Why no repent in hell?

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Essentially how I think about it is that when someone rejects God and His grace through Christ after all the chances God gives them, they are then sent to hell when they die. Because they are in hell, they have no chance of repenting because they have been giving over to their corrupt nature. Our natures now are corrupt but not wholly. When they are sent to hell, that grace that holds them from being fully corrupt is lost because they are completely separated from God. There is no goodness or love or grace in hell, and without those beautiful gifts of God, their nature us wholly corrupted and lost, therefore they have no desire to repent. Their only desire is to do that which is evil. This is at least how I see it.
 
tafan2 said:
This is the only post so far that attempts to say “why”, the video posted also ignores the basic question if the caller. But I am not quite sure about this answer. There is no change at all in heaven ? I thought the speculation about aeviternity suggests there is some degree of change and action in heaven. There is some ordering of events beyond time. If so, then the “why no repentence in hell” is still an open question. Why do our wills become fixed after death? On one hand, if we have chosen God, it makes sense, we would be in his presence and never desire in the least bit to sin. On the other hand, of we reject God, why would we never desire to change our mind?
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Because heaven is the everlasting “now”. I imagine that hell is the same. There is no time, therefore no change, in the after life.

Anyway, that is how it was explained to me.
 
To all concerned,

Remember that heaven and hell are simply constructs to help us understand the consequences of our actions.

God is Who Is. In Him, all creatures live, move and are.

To me, that means that God is both heaven and hell. He is heaven to those who love Him and hell to those who don’t.
 
De_Maria said:
Remember that heaven and hell are simply constructs to help us understand the consequences of our actions.
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They’re actually states of existence, not just constructs. Some of the Biblical language (especially as concerns hell) are in fact constructs that only approximate reality, for example, God hurling people into eternal fire—we are the ones who do that to ourselves and He just, with a broken heart, executes our decision. But what you’re getting at is that the love of God is Heaven to those who love Him and the absence of God is hell to those who don’t. That’s accurate. I think the Catechism says the absence of God is the greatest suffering in hell.
 
I can’t really add to anything that has been said in terms of choices being final after death. Some people wonder how people could be fixed given the extreme tortures of hell. Some of the saints who claimed to have been shown hell say that the damned absolutely do hate their eternal suffering, but that even if they were given a chance for a “do over” or a “reboot” using the popular phrase today, they would end up falling back into the same sins.

THAT seems hard to believe, given the horrid reality of hell, but maybe the fact that it is hard to believe is a GOOD thing!🤔
 
“MarysLurker said:
De_Maria said:
Remember that heaven and hell are simply constructs to help us understand the consequences of our actions.
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They’re actually states of existence, not just constructs. …
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They are both. There is no place in the after life. Heaven is a state of being. A condition of existence. And there is only one existence. God.

Hell is the same. There is no such place. It is a state of being. Let me see if this quote from Dr. Scott Hahn will help.

Now the saints in heaven would freeze in purgatory, and hell fire for the saints in heaven would be like ice, dry ice. Our God is a consuming fire. The periphery of the universe is hell fire. That isn’t the hottest. The hottest is what you find when you get closest to God. Out of the nine choirs of angels, the highest are the Seraphim. In Hebrew it means the burning ones. They glow bright because they are consumed with this passionate, fiery love that God has for all eternity for us as His children.

What I’m trying to say is that God is the fire that loves us in heaven but punishes those in hell.

Deuteronomy 4:24 For the Lord, your God, is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
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That’s a really interesting thought, thanks for sharing!
If you love God and obey His commandments, the very presence of God shines so hot In love for us that we are in eternal bliss, but the very of presence of God is as a burning furnace to those who don’t love Him and disobey Him. Wow!
What a great God we have!
 
Well, we will have physical bodies, so there has to be some type of material aspect to heaven.
 
Good point. Although, St. Paul calls them, “spiritual bodies”.

1 Corinthians 15:44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.
 
I don’t think he meant a purely spiritual body. That doesn’t really make sense. The church doesn’t teach that. The resurrection is a glorified, physical body. And we know the Jesus’s body was physical after he Rose from the dead.

I do not buy into the argument that heaven is just a state. I think it has to be a place.
 
MaximilianK said:
I understand that there is no repentance after death (or in hell) what about will. Someone can explain ? Or i think Aquinas develops this problems
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Each person is created journeying and that ends with death in the particular judgement. At death the soul and body are parted, until the resurrection, but the particular judgement is before the resurrection.

Catechism
311 Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. …
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Hebrews 9:
27 It is appointed to men to die once, and after that comes the judgment.
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1 Cor 3
8 Each one will receive his pay, according to his works
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I certainly can’t imagine it any other way. Even the Church describes it as God’s House and heavenly Jerusalem. But I can also see where those are just used because our three dimensional minds can’t conceive of non-dimensional conditions.
 
De_Maria said:
But I can also see where those are just used because our three dimensional minds can’t conceive of non-dimensional conditions.
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Although non-dimensional conditions is a rather vague term, I agree and it would likely include all of us being unable to conceive the situation. Its likely why people fall back to the pure spirit idea. Having seen dead bodies all there is to think is that the soul has left and is now like an angel. We become spirits. That is the easiest to understand. At the time of Christ, many Jews who denied the resurrection still believed in an afterlife, a place of the spirits to dwell. The resurrection of the body and all that it implies is the difficult concept to conceive. Heaven/hell being simply a “state” outside of the universe that our souls occupy is simpler. But that is not how man was created. We were created body and soul, the soul being much different than an angel. Why would our salvation entail us to be of a different nature?
 
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The questions: What is material?, What is energy?, and What is spirit?, are, probably, not quantifiable and definable as they relate to glorified existence. We may never know how all of these correlate with our existence in heaven. However, it is fun to contemplate.
 
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All very true. But whatever the answer, we do know the following:
We will have a body and soul
A soul is not the same as an angelic spirit.
 
The Catholic Answers radio program linked to early in this thread says that if repent means that you recognize what you did was wrong, then the answer is YES, you do regret it. Because for example if you are in heaven, you will understand that your actions were wrong, but you won’t feel the pain of it.

I explored the issue on two other Catholic forums and read articles on it and it looks like there are a range of answers. Sister Faustina said that in hell, the remorse of conscience was one of the leading punishments, whereas St Thomas Aquinas said that those in hell might in fact repent, but it would be in only a pragmatic sense that they wish that they hadn’t caused the action that led them to be in hell, not that they reject their actions in a moral way because of the sins’ malice / hatred.
 
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I read St Faustina’s diary very carefully and imo I don’t see the two accounts as opposed to each other.

There are a lot more than just St Aquinas who say the damned do not/will not repent, except in the sense that they regret being in hell.
 
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