Fire, in the spiritual sense, can mean either love or hatred depending on the context, just as natural fire can be either comforting in keeping you warm, or scary in burning down your house. Our language reflects this, too -- we use concepts like a smoldering hatred or a burning love. So fire signifies a love, either a good love of the neighbor and to the Lord, or, in a bad sense, selfish love of oneself that, if unchecked by conscience, leads to hatred of anyone that opposes it.

566. Hellfire and Gnashing of Teeth

Until now, hardly anyone has known the meaning of the eternal fire and gnashing of teeth ascribed to people in hell in the Word. This is because people think materialistically about statements in the Word, in ignorance of its spiritual meaning. So some of them understand the fire to be material fire, some think it is torment in general, some the pangs of conscience, some that it is just words meant to strike a terror of evil into us. Some understand the gnashing of teeth to be a kind of grinding, some only the kind of shudder we feel when we hear this kind of clash of teeth.

Anyone familiar with the spiritual meaning of the Word, though, can realize what eternal fire and gnashing of teeth are, since there is spiritual meaning in every expression and in the meaning of every expression in the Word. At heart, that is, the Word is spiritual, and spiritual meaning can be expressed to us only in natural terms because we are in a natural world and think on the basis of what we encounter in it.

In the following pages, then, I shall explain what the eternal fire and gnashing of teeth are that evil people find after death, or that their spirits experience once they are in the spiritual world.