It’s a bit strange how the meaning of the well-known phrase ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ has been so twisted… Well, you can’t possibly interpret it so literally! The essence of it is not that if you have good intentions, you’ll inevitably end up in hell… And it’s certainly not about how every good intention harbors a bunch of bad ones… Or even a more simplistic interpretation: ‘if you do something good for people (or someone), those same people (or someone) will punish and betray you’.
This is just complete nonsense, can anyone really draw such unrealistic conclusions that have nothing to do with the meaning of the proverbial phrases? And yet people (and I personally know them) flaunt this! ‘I did everything for him, and he screwed me over… Good intentions…’ Well, I won’t even talk about the fact that when you want to give something to someone, you shouldn’t expect anything in return, that’s a whole different topic.
So, what is the meaning of this mysterious phrase – ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’? Here’s what it is.
The key word here is not ‘good’, but ‘intentions’. By definition, there can be no problem with good. It’s good that people have good intentions. It’s right. But that’s not enough. You not only need to have good intentions, but also act on them. Otherwise, it goes like this: people conceive a good intention in their hearts. It enlightens them, they glow and melt from the sweet goodness of their intentions. And that’s where it ends. People do nothing. Why? Because they’re already fooled by this goodness, their brains deceive them, they already ‘think’ they’ve done something just by ‘intending’.
However, no matter how many and what kind of good intentions a person has, if they immediately (this is the key point) do nothing about realizing these intentions, turning them into reality, then that’s it. The intention remains just an idea. And this is much worse than if a person never had a single good intention: demand arises from nothing. Demand comes from those who have good ideas, kind impulses, desires to give, but kill them without bringing them to action. This is how the road to hell is paved. And the more unrealized good intentions there are, the better paved the road becomes.
So you have to act. Immediately. If you want to help people – right now you need to go and help them. If you want to feed the hungry – right now buy food and go feed them. If you want to save animals – right now go and save them. Or give money to those who do. Only action counts.
And the same law applies to a person’s own life. The more a person is given – abilities, talents, knowledge, skills – the more will be demanded of them. The more will be asked of them. And the more intentions a person has – not turned into action – the richer their road to hell is paved, the more likely this road will lead them there.
I won’t delve into the theosophical discussions now on what hell is, although the author of the phrase we’re discussing is a theologian. It works perfectly for atheists too. Besides the biblical meaning, for everyone hell is something of their own. But for me, it’s scarier in old age to look at all the endless possibilities to change the world from my own to the world of the entire planet that were in my hands, and then look at what I actually did, and be filled with deep sorrow over the ‘years lived in vain’. I already feel the breath of this hell. It’s close. It’s catching up. With each passing year, this hell breathes hotter on my neck, reminding me that the years are passing, and I’ve done so little of what I ‘intended’.
I wish every young person realized this, even when they’re very young, so they wouldn’t feel ‘agonizing pain’ when all their intentions shimmer as bricks on that long yellow brick road…
From a reliable (in my view) source: The exact meaning of this expression: ‘Hell is full of good meaning and wishings’ – ‘Ад полон добрыми намерениями и желаниями’. It belongs to the English theologian of the 17th century George Herbert. The meaning of this phrase is that there are significantly more good intentions than good deeds, and people who have good intentions but do not implement them cannot be considered righteous and end up in hell. To some extent, this expression is a loose paraphrase of the thought of the apostle James expressed in his General Epistle: ‘faith without works is dead’.
PS By the way, I understood the meaning of this phrase even before I started studying Christianity, at the age of 11.
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