The Meaning of Hell
Understanding why we can't question the belief in Hell as explicated by Sufis and philosophers According to mystical belief, to be human is to be accountable to God, to accept the measure called absolute. Our human state is such a treasure that we are not ready to exchange it for anything. If we are offered all the treasured things of the world on the condition that we renounce our human state and become beasts, we will not accept the bargain. The cost of failing to realise responsibilities or potentialities of human state can’t be anything less than hell. As Frithjof Schuon, metaphysician and doyen of traditionalist school, writes, “The notion of Hell becomes perfectly clear when we think how senseless it is-and what a waste and a suicide-to slip through the human state without being truly man, that is, to pass God by, and thus to pass our own souls by, as if we had any right to human faculties apart from the return to God, and as if there were any point in the miracle of th
