“Let it be understood then, my Lord Fauste, that the damned man–or the soul, if you will–can no more attain Grace than can he hope for an end to his sufferings or a tide wherein he might perchance be removed from such anguish. Why, if they could be given the hope of dipping water day by day from the sea at the sea shore until the sea were dry, then that would be a redemption. Or if there were a sandheap as high as Heaven from which a bird coming every other year might bear away but one little grain at a time, and they would be saved after the whole heap were consumed, then that would be a hope. But God will never take any thought of them. They will lie in Hell like unto the bones of the dead. Death and their conscience will gnaw on them. Their firm belief and faith in God–oh they will at last acquire it–will go unheeded, and no thought will be taken of them. Thou thinkest perhaps that the damned soul might cover itself over and conceal itself in Hell until God’s Wrath might at last subside, and thou hast the hope that there might come a release if thou but persist in the aim of hope that God might still take thought of thee–even then there will be no salvation. There will come a time when the mountains collapse, and when all the stones at the bottom of the sea are dry, and all the raindrops have washed the earth away. It is possible to conceive of an elephant or a camel entering into a needle’s eye, or of counting all the raindrops. But there is no conceiving of a time for hope in Hell.” (Faust Book, Ch XI)

Religious

In some forms of Western Christian belief, damnation to hell is the punishment of God for persons with unredeemed sin. Damnation can be a motivator for conversions to Christianity.

One conception is of eternal suffering and denial of entrance to heaven, often symbolized in the Bible as burning and fire.

Another conception, derived from the scripture about Gehenna is simply that people will be discarded (burned), as being unworthy of preservation by God.

In Eastern Christian traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy), as well as some Western traditions, it is not seen as a legalistic punishment meted out by an angry and vengeful God for a slight against some set of spiritual rules. Instead, it describes a state of separation from God, a state into which all humans are born but against which Christ is the Mediator and “Great Physician”.

Etymology

Its Proto-Indo-European language origin is usually said to be a root dap-, which appears in Latin and Greek words meaning “feast” and “expense”. (The connection is that feasts tend to be expensive.) In Latin this root provided a theorized early Latin noun *dapnom, which became Classical Latin damnum = “damage” or “expense”. But there is a Vedic Sanskrit root dabh or dambh = “harm”.

The word damnum had not as yet got exclusively religious overtones. From it in English came “condemn”; “damnified” (an obsolete adjective meaning “damaged”); “damage” (via French from Latin damnaticum). It began to be used for being found guilty in court; but, for example, an early French treaty called the Strasbourg Oaths includes the Latin phrase in damno sit = “would cause harm”. From the judicial meaning came the religious meaning.