The Spiritual Bell Curve. When we think of the final resting place of a truly holy soul, like that of St. Francis, we can picture it over in the far right hand corner of the bell curce. All the less holy souls are to the left of his.
The very worst souls that ever lived may be pictured far off on the lower left. Dante said that the three “worst” souls who ever lived were Brutus, Judas, and Mohammed. They will spend eternity, he wrote, in the very mouth of the devil, gnawed on ravenously forever, so we have but to imagine an angry, slavering mouth over there, in the far left corner of the spiritual bell curve, chomping away.
Vertically, we may think of the center line dividing the saved souls from the perpetually accursed. Hell is on the left, Heaven on the right.The rewards and punishments increase in intensity as one goes downward toward the bottom. If this can be used to help get our own minds to picture the way our souls will spend eternity, we may work harder to get them there.
There are Scriptural reasons for considering the bell curve as a way to “grade” souls. For instance:
“Then two men will be in the field: one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill: one will be taken and the other left. Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming.”,
Matthew 24: 40-42
Those two indications that half of the souls may be saved are not conclusive, but they are indicative. The important thing to remember when considering such possibilities as these is not that our tentative conclusions about them are necessarily right, but that we cannot prove that they are wrong. As we search for better ways to describe spiritual realities, such things as the “spiritual bell curve” help to get our minds more used to thinking about such things, and using familiar tools to help us do so more effectively. It is a step in the right direction.
