A Short Thesis - On the Void and What Lies There

[Iudaes 1095]

 

St. Julia defending the Tribe of Horen from Iblees’s iniquity. (Gospel 2:22-23)

 

In Nomine Patris!

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A Short Thesis
On the Void and What Lies There

 

Scribed by
 Manfried Cardinal St. Julia

 

Sigismund’s End, 1786

 

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I

 

It is with God that all things lie, graced by the ever-eternal presence of His, bestowed unto His Creation through His light. It is with God that we, the humans and elves, orcs and dwarves, lie in His divine presence, defended by His light and warmed by it, the constant stream of it washing down unto us from the Seventh Sky and blessing us with His Love and Goodness. It is God who warms us. It is God who enlightens us. It is God who makes us feel protected and good. And while His blessed light shines most notably in the Seven Skies and brightens the path of virtue on this terra of which grounds we tread, the Void is something different. Like our world, the Void is of His Creation, born with all other planes as He willed them into existence. Of His Creation and forever to be of His Creation and while stolen from Him by the Lord of Darkness, Iblees, to be retaken as foretold in the Scroll of Auspice, “Thus the good sons of Krug are given the Void, and it is made to serve them, and they hone their strength eternally.“ (Auspice 3:13)

 

It is through the actions of Iblees that the Void now serves as the home of the damned, opposite to the Seven Skies, the home of the virtuous. It is intrinsic in the cycle of life, just as the Seven Skies are, however it is where the sinners lie, the servants of Iblees wait and where the corruption of Iblees seen in the Scroll of Gospel festers like an infected wound upon all of Creation, awaiting to snap back once more at the world as it did with Saul, “Thus Saul worked Iblees’ iniquity in Horen’s camp, and it came that a great many there were corrupted.” (Gospel 2:33) It is the Void which exists as punishment for a life of sin, not necessarily out of the will of God but of His abandonment of sinners for they are too far from His grace, unable to be saved from the wretched hands of the Lord of Darkness. And so, the Void is where they live out eternal damnation in pain and suffering, however not of which the usual human mind imagines.

 

II

 

It was mere days ago that the Void was imagined by a layman in a manner of which is unlike mine. A place of human suffering. Of torture, fire and such. It was imagined in the lens of a mortal, a plane of physical suffering. Of physical pain and torture of which is seen in this world of our’s. Of the whip, of the blade, and of the tools of man of which have been built to cause suffering and punishment among us. This is something of a common perception of the Void, as when we of flesh and blood hear pain and suffering, we are quick to imagine the spilling of our blood and the burning of our flesh. We are swift to imagine what we fear in pain. Tools as elaborate as the spiked coffin or as simple as the blade. However, it is the Church’s idea of the Void that differs from what is a common idea of what the Void is. What lies in the Void. What we shall meet if we are to become corrupted by Iblees’s iniquity and become deserving of damnation in the realm of the Lord of Darkness. What awaits us is not punishment of physical pain but of spiritual pain.

 

A quote from the Catechism of our Blessed Church, “The Void is a place of emptiness and despair. Whoever has entered the Void has unequivocally forsaken God, and has therefore forsaken all good things. Although it is often depicted as full of fire and brimstone, the only substance in the Void is that of other beings existing in torturous separation from the Creator.”

 

III

 

It is clear that while we live in the physical world now, we shall ascend (or descend) into the spiritual world or the afterlife, these two being the Seven Skies, the realm of God and the virtuous, and the Void, the realm of Iblees and the damned. With the distinction between our world and the afterlife being made, the physical and the spiritual respectively, my point becomes clear. I said previously that it is through the human lens in which we view the Void and as we are born in the physical world, it is through a physical lens that we view the spiritual. To comprehend the pain in which the damned suffer in the Void, we put it into our physical perspective and therefore attribute physical pain to a spiritual plane. However this in my view, while extremely useful, is incorrect. 

 

It is through the lens of which I use to look at the Void that I see a plane not of the spilling of blood and the burning of flesh but a plane devoid of Him. It is said perfectly in these two excerpts from Scripture, “Now Iblees had suffered in the Void for an age, avoiding the grace of GOD, for he doubted the Lord even as he fled Him.” (Gospel 2:5) and “So Iblees saw that the brothers were weak, and he ascended the emanations of glory, though he was loathe to feel the grace of GOD.” (Gospel 2:8) Iblees had been suffering in the Void for an age, not once touched by the grace and light of God in his seclusion. He had not felt God’s presence for the era of which he had spent in the dark, black Void for it is devoid of Him. So far separated from the Lord’s throne in the Seventh Sky that the light of God stops short of the Void and never touches the plane’s contents, leaving it a barren wasteland of despair and tenebrosity. 

 

It is this what caused Iblees to suffer and it is this which causes the damned who dwell with him in the Void to suffer. Not physical pain but spiritual pain. Abandoned by the Lord Almighty, separated from Him by a great chasm. And so, the soul of the damned becomes a wellspring of anguish. Void of His Love, of His Goodness, of His Grace, and Void of any hope. The final understanding that one shall live out the rest of eternity without God. 

 

This is true pain and something that one in the physical world cannot comprehend. You may ask, “How can we then comprehend physical pain if we may not have been burned or cut and then not comprehend spiritual pain?” It is a good question and the answer is very simple. There are men and women who walk this world today who have experienced torture and suffered at the hands of great physical pain. However, no one walking on this terra today has ever experienced spiritual pain to such a magnitude as felt in the Void. Spiritual pain in this world certainly does exist, however this world sits in the bosom of the Lord and His light. It is not devoid of Him and His glory. Nay, His light graces our world like the waves upon a beach and so our spiritual thirst is fulfilled and we are cleansed, bathed in His luminosity. 

 

IV

 

“So he descended the emanations of glory, and drew farther from GOD, until he reached the Void.”
(Gospel 1:17)

 

And so, we come to our conclusion. Here, I wish to clarify one point. It is not my goal to shun the imagination of others in their attempt to comprehend the everlasting suffering one may find in damnation but to present the Church’s and my own as to provide for the better education of the lay faithful. It becomes clear that none know what awaits us in the Seven Skies and too in the Void. However, with evidence I have come to the Church’s conclusion and while I do not find in my own thoughts the perception of the Void to be one of fire and physical pain, I believe it serves as a useful tool to allow the faithful to fully comprehend what damnation means. Even though God granted us many gifts, it is in our limitations as mortals, unlike Him, that we find ourselves unable to grasp the idea of certain things such as the Seven Skies, the Void or the Lord Almighty Himself. We reside in the physical and therefore it is helpful for us too to pass on our mortal experiences into the spiritual planes to understand what lies beyond.

 

“Torturous separation from the Creator” as I have said previously is the worst pain imaginable. Without the Creator, we the Creation are nothing. We have no purpose nor do we have any love and care provided. Instead, the damned are left to rot in the Void, souls who have slipped out of God’s fingers by a choice of their own. This is not how Creation is meant to live. It is not natural for us to be so far separated from the Lord Almighty. 

 

Once one reaches the Void, the lantern which you have been using to illuminate your path through sinful darkness has dimmed and eventually gone out. The damned look with panic around them and soon find themselves lost in that murky darkness which in life they have found to be filled with pleasure, now only the creator of their torturous existence for an eternity. I call to the sinners in this conclusion of mine. Turn back while you still have light in that lantern of your’s. Accept God’s word and envelop oneself in His blessed light. Otherwise, you shall be a lost soul, experiencing pain unlike the physical pain you imagined. Pain so deep, one simply cannot comprehend it until it is too late.

 

Signed with the love of a Father,
Manfried,
Cardinal St. Julia,
Prelate for the Canonist Priesthood,
Cardinal Judge of Helena,
Vicar of Helena,

 

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Propalatam Deus, da nobis multa sunt beneficia ut non palpet proximorum expendas.
Quia tu id etiam a misericordissimo et maxima benevolentia atque amantissima.
In nomine Patris, amen.

 

[VIROS 2915]

James II speaks to a nearby acolyte, “What a coincidence, I was drafting a sermon on a similar topic last evening. It seems the Void is on everybody’s mind as of late. Cardinal St. Julia certainly keeps his finger on the pulse of the faithful.”