Obi-Wan Kenobi wrote:
a) In Purgatory, they are still turning their hearts. In Heaven, their hearts have turned and are fixed on God. Jesus doesn't simply set us free from the punishment for our sins; He sets us free from our sins, so that they no longer have a hold of us and we need no longer repent because there is nothing left to repent of.
b) I wouldn't draw too many conclusions about the state of the afterlife from the story of the rich man and Lazarus. That's not its point.
Obi-Wan,Regarding the souls in purgatory (A), if they are still turning their hearts, then it suggests that they are still repenting, which in turn suggests that repentance
does happen in the afterlife, but is restricted to those in Purgatory. Also, regarding those in heaven, I understand the idea that Christ takes away a person's personal guilt for a sin, but it seems to me that a righteous person would still wish that the sinful act that they performed had not occurred. They would continue to have their desire that they didn't commit the act and continue the act of keeping their heart turned from the bad did that they committed. If a person confesses on earth and receives absolution, they still repent of their act I think, even though they no longer carry personal guilt for it, and then when they die, supposing that their soul became frozen into a fixed state as you suggested as a possibility (I heard that Catherine of Siena compared the soul in the afterlife to a fallen tree), then their soul would be fixed into that state of repentance for the absolved sin.
Regarding whether those in hell can regret their mistakes (B), I don't think that you've really addressed the case of the Rich Man. But my aim is not to "stick" you in the thread discussions either, so here I will note that it looks like there are alot of Catholic writers saying that people in hell regret their mistakes.
A Dominican website has this Q&A that lists regret as a pain in hell:
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What are the pains of Hell? Separation from God, torture by fire, regret, and the companionship of the devils.
http://www.willingshepherds.org/Heaven% ... 20Etc.htmlCatholic Straight Answers notes:
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Some Saints have had visions of hell. Blessed Sister Faustina described hell as follows: “Today I was led by an Angel to the chasms of hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw: The first torture that constitutes hell is the loss of God; the second is perpetual remorse of conscience..."
http://catholicstraightanswers.com/does-hell-exist/The Straight Answers entry seems to treat remorse as synonymous with repentance, talking about people who don't repent in their lifetimes: "If a person
does not repent of mortal sin, does not have any remorse, and persists in this state, then that person’s rejection of God will continue for eternity. In a sense, people put themselves in hell."
Wikipedia refers to the Catholic church's views on hell and quotes Isaac of Nineveh, who is venerated in the Chaldean Catholic Church as a saint:
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The [Catholic] church believes that hell is eternal because the sinner refuses to turn away from his mortal sin to God's forgiveness of sins.[13]... In some ancient Eastern Christian traditions,[which?] Hell and Heaven are distinguished not spatially, but by the relation of a person to God's love.
I also maintain that those who are punished in Gehenna, are scourged by the scourge of love. Nay, what is so bitter and vehement as the torment of love?...It would be improper for a man to think that sinners in Gehenna are deprived of the love of God...it torments sinners...Thus I say that this is the torment of Gehenna: bitter regret.
— St. Isaac of Syria, Ascetical Homilies 28, Page 141
Combining the the two paragraphs in Wikipedia's entry, the idea seems to be that the person regrets their sins but refuses to combine it with turning to God's forgiveness.
I suppose that at this point if I had to make sense of this issue and justify what II Clement says, in light of Cyprian's claim that repentance in hell is ineffectual, I would say that Cyprian and II Clement are talking about different kinds or usages of repentance.
I would have to distinguish the times when Catholic writers say that you can repent in the afterlife from the times that they say that you can't. The Orthodox Church seems to be less dogmatic about these kinds of things though and I suppose that it would probably just be okay with theologians disagreeing with eachother. But my goal isn't to conclude that II Clement is wrong, either.
Michael Pakaluk in
On Needing God tries to distinguish the regret in hell from repentance by proposing that it was only the regret that takes the form of self-blame:
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Someone with a restless heart somewhere deep down, if banished from the presence of God eternally, will be filled with an eternal aching regret: not the regret of repentance, mind you, but the regret of mere self-recrimination, the “worm which never dies.” They do not respond to God after death as, “Oh, this is the one I have been restless for,” because, if that were the case, they would not have been banished to hell. The saints say that eternal regret is hell enough: indeed it is, for even the vaguely restless at heart.
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/1 ... g-on-hell/Pakaluk didn't really explain what he means by self-blame as different from repentance though.
Tracy Finke suggested in her book
Embracing Catholicism and repeated in her book
Confirmed Catholic (both quoted in the box below) that the person wishes that he hadn't made the mistake for the purely pragmatic reason that it caused him to go to hell:
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St. Thomas Aquinas said that the sinner in Hell regrets his sin, but not because of guilt, but because of its terrifying consequences. That is why a sinner in Hell resents God, but he won't repent to God. If there was a moment of contrition (sorrow for sin) in a sinner in Hell, it would instantly set him loose to fly upward into God's presence. As Saint Catherine of Siena has said, "One drop of contrition could empty Hell."
But I don't know if this explanation about the regret in hell is correct. Sister Faustina's answer seems to imply that the person does have remorse of conscience and doesn't mean it just as a pragmatic phenomenon. It seems like people in hell who are alive there for eternity could figure out that what they did was immoral.