and lastly they will see their own nakedness, their own beggary, their own chains, their own torments — all of which they would perhaps wish not to see; but anything good, from which they could receive consolation, they will certainly not see. O darkness that is no darkness: a darkness for concealing all good things, but not for making manifest all evil things.
Moreover, the straits in hell are so narrow that they can scarcely contain the multitude of the bodies of the damned. For since the earth is, as it were, an indivisible point when compared with the immensity of heaven, and since hell comprises not the whole earth, nor even half of it, but only the center; and since the number of men who are damned is greater than the number of those who are to be saved — of whom we nevertheless read in the Apocalypse: "I saw a great multitude, which no man could number" (Rev. 7:9) — who can conceive how straitened they must be in hell? Let the great kings go then — Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and the others whom the whole world could scarcely contain — and let them widen, if they can, the straits of hell, so that they may lie a little more comfortably! And yet nearly all mortals strive to extend and enlarge their fields, their dominions, their kingdoms, so that for a brief time they may glory in the multitude of their subjects; and it never enters their minds how great the straits are that await them in hell, where they will be forced to dwell not for a brief time but without any end, whether they will it or not.
But now what shall I say of the incredible destitution of lost men? They are in want of all good things; the abundance of punishments alone makes rich all those who dwell in the world below. Rich men in hell will indeed remember with what delights they abounded on earth while they lived — whether in food and drink, or in costly garments, or in hunting and fowling, or in gardens and vineyards, or in theaters and various games — but all this remembrance will increase their grief, when they see themselves in hell naked, prostrate, despised, most miserably stripped of all goods and fortunes. Then they will say what we read in the book of Wisdom: "What has pride profited us? Or what has the boasting of riches brought us? All those things have passed away like a shadow" (Wis. 5:8-9). Let us come to the second point, which is time. How long will the exile of hell last? Would that it lasted no longer than the sojourn of this present life! But there will be no comparison; for to time there will succeed not time, but eternity. And so the dwelling of the wicked in the torments of hell will last as long as the eternity of God, which, just as it has no beginning, so also will have no end. The damned will be tormented as long as the blessed will rejoice. Finally, the reprobate will die as long as God Himself lives; and unless God ceases to be what He is, the reprobate will not cease to be in the punishments in which they are. O death-dealing life! O immortal death! If you are life, how do you kill? If you are death, how do you endure? Therefore you must be called neither death nor life, since each of these has something good — life has rest, and death an end — but you have neither rest nor end. What then shall we say you are, but all the evil that both life and death have? It would surely be a great thing if we could even moderately understand what the eternity of punishments is. For this thought alone would, like a kind of bridle, restrain all the lusts of men, and would so govern our life that we should be compelled to be not only Christians, but all most holy. Let us come to the manner, which we have said is a punishment without measure. For the punishment of hell is not any single punishment, but the sum total of all punishments: for in hell all the senses are tormented, both internal and external, and that not by turns, but all those punishments rush upon a man as it were in battle array. Here on earth we never experience that universal evil of the damned, just as we never experience the universal good of the blessed: for he who suffers in his eyes does not at the same time suffer in his teeth, and he who suffers in his teeth does not at the same time suffer in his eyes; and so of the rest in the same manner. But in the world below, the most atrocious pains in all the members must be endured at one time, since the fire of hell encompasses the whole body, torments the whole most vehemently, and never consumes it. "Depart, you cursed, into everlasting fire," says the Judge (Matt. 25:41); and Isaiah: "Their worm dies not, and their fire is not quenched" (Isa. 66:24; Mark 9:44, 46, 48), which He repeated three times in the same chapter, that He might plainly impress upon our hearts that the punishment of hell is a fire that will endure for everlasting time, and will most cruelly afflict the whole body with the sharpest pain for all eternity. Those who have seen a man here on earth burned by fire under a just sentence have scarcely been able to endure the sight of such a punishment, though it is ended in a very short time. But if a man, however guilty, were to remain in the fire for a whole day, surely no one could bear so horrendous a spectacle. Let each one therefore say within himself: If I cannot bear the burning of a living man who is nothing to me, how shall I be able to bear the burning of my own body for one hour, or a day, or a month, or a year? And if this seems to me too horrendous even to think of, with what folly do I expose myself to so great a danger, that I should burn for eternity? Now if we do not believe these things, where is our faith? If we do believe them, where is our judgment? Where is our prudence? If we are of sound mind and have faith in the holy Scriptures, how can it be that we are not stirred up when so monstrous a danger hangs over us? Let each one, then, who desires to be saved enter into his own heart, and having most attentively considered all these things, so conduct himself that death may find him prepared, and that the fire of hell may not receive him, but that he may deserve to enter happily into the joy of his Lord.