1

Professor Tammy Frailly

HUM 220 2W1 Human Values and Meaning
Josh Landon
March 12, 2014

RESEARCH PROJECT LITERATURE REVIEW

God is good. Hell is bad. God makes people go to Hell. What is up with that? If God is
so good, as Christianity claims, then how could He send people to Hell, as Christianity also
claims? How could someone sin so terribly as to warrant eternal, unending punishment?
Certainly a loving God would not send people to Hell simply because they failed to become
Christians. Could we not say that the idea of Hell is incompatible with the existence of a
perfectly good, all-loving God?
Almost all of Christianity throughout history has not only believed in the co-existence of
Hell and God, but they have thought that such belief is rational and coherent as well. This
project attempts to understand how this might be so. Is there a contradiction between the two
doctrines? The question of whether God or Hell actually exist is well outside the boundaries of
this project. Likewise, questions related to which conceptions of God and Hell are most accurate
cannot be discussed at length except insofar as it helps construct a coherent Christian theology of
Hell and God.
This review will be divided in to two sections. The first discusses the relevant way of
thinking about God as exemplified in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Eleonore Stump, Peter
Kreeft, and T. J. Higgins are all contemporary Catholic philosophers who follow, to some extent
or another, the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Their collective thought, as represented in Aquinas,
will be discussed together. This will be done for a number of reasons. It is impossible to
understand the distinctives of each of their philosophies until a fair amount of introductory
philosophical education has been done. For the most part, the differences are irrelevant to the
2

purposes of this project anyway. So, in the interest of keeping this review accessible to non-
philosophers and because it seems pointless to repeat the same ideas over and over again, the
contributions of these four sources will be discussed as one, typified in Aquinas. The distinctive
nature of these sources has already been discussed in the annotated bibliography.
In the second section, the discussion moves to how people in a universe ruled by such a
God might end up in Hell. Although a popular writer, C.S. Lewis best explains the traditional
view on this in a way that most non-philosophers can easily understand. It is generally a view
that finds agreement among the Thomistic philosophers mentioned above, the Catechism of the
Catholic Church, and many contemporary Evangelicals. If one wishes to examine the distinctive
credentials and potential contribution of each individual source, the annotated bibliography may
be consulted.
What we will find is that God is understood as being good in a very particular sort of
way. We will also see that the nature of God and of man weighs heavily on how one understands
Hell. Although it may not be obvious to some readers how each of the concepts in this review
are important for answering the problem of Hell, the connections and relevance of it all should
become clear in the conclusions paper. In the end, it should all come together to construct a
coherent perspective on the coexistence of an all-loving God and a Hell full of His creatures.
Aquinas on God
A little less than a thousand years ago, one of the most brilliant, insightful, and logically
structured minds set out to compose what still stands as one of the greatest philosophical and
theological works penned since at least the fourth century AD. Thomas of Aquino, the Catholic
scholar and doctor of the church now known as Thomas Aquinas, systematized Christian thought
in this Summa Theologia (affectionately called "the summa" by his many followers). Among the
3

many intellectual achievements represented in the summa is a distinctly Aristotelian conception
of the Christian God. In other words, one of the many things Aquinas is known for is his
brilliant articulation and defense of a way of thinking about God that uses the categories and
thought of the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle. This perspective on what sort of being God
is, will tremendously help this project.
It is necessary to grasp two closely related things about God in order to see the weight
that this bears on the project. First, one must see what Aquinas means when he says that God is
good. The idea that God is good may seem simple enough at first, but the idea of goodness has
actually been a point of great contention throughout the history of philosophy, as Higgins shows
(346-54). In Aquinas, goodness is closely related to existence (Stump, 184). One can almost say
that things are good insofar as they exist. Evil is a corruption of something good. Evil cannot
exist on its own, but must reside in something that was originally good. If something has no evil,
it is perfectly good and exists to the fullest extent permitted by its nature.
Now consider God. God exists infinitely (Aquinas, 30-33). His existence is literally
unlimited. The essence of each created thing limits its existence to the kind of thing it is. Trees
are quite different from humans because their essence actualizes different qualities in them than
those seen in humans. But God has no limiting essence. He is raw existence itself. As strange
as it may sound to the non-philosopher, this infinite existence is a great deal of what is meant
when Aquinas says that God is good.
The second thing we need to see about God is that He is the final end of all else that
exists. Peter Kreeft does an excellent job explaining this in his commentary on the summa. To
say that something is an end, in this context, is not to say that it stops existing, as in "this is the
end of the rope." Rather, the end is the goal or purpose of something, as in "an end to a means."
4

A thing's end answers the "why" question. It is the point of something; what gives it its meaning
and determines what sort of thing it is meant to be. Kreeft explains that "our last end is the
determinate direction and orientation of all of our life, at every moment, not just the last
moment" (349). It is what a thing is for. To whatever extent a thing successfully attains to its
end, it is a good thing. To the extent that it fails to attain its end, it is metaphysically (and
perhaps morally) bad.
What Aquinas is saying is that God is the final end of the whole universe, including each
individual creature in the universe. People do things and events happen for lots of different
reasons. But the point of it all is God. All the little ends (why she chose this, why that happened
there) terminate (or culminate?) in one, overarching, final end. The whole universe is about
God. It is for God. The creatures in the universe exist for God. The point of human life is God.
God made humans for Himself. He created them to know, to love, and to enjoy Him forever.
The meaning of life, the ultimate goal of life, the reason there is life at all is all found in God, the
ultimate cause and ultimate end of the whole universe.
There is something we must be clear on. For Aquinas, a thing's end is what completes or
perfects it. As already noted, a thing is good to the extent that it meets its end. If the end of a
knife is to cut, then a dull knife is a bad knife, for it fails to do what it was made to do. It may be
good at other things, such as making a loud noise when struck against a rock, but this does not
make it a good knife, because that is not what knives are for.
The end of man is what Aquinas calls the beatific vision. Basically, it is being united
with God, seeing Him, loving Him, and knowing Him intimately. A person who fails to attain
this union with God has missed the whole point of their life. One cannot be perfected,
completed, or made whole apart from this union with God. Just as a knife cannot be good unless
5

it is able to cut things, so a human cannot be perfectly fulfilled and happy unless they have God
in this way. Anything that detracts, obstructs, restricts, or otherwise inhibits one from attaining
this glorious end is bad. For the followers of Aquinas (including Stump, Kreeft, and Higgins),
the failure to have and know God in this way is Hell.
Why People Go to Hell
Much of what follows is discussed in a rather technical manner by Stump, who got most
of it from Aquinas. As such, Higgins and Kreeft would probably readily agree with most of it.
Hodge gives the classic Princeton perspective on Hell, whereas Luis Berkhof defends the Dutch
Reformed view. Although these theologians have made enormous contributions to Christian
theology, their work may not be as helpful in solving the problem of Hell. Contemporary
Evangelical theologian Norman Giesler provides help to the project primarily by restating,
organizing, and directing one to the main points and major views on the issue. However,
Christian thinker C. S. Lewis will be very helpful in solving the problem of Hell.
Lewis made it very clear that he was not an actual theologian in the scholarly sense.
However, he did understand orthodox Christian doctrine very well. Anyone who has read him
knows he was an exceptionally skilled writer. Because of this, his ability to communicate
Christian beliefs and perspectives in a way that is widely accessible to twentieth century English
readers is unmatched. In his book, The Problem of Pain, he addresses the general problem of
suffering. In the course of dealing with this problem, he ends up explaining a very interesting
perspective on how Hell works. It is not at all uncommon for contemporary evangelical
theologians to reference his work when dealing with things such as the problem of Hell.
Let us begin. In order to make sense of people going to Hell, something must be
understood about how people work. To whatever extent a person is good, she enjoys good
6

things. If someone is perfectly good, she will always choose the good, and she will have fun
doing it. She will actually like being good. But if someone is bad, he will enjoy doing bad
things. He may know that what he does is bad, but he will prefer the corruption to the real thing,
because somewhere inside, he actually sees the bad as better and more "good" to him than what
is actually good. So his intellect and will are broken. A man in such a condition cannot enjoy
the good, because it will feel bad to him. The bad is what feels good to him, because he is bad.
The good grinds against his habits, his perceptions, and his will, so he hates it. He wants the bad,
even if it is actually bad for him (which it undoubtedly is). If good were forced on him, it may
feel rather uncomfortable for him. However, for the person that is good, an experience of
something that is truly good will truly feel good to her, for she not only acknowledges that it is
good, but it actually feels good to her. She wants the good, she likes it, and the more of it she
gets, the better.
We have already said that God is infinitely good. We might say just as accurately that He
is infinite goodness. Remember that the perfectly good person loves to experience goodness, for
she loves the good. Encountering goodness feels very good for her. You might say that she is
happy, joyful, and fulfilled as she experiences true goodness. Now, she enjoys quite a lot of
good things. Perhaps she enjoys good food, beautiful music, and friendship with other good
people. But all of these can only be experienced in this life in limited, finite amounts. The
goods of food, music, and other people cannot give her an eternal joy, for she will always wake
up in the morning needing more of them. If left alone for a few days she will become lonely. If
left without food for a few hours, she will become hungry again. Her chief end is not found in
these things. Her chief and final end is in union with God. But God is infinite goodness. So the
whole point of her existence is to have infinite goodness in God (and where else could it be
7

found?). And, so long as she is perfectly good when she meets Him, her encounter and union
with Him will result in nothing less than infinite, everlasting, and eternal joy, happiness, and life.
However, what of the bad person? Indeed, what of anyone who is less than perfectly
good? Can anyone less than a perfectly good person perfectly enjoy infinite goodness? It seems
clear that one may derive a great deal of happiness from experiences of good even if one is still
partly bad. However, one cannot unite to and enjoy an all-consuming, life-giving infinite
goodness unless one is completely pure. So it seems that the bad person could not be bound
eternally to the infinitely good God unless he can somehow be made perfectly good.
Here is the most interesting thing so far. It is not just that the bad person cannot be united
to the infinite goodness of God, but he does not want to be. Do not misunderstand; knowing and
loving God is still what is best for the bad person. Only in God can he be made truly happy and
fulfilled. The last end of this bad person is still union with God. But he does not want it because
the infinite goodness of God, though eternal bliss for the good person, would be a terribly
unpleasant thing for him to experience. Amazingly, he would prefer the corrupted (bad) finite
goods to the actual infinite goodness of God because bad feels better to him. So long as he
remains bad, any encounter with infinite goodness will be the most painful thing he could
possibly experience, if it didn't destroy him.
For Lewis (and all orthodox Christians), all people are bad. They are all heading to Hell,
for the only alternative is union with infinite goodness (Heaven) which is not only impossible,
but quite unpleasant, so long as we remain in our wretched condition. To avoid Hell, we must
somehow be made completely good so that we want and love God perfectly. Christians say that
this is precisely what God does to those who are willing through the death and resurrection of the
God-man, Jesus of Nazareth.
8

Conclusion
The literature reveals a very specific conception of God as an infinitely good being.
When considered with the way in which humans are made for God, but seem to enjoy bad things,
this could be the key to solving the problem of Hell. One may already be able to see how all of
this could be assorted in a way that makes the coexistence of a good God and Hell quite
plausible. Perhaps the place that must be struck at for the Christian view to crumble has also
been revealed. In the conclusions paper, these possibilities will be explored.
















9

Appendix - Defining the Terms
It may be helpful for many readers if a few terms are introduced. These terms may be
found throughout the project, including in this review. They may be familiar to many readers,
but some of them are used differently here than the way they are used in more popular language.
First, one might as well start off with an understanding of the terms scholarly and popular. A
scholarly book or article is written by a professional in that field. It is reviewed by other
professionals in that field who have also done work on that particular subject. Popular work is
pretty much everything else.
Philosophy is that academic field that deals with secondary (meta) questions. Of special
interest are questions about how things exist, how they can be moral, and how they can be
known. Ontology is the study of existence. If something is metaphysical, it deals with the
fundamental nature of reality and what it means to be real. Christian theology deals with
Christian doctrine and beliefs. Although most think of it on a popular subjectivist level, it also
constitutes its own field of academic and scholarly work, much like philosophy.














10

WORKS CITED

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica, Volume I, Ia QQ. 1-119, Volume II, Ia IIae QQ. 1-
114, Volume V, IIIa QQ. 74-99. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican
Province. Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1920. Print.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pontificated by Pope John Paul II. New York, NY: An Image
Book Doubleday. 1994. Print.

Berkhof, L. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids, MA: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1939.
Print.

Geisler, Norman. Church and Last Things, Volume 4 in Systematic Theology. Minneopolis:
Bethany House. 2005. Print.

Higgins, T. J. "Good" in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition, volume 6, 346-354. New
York, NY: Thomason Gale, 2003. Print.

Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology, Volume 3. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons.
1878. Print

Kreeft, Peter. Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas
Aquinas' Summa Theologica Edited and Explained for Beginners. San Francisco, CA:
Ignatius Press. 1990. Print.

Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1962. Print.

Stump, Eleonore. "Dante's Hell, Aquinas's Moral Theory, and the Love of God" in the Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, Volume 16, No. 2. June, 1986. 181-198.