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

by David Bentley Hart

He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone (11:32): all are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy.

Would that Christian tradition had—this is my incessant lament, my tireless refrain, my cri de cœur—heeded Gregory of Nyssa instead. So many unpleasant confusions might have been avoided, so many young minds might have been preserved against psychological abuse, so many Christian moral imaginations might have been spared such enormous corruptions. When Gregory looked at the eschatological language of the New Testament, what he believed he saw was—as I said in my First Meditation—not some everlasting division between the two cities of the redeemed and the reprobate, but only a provisional division between two moments within the single economy of a universal salvation. What he found was—as I phrased it in my Second Meditation—two distinct eschatological horizons, one wholly enclosed within the other.

From eternity, says Gregory, God has conceived of humanity under the form of an ideal “Human Being” (ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos), at once humanity’s archetype and perfection, a creature shaped entirely after the divine likeness, neither male nor female, possessed of divine virtues: purity, love, impassibility, happiness, wisdom, freedom, and immortality.

On the Making of Humanity, Gregory reads Genesis 1:26–7—the first account of the creation of the race, where humanity is described as being made “in God’s image”—as referring not to the making of Adam as such, but to the conception within the eternal divine counsels of this full community of all of humanity: the whole of the race, comprehended by God’s “foresight” as “in a single body,” which only in its totality truly reflects the divine likeness and the divine beauty.

And what thus came into being was, through omnipotent wisdom, not part of the whole, but the entire plenitude of the nature altogether.”

For Gregory, of course, good classical Christian metaphysician that he was, evil and sin are always accidental conditions of human nature, never intrinsic qualities; all evil is a privation of an original goodness, and so the sinfulness that separates rational creatures from God is only a disease corrupting and disabling the will, robbing it of its true rational freedom, and thus is a disorder that must ultimately be purged from human nature in its entirety, even if needs be by hell. As Gregory argues in On the Making of Humanity, evil is inherently finite—in fact, in a sense, is pure finitude, pure limit—and so builds only toward an ending; evil is a tale that can have only an immanent conclusion; and, in the light of God’s infinity, its proper end will be shown to be nothing but its own disappearance. Once it has been exhausted, when every shadow of wickedness—all chaos, duplicity, and violence—has been outstripped by the infinity of God’s splendor, beauty, radiance, and delight, God’s glory will shine in each creature like the sun in an immaculate mirror, and each soul—born into the freedom of God’s image—will turn of its own nature toward divine love. There is no other place, no other liberty; at the last, to the inevitable God humanity is bound by its freedom.

if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.

After all, consider how happy we could all be if we never had to think of anyone’s sufferings at all.

who then exactly is that parent when he or she has achieved union with God, once those memories have been either converted into indifference or altogether expunged? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?

the paradox of the ship of Theseus,

it is the living form, rather than its mere material instantiation, that has been obliterated.

Who is it, after all, who remains to be saved?

According to Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), in fact, only the Trinitarian God is “personal” in the full sense, because in the simplicity of his coinherent life of love he comprises every modality of personal being: he is at once “I,” “we,” “thou,” “you,” but entirely as the one God. We are not that. And this means that we require others in order to possess all the necessary and constitutive modalities of true personal existence for ourselves. So, if not subsistent relations, we are nonetheless, so long as we are anything at all, subsistences of relationality; each of us is an entire history of attachments and affinities, and none of those attachments and affinities is merely accidental to some more essential self.

George MacDonald: Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father? (Unspoken Sermons, Series I: “Love Thy Neighbour”)

Gregory says in his great mystical commentary On the Song of Songs—“the redeemed unity of all, united one with another by their convergence upon the One Good.” Only thus will humanity “according to the divine image” come into being, and only thus will God be truly all in all.

In reality, the idea of eternal perdition for the wickedest of souls, in a place of unending suffering, appears to have been a Greek notion—mythological, religious, and philosophical—before it ever took (shallow) root in Jewish thought; it is certainly also an idea of only the most dubious “scriptural” authenticity. Plato’s Phaedo, for example, contains a far more unambiguous theory of perpetual damnation than does any text found in the Bible. The spiritual vision common to the pagan world in which Christianity was born accommodated an immense range of speculations and beliefs and doubts regarding the nature and destiny of the human soul; but only a very few systems of religious thought were wholly free of terrifying opinions concerning what lay ahead for the reprobate or spiritually deluded.

anyone who thinks that what we do in this life can be “serious” only insofar as it figures into some sublimely fatuous game of chance, whose final stakes are absolutely all or nothing, suffers from a tragically diminutive moral imagination. It was precisely the absence of the banality of an eternal hell in Origen’s thought that allowed him to believe that all of life and all of creation have a meaning, one immeasurably richer and more ravishing than some tawdry final division between the winners and losers of the game of history: the fullness of reality that will be achieved when all being is perfectly united to God, and God is all in all. For Origen 1 Corinthians 15 was the great key to the whole of the Christian mystery.

Christians rarely pay particularly close attention to what the Bible actually says, for the simple reason that the texts defy synthesis in a canon of exact doctrines, and yet most Christians rely on doctrinal canons. Theologians are often the most cavalier in their treatment of the texts, chiefly because their first loyalty is usually to the grand systems of belief they have devised or adopted; but the Bible is not a system. A very great deal of theological tradition consists therefore in explaining away those aspects of scripture that contradict the finely wrought structure of this or that orthodoxy. To

No principle is more deeply embedded in the soil of Protestant belief than the assertion that we are saved not by works but “by faith alone”; and yet the only appearance of this phrase in the whole of the New Testament (James 2:24) is in a verse that exactly contradicts such a claim.

Most are captives of systems of theology that arose in the sixteenth century and after—this is true even of most Catholics—which were so remote in sensibility and conceptual structure from the world of the first century that they scarcely retained anything of the intellectual atmosphere and natural idiom of the Evangelists and Apostles, and which incorporated distinctly modern notions about such things as the nature of sovereignty and the logic of rational freedom.

and when creation, by this perfect union with God, is finally fully raised up out of the nothingness from which God liberates it in making it exist.

then, finally, there was his metaphysical—but also biblical—conviction regarding the inherent finitude of evil, the infinite fullness of God’s goodness, and the irrepressible dynamism of the moral life of rational spirits. He accepted, naturally, the definition of evil as a purely privative reality, with no substance or nature of its own, since God alone is the source of all being and “in him there is no darkness at all.” He believed also that finite natures are necessarily dynamic realities, constituted as much by change as by formal stability, and that a finite rational being exists only in its act of moral and ontological desire for the Good, ever in motion. And he believed, of course, that God alone is the infinite plenitude of being and goodness that every soul seeks, by union with whom the soul is transformed into an eternally expanding vessel of divinity, an infinite capacity for love and knowledge transfigured forever—again, as Paul says—“from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

if this story then also entails that God freely and needlessly created the world knowing that this would be the result, then Christianity has no “evangel”—no “good news”—to impart. There is only the hideous truth of a monstrous deity presiding over an evil world whose very existence is an act of cruelty, meaninglessly embellished with the additional narrative detail—almost parodic in its triviality—of the arbitrary salvation of a few select souls who are not even in any special sense deserving of the privilege (else grace were not grace, and absolute power were not absolute power).

Thomas’s defense of Peter Lombard’s (genuinely sadistic) idea that the saints in heaven receive an increase in their beatitude from their knowledge of the tortures of the damned.

he was certain, of course, that the joys of the beatific vision must of their nature be perfect, and hence wholly unmarred by any shadow of sorrow or pity. Thus, in order to affirm that the sufferings of the damned—not only in themselves, but also as known to the saints—must conduce to some good, he could scarcely have arrived at any other conclusion than the one he reached.

So, if one must make sense of the senseless here, then one must find some “greater good” in what to all appearances would be an unmitigated evil. So it was that the Lombard and Thomas arrived at their “amplification of beatitude” argument, since this endues hell with at least an extrinsic value. It was a poignantly desperate attempt to find some purpose in what would otherwise obviously be recognizable as an endless act of needless vindictiveness. But it is an absurd and depraved argument from every imaginable angle. To begin with, there is something inherently silly about the notion that God—the infinite wellspring of all Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Being—would not be sufficient in himself to communicate the perfect knowledge of the Good and the happiness it entails to rational natures, formed for no other end than seeking union with him, when they are joined to him in eternity. It is nonsensical to think that the knowledge of his goodness could require or even allow for rational clarification—or that the soul’s rational pleasure in that knowledge could be susceptible of increase—by way of some negative contrast, such as the sufferings of the damned. If a rational creature formed in the divine image required such a contrast fully to know God’s goodness, then God’s self-revelation as the Good in creatures could never be complete in itself. It would of its nature always require the “negative probation” of what is contrary to the Good. There would then, it seems, be some de...