Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Quote - St. John Chrysostomos ~ Christ's victory over death
Hades was embittered when it encountered Thee in the lower regions....it received a body, and encountered God face to face. It received earth, and confronted heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen. O death, where is your sting? O hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen! And you, o death, are annihilated! Christ is risen! And the evil ones are cast down! Christ is risen! And the angels rejoice! Christ is risen! And life is liberated! Christ is risen! And the tomb is emptied of its dead; for Christ having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
- from the Paschal homily of St. John Chrysostomos
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Unitarian Creed? A premise that does not hold water.
Truth is not absolute; it changes over time.
Logically speaking, this is a surprising statement and cannot be true. If there is no absolute truth, then everything is relative. Your personal view is just as valid as anybody else’s. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and others thrived on exactly this type of thinking. If there is no absolute truth, then these men have no judge because there is no basis to judge them. “Truth is not absolute; it changes over time:” If this statement excludes itself or includes itself, it is a self- decimated proposition to borrow from Ravi Zacharias. If this statement excludes itself, then it is positing an absolute that contradicts absolutes. If it includes itself, then it has just defeated itself because even the statement “Truth is not absolute; it changes over time” means that even this statement will change over time. So this statement is decimated; it cannot be true. To say that people have “life, liberty and justice” or “freedom” would not be true either because it too is impermanent and changes over time.
I shudder to think at the implications of such type of reasoning as the above statement or strange-creed. Not only for Western Civilization but also for the Eastern world, which may be coerced into agreeing with this statement above and entering the world of shadows or progressivism with no goal or anything at all to reach towards. At least with the goal of reform, we have what G.K. Chesterton said, was at least, a form to return-to. The goal, at least, is clear here. With Progressivism there is not clear goal. It is the philosophy of no anchor but only mindless moving forward. To what? We shall all soon see.
This is indicative of the logic of the day. We have failed the proper philosophical training in logic of our kids by such a statement as above. We have failed to teach them to think! Simply, this error was made by removing The Absolute from the day-to-day discussions and reasoning of people and our youth. This basic understanding was known to the ancient sages who looked at the discursive reasoning as a way to higher intellect. The Socratic dialogue was essential in discussing things to their absolute parts, in other words dissecting every sentence down to each word so there was no thing overlooked or confused. This was why Confucius was so keen on expressing the need for the clarifications of words; otherwise, we could never truly know what each person is saying. Each word needed to be clarified by each person in the discussion. This was parsed-out in Socratic or Confucian discussions so everything was clear. If this was not done correctly, then no discussion could take place. For there was no anchor in the words to base the discussion and therefore the discussion was meaningless.
Today in the West or "the age of political correctness", this error is so large that it is really surprising that it is not seen. My guess is that is well known, but the saying that it is difficult to swim upstream is apt here. With no Absolute or no Primal Principle behind all things, there can be no pursuit of truth. The only truth in this sad scenario is change and change has no room for absolutes, it nullifies them claiming that law even is not absolute but only in flux. So if it comes in-mode to kill your brother rather than love them, then so be it; a piece of paper signed by the founders of The Constitution will serve as of no value when the lync-mob is at your door. In fact it will server as toilet paper for the backsides of those who employ the whip as a means to an end. Human dignity and sacredness do not come from a book or a document no matter how old, it can only come forth from The Divine God who gives man his rights and freedoms within certain boundaries that complete the Divine life and its pursuit. The Incarnation of the Divine in Christ shows God among us in a complete revelation of God and not as deists would think of god as the old man far removed from his own creation, indifferent and dead. Such a god is an idol and not of any useful purpose to man and his thinking and doing.
Where/when did this fallacious thinking take hold of us? And what is the remedy? These are the questions that will need to be answered for our generation and the children now growing up under this doomed fallacy. In a reform ideology it assumes a return to a form that exists as a concrete reality or absolute. In a progressive ideology of moving forward there is only the law of endless change, no moral indicator, no road signs to what is correct or Absolute, but only a move to oblivion where truth is relative and everyone is free to do mostly as they please. The sacredness of each individual is at stake, but will we hear the Voice of God within the party's roar of music, rich food, and strong wine? The humanness of man is at stake. Will we move forward to the abolition of man (C.S. Lewis) and enter into the age of death and decay within the forces of change, never sated, never reached, and never more...? Dare we wait and see?
I shudder to think at the implications of such type of reasoning as the above statement or strange-creed. Not only for Western Civilization but also for the Eastern world, which may be coerced into agreeing with this statement above and entering the world of shadows or progressivism with no goal or anything at all to reach towards. At least with the goal of reform, we have what G.K. Chesterton said, was at least, a form to return-to. The goal, at least, is clear here. With Progressivism there is not clear goal. It is the philosophy of no anchor but only mindless moving forward. To what? We shall all soon see.
This is indicative of the logic of the day. We have failed the proper philosophical training in logic of our kids by such a statement as above. We have failed to teach them to think! Simply, this error was made by removing The Absolute from the day-to-day discussions and reasoning of people and our youth. This basic understanding was known to the ancient sages who looked at the discursive reasoning as a way to higher intellect. The Socratic dialogue was essential in discussing things to their absolute parts, in other words dissecting every sentence down to each word so there was no thing overlooked or confused. This was why Confucius was so keen on expressing the need for the clarifications of words; otherwise, we could never truly know what each person is saying. Each word needed to be clarified by each person in the discussion. This was parsed-out in Socratic or Confucian discussions so everything was clear. If this was not done correctly, then no discussion could take place. For there was no anchor in the words to base the discussion and therefore the discussion was meaningless.
Today in the West or "the age of political correctness", this error is so large that it is really surprising that it is not seen. My guess is that is well known, but the saying that it is difficult to swim upstream is apt here. With no Absolute or no Primal Principle behind all things, there can be no pursuit of truth. The only truth in this sad scenario is change and change has no room for absolutes, it nullifies them claiming that law even is not absolute but only in flux. So if it comes in-mode to kill your brother rather than love them, then so be it; a piece of paper signed by the founders of The Constitution will serve as of no value when the lync-mob is at your door. In fact it will server as toilet paper for the backsides of those who employ the whip as a means to an end. Human dignity and sacredness do not come from a book or a document no matter how old, it can only come forth from The Divine God who gives man his rights and freedoms within certain boundaries that complete the Divine life and its pursuit. The Incarnation of the Divine in Christ shows God among us in a complete revelation of God and not as deists would think of god as the old man far removed from his own creation, indifferent and dead. Such a god is an idol and not of any useful purpose to man and his thinking and doing.
Where/when did this fallacious thinking take hold of us? And what is the remedy? These are the questions that will need to be answered for our generation and the children now growing up under this doomed fallacy. In a reform ideology it assumes a return to a form that exists as a concrete reality or absolute. In a progressive ideology of moving forward there is only the law of endless change, no moral indicator, no road signs to what is correct or Absolute, but only a move to oblivion where truth is relative and everyone is free to do mostly as they please. The sacredness of each individual is at stake, but will we hear the Voice of God within the party's roar of music, rich food, and strong wine? The humanness of man is at stake. Will we move forward to the abolition of man (C.S. Lewis) and enter into the age of death and decay within the forces of change, never sated, never reached, and never more...? Dare we wait and see?
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Bishop Kallistos Ware ~ Dare we hope for the salvation of all? Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian
Dare we hope for the salvation of all? Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian
DARE WE HOPE FOR THE SALVATION OF ALL?
Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian
“God is not one who requites evil., but He sets aright evil.”
St Isaac the Syrian
“Love could not bear that”
There are some questions which, at any rate in our present state of knowledge, we cannot answer; and yet, unanswerable though these questions may be, we cannot avoid raising them. Looking beyond the threshold of death, we ask: How can the soul exist without the body? What is the nature of our disembodied consciousness between death and the final resurrection? What is the precise relationship between our present body and the “spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44) which the righteous will receive in the Age to come? Last, but not least, we ask: Dare we hope for the salvation of all? It is upon this final question that I wish to concentrate. Unanswerable or not, it is a question that decisively affects our entire understanding of God’s relationship to the world. At the ultimate conclusion of salvation history, will there be an all-embracing reconciliation? Will every created being eventually find a place within the Trinitarian perichoresis, within the movement of mutual love that passes eternally among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
Have we the right to endorse that confident affirmation of Julian of Norwich, as T. S. Eliot does in the last of his Four Quartets?
Let us pose the question more sharply by appealing first to the words of a twentieth-century Russian Orthodox monk and then to the opening chapter of Genesis. The dilemma that disturbs us is well summed up in a conversation recorded by Archimandrite Sophrony, the disciple of St Silouan of Mount Athos:
It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the hell of separation from God… He could not bear to think that anyone would languish in “outer darkness.” I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, “God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.”
Obviously upset, the Staretz said, “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise, and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire—would you feel happy?”
“It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,” said the hermit. The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance. “Love could not bear that,” he said. “We must pray for all.”
Here exactly the basic problem is set before us. St Silouan appeals to divine compassion: “Love could not bear that.” The hermit emphasizes human responsibility: “It would be their own fault.” We are confronted by two principles that are apparently conflicting: first, God is love, second, human beings are free.
How are we to give proper weight to each of these principles? First, God is love, and this love of His is generous, inexhaustible, infinitely patient. Surely, then, He will never stop loving any of the rational creatures whom He has made; He will continue to watch over them in His tender mercy until eventually, perhaps after countless ages, all of them freely and willingly turn back to Him. But in that case what happens to our second principle, human beings are free? If the triumph of divine love is inevitable, what place is there for liberty of choice? How can we be genuinely free if in the last resort there is nothing for us to choose between?
Let us restate the issue in a slightly different way. On the first page of the Bible it is written, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was altogether good and beautiful” (Gen 1:31, lxx). In the beginning, that is to say, there was unity; all created things participated fully in the goodness, truth and beauty of the Creator. Are we, then, to assert that at the end there will be not unity but duality? Is there to be a continuing opposition between good and evil, between heaven and hell, between joy and torment, that remains forever unresolved? If we start by affirming that God created a world which was wholly good, and if we then maintain that a significant part of His rational creation will end up in intolerable anguish, separated from Him for all eternity, surely this implies that God has failed in His creative work and has been defeated by the forces of evil.
Are we to rest satisfied with such a conclusion? Or dare we look, however tentatively, beyond this duality to an ultimate restoration of unity when “all shall be well”? Rejecting the possibility of universal salvation, C. S. Lewis has stated:
“Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and specially of Our Lord s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”
Is Lewis right? Does universalism in fact contradict Scripture, tradition, and reason in such a stark and clear-cut way?
Two strands of Scripture
It is not difficult to find texts in the New Testament that warn us, in what seem to be unambiguous terms, of the prospect of never-ending torment in hell. Let us take but three examples, each consisting of words attributed directly to Jesus.
Mark 9:43, 47-48. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire… And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (cf. Mt 18:8-9; Is 66:24).
Matthew 25:41 (from the story of the sheep and the goats). “Then He will say to those at His left hand, cYou that are accursed, depart from Me into the eternal fire”
Luke 16:26 (the words of Abraham to the rich man in hell). “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”
It is difficult, if not impossible, to speak about the life after death except through the use of metaphors and symbols. Not surprisingly, then, these three passages employ a metaphorical “picture language”: they speak in terms of “fire,” the “worm,” and a “great chasm.” The metaphors doubtless are not to be taken literally, but they have implications that are hard to avoid: the fire is said to be “unquenchable” and “eternal”; the worm “does not die” ; the gulf is impassable. If “eternal” (aionios, Mt 25:41) in fact means no more than “age-long”—-lasting, that is, throughout this present aeon but not necessarily continuing into the Age to come—and if the gulf is only temporarily impassable, then why is this not made clear in the New Testament?
Yet these and other “hell-fire” texts need to be interpreted in the light of different, less frequently cited passages from the New Testament, which point rather in a “universalist” direction.
There is a series of Pauline texts which affirm a parallel between the universality of sin on the one hand and the universality of redemption on the other. The most obvious example is 1 Corinthians 15:22, where Paul is working out the analogy between the first and the second Adam: “As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” Surely the word “all” bears the same sense in both halves of this sentence. There are similar passages in Romans: “Just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (5:18); “God has imprisoned all in disobedience, that He may be merciful to all” (11:32). It might be argued that in these three cases Paul’s meaning is simply that Christ s death and Resurrection extend to all the possibility of redemption. It does not follow that all will or must be saved, for that depends upon the voluntary choice of each one. Salvation, that is to say, is offered to everyone, but not everyone will actually accept it. In fact, however, Paul suggests more than a mere possibility; he expresses a confident expectation. He does not say, “All may perhaps be made alive,” but “All will be made alive.” At the very least this encourages us to hope for the salvation of all. C. S. Lewis therefore contradicts St Paul when he asserts as an established fact, “Some will not be redeemed.”
The same note of expectant confidence is also to be heard, yet more distinctly, in 1 Corinthians 15:28 (this was Origens key text). Christ will reign, says Paul, until “God has put all things in subjection under His feet… And when all things are made subject to the Son, then the Son himself will also be made subject to the Father, who has subjected all things to Him; and thus God will be all in all’ ” The phrase “all in all” (panta en pasin) definitely suggests not ultimate dualism but an ultimate reconciliation.
There is also the text from the Pastoral Epistles that influenced the Arminians and John Wesley: “It is the will of God our Savior… that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). It can of course be pointed out that the author does not here state as a certainty that all will be saved, but merely says that this is what God wants. Are we to assert, however, that God’s will is going to be eventually frustrated? As before, we are being encouraged at least to hope for universal salvation.
It is important, therefore, to allow for the complexity of the Scriptural evidence. It does not all point in the same direction, but there are two contrasting strands. Some passages present us with a challenge. God invites but does not compel. I possess freedom of choice: am I going to say “yes” or “no” to the divine invitation? The future is uncertain. To which destination am I personally bound? Might I perhaps be shut out from the wedding feast? But there are other passages which insist with equal emphasis upon divine sovereignty. God cannot be ultimately defeated. “All shall be well,” and in the end God will indeed be “all in all.” Challenge and sovereignty: such are the two strands in the New Testament, and neither strand should be disregarded.
God the cosmic physician
Turning now from Scripture to tradition, let us look first at the author who, more than anyone else in Christian history, has been associated with the universalist standpoint, Origen of Alexandria. He is someone who, over the centuries, has been greatly commended and greatly reviled, in almost equal measure. He is praised, for instance, by his fellow Alexandrian Didymus the Blind, who calls him “the chief teacher of the Church after the Apostles.” “Who would not rather be wrong with Origen than right with anyone else?” exclaims St Vincent of Lerins. A striking but typical expression of the opposite point of view is to be found in a story told of St Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism in Egypt. While conversing one day with some visiting monks, Pachomius was puzzled because he noticed an “exceedingly nasty smell,” for which he could find no explanation.
Suddenly he discovered the reason for the odor: the visitors were Origenists. “Behold, I testify to you before God,” he admonished them, “that everyone who reads Origen and accepts his writings will go down to the depth of hell. The inheritance of all such persons is the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth… Take all the works of Origen that are in your possession, and throw them into the river.” Alas! All too many have heeded Pachomius’ advice, burning and destroying what Origen wrote, with the result that several of his chief works survive only in translation, not in the original Greek. This is true in particular of the treatise On First Principles, where Origen expounds most fully his teaching about the end of the world. Here we have to rely largely on the Latin version (not always accurate) made by Rufinus.
Origen, to his credit, displays a humility not always apparent in his leading critics, Jerome and Justinian. Again and again in his treatment of the deeper issues of theology, Origen bows his head in reverent wonder before the divine mystery. Not for one moment does he imagine that he has all the answers. This humility is evident in particular when he speaks about the Last Things and the future hope. “These are matters hard and difficult to understand,” he writes. “ .. .We need to speak about them with great fear and caution, discussing and investigating rather than laying down fixed and certain conclusions.”
Yet, humble or not, Origen was condemned as a heretic and anathematized at the time of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople under the Emperor Justinian in 553. The first of the fifteen anathemas directed against him states: “If anyone maintains the mythical preexistence of souls, and the monstrous apocatastasis that follows from this, let him be anathema.” This seems entirely explicit and definite: belief in a final “restoration” (apocatastasis) of all things and all persons— belief in universal salvation, not excluding that of the devil—has apparently been ruled out as heretical in a formal decision by what is for the Orthodox Church the highest visible authority in matters of doctrine, an Ecumenical Council.
There is, however, considerable doubt whether these fifteen anathemas were in fact formally approved by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. They may have been endorsed by a lesser council, meeting in the early months of 553 shortly before the main council was convened, in which case they lack full ecumenical authority; yet, even so, the Fathers of the Fifth Council were well aware of these fifteen anathemas and had no intention of revoking or modifying them. Apart from that, however, the precise wording of the first anathema deserves to be carefully noted. It does not speak only about apocatastasis but links together two aspects of Origen’s theology: first, his speculations about the beginning, that is to say, about the preexistence of souls and the precosmic fall; second, his teaching about the end, about universal salvation and the ultimate reconciliation of all things. Origen’s eschatology is seen as following directly from his protology, and both are rejected together.
That the first of the fifteen anathemas should condemn protology and eschatology in the same sentence is entirely understandable, for in Origens thinking the two form an integral unity. At the beginning, so he believed, there was a realm of logikoi or rational intellects (noes) existing prior to the creation of the material world as minds without a body. Originally all these logikoi were joined in perfect union with the Creator Logos. Then followed the precosmic fall. With the exception of one logikos (which became the human soul of Christ), all the other logikoi turned away from the Logos and became, depending on the gravity of their deviation, either angels or human beings or demons. In each case they were given bodies appropriate to the seriousness of their fall: lightweight and ethereal in the case of angels; dark and hideous in the case of demons; intermediate in the case of human beings. At the end, so Origen maintained, this process of fragmentation will be reversed. All alike, whether angels, human beings, or demons, will be restored to unity with the Logos; the primal harmony of the total creation will be reinstated, and once more “God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Origens view is in this way circular in character: the end will be as the beginning.
Now, as we have noted, the first of the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas is directed not simply against Origen’s teaching concerning universal reconciliation, but against his total understanding of salvation history—against his theory of preexistent souls, of a precosmic fall and a final apocatastasis—seen as a single and undivided whole. Suppose, however, that we separate his eschatology from his protology; suppose that we abandon all speculations about the realm of eternal logikoi; suppose that we simply adhere to the standard Christian view whereby there is no preexistence of the soul, but each new person comes into being as an integral unity of soul and body, at or shortly after the moment of the conception of the embryo within the mothers womb. In this way we could advance a doctrine of universal salvation—affirming this, not as a logical certainty (indeed, Origen never did that), but as a heartfelt aspiration, a visionary hope—which would avoid the circularity of Origens view and so would escape the condemnation of the anti-Origenist anathemas. We shall return to this possibility in a moment when considering St Gregory of Nyssa, but let us first explore further Origen’s reasons for affirming a final apocatastasis.
It is often claimed that belief in universal salvation, because it considers the eventual triumph of divine love to be inevitable, fails to properly allow for our liberty of choice. This is an objection to which Origen is consistently sensitive. However confident his hope that God s love will in the end prevail, he is careful never to undermine the vital significance of human free will. While affirming that “God is love,” he does not lose sight of the correlative principle, “Human beings are free.” Thus, when speaking of the subjection of all things to Christ, and of Christ to the Father (1 Cor 15:28), he observes: “This subjection will be accomplished in accordance with various assured methods and disciplines and times; yet it should not be thought that there is some necessity which compels all things into subjection, or that the whole world will be subdued by force to God.” Origen is altogether definite here: there is no compulsion, no force. If God s love is finally victorious, this will be because it is freely and willingly accepted by the whole of rational creation. Origen’s apocatastasis is not simply a deduction from some abstract system; it is a hope.
Here we touch upon a difficulty that is frequently felt not only in connection with the final reconciliation at the end of the world but also throughout our Christian experience in this present life. It is tempting to regard divine grace and human freedom as two contrasting principles, the one excluding the other; and as a result we often assume that the stronger the action of grace, the more restricted is the exercise of our human freedom.
But is this not a false dilemma? In the words of John A. T. Robinson:
Everyone may point to instances in which he has been constrained to thankful response by the overmastering power of love. And yet, under this strange compulsion, has anyone ever felt his freedom infringed or his personality violated? Is it not precisely at these moments that he becomes conscious, perhaps only for a fleeting space, of being himself in a way he never knew before, of attaining a fullness and integration of life which is inextricably bound up with the decision drawn from him by another’s love? Moreover, this is true however strong be the constraint laid upon him: or, rather, it is truer the stronger it is. Under the constraint of the love of God in Christ this sense of self-fulfillment is at its maximum. The testimony of generations is that here, as nowhere else, service is perfect freedom.
Surely this is true par excellence of the victory of God’s love in the age to come. The power that is victorious is the power of loving compassion, and so it is a victory that does not overrule but enhances our human freedom.
Origen’s caution is evident in particular when he refers to the salvation of the devil and his angels. He makes it abundantly clear that he regards this not as a certainty but as a possibility. In his Commentary on John he does no more than pose a question: “Since human beings can display repentance and turn from unbelief to faith, shall we shrink back from asserting something similar about the angelic powers?” In his treatise On Prayer; Origen limits himself to saying that God has a plan for the devil in the age to come, but we have at present no idea what this plan may be: “God will make arrangements for him, I know not how.” In the work On First Principles, the matter is left to the judgment of the reader:
Whether certain of those orders, which are under the leadership of the devil and are obedient to his wickedness, can at some point in future ages be converted to goodness, inasmuch as there still exists in them the power of free will; or whether the evil has become so permanent and deep-rooted that it has become through habit part of their nature: let my reader decide this for himself.
Here Origen suggests two possibilities: either the demons still possess the power of free will, or else they have reached the point of no return, after which repentance is impossible. But he expresses no judgment; both possibilities are left open.
This raises an interesting question, which I once put to a Greek archbishop at the beginning of a four-hour car journey, in the hope that it would help us while away the time. If it is possible that the devil, who must surely be a very lonely and unhappy person, may eventually repent and be saved, why do we never pray for him? To my disappointment (for I could not at the moment think of other topics of conversation), the archbishop settled the matter with a sharp and brief rejoinder: “Mind your own business.” He was right. So far as we humans are concerned, the devil is always our adversary; we should not enter into any kind of negotiations with him, whether by praying for him or in other ways. His salvation is quite simply none of our business. But the devil has also his own relationship with God, as we learn from the prologue of the book of Job, when Satan makes his appearance in the heavenly court among the other “sons of God” (Job 1:6-2:7). We are, however, altogether ignorant of the precise nature of this relationship, and it is futile to pry into it. Yet, even though it is not for us to pray for the devil, we have no right to assume that he is totally and irrevocably excluded from the scope of God s mercy. We do not know. In Wittgenstein’s words, Wovon man nicht reden kann, daruber muf? man schweigen.
The strongest point in Origens case for universalism is his analysis of punishment. We may summarize his view by distinguishing three primary reasons that have been advanced to justify the infliction of punishment.
First, there is the retributive argument. Those who have done evil, it is claimed, themselves deserve to suffer in proportion to the evil that they have done. Only so will the demands of justice be fulfilled: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Ex 21:24). But in the Sermon on the Mount Christ explicitly rejects this principle (Mt 5:38). If we humans are forbidden by Christ to exact retribution in this way from our fellow humans, how much more should we refrain from attributing vindictive and retributive behavior to God. It is blasphemous to assert that the Holy Trinity is vengeful. In any case, it seems contrary to justice that God should inflict an infinite punishment in requital for what is only a finite amount of wrongdoing.
The second line of argument insists upon the need for a deterrent. It is only the prospect of hell-fire, it is said, that holds us back from evil-doing. But why then, it may be asked, do we need an unending, everlasting punishment to act as an effective deterrent? Would it not be sufficient to threaten prospective malefactors with a period of painful separation from God that is exceedingly prolonged, yet not infinite? In any case, it is only too obvious, especially in our own day, that the threat of hell-fire is almost totally ineffective as a deterrent. If in our preaching of the Christian faith we hope to have any significant influence on others, then what we need is not a negative but a positive strategy: let us abandon ugly threats, and attempt rather to evoke people’s sense of wonder and their capacity for love.
There remains the reformative understanding of punishment, which Origen considered to be the only view that is morally acceptable. Punishment, if it is to possess moral value, has to be not merely retaliatory or dissuasive but remedial. When parents inflict punishment on their children, or the state on criminals, their aim should always be to heal those whom they punish and to change them for the better. And such, according to Origen, is precisely the purpose of the punishments inflicted upon us by God; He acts always as “our physician.” A doctor may sometimes be obliged to employ extreme measures which cause agony to his patients. (This was particularly so before the use of anesthetics.) He may cauterize a wound or amputate a limb. But this is always done with a positive end in view, so as to bring about the patient’s eventual recovery and restoration to health. So it is with God, the physician of our souls. He may inflict suffering upon us, both in this life and after our death; but always He does this out of tender love and with a positive purpose, so as to cleanse us from our sins, to purge and heal us. In Origen’s words, “The fury of God’s vengeance avails to the purging of our souls.”
Now, if we adopt this reformative and therapeutic view of punishment—and this is the only reason for inflicting punishment that can worthily be attributed to God—then surely such punishment should not be unending. If the aim of punishment is to heal, then once the healing has been accomplished there is no need for the punishment to continue. If, however, the punishment is supposed to be everlasting, it is difficult to see how it can have any remedial or educative purpose. In a never-ending hell there is no escape and therefore no healing, and so the infliction of punishment in such a hell is pointless and immoral. This third understanding of punishment, therefore, is incompatible with the notion of perpetual torment in hell; it requires us, rather, to think in terms of some kind of purgatory after death. But in that case this purgatory should be envisaged as a house of healing, not a torture chamber; as a hospital, not a prison. Here, in his grand vision of God as the cosmic physician, Origen is at his most convincing.
An uncondemned universalist
Origen’s longing for the salvation of all had already brought him under suspicion in his own lifetime. Yet there were some among his spiritual descendants who kept alive this universal hope. The two most notable examples are to be found at the end of the fourth century: Evagrius of Pontus, monk in the Egyptian desert, and St Gregory of Nyssa, the younger brother of St Basil the Great. Evagrius upheld and perhaps hardened the full Origenist teaching concerning the preexistence of souls, the precosmic fall, and the final apocatastasis; and for this he was condemned along with Origen in 553. Gregory of Nyssa, on the other hand, abandoned Origen’s speculations concerning preexistence and the precosmic fall, while holding fast to his belief in an ultimate restoration; and, significantly, he has never been anathematized for this, either in 553 or in more recent times. In expressing his hope that all will be saved, Gregory of Nyssa is fully as confident as Origen. His words recall the great affirmation of Paul, “and thus God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). “When, through these long and circuitous methods,” writes Gregory, “the wickedness which is now mingled and consolidated with our nature has been finally expelled from it, and when all those things that are now sunk down in evil are restored to their original state, there will ascend from the entire creation a united hymn of thanksgiving… All this is contained in the great mystery of the Divine Incarnation.” This final restoration, Gregory clearly states, will embrace even the devil.
Despite this bold claim, Gregory of Nyssa has never been condemned as a heretic, but on the contrary he is honored as a saint. Why should this be so? Perhaps he escaped reprobation because he was Basil’s brother. Yet if he was treated differently from his master Origen, perhaps it was because, while retaining Origen’s hope in the eventual triumph of good over evil, he abandoned the notion of preexistence and so avoided the circularity of the Origenist scheme. Whatever the explanation, the fact that Gregory has not been anathematized is certainly significant. It suggests that, if dissociated from speculations about a precosmic fall, a carefully qualified expression of universal hope is acceptable, even within the bounds of strict orthodoxy.
St Gregory of Nyssa is one of the patrons of the house of ecumenical studies to which I am attached in Oxford; and personally I am delighted that this should be so.
The scourgings of love
A third patristic author who dared to hope for the salvation of all was St Isaac of Nineveh, honored and loved throughout the Christian East as “Isaac the Syrian.” Although he lived some three generations after the Fifth Ecumenical Council, he was unaffected by the anti-Origenist anathemas associated with it; for, as a member of the Church of the East, dwelling in Mesopotamia far outside the bounds of the Byzantine Empire, he owed no allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople and did not recognize the Council held in 553 as ecumenical. Possibly he was altogether unaware of its decrees.
Particularly striking is Isaacs understanding of hell. He insists that the texts in the New Testament about fire, the worm, outer darkness, and the gnashing of teeth are not to be understood literally and in a physical sense. He speaks of hell or Gehenna as “noetic” or “intelligible.” Hell is an “effect,” not a “substance,” while the “outer darkness” is not a place but “the state without any delight in true knowledge and communion with God.” “There will be psychic weeping and grinding of teeth,” says Isaac, “which is a grief more hard to endure than fire.” The teeth-gnashing in the Age to come, then, so far from being physical and material, signifies an inner and spiritual anguish. I am reminded of the story of the preacher who, in his sermons on hell, dwelt with particular relish upon the gnashing of teeth. Eventually an elderly member of the congregation could bear it no more. “But I have no teeth,” she exclaimed—to which the preacher replied severely, “Teeth will be provided.”
Isaac had a better answer. In his view, the real torment in hell consists, not in burning by material fire, nor in any physical pain, but in the pangs of conscience that a person suffers on realizing that he or she has rejected the love of God:
Also I say that even those who are scourged in hell are tormented with the scourgings of love. The scourges that result from love—-that is, the scourges of those who have become aware that they have sinned against love—are harder and more bitter than the torments which result from fear.
The pain which gnaws the heart as the result of sinning against love is sharper than all other torments that there are.
It is wrong to imagine that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God… [But] the power of love works in two ways: it torments those who have sinned, just as happens among friends here on earth; but to those who have observed its duties, love gives delight.
So it is in hell: the contrition that comes from love is the harsh torment.
When I first came across this passage as a student more than forty years ago, I said to myself: That is the only view of hell that makes any sense to me. God is love, St Isaac tells us, and this divine love is unchanging and inexhaustible. God’s love is everywhere and embraces everything: “If I go down to hell, Thou art there also” (Ps 138 [139] :8). Thus even those in hell are not cut off from the love of God. Love acts, however, in a twofold way: it is joy to those who accept it but torture to those who shut it out.
In the words of George MacDonald, “The terror of God is but the other side of His love; it is love outside, that would be inside.” Thus those in hell feel as agonizing pain that which the saints feel as unending delight. God does not inflict torment upon those in hell, but it is they who torment themselves through their willful refusal to respond to His love. As Georges Bernanos observes, “Hell is not to love any more.” “The love of God,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “will be an intolerable torment to those who have not acquired it within themselves.” From this it follows that those in hell are self-enslaved, self-imprisoned. Ultimately, states C. S. Lewis,
there are only two kinds of people…those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “ Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell… The doors of hell are locked on the inside?
Now if all this is true—if, as Isaac says, those in hell are not cut off from the love of God, and if, as Lewis asserts, they are self-imprisoned—then may it not be that they still have some hope of redemption? (Indeed, the Orthodox Church says a special prayer for them at Vespers on the Sunday of Pentecost.) If divine love is constantly knocking on the door of their heart, and if that door is locked on the inside, may not the time come when at long last they respond to love’s invitation and open the door? If the reason for their suffering is that they recognize how grievously they have sinned against love, does this not imply that there is still within them some spark of goodness, some possibility of repentance and restoration?
Isaac, for his part, definitely believed that this was so. In the second part of his Homilies (previously thought to have been lost, but rediscovered in 1983 by Dr. Sebastian Brock) Isaac speaks of a ‘wonderful outcome” that God will bring to pass at the end of history:
I am of the opinion that He is going to manifest some wonderful outcome, a matter of immense and ineffable compassion on the part of the glorious Creator, with respect to the ordering of this difficult matter of [Gehenna’s] torment: out of it the wealth of His love and power and wisdom will become known all the more—and so will the insistent might of the waves of His goodness.
It is not [the way of] the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction.
Isaac has two main reasons for affirming with such confidence his expectation of a ‘wonderful outcome.” First, even more passionately than Origen, he rejects any suggestion that God is vengeful and vindictive. This he sees as blasphemy: “Far be it, that vengeance could ever be found in that Fountain of love and Ocean brimming with goodness!” When God punishes us, or appears to do so, the purpose of this punishment is never retributive and retaliatory, but exclusively reformative and therapeutic:
God chastises with love, not for the sake of revenge—far be it!—but seeking to make whole His image… Love’s chastisement is for correction, but it does not aim at retribution.
As Isaac insists in the second part, “God is not one who requites evil, but He sets aright evil… The Kingdom and Gehenna are matters belonging to mercy.” Gehenna is nothing else than a place of purging and purification which helps to bring about God’s master plan “that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).
Second, and more fundamentally, Isaac is convinced that “many waters cannot quench love” (Song 8:7). “Not even the immense wickedness of the demons can overcome the measure of God’s goodness,” he writes, quoting Diodore of Tarsus. Unquenchable and limitless as it is, Gods love will eventually triumph over evil: “There exists with Him a single love and compassion which is spread out over all creation, [a love] which is without alteration, timeless and everlasting… No part belonging to any single one of [all] rational beings will be lost.” Here, then, in distant Mesopotamia is one who is not afraid to affirm with Julian of Norwich and T. S. Eliot, “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Love and freedom
Within the tradition of the Christian East, then, we have identified three powerful witnesses who dare to hope for the salvation of all. Other witnesses could certainly be cited from the West, particularly among the Anabaptists, Moravians, and Christadelphians. Yet it has to be admitted that in East and West alike—but more particularly in the West because of the influence of St Augustine of Hippo—the voices raised in favor of universal salvation remain a small minority. Most Christians, at any rate until the twentieth century, have assumed that the main part of the human race will end up in an everlasting hell: “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt 22:14). How far is such an assumption justified? Having looked at Scripture and tradition, let us now invoke reason. Drawing together all that has been said so far, let us marshal three arguments in favor of universalism and four against.
In favor of universal hope
The power of divine love. As a God of infinite compassion, it is argued, the Creator is not grudging in His mercy and forgiveness but immeasurably patient. He compels no one, but He will in fact wait until each and every one of His rational creatures voluntarily responds to His love. Divine love is stronger than all the forces of darkness and evil within the universe, and in the end it will prevail. “Love never fails” (1 Cor 13:8); it is never exhausted, never comes to an end. This appeal to the invincibility of divine love is the strongest argument in favor of universal hope.
The essence of hell. This is basically a restatement of the first argument. As we noted when citing St Isaac the Syrian, hell is not God s rejection of humankind but humankind’s refusal of God. It is not a punishment which God inflicts upon us, but a state of mind in which we punish ourselves. God does not shut the door against those in hell; He does not withdraw His love from them, but it is they who deliberately harden their hearts against that love. Since, then, those in hell are still enfolded in divine love, it remains possible that they may some day open their hearts to this omnipresent compassion; and, when they do, they will find that God has not stopped loving them. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; for He cannot deny himself” (2 Tim 2:13). His nature is love, and He cannot cease to be that which He is.
The non-reality of evil. This is an argument that we have not so far had occasion to discuss. “I am He who is,” says God to Moses at the burning bush in the Septuagint version of Ex 3:14; “I am the Existing One” (ego eimi ho on). God is Being and Reality, and He is the sole source of all existence. Evil, on the other hand, is in the strict sense non-being and unreality. Evil and sin have no substantive existence, for they are not a “thing” that God has made; they are a distortion of the good, a parasite—not a noun but an adjective. This was clearly shown to Julian of Norwich, who states in her Thirteenth Revelation: “I did not see sin, for I believe that it has no kind of substance, no share in being, nor can it be recognized except by the pains which it causes.”
Existence, then, is good, for it is a gift from God; and everything that exists, by the very fact of existing, retains some link with God, who is the only source of existence. From this it follows that nothing that exists can be entirely and utterly evil. To posit something totally evil would be a non-sense, a contradiction in terms; for such a thing would be altogether unreal and could not actually exist. Even the devil, because he exists, still has a continuing relationship with God. Thus where there is existence, there is hope—even for the devil.
A possible conclusion from this third line of argument is not universal salvation but conditional immortality. At the end God will indeed be “all in all,” not because all rational creatures have been saved but because at a certain point the radically wicked have simply ceased to be. Cut off from God, the unique source of existence, they have lapsed into non-being. At the end-time, that is to say, there will be a resurrection to eternal life, but no resurrection to eternal death; or, rather, there will be resurrection to a death that is final but not continuing, for it will entail annihilation.
This notion of conditional immortality has much to be said in its favor. It is an attractive way of avoiding the need to choose between universal salvation and an unending hell. But, although it was held by the fourth-century African author Arnobius of Sicca, it has otherwise little support in earlier tradition. The objection commonly advanced against the “conditionalist” standpoint is that God s gift of existence is stable and changeless. It is something that He will never withdraw: “For the charismata and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). Within each rational being endowed with free will, there is something unique and unrepeatable; God never does the same thing twice. Shall this uniqueness disappear forever from the universe?
Against universal hope
The argument from free will. Because humans are free, it is argued, they are at liberty to reject God. His gifts are irrevocable; He will never take away from us our power of voluntary choice, and so we are free to go on saying “No” to Him through all eternity. Such unending rejection of God is precisely the essence of hell. Because free will exists, there must exist also the possibility of hell as a place of everlasting suffering. Take away hell, and you deny freedom. None can be forced to enter heaven against their will.
As the Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov observes, God can do anything except compel us to love him; for love is free, and thus where there is no liberty of choice there is no love. Whereas the appeal to the power of divine love constitutes the strongest argument in favor of universal salvation, this appeal to free will is certainly the strongest argument on the other side. Significantly, both parties in the debate, although in different ways, seek their main support from the fact that God is love.
The point of no return. But, it may be rejoined, does not this argument from free will prove too much? If God never takes away from us our liberty of choice, and if those in hell therefore retain free will, then is not the possibility of repentance a continuing option for them? To this the anti-universalists commonly reply that there is a point of no return, after which repentance becomes impossible. God does not deprive the damned of their freedom, but the misuse of their freedom becomes eventually so deeply rooted in them that they cannot thereafter change, and thus they remain fixed forever in their attitude of rejection. God has not ceased to love them, but they have rendered themselves incapable of ever again responding to that love.
A parallel can thus be drawn between the saints in heaven and the damned in hell. The saints in heaven have not lost their freedom, but it is no longer possible for them ever again to turn away from God and to lapse into sin. They still have liberty of choice, but all their choices are good. In a similar way the damned in hell still retain a residual freedom of choice, for they have not ceased to be persons. But all their choices are bad, and it is no longer possible for them to ascend to the divine realm.
The devil possesses freedom—but not the freedom to repent. In this way, after the Last Judgment there will be a “great divorce,” and the chasm between heaven and hell will remain forever impassable. The argument from justice. It is contrary to divine justice, so it is often alleged, that the wicked should enjoy the same reward as the righteous; the moral harmony of the universe will be impaired if evildoers do not receive their just recompense. I find this argument far less strong than the two previous arguments. As St Isaac the Syrian rightly insists, our human notions of retributive justice are altogether inapplicable to God. He is a God not of vengeance but of forgiving love; His justice is nothing other than His love. When He punishes, His purpose is not to requite but to heal.
The moral and pastoral argument. Finally, on the anti-universalist side it is often said that universalism deprives the Christian message of its sense of urgency and underestimates the note of insistent warning present throughout the New Testament. Christ begins His public preaching with the word “Today” (Lk 4:21). “See, now is the acceptable time,” states Paul; “see, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). Today, now: it is this present life that is our moment of opportunity and decision, our time of crisis, the kairos when we make the choices that determine our eternal future. If, on the other hand, we are allowed an unlimited series of further chances after our death, and if in any case we shall all end up in the same place whatever we do in this present life, then where is the challenge in the preaching of the Christian message, and where is the need for conversion and repentance here and now? If the triumph of God s love is inevitable and there is ultimately nothing for us to choose between, does this not make our present acts of moral decision trivial and meaningless?
Origen is aware of this difficulty. The doctrine of apocatastasis, he advises, ought to be kept secret; for, if preached openly to the immature, it will lead them to become careless and indifferent. No doubt it is for this reason that the nineteenth-century Pietist theologian Christian Gottlieb Barth remarks, “Anyone who does not believe in the universal restoration is an ox, but anyone who teaches it is an ass.” St Isaac the Syrian deals with the problem in a different way. It makes an immeasurable difference to us, he points out, whether we respond to divine love here and now or only after countless aeons. Even though the torment of hell is not everlasting, it remains truly appalling: “Nevertheless [Gehenna] is grievous, even if it is thus limited in its extent: who can [possibly] bear it?”
If the strongest argument in favor of universal salvation is the appeal to divine love, and if the strongest argument on the opposite side is the appeal to human freedom, then we are brought back to the dilemma with which we started: how are we to bring into concord the two principles God is love and Human beings are free. For the time being we cannot do more than hold fast with equal firmness to both principles at once, while admitting that the manner of their ultimate harmonization remains a mystery beyond our present comprehension. What St Paul said about the reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism is applicable also to the final reconciliation of the total creation: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!” (Rom 11:33).
When I am waiting at Oxford Station for the train to London, sometimes I walk up to the northernmost stretch of the long platform until I reach a notice: “Passengers must not proceed beyond this point. Penalty: £50.” In discussion of the future hope, we need a similar notice: “Theologians must not proceed beyond this point”—Let my readers devise a suitable penalty. Doubtless, Origen’s mistake was that he tried to say too much. It is a fault that I admire rather than execrate, but it was a mistake nonetheless.
Our belief in human freedom means that we have no right to categorically affirm, “All must be saved.” But our faith in Gods love makes us dare to hope that all will be saved.
Is there anybody there? said the traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door.
Hell exists as a possibility because free will exists. Yet, trusting in the inexhaustible attractiveness of God’s love, we venture to express the hope—it is no more than a hope—that in the end, like Walter de la Mare’s Traveller, we shall find that there is nobody there. Let us leave the last word, then, with St Silouan of Mount Athos: “Love could not bear that…We must pray for all.”
From “The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works” by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware
Thanks to source:
https://orthodoxchurchlife.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/dare-we-hope-for-the-salvation-of-all-origen-st-gregory-of-nyssa-and-st-isaac-the-syrian/
(bold added)
Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian
“God is not one who requites evil., but He sets aright evil.”
St Isaac the Syrian
“Love could not bear that”
There are some questions which, at any rate in our present state of knowledge, we cannot answer; and yet, unanswerable though these questions may be, we cannot avoid raising them. Looking beyond the threshold of death, we ask: How can the soul exist without the body? What is the nature of our disembodied consciousness between death and the final resurrection? What is the precise relationship between our present body and the “spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44) which the righteous will receive in the Age to come? Last, but not least, we ask: Dare we hope for the salvation of all? It is upon this final question that I wish to concentrate. Unanswerable or not, it is a question that decisively affects our entire understanding of God’s relationship to the world. At the ultimate conclusion of salvation history, will there be an all-embracing reconciliation? Will every created being eventually find a place within the Trinitarian perichoresis, within the movement of mutual love that passes eternally among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
Have we the right to endorse that confident affirmation of Julian of Norwich, as T. S. Eliot does in the last of his Four Quartets?
Let us pose the question more sharply by appealing first to the words of a twentieth-century Russian Orthodox monk and then to the opening chapter of Genesis. The dilemma that disturbs us is well summed up in a conversation recorded by Archimandrite Sophrony, the disciple of St Silouan of Mount Athos:
It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the hell of separation from God… He could not bear to think that anyone would languish in “outer darkness.” I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, “God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.”
Obviously upset, the Staretz said, “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise, and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire—would you feel happy?”
“It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,” said the hermit. The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance. “Love could not bear that,” he said. “We must pray for all.”
Here exactly the basic problem is set before us. St Silouan appeals to divine compassion: “Love could not bear that.” The hermit emphasizes human responsibility: “It would be their own fault.” We are confronted by two principles that are apparently conflicting: first, God is love, second, human beings are free.
How are we to give proper weight to each of these principles? First, God is love, and this love of His is generous, inexhaustible, infinitely patient. Surely, then, He will never stop loving any of the rational creatures whom He has made; He will continue to watch over them in His tender mercy until eventually, perhaps after countless ages, all of them freely and willingly turn back to Him. But in that case what happens to our second principle, human beings are free? If the triumph of divine love is inevitable, what place is there for liberty of choice? How can we be genuinely free if in the last resort there is nothing for us to choose between?
Let us restate the issue in a slightly different way. On the first page of the Bible it is written, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was altogether good and beautiful” (Gen 1:31, lxx). In the beginning, that is to say, there was unity; all created things participated fully in the goodness, truth and beauty of the Creator. Are we, then, to assert that at the end there will be not unity but duality? Is there to be a continuing opposition between good and evil, between heaven and hell, between joy and torment, that remains forever unresolved? If we start by affirming that God created a world which was wholly good, and if we then maintain that a significant part of His rational creation will end up in intolerable anguish, separated from Him for all eternity, surely this implies that God has failed in His creative work and has been defeated by the forces of evil.
Are we to rest satisfied with such a conclusion? Or dare we look, however tentatively, beyond this duality to an ultimate restoration of unity when “all shall be well”? Rejecting the possibility of universal salvation, C. S. Lewis has stated:
“Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and specially of Our Lord s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”
Is Lewis right? Does universalism in fact contradict Scripture, tradition, and reason in such a stark and clear-cut way?
Two strands of Scripture
It is not difficult to find texts in the New Testament that warn us, in what seem to be unambiguous terms, of the prospect of never-ending torment in hell. Let us take but three examples, each consisting of words attributed directly to Jesus.
Mark 9:43, 47-48. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire… And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the Kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (cf. Mt 18:8-9; Is 66:24).
Matthew 25:41 (from the story of the sheep and the goats). “Then He will say to those at His left hand, cYou that are accursed, depart from Me into the eternal fire”
Luke 16:26 (the words of Abraham to the rich man in hell). “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”
It is difficult, if not impossible, to speak about the life after death except through the use of metaphors and symbols. Not surprisingly, then, these three passages employ a metaphorical “picture language”: they speak in terms of “fire,” the “worm,” and a “great chasm.” The metaphors doubtless are not to be taken literally, but they have implications that are hard to avoid: the fire is said to be “unquenchable” and “eternal”; the worm “does not die” ; the gulf is impassable. If “eternal” (aionios, Mt 25:41) in fact means no more than “age-long”—-lasting, that is, throughout this present aeon but not necessarily continuing into the Age to come—and if the gulf is only temporarily impassable, then why is this not made clear in the New Testament?
Yet these and other “hell-fire” texts need to be interpreted in the light of different, less frequently cited passages from the New Testament, which point rather in a “universalist” direction.
There is a series of Pauline texts which affirm a parallel between the universality of sin on the one hand and the universality of redemption on the other. The most obvious example is 1 Corinthians 15:22, where Paul is working out the analogy between the first and the second Adam: “As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” Surely the word “all” bears the same sense in both halves of this sentence. There are similar passages in Romans: “Just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (5:18); “God has imprisoned all in disobedience, that He may be merciful to all” (11:32). It might be argued that in these three cases Paul’s meaning is simply that Christ s death and Resurrection extend to all the possibility of redemption. It does not follow that all will or must be saved, for that depends upon the voluntary choice of each one. Salvation, that is to say, is offered to everyone, but not everyone will actually accept it. In fact, however, Paul suggests more than a mere possibility; he expresses a confident expectation. He does not say, “All may perhaps be made alive,” but “All will be made alive.” At the very least this encourages us to hope for the salvation of all. C. S. Lewis therefore contradicts St Paul when he asserts as an established fact, “Some will not be redeemed.”
The same note of expectant confidence is also to be heard, yet more distinctly, in 1 Corinthians 15:28 (this was Origens key text). Christ will reign, says Paul, until “God has put all things in subjection under His feet… And when all things are made subject to the Son, then the Son himself will also be made subject to the Father, who has subjected all things to Him; and thus God will be all in all’ ” The phrase “all in all” (panta en pasin) definitely suggests not ultimate dualism but an ultimate reconciliation.
There is also the text from the Pastoral Epistles that influenced the Arminians and John Wesley: “It is the will of God our Savior… that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). It can of course be pointed out that the author does not here state as a certainty that all will be saved, but merely says that this is what God wants. Are we to assert, however, that God’s will is going to be eventually frustrated? As before, we are being encouraged at least to hope for universal salvation.
It is important, therefore, to allow for the complexity of the Scriptural evidence. It does not all point in the same direction, but there are two contrasting strands. Some passages present us with a challenge. God invites but does not compel. I possess freedom of choice: am I going to say “yes” or “no” to the divine invitation? The future is uncertain. To which destination am I personally bound? Might I perhaps be shut out from the wedding feast? But there are other passages which insist with equal emphasis upon divine sovereignty. God cannot be ultimately defeated. “All shall be well,” and in the end God will indeed be “all in all.” Challenge and sovereignty: such are the two strands in the New Testament, and neither strand should be disregarded.
God the cosmic physician
Turning now from Scripture to tradition, let us look first at the author who, more than anyone else in Christian history, has been associated with the universalist standpoint, Origen of Alexandria. He is someone who, over the centuries, has been greatly commended and greatly reviled, in almost equal measure. He is praised, for instance, by his fellow Alexandrian Didymus the Blind, who calls him “the chief teacher of the Church after the Apostles.” “Who would not rather be wrong with Origen than right with anyone else?” exclaims St Vincent of Lerins. A striking but typical expression of the opposite point of view is to be found in a story told of St Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism in Egypt. While conversing one day with some visiting monks, Pachomius was puzzled because he noticed an “exceedingly nasty smell,” for which he could find no explanation.
Suddenly he discovered the reason for the odor: the visitors were Origenists. “Behold, I testify to you before God,” he admonished them, “that everyone who reads Origen and accepts his writings will go down to the depth of hell. The inheritance of all such persons is the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth… Take all the works of Origen that are in your possession, and throw them into the river.” Alas! All too many have heeded Pachomius’ advice, burning and destroying what Origen wrote, with the result that several of his chief works survive only in translation, not in the original Greek. This is true in particular of the treatise On First Principles, where Origen expounds most fully his teaching about the end of the world. Here we have to rely largely on the Latin version (not always accurate) made by Rufinus.
Origen, to his credit, displays a humility not always apparent in his leading critics, Jerome and Justinian. Again and again in his treatment of the deeper issues of theology, Origen bows his head in reverent wonder before the divine mystery. Not for one moment does he imagine that he has all the answers. This humility is evident in particular when he speaks about the Last Things and the future hope. “These are matters hard and difficult to understand,” he writes. “ .. .We need to speak about them with great fear and caution, discussing and investigating rather than laying down fixed and certain conclusions.”
Yet, humble or not, Origen was condemned as a heretic and anathematized at the time of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople under the Emperor Justinian in 553. The first of the fifteen anathemas directed against him states: “If anyone maintains the mythical preexistence of souls, and the monstrous apocatastasis that follows from this, let him be anathema.” This seems entirely explicit and definite: belief in a final “restoration” (apocatastasis) of all things and all persons— belief in universal salvation, not excluding that of the devil—has apparently been ruled out as heretical in a formal decision by what is for the Orthodox Church the highest visible authority in matters of doctrine, an Ecumenical Council.
There is, however, considerable doubt whether these fifteen anathemas were in fact formally approved by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. They may have been endorsed by a lesser council, meeting in the early months of 553 shortly before the main council was convened, in which case they lack full ecumenical authority; yet, even so, the Fathers of the Fifth Council were well aware of these fifteen anathemas and had no intention of revoking or modifying them. Apart from that, however, the precise wording of the first anathema deserves to be carefully noted. It does not speak only about apocatastasis but links together two aspects of Origen’s theology: first, his speculations about the beginning, that is to say, about the preexistence of souls and the precosmic fall; second, his teaching about the end, about universal salvation and the ultimate reconciliation of all things. Origen’s eschatology is seen as following directly from his protology, and both are rejected together.
That the first of the fifteen anathemas should condemn protology and eschatology in the same sentence is entirely understandable, for in Origens thinking the two form an integral unity. At the beginning, so he believed, there was a realm of logikoi or rational intellects (noes) existing prior to the creation of the material world as minds without a body. Originally all these logikoi were joined in perfect union with the Creator Logos. Then followed the precosmic fall. With the exception of one logikos (which became the human soul of Christ), all the other logikoi turned away from the Logos and became, depending on the gravity of their deviation, either angels or human beings or demons. In each case they were given bodies appropriate to the seriousness of their fall: lightweight and ethereal in the case of angels; dark and hideous in the case of demons; intermediate in the case of human beings. At the end, so Origen maintained, this process of fragmentation will be reversed. All alike, whether angels, human beings, or demons, will be restored to unity with the Logos; the primal harmony of the total creation will be reinstated, and once more “God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Origens view is in this way circular in character: the end will be as the beginning.
Now, as we have noted, the first of the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas is directed not simply against Origen’s teaching concerning universal reconciliation, but against his total understanding of salvation history—against his theory of preexistent souls, of a precosmic fall and a final apocatastasis—seen as a single and undivided whole. Suppose, however, that we separate his eschatology from his protology; suppose that we abandon all speculations about the realm of eternal logikoi; suppose that we simply adhere to the standard Christian view whereby there is no preexistence of the soul, but each new person comes into being as an integral unity of soul and body, at or shortly after the moment of the conception of the embryo within the mothers womb. In this way we could advance a doctrine of universal salvation—affirming this, not as a logical certainty (indeed, Origen never did that), but as a heartfelt aspiration, a visionary hope—which would avoid the circularity of Origens view and so would escape the condemnation of the anti-Origenist anathemas. We shall return to this possibility in a moment when considering St Gregory of Nyssa, but let us first explore further Origen’s reasons for affirming a final apocatastasis.
It is often claimed that belief in universal salvation, because it considers the eventual triumph of divine love to be inevitable, fails to properly allow for our liberty of choice. This is an objection to which Origen is consistently sensitive. However confident his hope that God s love will in the end prevail, he is careful never to undermine the vital significance of human free will. While affirming that “God is love,” he does not lose sight of the correlative principle, “Human beings are free.” Thus, when speaking of the subjection of all things to Christ, and of Christ to the Father (1 Cor 15:28), he observes: “This subjection will be accomplished in accordance with various assured methods and disciplines and times; yet it should not be thought that there is some necessity which compels all things into subjection, or that the whole world will be subdued by force to God.” Origen is altogether definite here: there is no compulsion, no force. If God s love is finally victorious, this will be because it is freely and willingly accepted by the whole of rational creation. Origen’s apocatastasis is not simply a deduction from some abstract system; it is a hope.
Here we touch upon a difficulty that is frequently felt not only in connection with the final reconciliation at the end of the world but also throughout our Christian experience in this present life. It is tempting to regard divine grace and human freedom as two contrasting principles, the one excluding the other; and as a result we often assume that the stronger the action of grace, the more restricted is the exercise of our human freedom.
But is this not a false dilemma? In the words of John A. T. Robinson:
Everyone may point to instances in which he has been constrained to thankful response by the overmastering power of love. And yet, under this strange compulsion, has anyone ever felt his freedom infringed or his personality violated? Is it not precisely at these moments that he becomes conscious, perhaps only for a fleeting space, of being himself in a way he never knew before, of attaining a fullness and integration of life which is inextricably bound up with the decision drawn from him by another’s love? Moreover, this is true however strong be the constraint laid upon him: or, rather, it is truer the stronger it is. Under the constraint of the love of God in Christ this sense of self-fulfillment is at its maximum. The testimony of generations is that here, as nowhere else, service is perfect freedom.
Surely this is true par excellence of the victory of God’s love in the age to come. The power that is victorious is the power of loving compassion, and so it is a victory that does not overrule but enhances our human freedom.
Origen’s caution is evident in particular when he refers to the salvation of the devil and his angels. He makes it abundantly clear that he regards this not as a certainty but as a possibility. In his Commentary on John he does no more than pose a question: “Since human beings can display repentance and turn from unbelief to faith, shall we shrink back from asserting something similar about the angelic powers?” In his treatise On Prayer; Origen limits himself to saying that God has a plan for the devil in the age to come, but we have at present no idea what this plan may be: “God will make arrangements for him, I know not how.” In the work On First Principles, the matter is left to the judgment of the reader:
Whether certain of those orders, which are under the leadership of the devil and are obedient to his wickedness, can at some point in future ages be converted to goodness, inasmuch as there still exists in them the power of free will; or whether the evil has become so permanent and deep-rooted that it has become through habit part of their nature: let my reader decide this for himself.
Here Origen suggests two possibilities: either the demons still possess the power of free will, or else they have reached the point of no return, after which repentance is impossible. But he expresses no judgment; both possibilities are left open.
This raises an interesting question, which I once put to a Greek archbishop at the beginning of a four-hour car journey, in the hope that it would help us while away the time. If it is possible that the devil, who must surely be a very lonely and unhappy person, may eventually repent and be saved, why do we never pray for him? To my disappointment (for I could not at the moment think of other topics of conversation), the archbishop settled the matter with a sharp and brief rejoinder: “Mind your own business.” He was right. So far as we humans are concerned, the devil is always our adversary; we should not enter into any kind of negotiations with him, whether by praying for him or in other ways. His salvation is quite simply none of our business. But the devil has also his own relationship with God, as we learn from the prologue of the book of Job, when Satan makes his appearance in the heavenly court among the other “sons of God” (Job 1:6-2:7). We are, however, altogether ignorant of the precise nature of this relationship, and it is futile to pry into it. Yet, even though it is not for us to pray for the devil, we have no right to assume that he is totally and irrevocably excluded from the scope of God s mercy. We do not know. In Wittgenstein’s words, Wovon man nicht reden kann, daruber muf? man schweigen.
The strongest point in Origens case for universalism is his analysis of punishment. We may summarize his view by distinguishing three primary reasons that have been advanced to justify the infliction of punishment.
First, there is the retributive argument. Those who have done evil, it is claimed, themselves deserve to suffer in proportion to the evil that they have done. Only so will the demands of justice be fulfilled: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Ex 21:24). But in the Sermon on the Mount Christ explicitly rejects this principle (Mt 5:38). If we humans are forbidden by Christ to exact retribution in this way from our fellow humans, how much more should we refrain from attributing vindictive and retributive behavior to God. It is blasphemous to assert that the Holy Trinity is vengeful. In any case, it seems contrary to justice that God should inflict an infinite punishment in requital for what is only a finite amount of wrongdoing.
The second line of argument insists upon the need for a deterrent. It is only the prospect of hell-fire, it is said, that holds us back from evil-doing. But why then, it may be asked, do we need an unending, everlasting punishment to act as an effective deterrent? Would it not be sufficient to threaten prospective malefactors with a period of painful separation from God that is exceedingly prolonged, yet not infinite? In any case, it is only too obvious, especially in our own day, that the threat of hell-fire is almost totally ineffective as a deterrent. If in our preaching of the Christian faith we hope to have any significant influence on others, then what we need is not a negative but a positive strategy: let us abandon ugly threats, and attempt rather to evoke people’s sense of wonder and their capacity for love.
There remains the reformative understanding of punishment, which Origen considered to be the only view that is morally acceptable. Punishment, if it is to possess moral value, has to be not merely retaliatory or dissuasive but remedial. When parents inflict punishment on their children, or the state on criminals, their aim should always be to heal those whom they punish and to change them for the better. And such, according to Origen, is precisely the purpose of the punishments inflicted upon us by God; He acts always as “our physician.” A doctor may sometimes be obliged to employ extreme measures which cause agony to his patients. (This was particularly so before the use of anesthetics.) He may cauterize a wound or amputate a limb. But this is always done with a positive end in view, so as to bring about the patient’s eventual recovery and restoration to health. So it is with God, the physician of our souls. He may inflict suffering upon us, both in this life and after our death; but always He does this out of tender love and with a positive purpose, so as to cleanse us from our sins, to purge and heal us. In Origen’s words, “The fury of God’s vengeance avails to the purging of our souls.”
Now, if we adopt this reformative and therapeutic view of punishment—and this is the only reason for inflicting punishment that can worthily be attributed to God—then surely such punishment should not be unending. If the aim of punishment is to heal, then once the healing has been accomplished there is no need for the punishment to continue. If, however, the punishment is supposed to be everlasting, it is difficult to see how it can have any remedial or educative purpose. In a never-ending hell there is no escape and therefore no healing, and so the infliction of punishment in such a hell is pointless and immoral. This third understanding of punishment, therefore, is incompatible with the notion of perpetual torment in hell; it requires us, rather, to think in terms of some kind of purgatory after death. But in that case this purgatory should be envisaged as a house of healing, not a torture chamber; as a hospital, not a prison. Here, in his grand vision of God as the cosmic physician, Origen is at his most convincing.
An uncondemned universalist
Origen’s longing for the salvation of all had already brought him under suspicion in his own lifetime. Yet there were some among his spiritual descendants who kept alive this universal hope. The two most notable examples are to be found at the end of the fourth century: Evagrius of Pontus, monk in the Egyptian desert, and St Gregory of Nyssa, the younger brother of St Basil the Great. Evagrius upheld and perhaps hardened the full Origenist teaching concerning the preexistence of souls, the precosmic fall, and the final apocatastasis; and for this he was condemned along with Origen in 553. Gregory of Nyssa, on the other hand, abandoned Origen’s speculations concerning preexistence and the precosmic fall, while holding fast to his belief in an ultimate restoration; and, significantly, he has never been anathematized for this, either in 553 or in more recent times. In expressing his hope that all will be saved, Gregory of Nyssa is fully as confident as Origen. His words recall the great affirmation of Paul, “and thus God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). “When, through these long and circuitous methods,” writes Gregory, “the wickedness which is now mingled and consolidated with our nature has been finally expelled from it, and when all those things that are now sunk down in evil are restored to their original state, there will ascend from the entire creation a united hymn of thanksgiving… All this is contained in the great mystery of the Divine Incarnation.” This final restoration, Gregory clearly states, will embrace even the devil.
Despite this bold claim, Gregory of Nyssa has never been condemned as a heretic, but on the contrary he is honored as a saint. Why should this be so? Perhaps he escaped reprobation because he was Basil’s brother. Yet if he was treated differently from his master Origen, perhaps it was because, while retaining Origen’s hope in the eventual triumph of good over evil, he abandoned the notion of preexistence and so avoided the circularity of the Origenist scheme. Whatever the explanation, the fact that Gregory has not been anathematized is certainly significant. It suggests that, if dissociated from speculations about a precosmic fall, a carefully qualified expression of universal hope is acceptable, even within the bounds of strict orthodoxy.
St Gregory of Nyssa is one of the patrons of the house of ecumenical studies to which I am attached in Oxford; and personally I am delighted that this should be so.
The scourgings of love
A third patristic author who dared to hope for the salvation of all was St Isaac of Nineveh, honored and loved throughout the Christian East as “Isaac the Syrian.” Although he lived some three generations after the Fifth Ecumenical Council, he was unaffected by the anti-Origenist anathemas associated with it; for, as a member of the Church of the East, dwelling in Mesopotamia far outside the bounds of the Byzantine Empire, he owed no allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople and did not recognize the Council held in 553 as ecumenical. Possibly he was altogether unaware of its decrees.
Particularly striking is Isaacs understanding of hell. He insists that the texts in the New Testament about fire, the worm, outer darkness, and the gnashing of teeth are not to be understood literally and in a physical sense. He speaks of hell or Gehenna as “noetic” or “intelligible.” Hell is an “effect,” not a “substance,” while the “outer darkness” is not a place but “the state without any delight in true knowledge and communion with God.” “There will be psychic weeping and grinding of teeth,” says Isaac, “which is a grief more hard to endure than fire.” The teeth-gnashing in the Age to come, then, so far from being physical and material, signifies an inner and spiritual anguish. I am reminded of the story of the preacher who, in his sermons on hell, dwelt with particular relish upon the gnashing of teeth. Eventually an elderly member of the congregation could bear it no more. “But I have no teeth,” she exclaimed—to which the preacher replied severely, “Teeth will be provided.”
Isaac had a better answer. In his view, the real torment in hell consists, not in burning by material fire, nor in any physical pain, but in the pangs of conscience that a person suffers on realizing that he or she has rejected the love of God:
Also I say that even those who are scourged in hell are tormented with the scourgings of love. The scourges that result from love—-that is, the scourges of those who have become aware that they have sinned against love—are harder and more bitter than the torments which result from fear.
The pain which gnaws the heart as the result of sinning against love is sharper than all other torments that there are.
It is wrong to imagine that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God… [But] the power of love works in two ways: it torments those who have sinned, just as happens among friends here on earth; but to those who have observed its duties, love gives delight.
So it is in hell: the contrition that comes from love is the harsh torment.
When I first came across this passage as a student more than forty years ago, I said to myself: That is the only view of hell that makes any sense to me. God is love, St Isaac tells us, and this divine love is unchanging and inexhaustible. God’s love is everywhere and embraces everything: “If I go down to hell, Thou art there also” (Ps 138 [139] :8). Thus even those in hell are not cut off from the love of God. Love acts, however, in a twofold way: it is joy to those who accept it but torture to those who shut it out.
In the words of George MacDonald, “The terror of God is but the other side of His love; it is love outside, that would be inside.” Thus those in hell feel as agonizing pain that which the saints feel as unending delight. God does not inflict torment upon those in hell, but it is they who torment themselves through their willful refusal to respond to His love. As Georges Bernanos observes, “Hell is not to love any more.” “The love of God,” writes Vladimir Lossky, “will be an intolerable torment to those who have not acquired it within themselves.” From this it follows that those in hell are self-enslaved, self-imprisoned. Ultimately, states C. S. Lewis,
there are only two kinds of people…those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “ Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell… The doors of hell are locked on the inside?
Now if all this is true—if, as Isaac says, those in hell are not cut off from the love of God, and if, as Lewis asserts, they are self-imprisoned—then may it not be that they still have some hope of redemption? (Indeed, the Orthodox Church says a special prayer for them at Vespers on the Sunday of Pentecost.) If divine love is constantly knocking on the door of their heart, and if that door is locked on the inside, may not the time come when at long last they respond to love’s invitation and open the door? If the reason for their suffering is that they recognize how grievously they have sinned against love, does this not imply that there is still within them some spark of goodness, some possibility of repentance and restoration?
Isaac, for his part, definitely believed that this was so. In the second part of his Homilies (previously thought to have been lost, but rediscovered in 1983 by Dr. Sebastian Brock) Isaac speaks of a ‘wonderful outcome” that God will bring to pass at the end of history:
I am of the opinion that He is going to manifest some wonderful outcome, a matter of immense and ineffable compassion on the part of the glorious Creator, with respect to the ordering of this difficult matter of [Gehenna’s] torment: out of it the wealth of His love and power and wisdom will become known all the more—and so will the insistent might of the waves of His goodness.
It is not [the way of] the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction.
Isaac has two main reasons for affirming with such confidence his expectation of a ‘wonderful outcome.” First, even more passionately than Origen, he rejects any suggestion that God is vengeful and vindictive. This he sees as blasphemy: “Far be it, that vengeance could ever be found in that Fountain of love and Ocean brimming with goodness!” When God punishes us, or appears to do so, the purpose of this punishment is never retributive and retaliatory, but exclusively reformative and therapeutic:
God chastises with love, not for the sake of revenge—far be it!—but seeking to make whole His image… Love’s chastisement is for correction, but it does not aim at retribution.
As Isaac insists in the second part, “God is not one who requites evil, but He sets aright evil… The Kingdom and Gehenna are matters belonging to mercy.” Gehenna is nothing else than a place of purging and purification which helps to bring about God’s master plan “that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).
Second, and more fundamentally, Isaac is convinced that “many waters cannot quench love” (Song 8:7). “Not even the immense wickedness of the demons can overcome the measure of God’s goodness,” he writes, quoting Diodore of Tarsus. Unquenchable and limitless as it is, Gods love will eventually triumph over evil: “There exists with Him a single love and compassion which is spread out over all creation, [a love] which is without alteration, timeless and everlasting… No part belonging to any single one of [all] rational beings will be lost.” Here, then, in distant Mesopotamia is one who is not afraid to affirm with Julian of Norwich and T. S. Eliot, “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Love and freedom
Within the tradition of the Christian East, then, we have identified three powerful witnesses who dare to hope for the salvation of all. Other witnesses could certainly be cited from the West, particularly among the Anabaptists, Moravians, and Christadelphians. Yet it has to be admitted that in East and West alike—but more particularly in the West because of the influence of St Augustine of Hippo—the voices raised in favor of universal salvation remain a small minority. Most Christians, at any rate until the twentieth century, have assumed that the main part of the human race will end up in an everlasting hell: “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt 22:14). How far is such an assumption justified? Having looked at Scripture and tradition, let us now invoke reason. Drawing together all that has been said so far, let us marshal three arguments in favor of universalism and four against.
In favor of universal hope
The power of divine love. As a God of infinite compassion, it is argued, the Creator is not grudging in His mercy and forgiveness but immeasurably patient. He compels no one, but He will in fact wait until each and every one of His rational creatures voluntarily responds to His love. Divine love is stronger than all the forces of darkness and evil within the universe, and in the end it will prevail. “Love never fails” (1 Cor 13:8); it is never exhausted, never comes to an end. This appeal to the invincibility of divine love is the strongest argument in favor of universal hope.
The essence of hell. This is basically a restatement of the first argument. As we noted when citing St Isaac the Syrian, hell is not God s rejection of humankind but humankind’s refusal of God. It is not a punishment which God inflicts upon us, but a state of mind in which we punish ourselves. God does not shut the door against those in hell; He does not withdraw His love from them, but it is they who deliberately harden their hearts against that love. Since, then, those in hell are still enfolded in divine love, it remains possible that they may some day open their hearts to this omnipresent compassion; and, when they do, they will find that God has not stopped loving them. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; for He cannot deny himself” (2 Tim 2:13). His nature is love, and He cannot cease to be that which He is.
The non-reality of evil. This is an argument that we have not so far had occasion to discuss. “I am He who is,” says God to Moses at the burning bush in the Septuagint version of Ex 3:14; “I am the Existing One” (ego eimi ho on). God is Being and Reality, and He is the sole source of all existence. Evil, on the other hand, is in the strict sense non-being and unreality. Evil and sin have no substantive existence, for they are not a “thing” that God has made; they are a distortion of the good, a parasite—not a noun but an adjective. This was clearly shown to Julian of Norwich, who states in her Thirteenth Revelation: “I did not see sin, for I believe that it has no kind of substance, no share in being, nor can it be recognized except by the pains which it causes.”
Existence, then, is good, for it is a gift from God; and everything that exists, by the very fact of existing, retains some link with God, who is the only source of existence. From this it follows that nothing that exists can be entirely and utterly evil. To posit something totally evil would be a non-sense, a contradiction in terms; for such a thing would be altogether unreal and could not actually exist. Even the devil, because he exists, still has a continuing relationship with God. Thus where there is existence, there is hope—even for the devil.
A possible conclusion from this third line of argument is not universal salvation but conditional immortality. At the end God will indeed be “all in all,” not because all rational creatures have been saved but because at a certain point the radically wicked have simply ceased to be. Cut off from God, the unique source of existence, they have lapsed into non-being. At the end-time, that is to say, there will be a resurrection to eternal life, but no resurrection to eternal death; or, rather, there will be resurrection to a death that is final but not continuing, for it will entail annihilation.
This notion of conditional immortality has much to be said in its favor. It is an attractive way of avoiding the need to choose between universal salvation and an unending hell. But, although it was held by the fourth-century African author Arnobius of Sicca, it has otherwise little support in earlier tradition. The objection commonly advanced against the “conditionalist” standpoint is that God s gift of existence is stable and changeless. It is something that He will never withdraw: “For the charismata and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). Within each rational being endowed with free will, there is something unique and unrepeatable; God never does the same thing twice. Shall this uniqueness disappear forever from the universe?
Against universal hope
The argument from free will. Because humans are free, it is argued, they are at liberty to reject God. His gifts are irrevocable; He will never take away from us our power of voluntary choice, and so we are free to go on saying “No” to Him through all eternity. Such unending rejection of God is precisely the essence of hell. Because free will exists, there must exist also the possibility of hell as a place of everlasting suffering. Take away hell, and you deny freedom. None can be forced to enter heaven against their will.
As the Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov observes, God can do anything except compel us to love him; for love is free, and thus where there is no liberty of choice there is no love. Whereas the appeal to the power of divine love constitutes the strongest argument in favor of universal salvation, this appeal to free will is certainly the strongest argument on the other side. Significantly, both parties in the debate, although in different ways, seek their main support from the fact that God is love.
The point of no return. But, it may be rejoined, does not this argument from free will prove too much? If God never takes away from us our liberty of choice, and if those in hell therefore retain free will, then is not the possibility of repentance a continuing option for them? To this the anti-universalists commonly reply that there is a point of no return, after which repentance becomes impossible. God does not deprive the damned of their freedom, but the misuse of their freedom becomes eventually so deeply rooted in them that they cannot thereafter change, and thus they remain fixed forever in their attitude of rejection. God has not ceased to love them, but they have rendered themselves incapable of ever again responding to that love.
A parallel can thus be drawn between the saints in heaven and the damned in hell. The saints in heaven have not lost their freedom, but it is no longer possible for them ever again to turn away from God and to lapse into sin. They still have liberty of choice, but all their choices are good. In a similar way the damned in hell still retain a residual freedom of choice, for they have not ceased to be persons. But all their choices are bad, and it is no longer possible for them to ascend to the divine realm.
The devil possesses freedom—but not the freedom to repent. In this way, after the Last Judgment there will be a “great divorce,” and the chasm between heaven and hell will remain forever impassable. The argument from justice. It is contrary to divine justice, so it is often alleged, that the wicked should enjoy the same reward as the righteous; the moral harmony of the universe will be impaired if evildoers do not receive their just recompense. I find this argument far less strong than the two previous arguments. As St Isaac the Syrian rightly insists, our human notions of retributive justice are altogether inapplicable to God. He is a God not of vengeance but of forgiving love; His justice is nothing other than His love. When He punishes, His purpose is not to requite but to heal.
The moral and pastoral argument. Finally, on the anti-universalist side it is often said that universalism deprives the Christian message of its sense of urgency and underestimates the note of insistent warning present throughout the New Testament. Christ begins His public preaching with the word “Today” (Lk 4:21). “See, now is the acceptable time,” states Paul; “see, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). Today, now: it is this present life that is our moment of opportunity and decision, our time of crisis, the kairos when we make the choices that determine our eternal future. If, on the other hand, we are allowed an unlimited series of further chances after our death, and if in any case we shall all end up in the same place whatever we do in this present life, then where is the challenge in the preaching of the Christian message, and where is the need for conversion and repentance here and now? If the triumph of God s love is inevitable and there is ultimately nothing for us to choose between, does this not make our present acts of moral decision trivial and meaningless?
Origen is aware of this difficulty. The doctrine of apocatastasis, he advises, ought to be kept secret; for, if preached openly to the immature, it will lead them to become careless and indifferent. No doubt it is for this reason that the nineteenth-century Pietist theologian Christian Gottlieb Barth remarks, “Anyone who does not believe in the universal restoration is an ox, but anyone who teaches it is an ass.” St Isaac the Syrian deals with the problem in a different way. It makes an immeasurable difference to us, he points out, whether we respond to divine love here and now or only after countless aeons. Even though the torment of hell is not everlasting, it remains truly appalling: “Nevertheless [Gehenna] is grievous, even if it is thus limited in its extent: who can [possibly] bear it?”
If the strongest argument in favor of universal salvation is the appeal to divine love, and if the strongest argument on the opposite side is the appeal to human freedom, then we are brought back to the dilemma with which we started: how are we to bring into concord the two principles God is love and Human beings are free. For the time being we cannot do more than hold fast with equal firmness to both principles at once, while admitting that the manner of their ultimate harmonization remains a mystery beyond our present comprehension. What St Paul said about the reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism is applicable also to the final reconciliation of the total creation: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways!” (Rom 11:33).
When I am waiting at Oxford Station for the train to London, sometimes I walk up to the northernmost stretch of the long platform until I reach a notice: “Passengers must not proceed beyond this point. Penalty: £50.” In discussion of the future hope, we need a similar notice: “Theologians must not proceed beyond this point”—Let my readers devise a suitable penalty. Doubtless, Origen’s mistake was that he tried to say too much. It is a fault that I admire rather than execrate, but it was a mistake nonetheless.
Our belief in human freedom means that we have no right to categorically affirm, “All must be saved.” But our faith in Gods love makes us dare to hope that all will be saved.
Is there anybody there? said the traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door.
Hell exists as a possibility because free will exists. Yet, trusting in the inexhaustible attractiveness of God’s love, we venture to express the hope—it is no more than a hope—that in the end, like Walter de la Mare’s Traveller, we shall find that there is nobody there. Let us leave the last word, then, with St Silouan of Mount Athos: “Love could not bear that…We must pray for all.”
From “The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works” by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware
Thanks to source:
https://orthodoxchurchlife.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/dare-we-hope-for-the-salvation-of-all-origen-st-gregory-of-nyssa-and-st-isaac-the-syrian/
(bold added)
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
A World Split Apart ~ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A World Split Apart
Thursday, June 8, 1978.
I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates.
Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.
Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said...
The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.
Contemporary Worlds
There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units. For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in communist captivity. It may be that in the past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West, I am no judge here; but as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.
How short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples' approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success, there were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the twentieth century came the discovery of its fragility and friability. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.
Convergence
But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development is quite different.
Anguish about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side's defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.
If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world's rifts I would have concentrated on the East's calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West in our days, such as I see them.
A Decline in Courage [. . .]
may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Well-Being
When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration). Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development. The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country?
Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.
Legalistic Life
Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.
I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.
The Direction of Freedom
In today's Western society, the inequality has been revealed of freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.
It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and, in fact, it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society. (There is a huge number of prisoners in our camps which are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state resorting to means outside of a legal framework).
The Direction of the Press
The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?
Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.
Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.
Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?
There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.
A Fashion in Thinking
Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.
I have mentioned a few trends of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world. The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a review, to look into the influence of these Western characteristics on important aspects on [the] nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in [?...]
Socialism
It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.
I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the United States.
Not a Model
But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.
A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. Therefore if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.
All this is visible to observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
There are meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?
Shortsightedness
Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and meaning of events.
In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is. There have been naive predictions by some American experts who believed that Angola would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam or that Cuban expeditions in Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba. Kennan' s advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Moscow Old Square1 officials laugh at your political wizards! As to Fidel Castro, he frankly scorns the United States, sending his troops to distant adventures from his country right next to yours.
However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?
I have had occasion already to say that in the 20th century democracy has not won any major war without help and protection from a powerful continental ally whose philosophy and ideology it did not question. In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning that war with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy grew and cultivated another enemy who would prove worse and more powerful yet, as Hitler never had so many resources and so many people, nor did he offer any attractive ideas, or have such a large number of supporters in the West -- a potential fifth column -- as the Soviet Union. At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one; in this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the one perpetrated in Cambodia in our days.
Loss of Willpower
And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal. Thus at the shameful Belgrade conference free Western diplomats in their weakness surrendered the line where enslaved members of Helsinki Watchgroups are sacrificing their lives.
Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost, there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.
Facing such a danger, with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?
Humanism and Its Consequences
How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.
However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.
An Unexpected Kinship
As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "communism is naturalized humanism."
This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism). Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.
The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.
Before the Turn
I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.
To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.
If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.
It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.
Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward.
Notes[1] The Old Square in Moscow (Staraya Ploshchad') is the place where the [headquarters] of the Central Committee of the CPSU are located; it is the real name of what in the West is conventionally referred to as "the Kremlin."thanks to Source: http://www.oodegr.co/english/koinwnia/politika/split_apart1.htm |
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