Salvation as spectator sports, or some readings in St Thomas

In a New Yorker article titled ‘The Bad Place’ —on the surface a review, or perhaps a gloss, upon The Penguin Book of Hell (ed. Scott G. Bruce)—one encounters the following passage:

St Thomas Aquinas argued the opposite, half a century before Dante got to work. In the ‘Summa Theologica’, his grand synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian teaching, he defended the doctrine of Hell and insisted that we should think of it as a benefit, not a bug. Not only does Hell exist, Aquinas reasoned, but those blessed souls who make it to Heaven must be able, by some miracle of cosmic surveillance—the worst and longest season of ‘Big Brother’—to see and delight in the fate of Hell’s inhabitants. Because God’s punishments are unimpeachably correct, the lower regions must serve as part of the heavenly vista—the top-floor view of all that’s right and just. ‘In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render greater thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned’, Aquinas writes.

I noted it chiefly because the whole presentation sits oddly with what (to my shame) I had supposed I knew of Aquinas’s temper and method – though I know his work only in passing – and because it trades, at least in its rhetorical colouring, on a familiar trope: divine judgement as a species of cruelty, the God of justice recast as an angry and unrelenting magistrate. One does not, of course, go to the New Yorker for theology; still, it seemed worth taking a moment to discriminate between what the article asserts and what St Thomas actually wrote.

I was only half-surprised to discover that the sentence is indeed to be found in the Thomistic corpus. The scholastics, after all, can make claims which, taken out of context and without the patient habit of qualification, sound at best eccentric and at worst cruel. Yet, for the sake of exactitude, one must note that the locus is not, as the author contends, the Summa Theologiæ. The words cited – ‘Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned’ – occur in the Supplement to the Summa Theologiæ.¹ But the Supplement is not part of the unfinished Summa as Aquinas left it at his death. It was compiled afterwards, probably by Fra Rainaldo da Piperno, chiefly from Aquinas’s commentary on Book IV of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. This does not render the position ‘un-Thomistic’; it does, however, require more modesty than the journalistic line, ‘In the “Summa Theologica”, Aquinas writes’, as though the remark stood at the centre of his own final composition.

Within q. 94 itself, the article’s ‘delight in the fate of Hell’s inhabitants’ is suspect if it suggests relish in suffering as such, as the surrounding rhetoric (‘benefit, not a bug’, ‘cosmic surveillance’, ‘Big Brother’) can encourage one to imagine. But St Thomas is not proposing a cruel pastime in Heaven, as though blessedness required the spectacle of another’s pain; rather, he is reasoning – within a medieval psychology of the passions – that heavenly beatitude excludes sorrow, and that the saints’ joy is a joy in the rectitude of God’s judgement and in the magnitude of mercy shown to them. He explicitly distinguishes the saint’s joy from hatred or schadenfreude. In the same question he states, with precision, that ‘to rejoice in another’s evil as such belongs to hatred’, and therefore cannot characterise the blessed; the rejoicing, if the term be used, is ‘by reason of something annexed’, namely the manifestation of divine justice and the saints’ clearer apprehension of what mercy has delivered them from.

It is also worth observing that ‘see’ in this tradition commonly signifies not voyeuristic inspection, but a mode of knowledge consonant with the order of judgement. St Augustine, commenting on Isaiah’s ‘they shall go out and see the punishment of the wicked’,² denies any crude picture of the blessed travelling to places of torment; rather, ‘they shall go out by knowledge’.³ Aquinas’s ‘perfectly’ likewise points to the completeness of the blessed intellect under God, not to a kind of celestial ‘surveillance’ in the modern carceral sense.

Aquinas’s argument, whatever one makes of it, is not an exhortation to sadism, but a claim about beatitude’s impassibility and the manifestation of divine justice: the blessed do not rejoice in evil as evil, but in the goodness of God made manifest, and in the mercy that has delivered them from what they deserved.