Annotatio CCXXIX

”Their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be extinguished,” etc. — Isaiah 66:24

Jerome, at the end of book 18 on Isaiah, brought hither two damnable expositions of other authors, [but] without their name:¹ of these, the one teaches that the fire of hell is metaphorical, placed in the affliction of the conscience and memory alone; the other, that the fire of hell and the burnings of the damned are at some time at last to be ended. Since he relates these explanations not only without any confutation or accusation of the error, but even confirms [them] by bringing forward very many testimonies of the divine Scripture, Rufinus, the detractor of Jerome, took occasion of calumniating him, as a favorer of both dogmas.

The words of the former exposition are these: “‘The worm which shall not die, and the fire which shall not be extinguished,’ is taken by very many [to be] the conscience of sinners, which torments those set in punishments, because by their own vice and sin they were deprived of so great a good — according to that which is said, ‘I was turned in misery, while the thorn is fixed in me,’² and in Proverbs, ‘The moth of the bones [is] an understanding heart,’³ and again, under the obelus, ‘As the moth [consumes] a garment, and the worm the wood, so grief tortures the heart of a man.’”

The words of the latter interpretation are thus: “But those who wish the punishments at some time to be ended — and, though after long times, yet the torments to have a term⁴ — use these testimonies: (a) ‘When the fulness of the gentiles shall have entered in, then all Israel shall be saved’;⁵ and again, (b) ‘God hath concluded all under sin, that he may have mercy on all’;⁶ and in another place the holy [man] speaks, (c) ‘I will bear the wrath of the Lord, because I have sinned against him, until he judge my cause, and take away my judgment, and bring me forth into the light’;⁷ and again, (d) ‘I will bless thee, O Lord, for thou wast angry with me; thou hast turned away thy face from me, and hast had mercy on me.’⁸ The Lord also speaks to the sinner: ‘When the anger of my fury shall be [past], I will heal again.’ And this is that which is said in another place, (f) ‘How great is the multitude of thy goodness, O Lord, which thou hast hidden for them that fear thee.’⁹ All which [testimonies] they repeat, desiring to affirm that after the torments there will be refreshments — which now must be hidden from those to whom fear is useful, that, while they dread the punishments, they may cease to sin: which [matter] we ought to leave to the knowledge of God alone, whose not only mercy, but also torments, are [weighed] in a balance; and he knows whom, how, or how long he ought to judge. And let us only say what befits human frailty: ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in thy fury, neither correct me in thy wrath.’¹⁰ And, as of the Devil — [and] as of all deniers and impious [ones], who have said in their heart, ‘There is no God’¹¹ — we believe [there are] eternal torments: so of sinners and impious [ones], and yet Christians, whose works are to be tried and purged in the fire, let us think [that there will be] a moderated sentence of the judge, and [one] mingled with clemency.” Both of these explanations are so faithfully and word-for-word expressed in the second volume of Origen’s works, in the ninth homily on divers passages of Matthew, that I could easily have been persuaded that Jerome translated both from thence — had I not first, by most certain conjectures noted in the preceding book, discovered that that homily is not Origen’s. Nevertheless, the dogmas of both expositions are Origenic — proposed by Jerome indeed under another’s person, but not confirmed by [his] own assertion. For the impiety of the second interpretation he everywhere detests, as we show below, Annotation 290 of the sixth book; and the error of the former he in many places altogether condemns — especially in the epistle to Avitus, where, enumerating Origen’s heresies, he reckons this one too among the others, in these words: “Origen, in book 2 of the Περὶ Ἀρχῶν, places the fire of gehenna, and the torments which holy Scripture threatens to sinners, not in punishments, but in the conscience of sinners — when, by the virtue and power of God, all memory of [our] offenses is set before our eyes, and, as it were, from certain seeds left behind in the soul, the whole harvest of vices springs up; and whatsoever we had done in life, whether base or impious, the picture of all these things is portrayed in our sight; and the mind, beholding [its] past pleasures, is punished with the burning of conscience, and pierced through with the goads of penitence.” And in the book on the epistle to the Ephesians, book 3, expounding that [saying] from chapter 5, “Let no man deceive you with vain words,”¹² etc., he says: “Because there are very many who say that there are no future punishments for sins, nor torments to be applied from without, but that the very sin and the conscience of the offense is [itself] the punishment — while the worm in the heart dies not, and a fire is kindled in the mind after the likeness of a fever, which does not torment the sick [man] from without, but, seizing the very bodies, punishes [them] without the application of torments from without: these persuasions, therefore, and fraudulent snares, Paul called ‘vain and empty words,’ which seem to have a certain flower of speech, and to flatter sinners — but, while they give [false] confidence, rather carry them to eternal punishments.” From these [passages] it is clear how piously and catholically Jerome held that the fire of hell is corporeal,¹³ and that those who are set in it are tormented within and without.

But to those very testimonies of the divine Scripture, which Jerome — because he had elsewhere most fully explained [them] — here left unexplained, it must be said that by these the corporeal and external punishments of the damned are not taken away, but [that] mention is made of the interior and spiritual punishment: the memory and conscience of the damned being tortured with a perpetual goad. For the first and greatest punishment of the reprobate is the scourge of the avenging conscience;¹⁴ next to this is the exterior punishment — namely, fire, sulphur, the spirit of tempests, and the other corporeal torments which the divine Letters everywhere threaten to the impious and impenitent. Consult, on those things which pertain to the reality of the fire of hell, the fortieth Annotation of this book; but on those things which regard the eternity of the same fire, read Jerome’s opinion [in] Annotation 290 of book 6.