The Orthodox Way

by Kallistos Ware

For, whether the End comes late or soon in our human time-scale, it is always imminent, always spiritually close at hand. We are to have in our hearts a sense of urgency. In the words of the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete, recited each Lent: My soul, O my soul, rise up! Why art thou sleeping? The End draws near, and soon shalt thou be troubled. Watch, then, that Christ thy God may spare thee, For he is everywhere present and fills all things.4

Christ is the judge; and yet, from another point of view, it is we who pronounce judgement upon ourselves. If anyone is in hell, it is not because God has imprisoned him there, but because that is where he himself has chosen to be. The lost in hell are self-condemned, self-enslaved; it has been rightly said that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.

How can a God of love accept that even a single one of the creatures whom he has made should remain for ever in hell? There is a mystery here which, from our standpoint in this present life, we cannot hope to fathom. The best we can do is to hold in balance two truths, contrasting but not contradictory. First, God has given free will to man, and so to all eternity it lies in man's power to reject God. Secondly, love signifies compassion, involvement; and so, if there are any who remain eternally in hell, in some sense God is also there with them. It is written in the Psalms, “If I go down to hell, thou art there also” (139:7); and St Isaac the Syrian says, “It is wrong to imagine that sinners in hell are cut off from the love of God.”5 Divine love is everywhere, and rejects no one. But we on our side are free to reject divine love: we cannot, however, do so without inflicting pain upon ourselves, and the more final our rejection the more bitter our suffering.

“A new heaven and a new earth”: man is not saved from his body but in it; not saved from the material world but with it. Because man is microcosm and mediator of the creation, his own salvation involves also the reconciliation and transfiguration of the whole animate and inanimate creation around him—its deliverance “from the bondage of corruption” and entry “into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). In the “new earth” of the Age to come there is surely a place not only for man but for the animals: in and through man, they too will share in immortality, and so will rocks, trees and plants, fire and water.

Never, in all eternity, shall we reach a point where we have accomplished all that there is to do, or discovered all that there is to know. “Not only in this present age but also in the Age to come,” says St Irenaeus, “God will always have something more to teach man, and man will always have something more to learn from God.”10