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Some notes:



The woman condemned to hell, speaks briefly to her friend, Claire:

For us (in hell), everything is a torment. Everything we come to understand at death, every recollection of life and of what we know, becomes a burning flame.
Are you listening? Here we drink hatred as if it were water. We all hate one another.

More than anything else, we hate God.

Although I hate the devil, I like him because he and his helpers, the angels that fell with him at the beginning of time, strive to cause the loss of the people on earth. In truth, I would like to see you here, where I will remain forever. There are myriad demons. Uncountable numbers of them wander through the world, like a swarm of flies, without their presence even being suspected.

God takes everything much more seriously than any priest does.

Only one thing would have been able to bring me to my senses: a profound and prolonged suffering. But this suffering never came. Do you now understand that “Whom God loves, God chastises”?


Above all, I always scoffed at the fire of Hell.
The fire of which the Bible speaks is not the torment of conscience. Fire means fire. One must understand Our Lord’s declaration in its literal sense: “Depart from Me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire.” Literally!

Being spiritually enchained, we reprobates gaze in terror at our misspent lives, howling and gnashing our teeth, tormented and filled with hatred.
 
Claire, while Hell might be poorly drawn, it can never be exaggerated.

(end of message from hell)



That afternoon in the garden, I encountered a kindly, nearsighted lady from Budapest...
She added kindly: “Let nothing distress you — you know the advice of Saint Teresa — let nothing alarm you. Everything passes. He who possesses God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.”

When it comes to spiritual matters, we only have temporal reality to give us some
inkling of the unseen spiritual reality. In this state, it helps us to open our eyes of
faith and see that which is otherwise invisible, by reading this kind of story, and by
then going back to Scripture and reading it again with the added faculty of a
new sense of vision that we have acquired; as Our Lord says, "Let those with
eyes to see, see."

Quote from: theology101

Thats pretty frightening stuff. Ive always heard it said that the worst part of hell is knowing that you are eternally separated from God's love.

I'm glad you brought that up, Theo.

I've heard this on several occasions, and I've read that it's based in the Summa,
as well. But I've never heard it put into context very well. After reading this story,
which was sent to me from a friend, now I think I understand a bit better how it
fits into God's reality.

Before, I had thought, well, the sense of loss must be really bad if it's the worst
part about hell. But what to compare it to, was not very clear to me. "The worst
part" infers there is another part, but what is that?

There is a dream of St. John Bosco where he saw some of his students falling into
hell, by sliding down a road that got steeper and steeper, until they slid without
any ability to slow down or stop. When they fell through the barrier that separates
hell from what is outside of hell, the physical posture that they had at that
moment was fixed, such that they were unable to move any part of their body.
Don Bosco asked why that is, and he received the answer that hell is eternal, and
there can be no change in one's being for eternity. There is no way out, and there
is no way to reduce the sufferings that one endures, nor is there any way to move
one's body into a position less miserable, for the body cannot move at all. The
devils will attack it and it will have no recourse to aid. Don Bosco was able to put
his hand on the wall that is the outermost part of hell, and it burned his hand,
because the wall was so hot. He was given to understand that this wall is the one
that is the least hot, and that there are more walls inside, each one of which is
hotter than the one outside of it. Those who fall into the deepest places in hell are
stuck forever in the most intense fire.

So, if the sense of loss is worse than the fire itself, this helps us to know how
much that loss is. We have a sense of loss when we lose a game, or when we
make a bet and see our money disappear, or when we work really hard for
some material prize and end up losing it for whatever reason, or when someone
steals something of value from us, when a loved one dies, or for a captain, who
is forced to watch his ship founder and he would prefer to be on board himself, but
he cannot. Or when our nation loses a war: that's a big sense of loss. But to have
a sense of loss that is worse than the fire of hell -- a fire that does not consume, a
fire that does not diminish, but can only get worse, a fire from which we would
be unable to protect ourselves by moving our body to a shielded place because
we cannot move our body -- such a sense of loss is rather beyond our
comprehension. We have no such similar thing in this world.

When it comes to spiritual matters, we only have temporal reality to give us some
inkling of the unseen spiritual reality. In this state, it helps us to open our eyes of
faith and see that which is otherwise invisible, by reading this kind of story, and by
then going back to Scripture and reading it again with the added faculty of a
new sense of vision that we have acquired; as Our Lord says, "Let those with
eyes to see, see."


***
Question: How do Modernists fight against this "faculty" of spiritual vision?

...

Answer: To fight against this faculty of spiritual vision, the Modernists deny its
effect by denying its very existence; for they sneer and scoff at the word,
"faculty," and claim that there is no such thing, and they do this at the very
foundation of thought itself, in their pompous and erroneous philosophy.
***

Note: Any Sede who wants to chime in and accuse me of being remiss for not
including a reference so they can check to see if I got words wrong, can know that
you don't need any authority or source for this. What you need to do is to study
philosophy under the guidance of a reliable teacher, one that does not begin with
modern philosophers, but begins rather with love of the perennial wisdom of the
Traditional Catholic Faith of our Fathers.