In the Fullness of Time: A Personal Reflection on Freedom, Forgiveness, and Hope in the Final Restoration
For a while, I had been baffled by the Catholic belief in an eternal hell — what is the purpose of it, if we pray that God will “lead all souls to heaven”? This theological inquiry not only caused me to fall into intense spiritual anxiety, but also led me to lament over sins and the souls that do not know God. In addition, my spiritual naivete and my inadequate understanding of grace and free will caused me to agonize over the question of how an omnipotent God cannot 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. In Henry Chadwick’s words, it is a “consequence of man’s ignorance and difficulty” which were “originally a natural created state of man’s infancy in the struggle upwards, and therefore in no sense the result of sin, but because of freely chosen neglect, they pass into a penal condition of blindness to the truth and of ceaseless toil.” (Chadwick, 150–151) While I felt that I was not theologically well-trained enough to critique Augustine’s position or to articulate how I felt about it, nevertheless it was disheartening for me to think that this kind of ignorance could become a ‘carnal habit’ which will result in people ultimately losing the power to know what is right.
However, it was exactly the concept of having (or losing) “the power to know what is right” that served as a turning point in this agonizing intellectual and spiritual inquiry and 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 the concept of evil as a privation of the Good. If evil is non-being, doesn’t that mean that the person doing evil is in pursuit of at least some kind of goodness, or Good sub contrario? Or, in other words, could it be possible that the person is doing something that they think is right, even though it is objectively wrong or mistaken? But more importantly, must I, or we, lose faith in our fellow human beings and believe that it is possible for people to do evil for evil’s sake?
At the end, it seems to me that this idea does not sit well with the understanding 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.” (Hart, 173) No action can be purely irrational, and therefore no one can truly choose evil as an end in itself. 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.
This understanding of absolute freedom has often been used by infernolists to argue that hell is a state where “the apostate soul has chosen for itself in perfect freedom, and that permanency of hell is testament only to how absolute that freedom is.” (Hart, 171) This view led me to ask if an omnipotent God must depend on hell and evil, created things, 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, then how could such condemnation and suffering be eternal? If I believe in creatio ex nihilo, and that God alone is eternal, then I 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.
One thing I do speculate though, is that maybe we have been using the existence of an eternal hell for schadenfreude — some of us (me included, sometimes) somehow 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. Such a belief perhaps is the manifestation that we have become a people that is anti-suffering, and moreover, I wonder if our unhealthy view of suffering is the root of our bitterness. Regarding this, Theodore of Mopsuestia has a moot 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, though, is hope. 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,” Thomas Aquinas writes, and from whom would it be permissible to withhold this love? Indeed, whoever entertains with the possibility of even only one person besides themselves being depraved of heaven is hardly able to love unreservedly.
The more I think about these things, the deeper I begin to understand 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.” (Wojtyła, 135)
I admit it is a bit 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. 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. All the 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 the sudden, I have confidence that all shall be well.
Further Reading
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine of Hippo: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2014.
Wojtyła, Karol Józef. Love and Responsibility. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.
