Is Henry VIII in hell?

Rowan Williams gave a lovely sermon last week, on the Carthusian martyrs, fourteen Catholic monks tortured to death under Henry VIII for their refusal to submit to him after his breach with Rome. He suggested in the course of it that Henry might be in hell now, an unusual proposition for an Archbishop of Canterbury, but one which no fair-minded person will dismiss out of hand.

This is germane, too, because it implies an argument that while Christian rulers may aspire to totalitarianism, as perhaps Henry did, Christianity will always resist this because it is on the side of the tortured. Of course you might object that hell is the ultimate totalitarianism, but that's rather the Christian point. Hell is under the management of the other side.

In any case here are the central paragraphs.

The God who has, it seems, been vanquished, is yet a God who cannot be abolished. In many ages and many places, authorities even more appalling than Henry VIII have believed that they could abolish God and the cross of God; and they have had to discover that while they may vanquish, they cannot destroy. That which is the last hope, the last longing of the condemned and tortured, remains. The cross stands while the world turns. And whatever human power and human injustice can achieve and effect, the hanged God, the failed God, remains a sign forever. 

The cross stands while the world turns: the sign of our terrible human failure, the sign that God is not to be abolished, that justice cannot be extinguished forever; that the voice of the poor and the lost and the tormented cannot finally be silenced – not by any power that the universe can show, because it is rooted in what does not change. The cross stands and the world turns. The world changes, the world comes and goes – powers rise and fall, fashions come and go - sometimes the Christian faith looks attractive and fashionable in the world, and sometimes it looks stupid and marginal. And always it is what it is because the cross stands.

The Christian who knows his or her business is the Christian who has the freedom to return again and again into that silent unchanging presence - the hanged God, whose love, whose generosity, springs out of depths we can never imagine. It is the sounding of those depths that is the heart of the contemplative life – that life lived in such an exemplary way by the Carthusians then and now, lived by so many others in our world over the centuries, lived, we hope and pray, for many centuries and millennia to come.   

We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King's agents. A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton. If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path. 

Perhaps the most remarkable innovation of Christianity was to suppose that "the last hope, the last longing, of the condemned and tortured" should be justice and forgiveness rather than revenge. Socrates, it's true, doesn't demand revenge, but neither is he tortured, nor does he seem to feel he is unjustly condemned. He simply looks forward to an afterlife.

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