Dare We Hope That All Men be Saved?: With a Short Discourse on Hell

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

This book is perhaps one of the most misunderstood works of Catholic theology of our time. Critics contend that von Balthasar espouses universalism, the idea that all men will certainly be saved. Yet, as von Balthasar insists, damnation is a real possibility for anyone. Indeed, he explores the nature of damnation with sobering clarity. At the same time, he contends that a deep understanding of God’s merciful love and human freedom, and a careful reading of the Catholic tradition, point to the possibilitynot the certaintythat, in the end, all men will accept the salvation Christ won for all. For this all-embracing salvation, von Balthasar says, we may dare hope, we must pray and with God’s help we must work.

The Catholic Church’s teaching on hell has been generally neglected by theologians, with the notable exception of von Balthasar. He grounds his reflections clearly in Sacred Scripture and Catholic teaching. While the Church asserts that certain individuals are in heaven (the saints), she never declares a specific individual to be in hell. In fact, the Church hopes that in their final moments of life, even the greatest sinners would have repented of their terrible sins, and be saved.

Sacred Scripture states, “God ... desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:45).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Oct 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781681491288

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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FOREWORD

by the

Very Rev. Robert Barron

It is curious indeed that a text so often characterized as advocating an easy universalism in regard to salvation actually commences with a clear statement that all men stand under the divine judgment. Whatever else Hans Urs von Balthasar says in this book, the one thing he is quite clearly not saying is that we have certain knowledge that all people will be saved. But he will insist—in fact, it is the gravamen of his argument—that we are permitted to hope that hell might be empty of men. That this proposition is controversial was evident from the moment this book was published, and it remains evident today. Take even the most cursory look at the extensive and vehement internet conversation surrounding this issue if you doubt me. In the opening pages of his book, Balthasar himself mentions a number of theologians and journalists who dismissed his speculations out of hand, some even questioning his orthodoxy. In very recent times, certain theologians have opined that Balthasars universalism has contributed mightily to the decline of the Church’s influence in the West and to an attenuating of her missionary impulse. In the more popular forums of discussion, one hears that Balthasar’s point of view runs counter to the explicit teaching of Jesus and to the witness of many of the saints.

How does Balthasar (and how can his advocates today) respond to these criticisms? His first move is to remind defenders of a crowded hell that the biblical witness in regard to this issue is, to say the least, complex. Alongside the many references to hell and those who will suffer therein, there are at least as many biblical evocations of universal salvation. To cite simply a few of the best known: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (Jn 12:32); and He has made known to us. . . the mystery of his will. . . as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (Eph 1:9-10); and of course, This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:3-4). That these passages rule out the certitude that many are in hell and justify at least the hope that hell might be empty strikes Balthasar as self-evident.

The testimony of the Fathers is, he convincingly shows, just as multivalent and textured. To be sure, Augustine and many of his colleagues in the Christian West advocated the harsh view that the vast majority of men—the massa damnata—will find their way to hell. However, this teaching was countered by many weighty Fathers in the Christian East, including Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and especially Origen of Alexandria, all of whom taught universal salvation, or something quite close to it. It is, therefore, simply not the case that a clear patristic consensus exists around the issue of a crowded hell. Furthermore, practically all the Fathers, both East and West, reject the view that hell—empty or not—is created by God. Rather, they hold that it is brought about by sinners themselves, whose resistance to the divine love produces suffering in them. In this context, Balthasar cites C. S. Lewis, who famously argued that the door to hell is locked from the inside by those who, from the bottom of their hearts, want to be left alone.

I believe it is fair to say that the recovery of these elements, brought about through the nouvelle théologie’s thorough-going ressourcement, both biblical and patristic, contributed to a development of doctrine in regard to the issue under consideration. Without ever embracing Origen’s apokatastasis pantōn, Balthasar affected a sort of Origenizing of Augustine, a nuancing of the massa damnata theology that, by the early twentieth century, was found increasingly incredible and, indeed, unscriptural. This development has been rather clearly confirmed in the magisterial teaching of the Church, especially in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium and Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe Salvi, both of which offer interpretations of our question that are infinitely more generous than anything in the Augustinian tradition.

The most striking and original contribution that Balthasar makes to this discussion, I believe, is his critique of Thomas Aquinas’s view—shared widely in the classical tradition—that part of the joy of heaven is to witness the sufferings of the damned. To this he contrasts the approach of a surprising number of saints and mystics who declared a willingness to suffer on behalf of a denizen of hell or even, at the limit, to take his place as a gesture of love. The prototype here is Saint Paul himself, who says in the ninth chapter of Romans: I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh (Rom 9:3). The possibility that his fellow Jews might be separated from Christ does not awaken in Paul anything even vaguely resembling gloating self-satisfaction, or even delight in the divine justice, but rather a mercy that conduces to utter self-sacrifice.

Balthasar draws our attention to a number of female mystics who share this Pauline attitude: Mechtilde of Hackeborn, Angela Foligno, Thérèse of Lisieux and Catherine of Siena. A conversation between Christ and Catherine is especially illuminating. Fired by the hope that all people might be saved, Catherine said to Jesus, How could I ever reconcile myself, Lord, to the prospect that a single one of those whom you have created in your image and likeness should become lost and slip from your hands. The answer that the Lord gives her, confided to her spiritual director Raymond of Capua, is breathtaking: Love cannot be contained in hell; it would totally annihilate hell. In other words, the love that Catherine is exhibiting, precisely through her hope that all be saved, functions as an antidote to the poison, or, according to her own metaphor, an obstacle to the entrance of hell. She tells her Lord, If I could remain united with you in love while, at the same time, placing myself before the entrance of hell and blocking it off in such a way that no one could enter, that would be the greatest of joys for me.

Stated abstractly and dispassionately—are there many or few who are saved?—the question remains finally unanswerable, and Balthasar acknowledges this. However, Christ’s own journey to the limits of godforsakenness, to which the saints just mentioned bore witness, provides ample ground for the hope that all might come to salvation. Because of God’s acrobatic display of love—the Son going all the way down to the very bottom of sin and death and then being drawn back to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit—we may reasonably hope that even those who have wandered farthest away from God will be drawn into the dynamics of the divine life. Edith Stein—still another female saint who vibrantly envisioned the possibility of universal salvation—said that human freedom can, in principle, stand definitively athwart God’s love; but given what God has accomplished in Christ, it can be, so to speak, outwitted.

I should like to conclude with just a word about the implications of Balthasar’s position for mission and evangelization. As I suggested above, some hold that the lively hope for universal salvation would conduce to indifferentism: If all will be saved anyway, why bother with preaching, teaching, going on missionary journeys, and so on? But this is so much nonsense. The God of the Bible delights in working through secondary causes. Therefore, the ardent witness of deeply committed evangelists, teachers, and missionaries might well be precisely the means by which God deigns to bring his people to eternal life. The hope for the salvation of all ought not to dampen the missionary spirit but, rather, to stir it up.

This is why I believe that this text, much debated from the time of its publication, will prove indispensably important to the task that all of the postconciliar popes have placed before the Church, namely, the work of the new evangelization.

DARE WE HOPE

THAT ALL MEN BE SAVED?

Too often we think of hope in too individualistic a manner as merely our personal salvation. But hope essentially bears on the great actions of God concerning the whole of creation. It bears on the destiny of all humanity. It is the salvation of the world that we await. In reality hope bears on the salvation of all men—and it is only in the measure that I am immersed in them that it bears on me.

Jean Cardinal Daniélou, S.J.

Essai sur le mystère de

l’histoire (1953), p. 340

Neither Holy Scripture nor the Church’s Tradition of faith asserts with certainty of any man that he is actually in hell. Hell is always held before our eyes as a real possibility, one connected with the offer of conversion and life.

The Church’s Confession of Faith:

A Catholic Catechism for Adults,

published by the German Bishops’ Conference,

English edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987),

p. 346

1. THE ISSUE AND THE CHARGE*

All of us who practice the Christian faith and, to the extent that its nature as a mystery permits, would also like to understand it are under judgment. By no means are we above it, so that we might know its outcome in advance and could proceed from that knowledge to further speculation. The apostle, who is conscious of having no guilt, does not therefore regard himself as already acquitted: It is the Lord who judges me (1 Cor 4:4). Still, in standing trial, we are not left helpless and disheartened; rather, as that same apostle constantly tells us, we can have confidence (parrhesia) and hope, since our judge is he who—as dogma says—has borne the sins of everyone. Are we therefore quite untroubled in the certainty of our salvation? Surely not, for which man knows whether, in the course of his existence, he has lived up to God’s infinite love, which chose to expend itself for him? Must he not, if he is honest and no Pharisee, assume the opposite? In attempting to respond to grace, did he allow God to act through him as God pleased, or did he presume to know better than God and act according to his own pleasure?¹

On the basis of this reverential state of being under judgment, the question arises of just which form and scope Christian hope may, or may not, take. For judgment can be without mercy and ominous for those who themselves have been without mercy in life (Jas 2:13) but will be merciful (for the Judge is the Savior) for those who, in their own lives, have tried to respond to God’s mercifulness: Mercy triumphs over judgment. That both of these possibilities are kept before our eyes is consistent with God’s strategy since the beginning of his covenant with us: See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil (Deut 30:15); Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death (Jer 21:8); In the path of righteousness is life, but the way of error leads to death (Prov 12:28 LXX). By way of the New Testament (Mt 7:13f.; 2 Pet 2:15), this pattern of alternatives found its way into the earliest Christian writings (Didache Barn. 18-20). Man is under judgment and must choose. The question is whether God, with respect to his plan of salvation, ultimately depends, and wants to depend, upon man’s choice; or whether his freedom, which wills only salvation and is absolute, might not remain above things human, created and, therefore, relative.

One can also approach this in another way, and we will see that Anselm does so: assuming that men can be divided into those who are just and those who are unjust, can one likewise, then, divide the divine qualities in such a way as to leave mercy on one side and (punitive) justice on the other? And since the two cannot, as on Calderon’s stage, enter into noble competition with each other, it will probably have to be as described in a Spanish work on dogmatics: A healing punishment issues from sheer mercy (this probably refers to Purgatory); "a vengeful punishment [poena vindicativa] from pure justice, and this corresponds strictly to the offense" (this refers to hell).² Thus, where God’s mercy (which is obviously taken as finite here) wears thin, it remains for pure justice to exert itself. Now, since precisely this sort of assumption that divine qualities are finite is not acceptable, a dispute arises about whether one who is under judgment, as a Christian, can have hope for all men.

I ventured to answer this affirmatively and was, as a result, called to order rather brusquely by the editor of Fels (G. Hermes);³ in Theologisches, Heribert Schauf and Johannes Bökmann added their voices to this reprimand;⁴ the concerns of these latter two will be considered mainly in the next-to-last chapter here. At a press conference in Rome, besieged about the question of hell, I made known my views, which led to gross distortions in the newspapers (L’inferno è vuoto), whereupon I published, in Il Sabato, that Kleine Katechese über die Hölle (Short Discourse on Hell), which was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano without my knowledge and aroused the ire of the right-wing papers.⁵

Bökmann is perfectly correct: If one were certain of attaining the ultimate goal no matter what, a quite essential motivation to conversion and absolute Christian resolve would be lost.⁶ However, I never spoke of certainty but rather of hope. The three critics, by contrast, possess a certainty, and G. Hermes expresses it with matchless force: "Such a hope does not exist, because we cannot hope in opposition to certain knowledge and the avowed will of God (318b). It is impossible that we can hope for something about which we know that it will certainly not come about (ibid.). Therefore, the closing sentence of the essay declares tersely: There is no hope for the salvation of all (320a). If I speak no less than five times of the fully real possibility, which confronts every person, of forfeiting salvation, the retort I get is that the matter is not treated seriously by putting on a stern face but by stating the entire and full truth. And the full truth about hell is not stated if one only speaks of its possibility. . . and not of its reality. At this point, a first paradoxical statement occurs: If we once admit that it is really and seriously possible, even considering all the opposing arguments, that men are damned, then there is also no convincing argument against men’s really being damned (320a). This is not comprehensible to me: if God sets the two ways" before Israel, does it necessarily follow that Israel will choose the way of ruin? There was certainly no lack of seriousness behind the presentation of the two ways. But G. Hermes, of course, knows that the possibility is reality; he is not the only one, as we will see, who knows this. Just how will become evident from what follows here.

But first one other regrettable thing: as a consequence of not sharing in this secure knowledge—and R. Schnackenberg, for instance, does not share in it when he says of Judas Iscariot that it is not certain that he is damned for all eternity⁷—one is then numbered among those average Catholics (256a) who veil the hereafter in a rose-red fog and wishful fancies (252a), participate irresponsibly and cruelly in operation mollification (256c) through their salvation-optimism (256b), adopt the dull and colorless garrulousness of present-day Church discourse (253a), practice modernistic theology (250b) and call for presumptuous trust in God’s mercifulness (253a). So be it; if I have been cast aside as a hopeless conservative by the tribe of the left, then I now know what sort of dung-heap I have been dumped upon by the right. But back to matters of substance.

We are not allowed to have hope for all men. But perhaps for certain individuals, and if so, for which ones? Now comes a second paradox from G. Hermes: We can well. . . hope for every [!] individual [!] man and pray that he attains salvation, because [?] we do not know what judgment God will pass upon him. But we cannot hope that all men will enter heaven, because that is expressly excluded through revelation (318b). Let us, however, leave the paradoxical admission aside and attend solely to the end of the sentence, which at last reveals the source of the critic’s certain knowledge. It is, of course, the texts in the New Testament, which in fact contain sufficiently abundant talk of hellfire (Mt 5:22, 29f.; 10:28; 23:33), of the outer darkness (Mt 8:12; 22:11ff.; 25:30), of eternal punishment (Mt 25:46), of the unquenchable fire (Mk 9:43) and, abundantly in Revelation, of the lake of fire (19:20, 20:10; 21:8). Not only are there threatening words from Jesus—such as those against the unrepentant cities (Mt 11:20ff.), the blasphemers against the Holy Spirit (Mt 12:31), the unmerciful servant, the evil vineyard-tenants and the worthless servant (Mt 18:21ff.; 21:33ff.; 25:30)—but also, it would appear, a correct account of what will take place at the Last Judgment, when the Judge, with a Michelangelesque gesture (in the Sistine Chapel), sends the evildoers away from him: Depart from me. . . into the eternal fire,. . . into eternal punishment (Mt 25:41, 46); and finally: I never knew you (Mt 7:23; 25:12). Does not all that suffice for providing certain knowledge?

Now there is, of course, in the same New Testament,