Annotation XLI

”Every tree that does not make [good] fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire.” — Matthew 7:19

Whether the privation of the divine glory is a graver gehenna.

Chrysostom, homily 24 on Matthew, discoursing (on the occasion of this saying) about gehenna, says that the lack of the divine vision is a greater punishment than all the torments of gehenna. And he expresses this opinion in these words: “I know that very many dread gehenna alone; yet I say that the loss of that glory is a far more bitter punishment than gehenna itself.” And below: “Intolerable indeed is that thing, and horrible that punishment; yet if someone should set before me a thousand gehennas, he will say nothing such as it is to be repelled from the honor of that blessed glory.” And in the first exhortation to the fallen Theodore, he says: “There are some of an absurd judgment; these merely love to have escaped gehenna. But I, on the contrary, affirm that there is a certain torment much harsher than gehenna — that is, not to have attained so great a glory, and to have fallen away from it. Nor do I think that one should mourn over the evils of gehenna with as great a grief as it is necessary to bewail [our] fall — that we have fallen from the heavens — which is doubtless the harshest torment of all.”

St. Bonaventure (in the second book of the Sentences, distinction 33, question 3) and Richard of Middleton (on distinction 50 of the fourth [book] of the Sentences, in the last question) observed that this opinion seems to differ from the universal definition of the theologians, who lay down that the punishment of infants — lacking the divine vision alone — is the mildest of all punishments, as Augustine taught in chapter 55 of the Enchiridion to Laurentius. St. Thomas, in the Disputed Questions, in the question on the punishment of original sin, article one — and the same Bonaventure and Richard — say that Chrysostom’s assertion is most true in [the case of] adults, but by no means in infants; and that the cause of this difference is that the former [adults] see themselves expelled from eternal happiness by the wickedness of their own will, but the latter [infants] know that they lack the heavenly glory not by their own [fault], but by the fault of the first parent.

But Prudentius — although he was an adult, and already worn with old age — nevertheless seemed to have thought the punishments of hell more grievous, and more to be dreaded by him, than the loss of eternal happiness; when, at the end of his Hamartigenia — choosing rather to be thrust out of heaven than thrust down into gehenna — he prayed to Christ in these verses:

“In the Father’s treasuries there is much dwelling, O Christ, divided among unequal places; I do not ask [for] a blessed home in the [heavenly] region — let the holy throngs of the pious be there; but for me it is enough, if no face of an infernal minister meet me, nor the greedy flame of gehenna devour this soul, plunged in the lowest furnaces.”