THE DUTY TO HOPE: FREEDOM AND THE FINAL RECONCILIATION
Statue of Our Lady of Fatima, from whom the Fatima prayer is said to have originated. Public Domain.
For a while, I had been baffled by the common Christian belief in an eternal hell—what is the purpose of it, if we pray that God will “lead all souls to heaven,” as millions of Christians do in, for example, the Fatima prayer? This theological quandary not only caused me intense spiritual anxiety, but also led me to lament over both our individual and collective sins and the souls that do not know God. Moreover, why wouldn’t an omnipotent God simply make everyone believe in and love him? It was of little help when I read works by Augustine, who believes that evil is in the will, not in nature, and that it is a consequence of a free choice. Augustine also tells us that although ignorance and struggle may start off as normal parts of human experience, they can become carnal habits that ultimately rob us of the power to know what is right. It was disheartening for me to think that sin can deepen our weakness to a point where it becomes hardened resistance to God.
However, it was exactly the concept of having (or losing) the power to know what is right that eventually set me on the path to gaining some clarity and relief. It all started with me trying to reconcile the idea of not knowing what is right and Augustine’s concept of evil as a privation of the Good. The idea goes like this: that if God is the source of all that is good and does not create evil, then evil has no existence on its own. What we call “evil” is simply the lack of goodness. Evils like illness and pain result from the lack of something the body needs (like the lack of vitamin C causes scurvy), while moral evils like theft result from our lack of love for, and understanding of, the supreme good. We live in a world where good and evil are often defined as two simplistic cosmic forces that push and pull at each other, each with an independent existence. However, if evil is non-being, then the person doing evil is in pursuit of at least some kind of goodness, or Good sub contrario. The thief seeks the good of possessing something they will enjoy, even if the means they use to attain it are evil; a person might do something that they think is right because they willfully lack the capacity for right judgment, even though it is objectively wrong or mistaken.
This is tied to the fact that humans have rational will, which is closely related to intentionality. As David Bentley Hart writes, “Rational freedom, in its every action, must be teleological in structure: one must know the end one is choosing, and why.” (1) No action can be purely irrational, and therefore no one can truly choose evil as an end in itself - since evil, after all, is not a thing at all. This is especially persuasive when we are reminded that humans are created to know God, who is all Good and will be all in all. However, in order for humans to truly freely love God and the Good, they must be given the options to choose to do things that might not sit well with God. God does not create humans to be robots, after all. “A sinless world is impossible given freedom, and without freedom there are no human beings,” Denys Turner writes. (2)
This understanding of absolute freedom has often been used by people who believe in an eternal hell to argue that hell is a state of eternal darkness that motivates, or rather terrifies, mortals to do good according to God’s Law. For instance, T. S. Eliot, in his letter to American journalist Paul Elmer More, writes that he “had far rather walk… in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children’s game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end” because “religion has brought [him] at least the perception of something above morals, and therefore extremely terrifying.” (3) This view has led me to further questions. Must an omnipotent God depend on hell and evil to manifest himself to the world that he deeply loves? If the essential Christian understanding of God is that God is infinite love, then must divine punishment be punitive and destructive? Furthermore, if God punishes to heal and save (Cf. Hebrews 12:5-6; Isaiah 44:22 & 55:7; Hosea 6:1, etc), then how could such condemnation and suffering be eternal? If one believes in creatio ex nihilo, and that God alone is eternal, then one would believe that no rational but finite being can sink to be totally and eternally depraved. The inherent finitude of evil has nothing on the infinite fullness of the goodness of God, after all.
It is possible that we sometimes use the existence of an eternal hell for schadenfreude—some of us (myself included) have a much easier time forgiving cosmological evil than interpersonal evil. How can the perpetrator and the victim eventually end up in the same place?, we ask. On a surface level, it is because forgiveness does not look particularly triumphant. It seems as if when we release the perpetrator from their moral debt, the victim receives nothing in return for their suffering. Regarding this, the ancient Christian writer Theodore of Mopsuestia makes an important point: just as the suffering and the deliverance of the Israelites had a necessary role in the conversion of the Gentiles, so should we believe that what we endure will be beneficial to all for the salvation of all at the end.
I am no optimist when it comes to darkness and injustices in the world. I am also no theologian, nor am I God, therefore I am careful when claiming theological absolutes. But one absolute I do have is hope. Optimism and hope are two different things. While the former implies passive longing, the latter requires active participation. I have begun to realize that hope is not merely a warm and fuzzy feeling I hang on to when I myself am in deep desolation. It is a Christian obligation, just as love is. Love hopes all things (1 Cor. 13:7). “One can hope for eternal life for the others as long as one is united with him through love,” (4) Thomas Aquinas writes, and from whom would it be permissible to withhold this love? Indeed, 20th century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar puts the point more directly: “whoever reckons with the possibility of even only one person’s being lost besides himself is hardly able to love unreservedly.” (5) These notions seamlessly echo Pope John Paul II’s words on agape:
“We love the person, complete with all his or her virtues and faults, and, up to a point, independently of those virtues and in spite of those faults. The strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles, when his or her weakness or even sins come to the surface. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other's shortcomings and faults, and without in the least approving of them.” (6)
It is a cliche to say that we should “hate the sin, not the sinner.” But indeed, we are not asked to love what is evil, but to recognize that every person, and I mean every person, is both the embodiment of human finitude and brokenness, and the bearer of the image of God. As humans, however weak or ignorant we are in our discernment of the good, we were made by God, whose dominion far surpasses that of evil, which is nothing. Since evil will ultimately be overcome, we cannot actually love what is evil—all we have to love is our fellow human beings. Such a humbling thought is crystalized when we come to the realization that no one is in the position to deny anyone the infinite love and mercy of God. No one is beyond the help of God, and everyone has a share in the victory of the Cross. While it is one thing that we hold each others accountable for our actions, it is another thing that we view the world and human experiences as two-dimensional and allow ourselves to be swallowed by bitterness while others fall short of our universal obligation to hope and love, mistaking eternal damnation for ultimate restorative justice. It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Christ did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, which is all of us (Cf. Mark 2:17). Just like illness, sins are inevitable. To wish eternal hell for others is not only to look down upon God’s mercy and the Cross, which are the foundation of the faith, but also to crush down the notion that the ways of God are an enigma that cannot be fathomed. All of a sudden, it makes sense to pray that God will “lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of God’s mercy” with a joyful heart; and all of a sudden, I have confidence that all shall be well.
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 173.
Denys Turner, “All Will Be Well: Julian Norwich, David Hume, and the Problem of Evil,” Commonweal, January 31, 2021, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/all-will-be-well.
T.S. Eliot, “To Paul Elmer More, 2 June 1930,” https://tseliot.com/preoccupations/religion. Accessed, July 15, 2021.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Question 17, Article 3.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2014), 169.
Karol Józef Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 135.
