Salvation for All?
Stephen Watt asks whether a Catholic can accept Universalism?
Universalism and Catholicism: will all be saved?
As we approach the Feast of Christ the King at the end of the Church’s liturgical year, and then move into Advent with its focus on Christ’s Second Coming, it’s appropriate to spend some time thinking about what is involved in the Nicene Creed’s proclamation that
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
In particular, I’m going to focus on the challenge of ‘universalism’ which, in this context, means the claim that all will be saved, whatever their sins, and that there is no eternal hell; although there is a purgatorial hell where, for a finite amount of time, we may be cleansed of our sins so that we may enter fully into God’s Kingdom. One of the most forceful presentations of this view in recent years has been given by the Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart in his book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (2019). Quite apart from the intrinsic value of his arguments, Hart is well known for a punchy literary and personal style, all of which has led to a considerable and continuing interest in this work.
It is perhaps unfashionable to start off by noting that, as an adherent to Eastern Orthodoxy, Hart is a schismatic or, more delicately, in an irregular situation with regard to the Catholic Church. In short, he does not accept the teaching authority of the Catholic Church as expressed through the Pope and the Bishops. I would not expect Hart to accept that he also rejects the teaching authority of the Orthodox churches, still less that he stands outside the tradition of those churches: his book argues forcefully that universalism was an important strand of patristic belief and, moreover, is the only way of making sense of the Christian theology as a whole. But it is worth establishing at the beginning of this discussion that Hart’s understanding of ecclesial authority is problematic, particularly from a Catholic point of view. Moreover, it seems fairly clear that, from anything like a reasonable understanding of Catholic authority, universalism has been condemned by the Church. (Edward Feser gives a useful synopsis of the sources here https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/08/popes-creeds-councils-and-catechisms.html .) Hart is clearly not going to be surprised to learn that he is not a Catholic, and the debate on the orthodoxy of his Orthodoxy can be left to him and the Bishops of his church. But before embarking on a more detailed examination of his arguments, it is important to keep in mind the issue of the authority to teach definitively, and we have absolutely no reason to think that Hart’s position on this is the Catholic one. As I noted earlier, it’s rather unfashionable, and perhaps indelicate, to point this out in a time where much theology is done without reference to denominational boundaries and revealed authority. Nevertheless, there is absolutely no reason to expect agreement between two approaches which rest on different existential commitments: whatever might be learned from Hart, his way cannot be exactly our way.
All that said, let’s turn to the substance of Hart’s approach. Although he offers a number of theological, philosophical and rhetorical arguments for the truth of universalism, perhaps the key one rests on the goodness of God and human freedom. In essence, Hart argues that a finite creature, with a freedom of action restricted by its environment and character, can never be worthy of an infinite, eternal punishment. It would therefore be inconsistent with the goodness of God to impose one. Moreover, without the end of hell, the final victory of an omnipotent God over evil is incomplete:
In the end, if God is God and spirit is spirit, and if there really is an inextinguishable rational freedom in every soul, evil itself must disappear in every intellect and will, and hell must be no more. Only then will God, both as the end of history and as that eternal source and end of beings who transcends history, be all in all. For God, as scripture says, is a consuming fire, and he must finally consume everything (Hart, 2019, p.195).
There is self-evidently a narrative attraction to this: Christ as victor conquers evil and establishes a Kingdom unblemished by the damned. But I’m not sure in itself it is more compelling than the alternative picture of a universe set to rights with everything in its place: a choice presented, the wicked condemned, the good rewarded. The establishment of justice is, after all, an abiding and constant theme in much literature (think detective novels or Mozart’s Don Giovanni) which suggests that it is at least no less attractive a goal than perfect reconciliation.
Given that Hart is happy to speculate on the psychopathology of those ‘infernalists’ who countenance eternal punishment, it is perhaps only fair to return the favour by speculating on the sentimentalism of those universalists who imagine a Cockaigne where the personalities of the wicked are magically transformed while remaining themselves. When we approach God’s ineffable life at the end of our lives, the inadequacy of our language and imagination to express our eternal life with God becomes apparent. No one thinks that hell will be literally like the images of, say, Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings. Nor, when forced to reflect in detail, are the images of paradise much more easily expressed. Put roughly, we infernalists rely on a bald promise: the saved will be saved and the damned damned. All will be done with perfect justice. Just don’t ask me to be too specific on what that amounts to literally, any more than I can expect Hart to describe in detail quite what his purgatorial hell would involve that would transform Jack the Ripper into…what? (And how?)
None of this is an adequate reply to Hart’s specific arguments, but I don’t think there can be one any more than Hart’s arguments are themselves adequate. It should be a familiar observation to anyone involved in philosophy that some issues drag on over the generations despite individual thinkers being convinced they have resolved them. There is no way to short circuit those endless discussions: that’s just what philosophical argument is like. So at one level, the discussion of universalism will go on and should go on. But since it involves a multiplicity of intellectual issues that we have no reason to believe will resolved quickly or even this side of the Parousia, that leaves open the question of what to do in the meantime. (And that ‘meantime’ will extend for all those reading this longer than your lives and the lives of your children.) Hart is personally convinced that universalism is true and that to the extent that Catholic understandings of authoritative teaching support ‘infernalism’, so much the worse for Catholic understandings. That’s a common situation in modernity: an awareness of a number of possibilities in religion and ethics, all supported by smart people (or peoples) with conviction, and all possessing at least a measure of initial plausibility. We should not be surprised that people who are intelligent and morally good are atheists or Buddhists or whatever. Even if we believe that, given enough time and resources, we might be able rationally to persuade them of their error, such a belief should be coupled with a realisation that, in reality, such persuasion will not often succeed. And so we end back where I started. In the face of two compelling but conflicting visions of what Christ’s final victory will be like -for Hart, the ultimate reconciliation of all to God; for the Catholic, the establishment of perfect justice- it is unavoidable to fall back on something which offers an authority beyond the current state of the academic debate. That’s part of the human condition: we won’t settle key issues of fundamental importance in our lifetimes if ever. So where do we wait and what do we rely on in the meantime? The Catholic Church has an answer to that. I’m not at all sure that Hart does, except for his conviction that he is utterly, certainly and miraculously right.
Stephen Watt
Further reading:
Hart, D.B.H., 2019, That All Shall Be Saved, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.
There have been extensive discussions of this issue on Edward Feser’s blog (opposing universalism)
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
  and Father Adrian Kimel’s (supportive of it)
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/
.