What Heaven is Like

[Aiza]

Ok, firstly you didn't really answer my question. You only said that hell is suffering. But would an unholy person in hell find suffering enjoyable? Or would he wish the suffering would end and want to leave hell?

If you are enjoying something, it is not suffering.

Also, would an unholy person find being in hell more or less enjoyable than being an unholy person in heaven?

I thought I answered this, but maybe I was unclear. Hell is a state, not a physical place. The flames come from within. A wicked person "in Heaven" (to come face-to-face with God himself) is still in Hell since his heart is still removed from God. Do they suffer more, to be surrounded by all the holiness and goodness that they find so distasteful? Blessed John Henry Newman certainly believes as such:

"Nay, I will venture to say more than this;—it is fearful, but it is right to say it;—that if we wished to imagine a punishment for an unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy a greater than to summon it to heaven. Heaven would be hell to an irreligious man. We know how unhappy we are apt to feel at present, when alone in the midst of strangers, or of men of different tastes and habits from ourselves. How miserable, for example, would it be to have to live in a foreign land, among a people whose faces we never saw before, and whose language we could not learn. And this is but a faint illustration of the loneliness of a man of earthly dispositions and tastes, thrust into the society of saints and angels. How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God's holiness, and these would make him shudder. He would feel himself always in His presence. He could no longer turn his thoughts another way, as he does now, when conscience reproaches him. He would know that the Eternal Eye was ever upon him; and that Eye of holiness, which is joy and life to holy creatures, would seem to him an Eye of wrath and punishment. God cannot change His nature. Holy He must ever be. But while He is holy, no unholy soul can be happy in heaven. Fire does not inflame iron, but it inflames straw. It would cease to be fire if it did not. And so heaven itself would be fire to those, who would fain escape across the great gulf from the torments of hell. The finger of Lazarus would but increase their thirst. The very "heaven that is over their head" will be "brass" to them..."

Though I don't know if I agree or not: I am torn between agreement with him and the idea that it would make no difference: the incredible pain of being eternally separated from love is already so painful to think about, how can it possibly be any worse?

This sermon was in today's Magnificat (a Catholic magazine), and it made me think a bit of some of the things said on this forum, and on its surface it certainly does ring true to me, as someone who once rejected God and could find no appeal in even the idea of Heaven and now finds nothing more lovely than the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass or to even imagine the Beatific Vision.