Grammar of Assent

December, 1882
A serious misrepresentation of a passage in this volume, which appeared last year in a Review of great name, calls for some notice here.

Petavius says, that, according to Fathers of high authority, a refrigerium or refrigeria may be conceived as granted to the lost, amid their endless penal suffering; that is, that their punishment, though without end, is not without cessation. I have quoted his words in the footnote on p. 422; and in the text I have ventured on a suggestion of my own, but short of his, to the effect that a refrigerium was conceivable, which was not strictly a cessation of punishment, though it acted as such; I mean, the temporary absence in the lost soul of the consciousness of its continuity or duration.

The story is well known of the monk who, going out into the wood to meditate, was detained there by the song of a bird for three hundred years, which to his consciousness passed as only one hour. Now pain as well as joy, may be an ecstasy, and destroy for the time the sense of succession; even in this life, and when not great, it sometimes has this effect; and, supposing such an insensibility to time to last for three hundred years, for three hundred years pain might be gathered up into a point; and there would be for that interval a refrigerium. And, if for three hundred years, so it might be for three million, or million million, according to the degrees of guilt with which individual souls were severally laden.

It may be objected, that such a view of future punishment explains away its severity, and blunts its moral force as a threat and restraint upon crime. Not so; on this view the fact of suffering and of its eternity remains intact; and of suffering, it may be, "as by fire." Also, the eternity of punishment remains in its negative aspect, viz., that there never will be change of state, annihilation or restoration. Mere eternity, though without suffering, if realized in the soul's consciousness, is formidable enough; it would be insupportable even to the good, except for, and as involved in, the Beatific Vision; it would be a perpetual solitary confinement. It is this which makes the prospect of a future life so dismal to our present agnostics, who have no God to give them "mansions" in the unseen world.

On the other hand, it may be objected, that the longest possible series of refrigeria, to whatever extent, added together, they may run, is as nothing after all compared with an eternity of punishment. But this is to misconceive what I have been advancing. As belonging to an eternity, the refrigeria which I contemplate match in their recurrence, and reach as far as, that eternity, and are themselves in number infinite, as being exceptions in a course which is infinite.

Further, it may be objected that this view of future punishment is at first sight inconsistent with the teaching of St. Thomas, 2. 2, qu. xviii. 3, where he says that, if the lost are condemned to eternal punishment, they must know that it is eternal, because such knowledge is necessarily a part of their punishment.

I understand him to argue thus:—

1. It is de ratione pœnæ that it should voluntati repugnare.

2. But there cannot be this repugnantia, unless there is present to the party punished a consciousness of the fact of that pœna.

3. Therefore pœna implies a consciousness of the fact of the pœna.

4. And, if the pœna is perpetual, so is its consciousness.

Certainly: but I do not predicate anything of the pœna, nor of the consciousness of the pœna, nor of its perpetuity, nor of the consciousness of its perpetuity; I do but speak of the consciousness (perpetuity apart,) of the lapse of time or successiveness of moments, through which that pœna and consciousness of pœna passes. The lost may be conscious of their lost state and of its irreversibility, yet it may be a further question, whether, however conscious that it is irreversible, they are always or ever conscious of the fact of its long course, in memory and in prospect, through periods and æons.

The song of the bird, which the monk heard without taking note of the passage of time, might have been, "And they shall reign for ever and ever;" though of the many thousand times of the bird's repeating the words, there sounded in the monk's ear but one song once sung. And if this may be in the case of holy souls, why not, if it should so please God, in the instance of the unholy?

In what I have been saying, I have considered eternity as infinite time, because this is the received assumption.

And I have been speaking all along under correction, as submitting absolutely all I have said to the judgment of the Church and its head.

Vid. my article in the Contemporary above referred to.

THE END.