Eternally yours, St. Augustine
How one man dramatically shaped how we think about eternal punishment
The view of hell as eternal torment is ubiquitous in Christianity primarily due to Augustine (354–430CE) and the Latin Bible translation he used. However, eternal punishment for humans is NOT Biblical in the original Greek, which is why so many early church theologians from Clement of Alexandria to Origen to Gregory of Nyssa, were universalist, believing ALL will eventually be reconciled to God, even if they reject him during their life.
In Matthew 25:46 we see Jesus saying:
And these [who mistreat the “least of these”] will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Aionios and Aidios
The word for eternal AND everlasting here is aiōnios. Which is only one of two words in Greek translated to eternal or everlasting. The other is aïdios.
The difference, according to Ilaria Ramelli, is that aiōnios is QUALITATIVE of the life after death, as in “other-worldly” and aïdios is QUANTITATIVE, as in actually “without beginning or end”. The Bible NEVER uses aïdios to refer to punishment of humans. So why do we have “eternal” in our translation and believe Hell is eternal? In large part it’s because in the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, the two words are blended into one: aeternus.
Punishment or correction?
The second word to note is punishment. In Greek this word is kolasis, which according to the early church, was corrective punishment, not retributive. If the author wanted to portray retributive punishment, he would have used timoria. Clement of Alexandria says it like this:
God does not punish [timoria] — because punishment is a retribution of evil for evil — but chastises [kolasis] to help those who are chastised — Clement (Stromateis 7:16:102:1–3)
Does it make sense to say “eternal corrective punishment”? Of course not, for punishment to be corrective, it must have an end point at which you have learned from the punishment. You cannot give a prisoner a life sentence where they will never see the outside of a prison, and also say it’s corrective or restorative. It’s retributive by definition if they are never restored to society. Same thing applies here.
Augustinian catalyst
One of the first and the most prominent church fathers to advocate for hell as eternal torment was Augustine. As it turns out, Augustine was not very proficient in Greek and so built his theology upon the Latin Bible. When he read verses like Matthew 25:46 instead of aiōnios, he read aeternus. So it made sense to him that this punishment for the wicked would be “eternal”, not “otherworldly”, because aeternus does mean eternal how we think of it. Then he wrote popular books about it and influenced the church.
So there you have it. When you read “eternal” or “everlasting” in your Bible (except Romans 1:20 and Jude 1:6 which do use aïdios), in your mind you can switch it to “otherworldly” and probably get a better feel of what the author is saying. Even more than that, we can have hope that, at least according to the authors of the Bible and early church fathers, God is truly just and would not punish humanity eternally for sins committed in a finite lifetime.
Sources:
“On First Principles” — Origen
“City of God” — Augustine
“On the Soul and Resurrection” — Gregory of Nyssa
“A Larger Hope, Vol. 1” — Ilaria Rameli
“That All Shall Be Saved” — David Bentley Hart