Is hell a pagan concept?

The answer is ‘yes’ - hell was a concept deeply ingrained in the pagan mind. And that is the surprising landscape that Ilaria opens up for us in this next episode in Robin Parry’s interviews with her on apokatastasis.

In this interview, Robin asks her about a recent accusation that belief in '‘apokatastasis” was actually a pagan idea that crept into Christianity. Of course, that kind of accusation works well to stigmatise apokatastasis and condemn it to the heresy corner! This critique assumes that such a benevolent view of destiny must have its origins in human optimism not in any revelation.

Ilaria dismisses this out of hand - and says that the idea of apokatastasis originated in the scriptures. But in so doing, she makes a brief but intriguing point - that Plato did NOT believe in apokatastasis but in fact believed in hell as ‘eternal conscious torment’. This clip is very short - so I decided to expand Ilaria’s comments. (Plato’s views on hell are found in his Socratic dialogue “Gorgias” which I analysed as a source text in my doctoral thesis some years ago).

It turns out that Plato’s views on hell - and divine judgment - are remarkably similar to lots of traditional Christian views. The implications of this are significant: lots of our so-called “Christian” views on heaven and hell are not unique to Christianity but are shared with the pagan world. This is not to say that they are wrong - or right - but it does say that they are common sense ideas that spring from human reasoning not revelation.

So in my comments I compare and contrast the shared landscape between Plato’s ‘pagan’ views on hell (and heaven) and typical Christian views. The results are illuminating because they shine the light on what is really unique about the Christian view of human destiny and what seems to be just human reasoning. As Ilaria declares apokatastasis was one of those features that was unique to early Christianity. For the pagan mind, it was just too good to be true, and too wondrous for unaided common sense to apprehend.

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