Hell is other people.
A production of Sartre's Huis Clos |
At least, that’s what French existentialist and Marxist
Jean-Paul Sartre said. The line comes from his 1944 play Huis Clos (“No Exit”), in which three damned souls discover that
their eternal punishment is not fire-and-brimstone tortures such as abound in
Dante’s Inferno, but rather to be
locked in a room with the people who will most get on their nerves, to put it
mildly, for all eternity.
Sartre’s “Hell is other people” line is usually taken as his
commentary on the discomfort caused by living in community with other human
beings. The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony
of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up
the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity,
their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and
require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation
or concession of your own likes and desires—that,
says Sartre, is Hell.
But another man, an English contemporary of Sartre, had a
vastly different vision of Hell. In The
Great Divorce, a novel written in 1945, C. S. Lewis made it shockingly
clear that Hell is not being forced to live with others you hate; rather, real,
genuine, horrible Hell is to be all alone at last with nothing but your sins;
alone without any true communion with others or with God. Condemned souls, from
Lewis’ point of view, are not souls who suffer because they are forced to be around
people they don’t like; they suffer because they are utterly absorbed into
themselves, and are left in the end with no solace from their own sins.
Like Huis Clos,
Lewis’ novel dispenses with the typical depictions of hell as a place of
physical torture; yet unlike Sartre’s play, The
Great Divorce paints hell as a grey, mundane, dull town where people are
constantly restless and dissatisfied, in increasing and agitated personal and
spiritual isolation from one another even if they yet remain in some façade of
a community. To be sure, they retain a sizeable contempt for their fellow
sinners and even for the saints; the arrogant poet considers them all
intellectual inferiors, the narrow-minded cynic thinks them all fools, and the
self-satisfied apostate thinks them all unenlightened. Yet their punishment is
not to be in company with such people, but to have isolated their souls from
real and selfless relationship with an “other,” leaving them alone with their
pride, or their cynicism, or their lust, or their selfishness.
The essential point Lewis is trying to make is that, in the
end, Hell is not a punishment imposed by God upon unwilling, unfortunate souls.
It is a deliberate, individual choice, a choice a soul makes freely. As Lewis’ “guide” through other-worldly
regions explains: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say
to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell,
choose it.” He goes on to clarify that at some point, a condemned soul decided
it would rather keep a damning little sin, even if it cannot be happy with it,
rather than have that sin taken away altogether. When that happens, a soul
becomes practically swallowed up by its self-destroying sin; the soul almost
ceases to be itself, and begins to be merely the stuff of its own sins.
Often, as flawed human beings we can be easily tempted to
think our problem is other people. If
only so-and-so wasn’t such a jerk, this wouldn’t be so frustrating; my life
would get so much better if people just appreciated me. He is just so
unreasonable; she whines all the time. Dealing
with other people can be so trying an experience that we may despondently
declare that someone is “giving us Hell.”
But Lewis’ insight is clear: Hell is not bearing with the
(perhaps grave) faults of other people, but living willingly in our own. In
reality, human community (“other people”) is our greatest opportunity to grow
in charity; it sanctifies us in this life, and is one of the great joys of the
next. Here on earth, living with “other people” is not our hell, but our
Purgatory: it teaches us to learn about, cope with, and grow out of our own faults
in order to function as best we can in a faulty human society. In heaven, at
last, we will be relieved of our deficiencies and our sins will be erased from
our souls, so that the “other people,” the community of saints and angels, will
not be a burden but an everlasting joy—that exchange of mutual love with each
other and with that all-important “other,” God, for all eternity.
While Sartre may have been on to something about the pain of
living in community, he missed the other side of the coin: in a certain sense,
Heaven is other people—because we cannot get there, and we cannot choose to be
there, without being other-centered, without coming to live in the selfless
communion of love with God and man.
Jean-Paul Sartre |
C.S. Lewis |
When I grow up, I want to learn how to write like you do. :-)
ReplyDeleteGreat post, needless to say....
Wow, this is a wonderful and thought-provoking post. I'm new to your blog, (found it through Catholic Young Woman) and I love it! Your writing is wonderful!
ReplyDeleteSarah
sarah.frederes.com
I've always thought Sartre's quote was coming from a lack of humility. Of course, "the others" are flawed but so is everybody, including Sartre himself (whom I suspect was a rather difficult person to deal with). Very interesting post! xx
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