Abstract

In 1998 the Polish writer, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), observed: ''In my lifetime Heaven and Hell disappeared...After two thousand years in which a huge edifice of creeds and dogmas had been erected, from Origen and St Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Newman, when every work of the human mind and of human hands was created within a system of reference, the age of homelessness has dawned.'' The new circumstances in which Christianity now exists are acknowledged by most commentators nowadays. And it must be admitted that, as regards belief in hell, specifically, the future doesn't look too bright, even in the judgement of mainstream theologians.