The Great Divorce where he pictured it as a drab "grey town". Yet in The Problem of Pain, "Lewis sounds much like an annihilationist." He wrote: The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) describes Hell as "eternal death" (para 1861) and elsewhere states that "the chief punishment of hell is that of eternal separation from God" (para 1035). The question is what "eternal" means in this context. Thomas Aquinas, following Boethius, states that "eternity is the full, perfect and simultaneous possession of unending life" (Summa Theologica I, question 10), so apparently eternal separation from God is a "negative eternity", a complete and permanent separation from God. In the Collect (opening prayer) for the eighth Sunday after Pentecost in the Tridentine missal, we find the words "qui sine te esse non possumus", meaning "we who without Thee cannot be (or exist)". With this one may compare the Anglican prayer-book, as the collect for the ninth Sunday after Trinity, but stating "we who cannot do anything that is good without Thee". In the modern ordinary form of the Mass of the Catholic Church, in the collect is included again, used on Thursday in the first week of Lent. Conditional immortality The doctrine is often, although not always, bound up with the notion of "conditional immortality", a belief that the soul is not innately immortal. They are related yet distinct. God, who alone is immortal, passes on the gift of immortality to the righteous, who will live forever in Heaven or on an idyllic Earth or World to Come, while the wicked will ultimately face a second death. Those who describe or believe in this doctrine may not use "annihilationist" to define the belief, and the terms "mortalist" and "conditionalist" are often used. Edward Fudge (1982) uses "annihilationist" to refer to both the "mortalists" and "conditionalists" who believe in a universal resurrection, as well as those groups which hold that not all the wicked will rise to face the New Testament's "resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust". Justifications Interpretation of scripture Some annihilationists insist that words like "destroy, destruction, perish, death" must refer to "non-existence". While this interpretation of those terms does not imply the non-existence of Hades or the lake of fire, this interpretation does require that the suffering of the souls that inhabit it, is terminated by their reduction to non-existence. Adventists, and perhaps others, then understand