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The Starting Point of Our Trip
The Enemy Within
All journeys, no matter their final destination, have a starting point. And that starting point is usually home.
The journey we are going to make is no different. Before we visit hellâbefore we define what it is, speak about its history and significance, and explore who goes there and what itâs like to be thereâwe have to do something else. We have to get into the proper mind-set. We have to choose a point of origin. We cannot start a tour of hell in hell itself. We must start elsewhere. And the only logical starting place is homeâthat is, the state of our own souls.
The reason we canât begin with hell is because peopleâs opinions of what it might be like vary too much. At one end of the spectrum are those who think hell is complete nonsense, a product of religious and psychological superstition, a fictitious punishment the Christian church has used to beat people into submission for thousands of years. On the other end of the spectrum are those who believe in a ridiculously cartoonish version of hell, complete with a red devil with horns and a pitchfork and steamy black smoke coming out of his ears.
Then there are those who believe that hell is a myth, a product of evolutionary thought that has great value, at least in terms of understanding human history and psychology. However, they donât think this myth has any real basis in fact. On the other hand, some people believe hell is real, but only as a potential reality, and that no one actually goes there because of a doctrine known as universal salvation, which states that, in the end, God finds a way to allow everyone to go to heaven, no matter what theyâve done in life.
Finally, there are those who believe hell does indeed have mythological and psychological meaning, but that it also exists in reality as a place or state of eternal suffering, both in a spiritual way now and later on, after the resurrection of the dead, in a physical way, and that people do indeed go there. This is the position considered to be the most traditional and orthodox in Christian theology, and it is the position of this book.
But we canât start there. Thereâs just too much disagreement. We have to get there first. And the best way to do that is to start with something that nobody with common sense has any doubts about: the connection between hell and evil.
No matter what your belief regarding the definition of hell, everyone agrees that the concept of hellâtrue or notâhas something to do with the concept of evil, evil people, and the final destination of evil people. Whether or not that destination is a real place or a psychological state or a state of annihilation or a literary device is something we havenât gotten to yet. But we at least know the idea of hell has to do with the idea of where evil people might end up. On this point there is a general consensus.
Now if the trajectory of evil is hell, then the starting point of any travel guide to hell must be the evil we already knowânamely, the evil that exists in the world right now.
What exactly is evil? That can be a complicated question too. Some atheist philosophies deny the existence of evil or at least say itâs necessary for humans to go âbeyond good and evilâ in order to live authentic lives. But we are going to ignore these philosophies for now. First, because we canât get bogged down in absurdity. Second, because some of the very same atheists who deny the existence of evil are also the ones who have perpetrated the greatest acts of evil in the history of the world: Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, to name a few.
Besides those who deny evil on philosophical grounds, there has also been a pernicious movement underway since the time of Sigmund Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis to categorize all evil as mental illness. According to this way of thinking, Hitler, Stalin, and the other murderers, rapists, and child abusers of history werenât evil; they simply had severe psychopathic and antisocial personality disorders.
Thatâs not the Christian understanding of evil or psychology. Yes, itâs possible for someone to be a true psychopath, possessing a chronic mental disorder that results in criminal behavior, but thatâs not the whole story. Christianity has always believed that evil is a realityâboth personal and cosmicâand that it has to do with evil choices that are freely made. Many modern psychologists deny the existence of free will to begin with, so of course they must also deny the existence of evil and instead attribute all malevolent behavior to genetics or developmental problems in childhood or adolescence.
But again, we are not going to entertain such nonsense. For the purpose of this discussion we are going to accept what the great masses of humanity have always known: evil exists and is all around us, even inside us, and there are no words to adequately describe how unbelievably vicious, violent, twisted, and abominable it can be.
A quick review of just a few gruesome details associated with human activity throughout history is sufficient to establish this reality. We could go all the way back to the biblical story of Cain and Abel and the first murder.1 We could talk about the ritualistic sacrifice of children in ancient Carthage. We could describe all the nightmarish tortures long ago invented to inflict excruciating pain on human beings, from crucifixion to the medieval rack and saw to the practice of boiling people in oil.
But we donât have to confine ourselves to the ancient world. The most monstrous evil has taken place in recent, more âcivilizedâ times. Between 1900 and 2020, more than 150 million people were brutally butchered by totalitarian dictators and their regimes.2 The twentieth century saw a plethora of merciless wars caused by these evil governments, as well as mass executions, forced starvations, gulags, concentration camps, gas chambers, and unspeakable experiments on children.
The twenty-first century hasnât been much better. Think of September 11 and other acts of terrorism perpetrated against the innocent. Think of the mass shootings at schools or the thousands of serial rapes and murders that take place every year in every corner of the globe. Think of the whole culture of death, with abortion and infanticide and forced euthanasia becoming inscribed in law in every part of the world. Think of the random, disconnected acts of unprovoked cruelty we see in the news all the time: the woman who poured gasoline on her sleeping children and burned them alive; the man who kidnapped a teenage girl, repeatedly raped her, stabbed her, and put salt into her wounds before finally dismembering her. Thereâs just no end to the atrocities.
The horror is not only that people are being abused; itâs the unmitigated malice and barbarism behind the abuse. Itâs not just that people are killing other people; itâs the heinousness of the murders themselves, the desire of the killers to humiliate, torment, and inflict misery on their victims. Itâs not just the blood; itâs the bloodthirstiness, the sheer sadism, and the wickedness of it all. Yes, wickedness.
Weâre not talking here about crimes of passion. Nor are we talking about crimes committed purely for ambitionâs sake. Weâre talking about crimes in which the perpetrators seem to take joy in bestowing suffering on others. Weâre talking about cold, premeditated, methodical savagery.
This is the face of evil. And there is something definitely diabolical about it, something otherworldly, something disconnected from abnormal psychology or the politics of power or any naturalistic principle concerning the so-called survival of the fittest. Itâs a phenomenon that stands completely apart from the realm of atoms and molecules and the material universe. It just doesnât make sense in rational terms. And this spiritual quality of evil is impossible to deny. Examples of it are too numerous and too startling and too twisted. The fact is that while evil is not more powerful than good, it is certainly more visible. In fact, evil is the most visible of all the invisible realities proclaimed by the religions of the world.
That is why evil, ironically, can often be the gateway to deeper faith and spirituality for those who are naturally inclined to skepticism. Despite the denial of metaphysical evil by most modern philosophers and psychologists, many people who have difficulty believing in invisible, spiritual realities are sometimes led to a belief in the supernatural through the undeniable experience of evil. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, the existence of evil is the only religious doctrine that can really be empirically proven. Thatâs why some people come to believe in the devil before they believe in God.
But weâll talk more about that paradox later. At this point weâre still discussing the existence of evil and its seeming pervasiveness. And we have to go further still. If we want to understand anything about hell, we canât just do a survey of the evil monsters of history and leave it at that for the simple reason that itâs too easy to dismiss them as monsters. Itâs too easy to class them as aberrations and exceptions to the general goodness of humanity. If we want to go deeper into the subject of evil, we have to look at the evil inside ourselves.3
And here is where things get a little difficult. None of us ever likes to admit that we are capable of doing truly evil things. Yes, we acknowledge the fact that we sometimes fall short of the mark, that we occasionally do bad things, and even that much of the time we can be pretty consistent sinners, however we define sin. But thatâs quite different from being a Hitler or a terrorist or a cold-blooded killer. Those are the people we associate with evil, the monsters of the world. And since we obviously donât put ourselves into the monster category, most of us donât consider ourselves evil.
But thatâs only partly true. That kind of thinking misses the point because it doesnât go far enough. Itâs too shallow. Itâs too dishonest. Itâs not self-reflective enough. It only considers our actions from the point of view of our present circumstances. It doesnât address the free choices we are actually making in the center of our wills. It doesnât delve deeply enough into our dark sides. It doesnât ask the question: What if things were different in my lifeâhow would I act? It therefore doesnât address our personal capacity for evil.
Thatâs what we need to examine. What are we doing inside our heads from moment to moment? What kind of dark, secret thoughts are we harboring that we wouldnât dream of telling anyone? Most important, if these secret thoughts had something more substantial backing them up, what would our behavior look like?
You see, right now, most of you reading this book are very limited in your ability to act out your evil inclinations. Not only do you lack sufficient money and power, but you also lack sufficient motivation. Youâre sitting in a warm room with a roof over your head, the lights are on, and you have food in your stomach. Even though you may have a lot of problems to deal with, youâre not starving. Compared to other people in the world, youâre doing okay. But what if you found yourself in totally different circumstances? What if your whole life fell apart? What if you and those you loved really were struggling to eat and drink and survive? What would you do then?
Or, contrarily, what if your position was much stronger than it is now? What if you had unlimited power and wealth and the ability to satisfy your every little desire, just like the twentieth-century totalitarian leaders who caused so much carnage? How would you behave?
Please donât misunderstand me. Iâm not accusing you of being a monster. Nor am I denying the existence of free will and the ability of human beings to triumph over their circumstances. Iâm not saying the only difference between the average person on the street and Adolf Hitler is that Hitler had an army of brutal Nazis behind him. Iâm not claiming everyone is as bad as Hitler or that everything you do in life comes down to your upbringing and environment. If Hitler had been born into a different family in a different country in a different century, I donât think he would have been a much different person, at least not in terms of his will to choose evil. I donât believe he would have been a wonderfully warm, loving, and kindhearted individual. No. His evil inclinations would have manifested themselves in other ways and other actions. In his soul, he would still have made dark, selfish, evil choices. He just wouldnât have been in a position to murder six million Jews and set a whole world aflame. The scope of his evil would have been greatly restricted.
The point is that while we donât want to overemphasize the importance of environment so much that we deny the existence of evil, we also donât want to lose sight of the fact that circumstantial factors do have the ability to hide evil. Thatâs the crux of the matter. There are a lot more evil people out there than we commonly imagine. We just donât see them. They donât have the power, the money, the courage, or the fame to carry out their evil impulses. Much of their evil has never been brought to the surface. Itâs been rendered relatively harmless because of their situation in life.
And thatâs exactly what you have to realize about yourself too. Not that you are evil through and through. But that there may be a great deal more evil inside you than you are aware of. There may be a great deal more evil that you are capable of if you had been born into a different situation, if you had the means, motive, and opportunity to do what you truly wanted.
Before we embark on this trip to hell, it is absolutely imperative that you consider this fact. This is not meant to be an exercise in self-flagellation; rather, itâs meant to enable you to really understand why hell exists in the first place and why people actually want to go there. (Yes, I said want to go there).
For just a few minutes, focus on your inner capacity for evil. Donât try to deny it or minimize it or rationalize it or even judge it. Just look at it. Turn it around in your mind. Think about the most vile things you have ever done or said or thought. Think about your outbursts of prideful anger, your lapses into sexual sins, perhaps your drinking binges, your bouts of gluttony, your lying, your laziness, your cowardice, your ungratefulness, or your selfishness. Think about how many times you have indulged in this kind of behavior. Think about the times you have reveled in it. Think about how many times you have resolved to do better or to change and yet, the second you encountered even the tiniest temptation, you slithered right back into the mud.
And then, once youâve called all that to mind, realize that these arenât even the worst sins youâve committed. In fact, many of the things I just listedâthough outwardly repugnant because of the damage they causeâoften have a minimal amount of personal culpability attached to them. In other words, theyâre not completely your fault. Theyâre at least partially brought on by emotion or fatigue or hunger or suffering or habit or mental illness or insecurity or addictive inclinations or natural inclinations. Thus, the degree to which God holds you accountable for them (according to Christian teaching) may be significantly mitigated, because they are not truly free choices of...
