That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

by David Bentley Hart

If the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which … millions [should be] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? —WILLIAM JAMES

another description for a “spectrum” child’s “exaggerated” emotional sensitivity might simply be “acute moral intelligence.”

the received view throughout most of Christian history has actually been that hell is the final destination not merely of the monsters among us, but of all sorts of lesser miscreants: the profligate, the wanton, the unbaptized, the unbelieving, the unelect … the unlucky.

nothing can make the idea morally coherent.

All that said, however, I suppose I do have to plead guilty to a certain breach of etiquette. I knew before setting out that there are some fairly inflexible rules about how one is allowed to discuss this topic, and I chose to ignore them. No one has ever written them down, of course, but everyone is tacitly expected to observe them, and anyone so tactless as to violate them—to raise serious questions in the wrong way about the logical and moral coherence of the concept of a state of perpetual conscious torment visited upon rational creatures by a God of infinite love and justice, or about its scriptural or historical authenticity—risks the sort of censure that can scour a social calendar clean. These rules tell us that, even if one might think the concept of an eternal hell truly obscene, and that it makes existence itself seem like a cruel burden visited on us by a merciless omnipotence, one must never be so indiscreet as to say so. We must not scandalize the faithful. If one feels an irresistible impulse to raise questions here, one must still conceal any excessive personal distaste for the received view, affect doubt about one’s doubts, assume a deferential attitude toward tradition, and express oneself humbly, hesitantly, demurely, apologetically—even contritely. This, alas, I cannot do. Really, as far as I can see, these rules have nothing to do with good manners and everything to do with uneasy consciences. I am convinced that, just below the surface of most believe...

Christians know that something is incorrigibly amiss in the very concept of eternal torment, as otherwise they would not feel the need to absolve God of any direct responsibility for its imposition.

I am convinced, is that most Christians do not really believe what they believe they believe.

They are aware, at some level they rarely plumb within themselves, that they have acquiesced to an irrational and wicked tenet of the creed.

more objectively atrocious, or more aggressively perverse? The person who claims that every newborn infant enters the world justly under the threat of eternal torment and that a good God imposes or permits the imposition of a state of perpetual agony on finite, created rational beings as part of the mystery of his love or sovereignty or justice (or whatever else)? Or the person who frankly observes that such ideas are cruel and barbarous and depraved?

A belief does not merit unconditional reverence just because it is old or because its proponents claim a divine authority for it that they cannot prove; neither should it be immune to being challenged in terms commensurate to the scandal it poses. And the belief that a God of infinite intellect, justice, love, and power would condemn rational beings to a state of endless suffering, or would allow them to condemn themselves on account of their own delusion, pain, and anger, is probably worse than merely scandalous. It may be the most horrid notion the religious imagination has ever entertained, and the most irrational and spiritually corrosive picture of existence possible.

In truth, the notion of eternal torment is so unquestionably, resplendently warped and irrational that every defense of it ever made, throughout the whole of Christian history, has been a bad one. We may deceive ourselves that we have heard good arguments in its favor, but only because we have already made the existential decision to believe in hell’s eternity no matter what—or, really, because that decision was made for us before we were old enough to think for ourselves. Even many otherwise competent philosophers have, under the impulse of faith, convinced themselves and others of the solvency of arguments that, viewed dispassionately, scarcely rise to the level of pious gibberish. It has always all been a mirage. So, if one can make oneself retract that initial surrender to the abysmally ludicrous, even for only a moment, one will discover that all apologetics for the infernalist orthodoxy consist in claims that no truly rational person should take seriously. Every one of them is an exercise in self-delusion, self-hypnosis, pacification of the conscience, stupefaction of the moral intelligence—and nothing else.

We suddenly realize that, were the dominant tradition true, all of existence would be a kind of horror story, like a tale of guests at a party at a splendid estate enjoying themselves in perfect ease of mind while far below, down in the deepest basement of the house, there is a torture-chamber filled with victims whose cries never reach the rooms overhead.

There have been Christian “universalists”—Christians, that is, who believe that in the end all persons will be saved and joined to God in Christ—since the earliest centuries of the faith.

They even believed in hell, though not in its eternity; to them, hell was the fire of purification described by the Apostle Paul in the third chapter of 1 Corinthians, the healing assault of unyielding divine love upon obdurate souls, one that will save even those who in this life prove unworthy of heaven by burning away every last vestige of their wicked deeds.

first four centuries of the church,

I mean only that, if Christianity taken as a whole is indeed an entirely coherent and credible system of belief, then the universalist understanding of its message is the only one possible.

Some, for instance, will claim that universalism clearly contradicts the explicit language of scripture (it does not). Others will argue that universalism was decisively condemned as heretical by the fifth Ecumenical Council (it was not). The more adventurous will attempt what they take to be stronger versions of those same philosophical defenses of the idea of an eternal hell that I describe and reject in these pages.

have to give a complete account of my views on the matter simply as a courtesy to those who have taken the time to respond to my earlier statements, but without the benefit of knowing the entire shape of my thinking.

The only good thing I can report about this is that I seem to have nearly perfected a tone of voice that veils vexation behind lustrous clouds of disingenuous patience; and the acquisition of a new social skill is always a blessing.

casual callousness that is so frequent a concomitant of deep piety.

Abba Macarius was not only extraordinarily merciful, but in fact immeasurably more merciful than the God he worshipped.

It would also have been exceedingly hard for me not to notice how viciously vindictive the creator of such a hell would have had to be to have devised so exquisitely malicious a form of torture and then to have made it eternal, and how unjust in condemning men and women to unending torment for the “sin” of not knowing him even though he had never revealed himself to them, or for some formally imputed guilt supposedly attaching to them on account of some distant ancestor’s transgression.

if God knows all things, and so knew from everlasting that the final fate of the high priest would be to suffer everlasting torment, then the very choice to create him had been an act of limitless cruelty.

None of these, however, has ever persuaded me of anything, except perhaps the lengths of specious reasoning to which even very intelligent persons can go when they feel bound by faith to believe something inherently incredible.

A hardened heart is already its own punishment; the refusal to love or be loved makes the love of others—or even just their presence—a source of suffering and a goad to wrath.

It is the soul, then, and not God, that lights hell’s fires, by interpreting the advent of divine love as a violent assault upon the jealous privacy of the self.

the primary question of whether the God who creates a reality in which the eternal suffering of any being is possible—even if it should be a self-induced suffering—can in fact be the infinitely good God of love that Christianity says he is.

final state of eternal torment could be neither a just sentence pronounced upon nor a just fate suffered by a finite being, no matter how depraved that being might have become.

They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense.

In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities, in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense.

The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety.

In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen, learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

The conspiracy, so to speak, is an entirely open one, an unpremeditated corporate labor of communal self-deception, requiring us all to do our parts to sustain one another in our collective derangement.

For the Thomist, being is the first good, higher than any other, inasmuch as God himself is subsistent Being, and so, even for a soul in hell, nonexistence would be a greater evil than perpetual agony. Of course, this is ridiculous; but it helps fill in one of the gaps in the tale.

A gift that is at once wholly irresistible and a source of unrelieved suffering on the part of its recipient is not a gift at all, even in the most tenuously analogous sense; and, speaking for myself, I cannot see how existence as such is truly a divine gift if it has been entirely severed from free and rational participation in the goodness of things.

What I find fascinating about the Thomist position here is not that it is “wrong”—it does not rise to the level of the correct or incorrect—but that it is utterly devoid of so much as a trace of compelling logical content.

It poses its own premises not as logically established or analytic truths, but simply as necessary correlates of its own foregone conclusions.

The argument is nothing but a naked assertion, one that can recommend itself favorably only to a mind that has already been indoctrinated in obedience to a much larger and more pernicious set of assumptions, and that has been prepared by a long psychological and dogmatic formation to accept ludicrous propositions without complaint if it must, as it gropes ...

And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or...

A rational person capable of that assent, however—of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction—has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths: such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they...

he lovingly grants us the capacity freely to love, even if he lovingly withholds the conditions that would allow us to recognize him as the proper object of our love …

For the earliest Christians, the story of salvation was entirely one of rescue, all the way through: the epic of God descending into the depths of human estrangement to release his creatures from bondage to death, penetrating even into the heart of hades to set the captives free and recall his prodigal children and restore a broken creation.

As it happens, I do believe that the only hell that could possibly exist is the one of which those Christian contemplatives speak: the hatred within each of us that turns the love of others—of God and neighbor—into torment. It is entirely a state we impose upon ourselves.

Could such a refusal of God’s love be sustained eternally while still being truly free? And would God truly be the Good in an ultimate sense—and his act of creation good in a final sense—if the eternal loss of any soul to endless sorrow were a real possibility?

I am convinced that practically no one who holds firmly to the majority tradition regarding the doctrine of hell ultimately does so for any reason other than an obstinate, if largely unconscious, resolve to do so, prompted by the unshakable conviction that faith absolutely requires it.

It gives them a sense of belonging to a very small and select company, a very special club, and they positively relish the prospect of a whole eternity in which to enjoy the impotent envy of all those writhing, resentful souls that have been permanently consigned to an inferior neighborhood outside the gates. That is the sort of prestige that cannot be bought where the common people shop.

I cannot help but see them as victims of their own diseased emotional conditions; and I have no doubt that, if one were to inquire deeply into their pasts, one would encounter any number of depressingly mundane psychological explanations for their heartlessness.

I still insist that most putative believers in an eternal hell do not really believe in it at all, but rather merely believe in their belief in it.

the whole question of hell is one whose answer should be immediately obvious to a properly functioning moral intelligence, and that a person either grasps the truth of the matter without much need to be persuaded by arguments (whether dialectically solvent or merely intuitive) or does not:

If he truly thought that our situation in this world were as horribly perilous as he claims, and that every mortal soul labored under the shadow of so dreadful a doom, and that the stakes were so high and the odds so poor for everyone—a mere three score and ten years to get it right if we are fortunate, and then an eternity of agony in which to rue the consequences if we get it wrong—he would never dare to bring a child into this world, let alone five children; nor would he be able to rest even for a moment, because he would be driven ceaselessly around the world in a desperate frenzy of evangelism, seeking to save as many souls from the eternal fire as possible.