Liberal Faith: Essays in Honor of Philip Quinn

4. Self-Annihilation or Damnation?: A Disputable Question in Christian Eschatology

83 Four Self-Annihilation or Damnation? A Disputable Question in Christian Eschatology Paul J. Griffiths By the fourth century, if not earlier, a picture of what happens to human beings at the death of the body had been largely agreed upon by Christians . It was a picture intimately linked with a particular anthropology, as all such inevitably are: depicting what happens when we die is always at least an extrapolation from what we take ourselves to be while alive; it is also among the more important tools we have for focusing and elaborating our self-understanding and for meditating discursively and visually upon what we take ourselves to be. Disputes in eschatology are always also disputes in anthropology. What interests me in this essay is two facts about the Christian tradition . The first is that it had, by the fourth century, developed conceptual resources that could, if pressed only a little, easily yield the view WeithProof.indb 83 WeithProof.indb 83 6/30/08 11:53:15 AM 6/30/08 11:53:15 AM 84 Paul J. Griffiths that among the things we are capable of doing to ourselves is annihilation , taking ourselves quite out of existence, leaving nothing behind. These resources were of central importance to the tradition too. They weren’t marginalia or the speculation of some insignificant figures. Some thinkers, notably Augustine, get quite close to explicitly affirming that we can take ourselves out of existence, and, given his anthropology , it would certainly have made good sense for him to say just this. But in fact he always draws back: although he canvasses the possibility explicitly on occasion, and more often implies it by saying things that seem quite naturally to lead to it, he never affirms it. When he does discuss the possibility it is always negatively; and when it is implied, or seems to be, the implication is never assented to. And in all this Augustine is entirely typical of Christian thinkers in late antiquity who discuss the postmortem questions. This is the second interesting fact that I’ll explore in this essay: that a conclusion strongly suggested by some of the conceptual resources of a particular tradition is nevertheless resisted by the principal systematizers and transmitters of that tradition. When this happens, there is an internal tension. That’s what I want to explore in the case of the question of self-annihilation: I want to understand why there is a tension of the sort I’ve briefly sketched and to suggest how it might be eased. All this has something important to do with hell. Hell is, according to standard-issue Christian eschatology, a label for one of the only two postmortem destinies finally open to human beings, the other being heaven. If self-annihilation is or might be a possibility for Christian eschatological thought, then either hell’s definition will have to be expanded to include it, or it will have to be added as a third eternal destiny alongside heaven and hell. In either case, if self-annihilation is permitted as a possibly Christian view, then it will also have to be said that Christians assert conditional immortality for human beings rather than inevitable immortality. For if annihilation is possible for some human beings (or for all), this just means that immortality is not inevitable for all. Conditional immortality is among the contraries of inevitable immortality, and while it is certainly true that the vast majority of Christians have asserted inevitable immortality, there have always been some Christian voices raised in support of conditional immortality, which is the view I intend to explore further in this essay.1 To clarify the question, I begin with a conceptual analysis of selfannihilation . WeithProof.indb 84 WeithProof.indb 84 6/30/08 11:53:15 AM 6/30/08 11:53:15 AM Self-Annihilation or Damnation? 85 Self-Annihilation Conceptual Analysis If something is annihilated, it is, as the word’s etymology suggests, brought ad nihilum, to nothing. Whatever it was is now no more. Whatever was denoted by its personal proper name (if it had one) is now absent. A comprehensive list of the contents of the cosmos, postannihilation , will no longer yield whatever it is that has been annihilated, whereas that same list preannihilation would have yielded it. An annihilated thing will always leave traces or vestiges of itself: its having...