Saints Who Saw Hell gathers the accounts of saints and visionaries who have seen the horrors of Hell, offering readers a sobering warning of the ultimate torment: separation from God. Read on to learn the four principal torments of Hell according to Saint Catherine of Siena’s dialogues with Christ.
They have disparaged my mercy. So with justice I send them to damnation, with their cruel servant sensuality, and the cruel tyrant the Devil, whose servants they made themselves through their own sensuality. In this way, together they are punished and tortured, as together they have offended me. They are tormented, I say, by my ministering devils whom my judgment has appointed to torment those who have done evil.
Three Vices
My daughter, the tongue is not sufficient to tell the pain of these poor souls. There are three principal vices. First is self-love. It gives rise to the second, love of reputation, which itself leads to the third: pride, with injustice and cruelty, and with other filthiness and iniquitous sins, that follow upon these.
Four Torments
Separation from God
So I say to you that in hell, the souls have four principal torments, from which arise all the other torments. The first is that they see themselves deprived of the vision of me. This is such pain to them that, were it possible, they would rather choose the fire and the tortures and torments, and to see me along with them, than to be without the torments and not to see me.
The Worm of Conscience
This first pain then revives in them the second, the worm of conscience, which gnaws unceasingly, knowing that the soul is deprived of me, and of the conversation of the angels. Instead, through sin the soul has been made worthy of the conversation and sight of the devils.
The Sight of the Devil
The vision of the Devil is the third pain and intensifies in them their every agony.
The saints in heaven exult in the sight of me, refreshing themselves with joy in the fruit of their toils borne for me with such abundance of love and displeasure with themselves. In the same way, the sight of the Devil renews these wretched ones to torments. In seeing him, they know themselves more, that is to say, they know that, by their own sin, they have made themselves worthy of him. So the worm of conscience gnaws more and more, and the fire of this conscience never ceases to burn.
The sight is even more painful to them because they see him in his own form, which is so horrible that the heart of man could not imagine it. And if you remember well, you know that I showed him to you in his own form for a little space of time, hardly a moment, and you decided (after you had returned to yourself) that you would rather walk on a road of fire, even until the Day of Judgment, than to see him again.
With all this that you have seen, even you do not know fully how horrible he is. For by divine justice, he appears more horrible to the soul that is deprived of me, and more or less according to the gravity of that soul’s sin.
Eternal Fire
The fourth torment that they suffer is the fire. This fire burns yet does not consume, for the substance of the soul cannot be consumed, because it is not a material thing that fire can consume. But I, by divine justice, have permitted the fire to burn them with torments, so that it torments them, without consuming them, with the greatest pains in various ways according to the variety of their sins: to some more, and to some less, according to the gravity of their fault.
Other Torments
Out of these four torments issue all others, such as cold and heat and gnashing of the teeth and many others. They did not correct themselves after the reproof I gave them in this life concerning their injustice and false judgment. Nor did they change after the second reproof they received at the moment of death, but instead refused to hope in me or grieve for the offense done to me, but only for their own pain. So they have in this way miserably received eternal punishment.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Saints Who Saw Hell by Paul Thigpen, PhD which is available from TAN Books.
