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

by David Bentley Hart

But, that aside, there remains a far larger and grimmer absurdity in the moral possibilities these arguments ask us to entertain, and what those possibilities imply about the meaning of any human love. Needless to say, we cannot describe, or even faintly imagine, what the final state of a redeemed soul might be like. But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture; and there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude—a Kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ—which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality, rather than a perfect escape from personality.

But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances; they are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves. And this poses a problem. For me, all attempts to imagine the conditions of God’s Kingdom over against the reality of the eternal torment of those outside its demesne irresistibly summon up a single recurrent image: that of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that—those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love—really to be consigned to the fire, as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten, or willfully ignored, for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And, if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed, and is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Moreover,...

I cannot help but feel that this is something like the paradox of the ship of Theseus, except that in this case—in which the deepest emotional and personal elements that compose a soul have been stripped away—it is the living form, rather than its mere material instantiation, that has been obliterated. So why would we even speak about salvation at that point, rather than about the total replacement of one thing by ano...

Is the bliss of the beatific union with God so transfiguring and consuming and complete as to reduce all subsidiary relations to nothing, and thereby in a single stroke to reduce each personhood to nothing, so that all that remains is an anonymous act of intellection immersed in perpetual, unpitying delight? This is an obvious thing, really: This blessedly “oblivious” account of the afterlife of the elect is incoherent simply because, for salvation to be the salvation of persons—as opposed to the final liberation of something anonymous and “transcendent” of personality, something that must be rescued from its defiling entanglement in personality’s pathetic need for others—there must be some sort of continuity of identity between the soul as it exists during its wanderings in this vale of tears and the soul as it shall be when it is raised up into God. And such continuity is impossible apart from those we love, because we are, as persons, the creatures of our loves.

It is not simply that our identities are constituted by our memories—though, of course, they are, and this is crucially important—but also that the personhood of any of us, in its entirety, is created by and sustained within the loves and associations and affinities that shape us. There is no such thing as a person in separation. Personhood as such, in fact, is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing, and it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller (or a retreat into a more impoverished) existence. And so, as I said in my First Meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances.

In the end, a person cannot begin or continue to be a person at all except in and by way of all other persons.

But, then, this is to say that either all persons must be saved, or none can be. According to the traditional picture of a dual eternity, a final division of the saved and the damned (whether the latter be tortured forever or merely forever annihilated), God could in fact save no persons at all. He could of course erase each of the elect as whoever they once were, by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell, and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person—associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. But persons, it seems, could not be saved; they could only be damned. Only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny: tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether. Is this, then, our choice after all: either a hell of eternal torment or a heaven that is the annihilation of everything that ever made us who we were? If that is so, if to enter heaven we must be reduced to anonymous essences, each indiscernibly distinct from every other, perhaps it is to hell that we should want to go. And that, as it happens, is where this part of my argument ends.

This passage reminds me, as it happens, of certain of the teachings of Isaac of Nineveh, especially those regarding the nature of a truly merciful heart illuminated by God’s love, which is unable to contemplate even the sufferings of devils without tears of compassion.

It is quite the opposite—the morally sane and spiritually enlightened opposite, that is—of the degrading and barbaric nonsense that the felicity of heaven could be increased by the saints’ knowledge of the torments of the damned.

Plato’s Phaedo, for example, contains a far more unambiguous theory of perpetual damnation than does any text found in the Bible.

And how many modern Evangelicals think of salvation as something one receives by “accepting Jesus” as one’s “personal lord and savior,” even though such language is wholly absent from the New Testament, and even though all the real scriptural language of salvation is about a corporate condition of sacramental, moral, and spiritual union with the “body of Christ”?

Hence, the only defense of the infernalist position that is logically and morally worthy of being either taken seriously or refuted scrupulously is the argument from free will: that hell exists simply because, in order for a creature to be able to love God freely, there must be some real alternative to God open to that creature’s power of choice, and that hell therefore is a state the apostate soul has chosen for itself in perfect freedom, and that the permanency of hell is testament only to how absolute that freedom is.

Above all, a Christian is more or less obliged to believe that there is such a thing as an intrinsic nature in rational spirits: We are created, that is to say, according to a divine design, after the divine image, oriented toward a divine purpose, and thus are fulfilled in ourselves only insofar as we can achieve the perfection of our natures in union with God. There alone our true happiness lies.

Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God.

To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our souls, we ceaselessly yearn. Whatever separates us from that end, even if it be our own power of choice, is a form of bondage to the irrational. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.

to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose.

To this state one can attain only when one’s nature has been so emancipated from error that nothing can prevent it from reaching and enjoying the only end that can fulfill it: God. Only then is a rational being not a slave to ignorance and delusion.

At the same time, rationality must by definition be intentionality: the mind’s awareness, that is, of a purpose it seeks or an end it wishes to achieve or a meaning it wishes to affirm. Rational freedom, in its every action, must be teleological in structure: one must know the end one is choosing, and why. Any act of the mind or will done without a reason, conversely, would be by definition irrational and therefore a symptom of bondage to something outside of or lower than the rational will.