Part IV, Chapter XLIV, 3

As for rites of consecration, although they depend for the most part on the discretion and judgment of the Church’s governors rather than on Scripture, those governors must still be guided by what the action itself requires: its ceremonies, words, and gestures should be fitting and meaningful, or at least suited to the action. When Moses consecrated the Tabernacle, the altar, and their vessels (Exod. 40.), he anointed them with the oil God had ordered to be made for that purpose, and they became holy. Nothing was exorcised to drive away phantoms. When the same Moses, Israel’s civil sovereign, consecrated Aaron the high priest and his sons, he washed them with water—not exorcised water—clothed them in their garments, and anointed them with oil. Thus they were sanctified to serve the Lord as priests: he simply and fittingly cleansed and adorned them before presenting them to God as his servants. When King Solomon, Israel’s civil sovereign, consecrated the Temple he had built (2 Kings 8.), he stood before the whole congregation of Israel, blessed them, and thanked God for placing in his father’s heart the desire to build it and giving him the grace to complete it. Then he prayed that God would accept the house, though it could not match his infinite greatness, and hear the prayers of his servants who prayed within it or, if absent, toward it. Lastly he offered a peace offering, and the house was dedicated. There was no procession; the king remained where he stood. There was no exorcised water, no Asperges Me, no irrelevant use of words spoken on another occasion, but a fitting and rational address, wholly suited to presenting God with his newly built house. We do not read that St. John exorcised the water of the Jordan, or Philip the water of the river in which he baptized the eunuch, or that any pastor in the Apostles’ time put his own spittle to a person’s nose before baptism and said “In odorem suavitatis,” that is, “for a sweet savor to the Lord.” Neither the spittle, for its uncleanness, nor the application of those words of Scripture, for its frivolity, can be justified by any human authority.

To prove that a soul separated from its body lives eternally—not merely the souls of the elect by special grace, through restoration of the eternal life Adam lost by sin and our Savior restored to the faithful by sacrificing himself, but also the souls of the reprobate as a property naturally belonging to human nature, without any grace of God beyond what is given to everyone—various passages at first sight seem quite sufficient. But when I compare them with what I have previously cited from the 14 of Job (Chapter 38.), they seem to me much more open to another interpretation than Job’s words.

First are Solomon’s words (Ecclesiastes 12.7.): “Then the dust shall return to dust as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.” If no other text directly opposes it, this may readily mean that only God, not man, knows what becomes of a man’s spirit when he dies. Solomon himself gives a statement in this sense in the same book (Chap. 3. ver. 20,21.): “All go”—man and beast—“to the same place; all come from dust and all return to dust. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward, and the spirit of the beast downward to the earth?” That is, none but God knows. Nor is it unusual to say of things we do not understand, “God knows what” or “God knows where.” The words in Gen. 5.24., “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him,” are explained in Heb. 13.5.: “He was taken away so that he would not die, and was not found because God had taken him. Before he was taken away he had this testimony, that he pleased God.” This is as much evidence for the immortality of the body as for that of the soul, and proves that being taken away was peculiar to those who please God, not shared by the wicked, and depends on grace rather than nature. On the contrary, what interpretation can we give besides the literal sense of Solomon’s words (Eccles. 3.19.): “What happens to the sons of men happens to beasts; the same thing happens to them all. As one dies, so dies the other; indeed, they all have one breath”—one spirit—“so that a man has no advantage over a beast, for all is vanity”? Literally this implies no natural immortality of the soul, yet does not conflict with the eternal life the elect will enjoy by grace. And (chap. 4. ver.3.) “Better than either is the one who has not yet been,” that is, better than those now living or who have lived. If the souls of all who have lived were immortal, this would be hard to say: having an immortal soul would then be worse than having no soul at all. And again (Chapt. 9.5.): “The living know they shall die, but the dead know nothing,” that is, by nature and before the body’s resurrection.

Another passage that seems to favor the soul’s natural immortality is our Savior’s statement that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living. But he speaks of God’s promise and of the certainty that they will rise again, not of a life then actually being lived. In the same sense God told Adam that on the day he ate the forbidden fruit he would certainly die: from that moment he was a dead man under sentence, though the sentence was not executed until almost a thousand years later. Likewise Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive by promise when Christ spoke, but are not actually alive until the Resurrection. Nor does the story of Dives and Lazarus count against this, if we take it for what it is, a parable.

Other passages of the New Testament, however, seem directly to attribute immortality to the wicked. Clearly they will all rise for Judgment. Moreover, it is said in many places that they will enter “everlasting fire, everlasting torments, everlasting punishments,” and that the worm of conscience never dies. All of this is included in the phrase everlasting death, ordinarily interpreted as everlasting life in torments. Yet nowhere can I find a statement that anyone shall live in torment everlastingly. It also seems hard to say that God, the Father of Mercies, who does whatever he wills in heaven and earth, who holds all men’s hearts in his power, who works within men both the will and the act, and without whose free gift a man has neither inclination to good nor repentance for evil, would punish men’s transgressions without end and with every extremity of torture men can imagine, and more. We must therefore consider what everlasting fire and similar phrases of Scripture mean.

I have shown already that the Kingdom of God under Christ begins on the day of Judgment; that on that day the faithful will rise again with glorious and spiritual bodies, becoming his subjects in his eternal kingdom; that they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, nor eat and drink as they did in their natural bodies, but will live forever as individual persons, without the perpetuation of their kind by generation; and that the reprobate will also rise again to receive punishment for their sins. I have shown as well that those among the elect who are then alive in their earthly bodies will have their bodies suddenly changed and made spiritual and immortal. But there is no passage of Scripture proving that the bodies of the reprobate, who make up the kingdom of Satan, will also be glorious or spiritual, or that they will be like God’s angels, neither eating, drinking, nor procreating, or that they will live eternally as individual persons, as every faithful man will, or as Adam would have done if he had not sinned. Only the passages concerning eternal torments might be offered as proof, and they admit another interpretation.

We may therefore infer that, just as the elect after the Resurrection will be restored to the condition Adam enjoyed before his sin, the reprobate will be in the condition Adam and his descendants entered after the sin was committed—except that God promised a redeemer to Adam and to those of his seed who would trust in him and repent, but not to those who die in their sins, as the reprobate do.

Considered in this way, the texts mentioning eternal fire, eternal torments, or the worm that never dies do not contradict the doctrine of a second and everlasting death in the proper and natural sense of death. The fire or torments prepared for the wicked in Gehenna, Tophet, or wherever else may continue forever, and there may never be any lack of wicked men to suffer in them, though no individual man suffers eternally. For the wicked, left in the condition they occupied after Adam’s sin, may rise and live as before, marry and be given in marriage, and have coarse and corruptible bodies like all mankind now. Consequently they may beget children perpetually after the Resurrection as they did before; no passage of Scripture says otherwise. St. Paul, when speaking of the Resurrection (1 Cor. 15.), means only resurrection to eternal life, not resurrection to punishment. Of the former he says that the body is “sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, raised in honor; sown in weakness, raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body.” Nothing of the kind can be said of those raised for punishment. The passage is Luke 20. Verses 34,35,36., a fertile passage: “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage; but those counted worthy to obtain that world and the Resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are children of God, being children of the Resurrection.” The children of this world, living in the condition Adam left them, shall marry and be given in marriage; that is, they shall decay and produce succeeding generations. This gives immortality to the kind, not to individual persons. They are not worthy to be numbered among those who obtain the next world and a complete resurrection from the dead, but stay there briefly, like temporary residents, solely to receive the punishment their obstinacy deserves. The elect alone are children of the Resurrection, the sole heirs to eternal life. Only they can die no more; they, and not the reprobate, are equal to the angels and are the children of God. For the reprobate there remains after the Resurrection a second and eternal death. Between that Resurrection and their second and eternal death there is only a period of punishment and torment; through the succession of sinners entering it, this punishment shall last as long as the human kind endures through procreation, which is forever.

On this doctrine of the natural eternity of separated souls rests, as I said, the doctrine of purgatory. For if eternal life comes only by grace, there is no life but bodily life and no immortality until the Resurrection. Bellarmine’s texts for purgatory from the canonical Scripture of the Old Testament are first David’s fasting for Saul and Jonathan, mentioned in (2 Kings, 1. 12.), and again his fasting for Abner’s death in (2 Sam. 3. 35.). David fasted, Bellarmine says, to obtain some benefit for them from God after their deaths, since, after fasting to secure his own child’s recovery, he called for food as soon as he knew the child was dead. If the soul exists apart from the body, and fasting cannot obtain anything for souls already in heaven or hell, it follows that some souls of the dead are neither in heaven nor hell and so must be in a third place: purgatory. Thus by harshly straining the texts he has twisted them into proof of purgatory. Yet it is clear that mourning and fasting for the death of people whose lives brought the mourners no benefit are practiced to honor the dead, while mourning those whose lives benefited them comes from their personal loss. So David honored Saul and Abner by fasting, but consoled himself for his own child’s death by returning to his usual food.

In the other passages he cites from the Old Testament, there is not even an appearance or pretense of proof. He brings in every text containing the words anger, fire, burning, purging, or cleansing, provided some of the Fathers have applied it rhetorically in a sermon to the already accepted doctrine of purgatory. The first verse of Psalme, 37. reads, “O Lord, do not rebuke me in your wrath, nor chastise me in your hot displeasure.” What would this have to do with purgatory if Augustine had not applied wrath to hellfire and displeasure to purgatory’s fire? And what has purgatory to do with Psalme, 66. 12., “We went through fire and water, and you brought us to a moist place,” or with other such texts, which the doctors of those times used to adorn or expand their sermons and commentaries, then dragged by sheer ingenuity into service of their purposes?

As for ceremonies of consecration, most depend on the judgment of church governors rather than on Scripture. Even so, those governors must follow what the action itself calls for. The ceremonies, words, and gestures must be proper and meaningful, or at least appropriate to the action. When Moses consecrated the tabernacle, the altar, and their vessels (Exod. 40.), he anointed them with the oil God had ordered made for that purpose, and they became holy. Nothing was exorcised to drive off apparitions. Moses, Israel's civil sovereign, also consecrated Aaron, the high priest, and his sons. He washed them with water, not exorcised water, put their garments on them, and anointed them with oil. They became holy and able to serve the Lord as priests. This was a simple and proper way to wash and dress them before presenting them to God as his servants. When King Solomon, Israel's civil sovereign, consecrated the temple he had built (2 Kings 8.), he stood before the whole congregation of Israel and blessed them. He thanked God for putting it in his father's heart to build the temple and for giving Solomon the grace to complete it. Then he prayed that God would accept the house, although it could not match God's infinite greatness, and would hear the prayers of his servants who prayed inside it or, when away, toward it. Finally he offered a peace offering, and the house was dedicated. There was no procession: the king stayed where he stood. There was no exorcised water or Asperges Me, and no irrelevant use of words spoken on another occasion. He gave a proper, reasonable speech suited to presenting his newly built house to God. We do not read that St. John exorcised the Jordan's water or Philip the river water in which he baptized the eunuch. Nor do we read that any pastor in the apostles' time put his spit into the nose of someone being baptized and said, “In odorem suavitatis,” meaning “for a sweet scent to the Lord.” No human authority can justify the ceremony of spitting, because it is unclean, or the frivolous use of that Scripture passage.

Several passages may at first seem enough to prove that a soul separated from the body lives forever. The claim applies not only to the souls of the chosen, through special grace and the restoration of the eternal life Adam lost by sin and our Savior restored to the faithful by sacrificing himself. It also applies to rejected people's souls, supposedly as a natural property of human nature, requiring no grace from God beyond what all humans receive. But when I compare those passages with the passage from chapter 14 of Job that I quoted earlier in Chapter 38, I find them much more open to other interpretations than Job's words are.

First are Solomon's words (Ecclesiastes 12.7.): “Then the dust shall return to dust, as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.” Unless another text directly contradicts it, this could mean that only God knows what happens to a person's spirit on death, and humans do not. Solomon expresses this same thought in the same book (Chap. 3. ver. 20,21.): “All go”—humans and beasts—“to the same place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows that the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?” That is, no one but God knows. It is common enough to say “God knows what” and “God knows where” about things we do not understand. Gen. 5.24. says, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” This is explained at Heb. 13.5.: “He was taken away so he would not die; he was not found, because God had taken him away. Before he was taken away, he had testimony that he pleased God.” This supports the immortality of his body as much as that of his soul. It proves that his removal was something special for people who please God, not something they share with the wicked, and that it depended on grace rather than nature. By contrast, how can we read Solomon's words (Eccles. 3.19.) except literally? “What happens to human beings happens to beasts: the same thing happens to both. As one dies, so does the other. They all have one breath (one spirit), so a human has no advantage over a beast, for everything is empty.” Taken literally, this denies the soul's natural immortality. It does not conflict with the eternal life the chosen will enjoy by grace. He also says (chap. 4. ver.3.), “Better off than both is someone not yet born”—better than those now living or those who have lived. If everyone who ever lived had an immortal soul, that would be hard to say: having an immortal soul would then be worse than having no soul. And again (Chapt. 9.5.): “The living know they will die, but the dead know nothing”—that is, by nature and before the body's resurrection.

Another passage that seems to favor a naturally immortal soul is our Savior's statement that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive. But this concerns God's promise and the certainty that they will rise again, not a life they were actually living then. In the same way God told Adam that on the day he ate the forbidden fruit he would certainly die. From that day Adam was under a sentence of death, but the sentence was not carried out until almost a thousand years later. So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were alive by promise when Christ spoke, but will not actually live again until the resurrection. The story of the rich man and Lazarus proves nothing against this if we take it for what it is, a parable.

Other New Testament passages seem directly to ascribe immortality to the wicked. They clearly will all rise for judgment. Many passages also say they will go into “everlasting fire, everlasting torment, everlasting punishment,” and that the worm of conscience never dies. All this is included under “everlasting death,” which people normally explain as everlasting life in torment. Yet nowhere can I find a statement that anyone will live in torment forever. It also seems difficult to say that God, the Father of Mercies, who does whatever he wants in heaven and earth, who controls every human heart and produces both our willing and our doing, and without whose free gift no one even wants to do good or repent of evil, should punish people's sins without end by tortures as extreme as anyone can imagine or worse. We must therefore consider what “everlasting fire” and similar expressions in Scripture mean.

I have already shown that God's kingdom under Christ starts on judgment day. On that day the faithful will rise again with glorious, spiritual bodies and become subjects of his eternal kingdom. They will not marry or be given in marriage, or eat and drink as they did in their natural bodies. Instead, each will live forever as an individual, without relying on successive generations for the species to endure. The rejected will also rise again to receive punishment for their sins. And those among the chosen who are still alive in earthly bodies on that day will have their bodies suddenly changed into spiritual, immortal ones. But no Scripture passage proves that the rejected, who make up Satan's kingdom, will have glorious or spiritual bodies, or be like God's angels, neither eating, drinking, nor having children. Nor does any passage prove that each of them will live forever as an individual, as each faithful person will, and as Adam would have if he had not sinned. Only the passages about eternal torments might seem to prove it, and they can be read another way.

We can therefore infer that, after the resurrection, the chosen will return to Adam's condition before his sin. The rejected will be in the condition Adam and his descendants were in after his sin. The difference is that God promised Adam a redeemer for himself and those descendants who would trust him and repent. He did not promise one to those who die in their sins, as the rejected do.

Given this, passages mentioning eternal fire, eternal torment, or the worm that never dies do not contradict a second and everlasting death in the ordinary, literal sense of death. Fire or torments prepared for the wicked in Gehenna, Tophet, or wherever else may continue forever. There may always be wicked people to suffer them, even though no individual suffers forever. The wicked, left in their condition after Adam's sin, might rise again to live as before, marrying and being given in marriage. They might have heavy, perishable bodies like all humans now have and go on having children after the resurrection, as before. No passage of Scripture says otherwise. St. Paul, discussing the resurrection (1 Cor. 15.), speaks only about rising to eternal life, not rising to punishment. About the former he says the body is “sown in decay and raised without decay; sown in dishonor and raised in honor; sown in weakness and raised in power; sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body.” None of this can be said about bodies raised for punishment. Luke 20. Verses 34,35,36. is a rich passage on this point: “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage. But those counted worthy to reach that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Nor can they die again, because they are equal to the angels and are God's children, being children of the resurrection.” The children of this world, living in the condition Adam left to them, will marry and be given in marriage. That is, they will decay and produce successive generations. Their kind will endure, but individual people will not be immortal. They are not worthy to be among those who gain the next world and fully rise from the dead. They will spend only a short time as temporary residents of that world, solely to receive the punishment their stubborn disobedience deserves. The chosen alone are children of the resurrection and the only heirs to eternal life. They alone can never die again. They, not the rejected, are equal to angels and are God's children. After rising again, the rejected face a second and everlasting death. Between their resurrection and that second and everlasting death lies a period of punishment and torment. As new sinners arrive in succession, this punishment will continue as long as the human kind lasts through reproduction, which is forever.

As I said, the doctrine of purgatory rests on this doctrine that separated souls are immortal by nature. If eternal life comes only through grace, there is no life apart from bodily life and no immortality before the resurrection. Bellarmine's Old Testament passages from canonical Scripture in support of purgatory begin with David's fasting for Saul and Jonathan (2 Kings, 1. 12.), and then for Abner's death (2 Sam. 3. 35.). Bellarmine says David fasted to obtain something from God for them after their deaths. His reason is that David stopped fasting and asked for food as soon as he learned his own child had died, though he had fasted while trying to obtain the child's recovery. Then, assuming souls exist separately from bodies, Bellarmine argues that fasting can obtain nothing for souls already in heaven or hell. Therefore some dead people's souls must be in neither heaven nor hell, but a third place: purgatory. He has had to force those passages very hard to make them prove purgatory. In fact, mourning and fasting for someone whose life had brought mourners no benefit honor the dead person. When the dead person's life had benefited them, those ceremonies express their own loss. So David honored Saul and Abner by fasting. On the death of his own child he comforted himself by eating his usual food.

Bellarmine's other Old Testament passages have not even the appearance of proof. He cites every text containing “anger,” “fire,” “burning,” “purging,” or “cleansing,” whenever one of the Church Fathers has used it rhetorically in a sermon about the already accepted doctrine of purgatory. Take the first verse of Psalm 37: “Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger, or punish me in your fierce displeasure.” What would this have to do with purgatory if Augustine had not taken the anger to mean hellfire and the displeasure to mean purgatory's fire? And what does purgatory have to do with Psalm 66. 12., “We went through fire and water, and you brought us to a moist place”? The teachers of those times used this and similar passages to decorate or lengthen their sermons and commentaries, then dragged them by ingenuity into service as supposed proof.