What Divine mercy does to the righteous in paradise, so does Divine justice to sinners in hell. The severity of immortal punishment is eternal torment, complete and perfect at every moment. As heavy as it is in all eternity, so heavy is it at every moment, i.e. the sinner at every inseparable moment of eternal torment, suffers all together and completely the punishment that he must bear throughout the entire infinity of a painful life. He endures all punishment during all eternity and at every moment, so that it is at one and the same time extended to the entire length of infinity and concentrated in every moment. Eternity at every moment appears to him as a whole, and the past, and the future, and therefore always makes all torment present; and the torment, furthermore, is infinite in all its continuation, so is it immense at every moment. Who is all-wise and will keep this? (Psalm 106:43) This is what eternity consists of, in contrast to time, which is divided into parts, into the first and the previous, into the beginning and the end. And this is what God threatens in Deuteronomy, saying: "I will gather evil against them, and I will put my arrows to death in them" (32:23). Gather... The evil state of sinners is a gathering, a union of all evils. All the bitterness of sorrow is gathered in one chalice, all the flames of the inextinguishable fire are united in one flame in eternal torment.

At every moment it is all in its entirety. And I will put my arrows to death. What a poisonous arrow, what a heavy spear for the torn mind of a sinner. All his torment is before his eyes, and it does not diminish in the least, since it is inseparable, it is always before his eyes, and never ends, since it is eternal. This means boundless torment, hopeless and endless. If the torment were endless, but there was hope for at least temporary relief, then it would be unbearable. But without relief and infinite, it is unbearable and incomprehensible. Who is all-wise and will keep this? What mind can comprehend this extreme misfortune?

Without relief? Yes! In hell there is the deepest sorrow, but there is no sleep to soothe it. The wounds are fatal, but there is no balm to heal them. The sickness is incurable, but there is no oil to calm it. The flames are unbearable, and there is not a drop of water to extinguish them. Listen to the rich sinner about whom Luke speaks. What does he want? Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and wet my tongue, for I suffer in this flame (Luke 16:24). Father Abraham, you are the father of mercy, show me mercy. I am engulfed in flames, I burn and am tormented in the furnace of unquenchable fire. Oh, send happy Lazarus to dip only the tip of his finger in that drop of water and come to irrigate my inflamed tongue... But what does Abraham answer him? No, no, my son, thou hast sufficiently enjoyed thy good in thy past life, thou hast received thy good in thy belly (Luke 16:25), hope for nothing more. Oh, great calamity! He asks so little, and finds nothing decisively. He resorts to Abraham himself, the father of compassion, the sea of mercy, only for a drop of water to cool his flame, and does not receive it. So, his request was not heard? "No," says Chrysostom, "for a sinner there is no water even in the sea, i.e. God has mercy." Therefore, as I said, the fire of hell is only fire, but without dew, only torment, but without relief.

In the present life there is no such great evil that, even if incurable, would have no end. And in general, endless evil would be the most terrible evil. No matter how miserable we may be when we die, if this is unavoidable, we are nevertheless freed from all torments, and death is our last physician, along with life, robbing us of our illnesses. Not such is the state of sinners in hell, where the torment is extreme and has no relief, and what is worse is eternal and has no end, never ends, never! Thousands of years, millions of years will pass, and the flour will still be at its beginning. If a sinner sheds one tear every year, and sheds so many tears that rivers flow out of them, then not a single minute of this painful eternity will have passed. There, in the other world, there is no death that would put an end to the torment of the sinner, taking away his life. No, there death is immortal, there life itself is constant death! There sinners will ask for death every hour, but they will not find it, as the Holy Spirit says in the Apocalypse, they will seek it... death, and they shall not find it (9:6). How long is this torment? It is always and will never end, never!

Zeno was the most unworthy and unfortunate Byzantine emperor. For his violent and depraved life, the people, the nobles and the troops, but especially the Empress Ariadne herself, his wife, began to be burdened by him; And this is what she did to him. Once, as often happened, from strong intoxication, he fell into an insensible state, like a dead man. The Empress ordered him to be lowered into a deep grave and covered with it, and also ordered that no one should dare to take him out of it, and that in this way the Tsar should be buried alive, unworthy of either the throne or life. All this was done. At last the emperor awoke from his intoxication, and seeing himself in darkness and stench, he began to cry out, to call for help, to wail, but there was no one who, hearing his cries, would sympathize with him, opened the grave and rescued him from there. A heavy stone is placed on it. He is buried once and for all, buried forever.

From the grave of the unfortunate Zeno, I turn my mental gaze to the utter darkness of hell, where it is as if I see a miserable sinner, buried there by Divine justice. The Gospel says of a sinful rich man: "Die... and buried him (Luke 16:22). I hear his weeping, his pitiful cries: "Father Abraham, have mercy on me!" but, alas, no one hears him, for "the abyss is deep, and the darkness is hopeless," says Basil the Great. God holds the keys to this underground prison in His hands, and no one will open it. The heaviest stone of eternity covers the unfortunate, and on the stone the Holy Spirit inscribed the inscription: "And their time shall be for ever" (Psalm 80:16). He is buried once and for all, forever. He will never get out of there. You will tell me: for one temporal sin and such eternal torment is punishment? Can there be any correspondence between guilt and punishment? I answer you, if there is a comparison between temporal sin and eternal torment, it is by no means possible between a man like you, a useless man of the earth, and the Most High God, whom you have offended by your sin. If you lived forever, you would sin forever. That is why eternal torment has befallen you. A furnace of inextinguishable fire is before your eyes, and yet you sin? It means that you are worthy of eternal fire. You should be infinitely grateful to Divine justice, which has opened a whole abyss of endless torment to cut off the path of your crimes. If the punishment of hell were not eternal, what would the life of Christians be like? Righteous is the judgment of God! And their time will be for ever. Flour for ever, and there will never be an end to relief! This second arrow, which strikes the mind of the sinner, seems to be in itself the whole torment.

But there is a third arrow, perhaps sharper than the first two. That which strikes the will of the sinner and plunges it into the despair of a blessed life; it is an extreme desire, but without hope. Here again I reveal the depth of the abyss: desire without hope, and desire for God without hope in God. This arrow is, among other things, the flour itself. In this life, desire is like a fire that burns in our hearts and strives for the good that we hope to receive. If this good is easily attainable, our hope tempers the flame; and if it is impossible, despair completely extinguishes it. Thus, if we desire anything on earth, we are comforted by hope; but if we do not hope for anything, the desire itself disappears completely; and therefore either there is no illness in us at all, or, if there is, there is also a cure for it. But desire without hope is a flame without dew, desire alone is pure fire, and such is the desire of sinners.

In the same way, with all the strength, with all the thirst for extreme desire, the will of the sinful soul strives for the supreme Judge, for God. But like a solid stone, like a dry river, it finds the heart of God, expelling it with the words: Depart from me, accursed, into everlasting fire! Oh, how this blow strikes her, in what despair she retreats! And the more the deprivation inflames the desire, the more the desire increases the torment. The desire of God is the most ardent of all desires, just as God is the greatest Good of all blessings. Thus, the desire for God without hope in God is the strongest flame of torment, which I cannot explain to you: to always desire God and never hope to see Him.

Why can't the sinner hope? Because he has separated from God, and division is eternal. We know from experience in this life how difficult it is to be separated from the people who are most beloved, when, for example, a father or mother is separated from children, brother from brother, and bride from groom. In the time of Michael Palaiologos, the Hagarians invaded the Asian borders of the empire and took many people captive with them. Among the captives were two sisters who were drawn by lot to different gentlemen. They had to separate and go in different directions for their masters without hope of ever seeing each other. Who can describe, who can explain their weeping when the hour of parting came, when, mourning their fate, they shed a flood of tears, embraced each other tightly and clung to each other with their lips? And so, when they kissed for the last time, it was as if their souls had passed into their mouths and agreed among themselves not to undergo such a painful separation. United, they ascended to heaven, leaving their embraced corpses on the ground. I mean that the two sisters died embracing and kissing each other in the great pangs of parting, as if nature could not consent to the separation of bodies before the separation of souls, as says Nicephorus Gregoras, who relates this sad story.

I am telling you this in order to make it clear how painful it is to be separated from God, to wait for Him and forever not hope to see Him. But no one will understand this without first knowing what God is. Imagine that if the brightest and most blessed face of God were to hide from the righteous in paradise for a moment, paradise would turn into hell; And if for a moment he appeared as a sinner in hell, hell would turn into paradise. The hope of seeing this Divine Face at least once would have reduced to nothing all the lawless torment of sinners. Understand that all the above-mentioned torment is much easier, even an infinite number of such torments is nothing compared to the deprivation of seeing God's Face. As two great teachers of the Church assert: "The disgust and alienation of God for the fallen is much more painful than the torments expected in the afterlife" (Basil the Great); "to be subjected to a thousand torments means nothing in comparison with the deprivation of blessed glory" (Chrysostom). From this you can conclude how painful it is to be separated from God, to desire Him without hope to see Him forever.

Oh, the sharpest arrow in the will of the sinner! Oh, desire without hope, desire for God without hope in God! Oh, the torment that the will will experience, but the mind will not comprehend! And yet we don't care about it. It would be a great misfortune for us to lose even for one day the mercy of our superior, the closeness of a friend, the affection of a harlot. But the loss of love, mercy and glory from God is nothing. We are told that there are torments, but we continue on the path that leads to them.

Who repents? Who is correcting? Who turns from the way of perdition? One of two things: either we do not believe in the torments that await us and are therefore unfaithful, or we are foolish if, believing in retribution, we lead a life worthy of torment. Thus, we are subjected to torments either through unbelief or through our foolishness.

II. The ancients relate the legends of the spear of Achilles, which had the miraculous property of striking and healing. Indeed, the three arrows of torment that I have described to you have this miraculous property of striking the tormented and healing the sinner in this life. The first arrow strikes the tormented person in memory and arouses useless repentance in him, when he repents of the sins of the past life, but will no longer be able to receive forgiveness. But if the sinner keeps in his memory the thoughts of this arrow during his life in order to remember his sins and the punishment expected for them, he repents and receives forgiveness. The second arrow strikes the mind of the tormented person and causes him strong and incurable pain because he will always have endless torment before his eyes. If the sinner keeps in his mind the thought of this arrow, always imagining the great danger of torment to which he is hourly exposed, then he will be sick with contrition of heart, and in this pain he will find healing from the burden and the end of his evil life. The third arrow strikes the will of the tormented and arouses in him an extreme desire without hope, when he always desires, but never hopes, to see the Face of God, from Whom he has separated forever. If the sinner now accepts this blow to his will in order to truly desire God, then he can certainly enter His bosom again, since He Himself said: "He that cometh to Me I will not cast out" (John 6:37). In short, punishment, which for the body and soul of the condemned is boundless torment, for the reflection of the sinner is salvific healing. "The remembrance of hell does not allow one to fall into hell," says Chrysostom. When the monks lived more in the wilderness than in the world, when they asceticized and did not beg, a certain holy ascetic was greatly tempted by the flesh, and the devil immediately presented him with an opportunity in the person of a woman to stir him up even more. But God, wishing to protect him, so that the unfortunate man would not lose the fruit of his former exploits in an instant, inspired him with the following thought. Before falling into sin, he brought his finger close to the flame of the lamp, but could not bear the pain, he immediately withdrew it, then he thought within himself: I cannot bear it when my finger burns for a moment in the flame of a candle; but if I fall into sin, I will burn completely, soul and body, in the flame of eternal torment; Get away from me, Satan! He drove the woman away, defeated the flesh, put the devil to shame, escaped sin, and saved the soul. Whoever remembers the torments will not be subjected to them! No! When we are tempted by the flesh, the world, the devil, if each of us said to himself before doing evil: "For this act of mine I will be subjected to eternal torment in hell, do you think that we would still have the inclination to sin?" No, no; I repeat, he who remembers it is not subjected to torment. Who remembers her?

O Most Just God! In order to restrain the sins I have committed, death, sickness, and misfortune have sent me here, as Thy holy will shall determine. How long does all this last? For a very long time and someday it will end. But do not punish me with eternal torment that has no end. Alas for me! If the head hurts for one day or the tooth for one hour, the pain seems unbearable. What will happen when I am all burning in eternal fire?! Even the most revelry, if it is too long, tires me: what kind of endless torment will seem to me? For one adultery there is a thousand-year punishment. But patience and a thousand years have their end! For one theft, you will suffer for tens of thousands of years. Let it be so, and this will end. But eternal, endless torment! Oh, if I had thought about it carefully, the whole world would have lost its value in my eyes; I should have fled to the desert, buried alive in a coffin, wept and moaned day and night every moment! And how many years would it take? Ten, twenty, thirty, but someday it would have an end. Hellish torments do not have it! Oh, torment, torment of the triple arrow that causes a triple mortal plague! As soon as I think about you, my heart is already torn apart. But smite, smite him, that I may always remember thee, and thus escape thy fire.