Jacques Maritain's speculations about the 'last things'

 Jacques Maritain's speculations about the 'last things'

Suppose you are a Christian that is convinced that the fate of the 'damned' is irreversible and are forever excluded from the Kingdom of God. Is endless conscious torment the only alterative? If not, is there something different from annihilation? Interestingly enough, the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain thought that, perhaps, after a period of torments the damned might be allowed by a miracle to experience natural happiness (a sort of 'final limbo') forever excluded from the Kingdom of God. This is still an 'unending punishment' because the banishment from the supernatural happiness of the Kingdom is, indeed, unending. But torments are not. Here an excerpt (source: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/maritain-beginning-with-a-reverie.pdf):

""'Allis well,' cry the just. But everything could be better. It is well that God be patient to the end, but it is His love which cries out in our mouths, He has given us His love, not His patience. How could our love, this love which He has given us, be content to see God hated endlessly, and endlessly blasphemed by beings who have issued from His hands, to see crime endlessly added to crime? And among these damned there are some whom we have loved, there are some whom we still love, as much as St. Paul loved his race, for which he wished to be anathema. No, we shall not cease, we shall continue to pray and to cry out through the Blood of the Savior, ah! without having, we know it very well, the slightest right to have our request granted, yet giving vent freely, gratuitously, what else can we do, to the folly of our love."

...

And why could their prayer not be granted? Why could not the answer to the excess of their love be the excess of a miracle-a miracle of goodness in justice itself? God can make a man out of a stone; He can change bread into the Body of Jesus Christ. It is no more difficult by a miracle to change the will of a man or an angel, to raise up and rectify in its inmost being a will that is dead and confirmed in evil. It is by virtue of the order of nature that the will of the damned is fixed in evil in an absolute and immutable manner. A miracle, and a miracle alone, can change this. I mean leaving them in Hades, and simply transferring them from the abyss to the summits of an eternal Hell. Precisely because it is a miracle, it leaves intact, while transcending it, the order of things established according to the eternal laws of natures and the eternal justice of God. To anyone who agrees to go beyond an imagery which has nothing theologically necessary about it, and to understand all the analogical diversities that reality acknowledges, in the very bosom of Hell and its punishments, it seems that the possibility of such a miracle is conceivable in accord with the revealed formulas and sacred writ concerning the state of the damned. Pierced to its very center, the will, confirmed till then in evil, is turned about miraculously, as toward the true end of all nature, toward God the author of nature, toward the God it loved and detested at one and the same time. Now it loves Him above all else, with that same natural love which, at the time of the resurrection of the bodies, wells up naturally in the souls of the children who died without baptism and which, in the case we are speaking of, the will now receives through a pure miracle. This "pardoned" damned soul (still damned but pardoned) leaves the lower regions, leaves the fire, and is transported to Limbo. There it will enjoy, although it remains wounded, that natural felicity mentioned above, and which is still a kind of Hell compared to glory. Through pure mercy, it is introduced to that condition whose first fruits were brought to our attention by the souls of the little children who died without baptism-but under a different form in their case because they are innocent. No one leaves Hell; no one passes out of its gates; we are concerned here with no more than a transfer within the infernal regions, a passage from the lower places to the higher places of Hades, from the abyss to Limbo. And I do not say that this transfer must take place-who can know this? It depends on the pure divine will. I ask simply: Is it not possible that it take place-if God wills it (and who would dare to impose limits on Him)? And are we not permitted to hope for this? Supposing that the outcome be such, the principal punishment of Hell remains in any case eternal, that pain of loss, which these adults, unlike the children, know they have incurred through their personal fault. And the fire of Hell itself remains eternal, secundum substantiam; it continues to burn without end in all the infernal regions distinct from Limbo. But those who were plunged into that fire have been drawn out-miraculously.  " (Beginning with a reverie, pp. 20-2)