Re: The Epicurean Heretics seeing the future, & their punishment.

[Sharon Streight Powell]

The Epicurean heretics claim to know the future in that they say “the soul dies with the body.” So, perhaps it makes sense that their punishment is to see the future. Their punishment is perfected when their bodies are reunited with their souls and that moment of revelation is the last thing they ever know. For them, the fulfillment of the future is a moment frozen forever in time in which they are realizing their mistake.
(This possibly applies to other heretics, as well.)

 

[Koley Porter]

I think this is a very good reading. It seems that the constant of the hellish torments is that it is a continuation of the choices the sinner made in life. In the strange case of belief, it is a bit harder to keep doing what you are doing except to keep your incorrect view, which is difficult when it is explicitly corrected by direct experience. The Epicurians expected that their experience/mind would be exterminated upon bodily death. Now, ironically, being able to see the future, they know that, once they are reunited with their bodies, their experience/minds will, in effect, be annihilated, being consigned to a tomb and unable to perceive anything.

Also, I believe in came up in the discussion of how Epicurians can be heretics, as they lived before Christ instituted the Church. I think maybe the key is in the concept of natural religion, which is available to all and not dependent on divine revelation. If natural religion is indeed an insight into Christian truth, then a heresy against natural religion is a heresy against Christian faith.