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Here are some tips suggested by Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Spe salvi.

Judgement as a setting for learning and practising hope

At the conclusion of the central section of the Church’s great Credo – the part that recounts the mystery of Christ, from his eternal birth of the Father and his temporal birth of the Virgin Mary, through his Cross and Resurrection to the second coming – we find the phrase: “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead”. From the earliest times the prospect of the Judgement has influenced Christians in their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present life, ­as a summons to their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God’s justice. Faith in Christ has never looked merely backwards or merely upwards, but always also forwards to the hour of justice that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed. This looking ahead has given Christianity its importance for the present moment.

In the arrangement of Christian sacred buildings, which were intended to make visible the historicand cosmic breadth of faith in Christ, it became customary to depict the Lord returning as a king – the sym­bol of hope – at the east end; while the west wall normally portrayed the Last Judgement as a symbol of our responsibility for our lives – a scene which followed and accompanied the faithful as they went out to resume their daily routine. As the iconogra­phy of the Last Judgement developed, however, more and more prominence were given to its ominous and fright­ening aspects, which obviously held more fascination for artists than splendour of hope, often all too well the concealed beneath the horrors. 

World without hope 

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer’s own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress.

The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is – in its origins and aims – a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, in­ nocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God must be contested. 

Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. 

A world which must create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power – whatever be­ guiling ideological mask it adopts – will cease to dominate the world. Therefore the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and the­ ism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this­ worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. 

In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of im­ages, he speaks of a “longing for the totally Other” that remains inacces­sible – a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. 

On the other hand, he also con­stantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice – true justice – would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone”. This, would mean, how­ ever – to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols – that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve “the resurrec­tion of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit”. 

God’s image is the Innocent Sufferer 

Christians likewise can and must con­stantly learn from the strict rejection of images that is contained in God’s first commandment (cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that however great the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature, the dissimilarity between them is always greater. In any case, for the believer the rejection of im­ages cannot be carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would like, by saying “no” to both theses – theism and atheism. 

God has given himself an “im­age”: in Christ who was made man. In him who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an extreme. God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer who shares man’s God­ – forsaken condi­tion by taking it upon himself. This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive, yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. 

There is justice. There is an “un­ doing” of past suffering, a repara­tion that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope – the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life. 

Intermediate state 

Here I would like to quote a pas­ sage from Plato which expresses a premonition of just judgement that in many respects remains true and salutary for Christians too. Albeit us­ing mythological images, he express­ es the truth with an unambiguous clarity, saying that in the end souls will stand naked before the judge. It no longer matters what they once were in history, but only what they are in truth: “Often, when it is the king or some other monarch or po­tentate that he (the judge) has to deal with, he finds that there is no sound­ ness in the soul whatever; he finds it scourged and scarred by the various acts of perjury and wrong­doing …; it is twisted and warped by lies and vanity, and nothing is straight be­ cause truth has had no part in its development. Power, luxury, pride, and debauchery have left it so full of disproportion and ugliness that when he has inspected it (he) sends it straight to prison, where on its ar­rival it will undergo the appropriate punishment… Sometimes, though, the eye of the judge lights on a dif­ferent soul which has lived in purity and truth… then he is struck with admiration and sends him to the isles of the blessed”.

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (cf. Lk 16:19­31), Jesus admonishes us through the image of a soul destroyed by arrogance and opulence, who has created an im­passable chasm between himself and the poor man; the chasm of being trapped within material pleasures; the chasm of forgetting the other, of incapacity to love, which then becomes a burning and unquench­ able thirst.

We must note that in this parable Jesus is not referring to the final des­ tiny after the Last Judgement, but is taking up a notion found, inter alia, in early Judaism, namely that of an intermediate state between death and resurrection, a state in which the final sentence is yet to be pronounced. This early Jewish idea of an in­termediate state includes the view that these souls are not simply in a sort of temporary custody but, as the parable of the rich man illustrates, are already being punished or are experiencing a provisional form of bliss. There is also the idea that this state can involve purification and healing which mature the soul for communion with God. The early Church took up these concepts, and in the Western Church they gradually developed into the doctrine of pur­gatory. We do not need to examine here the complex historical paths of this development; it is enough to ask what it means.

People’s choices

With death, our life choice becomes definitive – our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which during an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for ha­tred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrify­ing thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. 

In such people all would be be­yond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word hell. On the other hand, there can be peo­ple who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours – people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are. 

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people – we may suppose – there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate in­terior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil – much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. 

What happens to such individ­uals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might oc­cur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God’s judge­ment according to each person’s par­ticular circumstances. He does these using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptual­ize these images – simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. 

Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a com­mon foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death. Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw – each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor 3:12­15). 

In this text, it is in any case evi­dent that our salvation can take dif­ferent forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage feast.

Blessed pain 

Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judge­ment. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly our­ selves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. 

Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an un­ deniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, ena­bling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter­relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. 

Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ’s Passion. At the moment of judgement, we experience, and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we can­ not calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time­ reckoning – it is the heart’s time, it is of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because
it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together – judgement and grace – that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). 

Nevertheless, grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “ad­vacate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1).

How can we help the departed?

A further point must be mentioned here, because it is important for the practice of Christian hope. Early Jewish thought includes the idea that one can help the deceased in their in­termediate state through prayer (see for example, 2 Macc 12:38-­45; first century BC). The equivalent practice was readily adopted by Christians and is common to the Eastern and Western Church. The East does not recognize the purifying and expiatory suffering of souls in the afterlife, but it does acknowledge various levels of beatitude and of suffering in the intermediate state. 

The souls of the departed can, however, receive “solace and refresh­ment” through the Eucharist, prayer and almsgiving. The belief that loves can reach into the afterlife, that recip­rocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for another continues beyond the limits of both death – this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity through­ out the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a ges­ture of gratitude or even a request for pardon? Now a further question arises: if “purgatory” is simply puri­fication through fire in the encounter with the Lord, Judge and Saviour, how can a third person intervene, all work out our salvation even if he or she is particularly close to the other?

When we ask such a question, we should recall that no man is an island, entire of itself. Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely my life spills over into that of oth­ers: for better and for worse. So, my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death.

In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other my prayer for him – can play a small part in his purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God’s time: in the communion of souls’ simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor it is never in vain. In this way we further clarify an important element of the Christian concept of hope for me too. As Christians, we should never limit ourselves to asking: how can I save myself? We should also ask: what can I di in order that others may be saved and that for them, too the star of hope may rise? Then I will have done my utmost for my own personal salvation as well.

Pope Benedict XVI 

Spe Salvi (41-48) |