Eleonore Stump and Hell: Responding to Fr Rooney

I actually enjoyed reading Fr James Dominic Rooney’s Facebook defense of Dr Eleonore Stump in response to my article “Predestined to Glory.”¹ I found it clearly written and coherent. I also believe that he attempted a good faith response. For these two reasons, both Rooney and my readers deserve a rejoinder.

Preliminaries

First off, two points I wish to quickly address:

1) Rooney writes:

Now, obviously, Stump rejects the possibility of theological determinism—as do I—and so Kimel’s objection fails to engage with the position. It is not plausibly the case that theological determinism is necessarily true, and all Stump needs is that it is possibly the case that theological determinism is false for her account to provide a reason God allows hell.

Rooney is correct. Given Stump’s brilliance as a philosopher and my own philosophical incompetence, I deemed it prudent not to respond to Stump on her own liber­tar­ian grounds.² I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I do know when I’m intellectually out-gunned. As they say down here in the South, “Mama didn’t raise no fool.” Yet I wanted to challenge Stump’s categorical claim that the divine love excludes the universalist thesis. While Thomas Talbott and Eric Reitan would have directly engaged Stump on the libertarian playing field, I judged that a more constructive and interesting approach would be to call a compatibilist end run. And so I signed St Augustine of Hippo to my team. Given his under­stand­ing of divine omnipotence and grace, God can bring even the most hard-hearted and resistant to free and wholehearted embrace of the gift of eternal joy and ecstasy in Jesus Christ without violating their personal integrity. Final rejection of God, therefore, can never be truly final. Omnipotent Love can and will find a way to restore every human being, no matter how obdurate, to himself. This is a bold and contentious claim, I know; but it actually makes plausible sense if one holds a dual sources account of divine universal causality and humanity’s innate orientation to the Good. Stump and Rooney may disagree with absolute predestination, but they cannot dismiss it as contrary to the Catholic faith. Augustine is, after all, the Doctor of Grace. And as Jesse Couenhoven has noted: “Universalist doctrines of predestination offer a powerful avenue for defending divine goodness.”³

Is Augustine’s doctrine of predestination properly described as deterministic? Given the divine transcendence and the ineffability of the causal joint between divine and creaturely agency, I honestly don’t know. I’m not even sure if predestination is appropriately described as deterministic even by way of analogy. Robert Matava has told me that divine causality is so different from finite determinism that it is probably best to find another word to name it.

And Fr Rooney, I have never claimed, nor do I believe, that universalist predestination is necessarily true, at least not if you mean that it is self-evidently true. As my daughter used to say, “That’s just silly talk.” But if you mean that God necessarily saves all because of his divine goodness and love, well, that is a different discussion, one which I did not touch on in my essay. Of course, if by “necessity” you are referring to divine predestination, then I wish you had just said so, to avoid confusion.

2) Rooney writes:

What Stump takes those reasons will become clearer in response to the central positive argument of the article. Kimel gives a positive argument for universalism, derived from DB Hart, which is simply a version of the logical problem of evil. The problem is this: if God can cause all rational creatures to be saved (He is omnipotent), and He is all-loving (He wills that all come into union with Himself), then God will do it.” (emphasis mine)

I will return later to the substance of the above passage, but here I simply want to correct the assertion that my central argument is dependent upon David Bentley Hart. As readers of my blog know, I became a universalist four years before David publicly announced his universalist convictions. I am also certain he would point out that the moral argument against eternal damnation can be traced back to the universalist Church Fathers and has long been the central plank in the universalist case against eternal perdition.

Okay, enough of trivial preliminaries. On to the good stuff.

The Good Stuff

1) Rooney writes:

In Stump’s view, God infallibly changes the will, but only indirectly in such a way that the creature remains the primary source of their acts—He acts by infusing charity in response to creaturely quiescence, so that, while His activity cannot be ‘resisted’ in itself (since God is omnipotent), it can be resisted diachronically in virtue of the creature’s sin and rejection of His love. But, indeed, that free will constitutes a ‘metaphysical limit’ to God’s power is no necessary part of the view. Instead, all Stump needs to say is that God had good reasons for being responsive in the above way to human free will in giving efficacious grace. That is, He could have set things up differently, but He didn’t, for good reasons.

Rooney has me at a disadvantage. He is far more knowledgeable of Stump’s philosophical and theological convictions than I. Not only did he study under her, but he has no doubt attended her lectures and engaged in extensive conversations with her. Back in 2015 (five years before he was awarded his Ph.D.!), he even published an essay critiquing her position on grace and freedom: “Stumping Freedom.” So I’m willing to trust Rooney’s interpretation of Stump’s views . . . but only to a point. Trust but verify.

In my article, I quoted a sentence from Stump’s 1986 essay on Dante:  “It is not within the power even of an omnipotent entity to make a person freely will anything.” Here is the paragraph from which it was taken:

For the suffering of the damned in hell on the view of Dante and Aquinas (and most other traditional Christian thinkers) never ends and never eventuates in redemption. How, then, is their suffering reconcilable with the love of God? Answering this question requires a somewhat closer look at the Christian notions of heaven and hell. On Christian doctrine, heaven should be understood not as some place with gates of pearl and streets of gold but rather as a spiritual state of union with God; and union with God should be understood to involve as a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition the state of freely willing only what is in accord with the will of God. But if this is an appropriate description of the Christian doctrine of heaven, then it is not within God’s power to ensure that all human beings will be in heaven, because it is not within the power even of an omnipotent entity to make a person freely will anything.⁴

Having reread Stump’s article on Dante only a few months earlier, this paragraph was fresh in my mind when I read “The God of Love.” Precisely because God has created rational beings that possess libertarian freedom, he can no more cause them to freely will anything than he can make 2+2=5. By incompatibilist definition, free actions exclude every form of determinism and compulsion; and given that God seeks an eternal union of love with his rational creatures, he will respect and honor their freedom. Stump elaborates in her 1985 essay “The Problem of Evil”:

According to [Christian doctrine] . . . all human beings since Adam’s fall have been defective in their free wills, so that they have a powerful incli­nation to will what they ought not to will, to will their own power or pleasure in preference to greater goods. It is not possible for human beings in that condition to go to heaven, which consists in union with God; and hell understood in Dantean terms is arguably the best alternative to annihila­tion. A good God will want to fix such persons, to save them from hell and bring them to heaven; and as the creator of these persons, God surely bears some responsibility for fixing and saving them if he can. How is he to do so?

It seems to me clear that he cannot fix the defect by using his omnipotence to remove it miraculously. The defect is a defect in free will, and it consists in a person’s generally failing to will what he ought to will. To remove this defect miraculously would be to force a person’s free will to be other than it is; it would consist in causing a person to will freely what he ought to will. But it is logically impossible for anyone to make a person freely will something, and therefore even God in his omnipotence cannot directly and miraculously remove the defect in free will, without destroying the very freedom of the will he wants to fix. . . . But if God intervenes to remove the defect in the wills of post-fall persons, he brings about a change in their wills; and this, I think, he cannot do if their wills are to remain free.⁵

As Stump sees it, for God to act unilaterally to repair the human will would be to violate the freedom of the human being. What then is the cure? The human being can change his will in different ways, but the one thing he cannot do is heal its defectiveness. That is beyond creaturely power. But he can invite God to heal it. “Let a person will that God fix his defective will,” Stump writes. “In that case, God’s alteration of the will is something the person has freely chosen, and God can then alter that person’s will without destroying its freedom.”⁶ She suggests that this willing that God should heal and repair the will is equivalent to willing that God should save us from our sin: “Willing to have God save one from one’s sin is willing to have God bring one to a state in which one is free from sin, and that state depends essentially on a will which wills what it ought to will.”⁷ In willing my salvation in Christ, I give God permission to act within the depths of my being, thus preserving my libertarian freedom and autonomy. So that’s where Stump stood almost forty years ago.

But has she altered her views since then? As Rooney has informed us, Stump now believes that God may alter a person’s will by infusing grace in response to creaturely quiescence. In her 2005 book Aquinas, she proposes that for any given person there may be moments when he or she is not opposed to God, when there is an absence of refusal. Let’s call it a moment of indifference or perhaps a failure to consciously attend to God’s presence and his offer of love. The mind is temporarily settled in neutral. In this quiescent moment neither decision for or against God is demanded. Stump explains:

It helps in this connection to call to mind Aquinas’s view of the nature of the will. According to Aquinas, the will can assent to something or reject it, but it can also simply do nothing at all. It can just be turned off; it can be inactive or quiescent. Sometimes the will is determined to want something by the nature of the will’s object, Aquinas says, but the exercise of the will—whether the will is turned off or not—is always in the power of the will itself. Furthermore, in principle, the will can move directly from any one of these positions to another. That is, in general, it can move from rejecting to quiescence, from quiescence to assenting, from assenting to rejecting, and so on. The will’s motion is thus analogous to bodily motion, on Aquinas’s views. I can walk east or walk west, but I can also simply cease walking east; and my ceasing to walk east is not by itself an instance of my walking west. Furthermore, I can move from walking east to ceasing to walk east without having to walk west in order to do so. Finally, my ceasing to walk east is not a special kind of walking; it is simply the absence of walking, an inactivity or quiescence in those particular bodily parts that function to produce walking.⁸

During these moments of abeyance, when the will is not actively rejecting the divine love and mercy, “God can avail himself of the absence of refusal to infuse the previously refused grace, in order to move the will from quiescence all the way to assent.”⁹ In this way, Stump believes, the libertarian freedom of the person is maintained and concerns about Pelagianism adequately addressed.

On the assumption that she has adopted Thomas’s view of quiescence as her own, Stump has modified her understanding of the relationship between divine agency and human freedom, yet not in a way that substantially changes her commitment to personal autonomy and liberty, particularly when it comes to the question of the damned. Why so? Either the reprobate never experienced in their lifetime a quiescent moment for God to take advantage of, or they subsequently rejected the infusion of grace, thereby losing their salvation. In either case, they now find themselves in a permanent state of active rebellion and alienation and are thus beyond rescue. The damned have freely chosen their fate. And this, I take it, is why Stump claims that the divine love excludes universal salvation. Communion with the Holy Trinity requires the free assent to the offer of salvation. When met with definitive rejection, God is impotent. And that is the problem that lies before us. As Stump writes: “If God had not willed to create human beings with free will, then all states of affairs would have been up to God alone. But then union with human beings would have been precluded for God, since union requires two wills to unite.”

2) Rooney accurately describes my argument as saying that there are no metaphysical reasons why God cannot alter the orientation of sinners from rejection of God’s offer of salvation to free acceptance. He then writes:

Conversely, Kimel argues, it would be impossible for any human being to resist God’s efficacious grace. Kimel therefore concludes that theological determinism (the view that God’s decisions make ours occur necessarily) is necessarily or obviously true: that God always acts ‘unilaterally.’ Kimel later assumes—contrary to Stump’s claims about damnation being a product of free will—that God would be directly responsible for damnation, since “. . . the Creator and Judge of heaven and earth has the last word. His will be done. Self-damnation is divine damnation.” That is, given theological determinism, God would be inflicting this anguish upon people for reasons that were not ultimately due to them. (emphasis mine)

Here Rooney misrepresents my position. I had hoped it was clearly stated, but apparently not. My argument does not imply that the damned are not personally responsible for their state of mortal sin (that’s a different question). My claim is this: at the Last Judgment, God confirms and eternalizes the free rejection of the reprobate precisely as divine punish­ment. In other words, I am speaking here of dual responsibility: divine damnation coin­cides with self-damnation; but it is God who has the last word. The Scriptures, without exception, cast God in the role of Judge who issues the verdict and announces the sentence. This is what must be the case because it is the last judgment. God has brought fallen time to a close. There is no more time for repentance and thus no more time for forgiveness. There is only the settling of accounts.

The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matt 14:41-42)

And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. (Matt 25:30)

Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. (Matt 25:41)

This imagery is continued in the Orthodox hymnody for the Sunday of the Last Judgment:

When Thou shalt come, O righteous Judge, to execute just judgment, seated on Thy throne of glory, a river of fire will draw all men amazed before Thy judgment seat; the powers of heaven will stand beside Thee, and in fear mankind will be judged according to the deeds that each has done.

The books will be opened and the acts of men will be revealed before the unbearable judgment seat; and the whole vale of sorrow shall echo with the fearful sound of lamentation, as all the sinners, weeping in vain, are sent by Thy just judgment to everlasting torment.

The trumpets shall sound and the tombs shall be emptied, and all mankind in trembling shall be raised. Those that have done good shall rejoice in gladness, awaiting their reward; those that have sinned shall tremble and bitterly lament, as they are sent to punishment and parted from the chosen. O Lord of glory, take pity on us in Thy goodness, and count us worthy of a place with them that have loved Thee.

Orthodox universalists are faced with the same texts, and we have our own hermeneutical strategies; but we have no need to reduce God to a passive role in the act of judgment.

Defenders of the free will defense of hell explicitly reject the traditional Latin construal of damnation as retributive punishment, thereby hoping to relieve God of his responsibility for the interminable sufferings of the reprobate; but the argument fails. At the Last Judgment, God, not the sinner, is the Judge and determiner of the final destiny of each human being—that is the biblical and credal assertion. He is not a passive observer sitting on the sidelines. And according to both the Latin tradition and the post-Justinian Eastern tradition, he confirms, establishes, and eternalizes the impenitence of the wicked, with the consequent suffering this finalization inevitably brings. He condemns them to the fate they have chosen. St John of Damascus refers to the eternal condemnation of the impenitent as final abandonment. Note how he weaves together the themes of free will and punishment:

There is absolute abandonment, when God has done everything for a man’s salvation, yet the man of his own accord remains obdurate and uncured, or rather, incorrigible, and is then given over to absolute perdition, like Judas. May God spare and deliver us from this sort of abandonment. . . . One should also bear in mind that God antecedently wills all to be saved and to attain to His kingdom. For he did not form us to be chastised, but, because He is good, that we might share in His goodness. Yet, because He is just, He does wish to punish sinners. So, the first is called antecedent will and approval, and it has Him as its cause; the second is called consequent will and permission, and it has ourselves as its cause. This last is twofold: that which is by dispensation and for our instruction and salvation, and that which is abandonment to absolute chastisement, as we have said.¹⁰

In my opinion, there can only be one compelling reason that God would condemn the lost to everlasting torment: because his justice requires him to punish the impenitent. Rooney has missed the import of the St Bonaventure quotation that I cite in my article, so I’ll quote it again: “God cannot permit any misery to exist in us except as a punishment of sin.” In his goodness God does not tolerate the suffering of his rational creatures unless that suffering is inflicted, directly or indirectly, as divine punishment. The maxim obviously has it limits. Clearly God does permit suffering, even horrific suffering, that cannot be justified by appeal to justice. That he does permit suffering in his world can only be excused by his promise that in the New Age he will redeem evil and heal and glorify its victims. God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28).¹¹ In the words of John the Seer: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). Yet I do maintain that the Bonaventurean maxim is directly applicable to the eschaton. In itself, suffering is an evil. If interminable eschatological torment is justified—if it can be justified—it is solely by appeal to the divine justice. Again the Seraphic Doctor:

The first Principle, being first, is also supreme; this means that every quality that Principle possesses, it must possess to the highest degree. Therefore, God must be supremely just. And so, in the work of retribution, God acts according to this supreme righteousness in such a way that he cannot act against himself, deny himself, or contradict his own justice. This is why it is necessary, precisely by virtue of God’s justice, that sin be punished in proportion to the degree of guilt, and most of all in those who, spurning the law of mercy, have dashed themselves through impenitence against the severity of justice. . . . Now divine justice ought to punish sinners in proportion to their guilt. But mortal sin that is followed by final impenitence implies a perpetual disorder, a lustful disorder, and a manifold disorder: therefore, it must be punished by means of a penalty that is perpetual, bitter, and manifold.¹²

Now apply this rationale to the free-will defense of hell, which attributes the unending suffering of the wicked solely to the choices made by the individual lost souls, ostensibly exculpating God of responsibility. Not only does this free-will defense depart from the Latin tradition, but it denies the divine goodness by introducing into the eschaton creaturely misery not demanded by divine justice. The medieval scholastics knew better.

As Creator, God foreknew that some/many/most rational beings would reject him, yet nevertheless chose to create the world. And so there is hell, and so the Church teaches. But God had three other choices:

1. He might have freely chosen not to create a world a world peopled by rational beings that would freely choose to reject the divine love.
2. He might have freely chosen to create a world in which his rational creatures did not sin. Rooney acknowledges this as a possibility, but I do not know if Stump would agree.
3. He might have freely chosen to annihilate the wicked at the moment of death.¹³

But he chose none of these options. Stump and Rooney, of course, believe that God had good reasons to not to avail himself of them; but those reasons are irrelevant. All that matters is that God freely created a world that includes the everlasting torment of the damned—hence his transcendent responsibility for their condition. As Uncle Ben told his nephew Peter Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

3) Rooney writes:

Kimel argues that we cannot escape this dilemma by proposing that God has good reasons not to save all. “If God eternally wills himself as our final good, does it make sense to speak of a higher good than theosis, than our becoming gods in God?” That is, there is no greater good in the created universe than theosis. Therefore, since a person is capable of union with God, and there is no greater good than union with God, God in His love will necessarily ensure that all persons are united with Him.

Here is an alternative way to resolve the dilemma that Kimel does not address, but which is central to Stump’s essay: God does achieve universal union with Himself and all persons. This is compatible with the possibility of damnation, as God can be united with His creatures in many distinct ways, not all of which are identical with the Beatific Vision. All things will be united with Christ, even though not all will experience the Beatific Vision. What it is for God to find union with the damned is distinct, given what the damned are freely like. Thus, as she puts it, given the state of the damned, “the office of love will change from what it might have been.” For that reason, “God can love unrequitedly; but God is not disappointed when he does,” since He loves the person who actually exists and achieves union with them in the eschaton to the degree that those damned are able to receive. God’s desire that all be united with Him is fulfilled.

Note that Rooney does not address head-on my claim that theosis—to become gods in God—is the highest good for rational creatures. There can be no higher good and therefore no good reasons for God to condemn the wicked to an eternal existence of misery. Yet Rooney argues that there are multiple ways for God to be united to his creatures short of the beatific vision. But this misses the critical point: God wills the deification of mankind in in the same eternal act that he wills himself as his final end. This is what God’s love for human beings means. Theosis is the only telos appointed for humanity; we are not ordered to any other—hence humanity’s natural desire for God. Deification is the salvific point of the Incarnation: to incorporate humanity into the divine life as sons in the Son. Perhaps Latin theologians who advocate a restricted absolute predestination or affirm a pura natura can entertain multiple ends for humanity (but with what warrant?). If so, I can only judge them heretical. The Catholic Church is fairly clear on this; but the Eastern Church is crystal clear. I’m sure that with sufficient time I could supply an arsenal of quotations from the Church Fathers and later theologians, as well as numerous scholarly studies.¹⁴ St Maximus’ Ambiguum 7 immediately comes to mind. But for the moment, this quotation from St Gregory of Nyssa will have to suffice:

But whenever the time come that God shall have brought our nature back to the primal state of man, it will be useless to talk of such things then, and to imagine that objections based upon such things can prove God’s power to be impeded in arriving at His end. His end is one, and one only; it is this: when the complete whole of our race shall have been perfected from the first man to the last—some having at once in this life been cleansed from evil, others having afterwards in the necessary periods been healed by the Fire, others having in their life here been unconscious equally of good and of evil—to offer to every one of us participation in the blessings which are in Him, which, the Scripture tells us, “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor thought ever reached.” But this is nothing else, as I at least understand it, but to be in God Himself; for the Good which is above hearing and eye and heart must be that Good which transcends the universe.¹⁵

God antecedently and eternally wills himself as humanity’s final good and consummation. Given his power to ensure this outcome, I am confident that he will make it so. Free will does not pose an insuperable obstacle, for the reasons I outlined in “Predestined to Glory.” At least on this point Augustine and I agree. If the doctrine of eternal damnation is true, then we can only speak of a failure of human beings to achieve their proper fulfillment and thus of a failure of the divine Omnipotence to accomplish his will—but that is impossible.

4) So why hell? Stump addresses this question in response to annihilation:

But, in response, consider Jerome, a person who rejects God. The putative objector imagines that it would be more loving of God towards Jerome to wipe him out of existence entirely, so that he simply is not there anymore, rather than to keep him in existence and care for him as love can. Put in this way, the objection seems to refute itself. God cannot unilaterally make Jerome flourish in his everlasting true self, but God can still love him while he exists. There is nothing to love if God annihilates him. (emphasis mine)

Hell, according to Stump, is an expression of God’s love. If God were to remove the gift of existence, the person would cease to be an object of his love. Now clearly Stump does not mean by that last sentence that God maintains the irredeemable in existence out of selfish reasons, as if he would miss them and his happiness would be diminished. The divine aseity excludes this possibility. Since love is the willing of the good of the other, she must believe that immortal life, even under the conditions of privation and suffering, is a good that outweighs all other considerations. God is simply doing his best for the damned under difficult circumstances.

Our fictional Jerome is in hell because he definitively, decisively, and irrevocably rejects the love and mercy of God and therefore rejects union with him. God does not cease to love Jerome, Stump assures us; but he no longer desires salvation for him, for that possibility no longer obtains by his consequent will, and he is not disappointed. God loves Jerome just as he is, in all of his incorrigible evil, rebellion, hatred, and malice; and he gives him all the care that he is psychologically and spiritually capable of receiving, though Stump does not tell us what that might mean for him, given Jerome’s adamant rejection and hatred of the Good.

Stump then elaborates on Jerome’s life before his death. Jerome is a Nazi who has alienated himself from his good mother Paula. She grieves for the despicable and hateful person her son has become; but she continues to love him and hopes for his redemption and gives him all the care and love that she can. Eventually, however, she comes to realize that her son will never change. He is the person his choices have made him. At this point her office of loving motherhood necessarily changes. She learns to compassionately accept her son for who he has become and will always be. Thus Stump:

Even in these circumstances, it is still possible for Paula (or for anyone else) to love Jerome; but, because of what Jerome has become, the office of love will change from what it might have been. Paula’s desire to have Jerome as part of her family life (which is the form a desire for union with Jerome would have had in Paula) will change in Paula to become only compassion for Jerome held at a distance. And her desire for the good of Jerome will change into a desire to give whatever care Jerome is still able and willing to accept from her. But these changes in Paula’s desire of love for Jerome will not leave Paula in a state of heartbrokenness if Paula has woven her desire for Jerome into a deepest heart’s desire for God. Interwoven in that way, Paula’s love for Jerome will be situated within Paula’s participation in union with God, shared with other persons who are also united to God in love. The loneliness Jerome has willed for himself cannot take away the joy of that shared union for Paula.

What is wrong with this picture? Nothing is wrong with Paula. She has resigned herself to reality, and in that faithful resignation has become holy. The problem lies with God. In her article Stump does not comment on the enduring unendurable misery of the damned, and this is . . . odd. If God’s loves the concrete person as he is, then he must find his state of ill-being and agony a matter of infinite concern and sorrow. Even we pathetic sinners know when it is time to euthanize our pets once their lives move into needless, irrelievable suffering. We may find the decision awful and heartbreaking, yet our love for our pets morally demands that we end their misery. In the words of the fictional character Robert Syverton: “They shoot horses, don’t they?” It is precisely this consideration that led philosopher Jonathan Kvanvig to propose that a God of love may well assent to requests from the damned to grant them ultimate separation from himself—namely annihilation.¹⁶ When unbearable suffering serves no redemptive purpose, providing final release is a good. Within the free-will model of hell, not to do so would be both unjust and uncaring.

Rooney agrees with Stump and advances an objection to my claim that damnation reveals the conditionality of the divine love. He writes:

This turns on its head, I think, another objection Kimel raises against Stump. Kimel argues that, if going to hell is possible, then “the divine love is unveiled as conditional, limited, restricted: God wills the salvation of sinners only if they repent.” If God allows hell and is satisfied with it, then He must not love all human beings and desire union with them. Instead, God’s love would be ‘conditional’ for His creatures, where He only loves those whom He causes to come into union with Him.

But this does not follow. Kimel cites Aquinas on God hating the damned, but Aquinas claims, like Stump, that God loves unrequitedly those who reject God. Stump’s claims about different ‘offices of love’ are reflected in Aquinas’ claim that God “does not will every good for every one.” This is compatible with God continuing to will goods other than the good of eternal life to the damned, such that they are capable of receiving. It is precisely this fact that allows Stump to claim that God is not disappointed by the damned’s rejection of Him and that God’s consequent will is ultimately fulfilled.

Since God can love people that do not repent, and His love is therefore not conditional on whether they eventually repent, God’s love is compatible with the situation where some reject Him forever. Precisely because God’s love is unconditional, God’s desire for union with all beings is not foreclosed or diminished by the creature’s rejection of Him. Only the creature themselves poses that obstacle to receiving God’s love and being unified with Him. As Stump puts it, “Hell is the inner condition of those who close themselves out from any desire for love.”

This is a serious objection and I have pondered it for many days; but I stand by my assertion on the conditionality of the divine love within the free-will paradigm. To love is to will (not wish but will) the very best for the other, and for rational human beings this very best is perfect union with and participation in the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We Orthodox call this theosis. But according to Stump, by God’s consequent will those who reject God are eternally excluded from the beatific vision. They are damned—self-damned, perhaps, but damned nonetheless—because they did not fulfill the condition of repentance and faith. How then is this not conditional love? In the eschaton God no longer wills their ultimate happiness, and given the divine simplicity and immutability, we must admit that he never did, at least not unconditionally. God does not change his mind. As St Thomas Aquinas writes: “Since, then, the will of God is the universal cause of all things, it is impossible that the divine will should not produce its effect.”¹⁷

But Stump and Rooney want to say that God still loves the reprobate, even though he wills neither their final end in theosis nor their deliverance from sin. At this point, love has been evacuated of meaning and degenerated into equivocity. What is the content of this loving of the irredeemable? Are we to suppose that God still thinks kindly of them? What goods does God provide for them? The good of existence, yes, but an existence of everlasting affliction, torment, and hopelessness. Rooney speaks of “God continuing to will goods other than the good of eternal life to the damned, such that they are capable of receiving,” yet ignores the simple fact that they are incapable of enjoying the goods of life, community, intercourse, comfort, affection. The damned have closed their hearts to any “desire for love.” They want nothing from God, except to be left alone in their malice and narcissism. They are frozen in their impenitence. The gap between God willing the good of eternal happiness and joy and his willing the “good” of eternal selfishness and misery is infinite. If God loves the damned in the eschaton, this love is necessarily expressed as retributive punishment—which is always contrary to the will of the one being punished—and therefore is appropriately named under the metaphor of wrath, as Jesus and the Apostles teach us:

He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him. (John 3:36)

But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. (Rom. 2:5-8)

At any rate, all the concerns raised by Stump and Rooney about free will disappear if efficacious grace is affirmed. If God has this competence and power, then by grace God can bring every rational being into a free embrace of his Goodness. Indeed, deifying grace is absolutely necessary for the kind of love required. Apart from elevation into the divine life, as Herbert McCabe incisively observes, there cannot be genuine love between transcen­dent Deity and rational beings. Love requires equality, but equality does not obtain between Creator and creature:

Now if we are to say that love depends on equality, even equality in this rather difficult sense of the word, it is evident that whatever relationship there may be between God and creature it cannot be one of love. The relationship here is just as unequal as it is possible for it to be; we can think of God as caring for his creatures and doing good for them, beginning with the primal good of bringing them into existence and sustaining them in existence. We can think of God as source of all the value that is in them. We can think of God as rewarding them or ignoring their offences. We can think of him on the model of a kindly caring master instead of a frightening despotic master, but what we cannot do is think of him as giving himself in love to a creature.¹⁸

Only by incorporation in Christ do rational creatures acquire equality with the Father and the Spirit within the Trinitarian divinity. The Apostle Paul states this crucial point in his Epistle to the Galatians:

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave, though he is the owner of all the estate; but he is under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us; when we were children, we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe. But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir. (Gal 3:25-4:7)

Here is the miracle of adoption by grace: we are taken up into the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God can now love us and we him, with the same love that the Trinitarian Persons share with each other. In deification the Creator-creature relationship is transcended and genuine love becomes possible. Joined to the risen Son, we become, in St Maximus the Confessor’s bold phrase, “God by grace.” McCabe elaborates:

For this is what is involved in the gift of Jesus. God loves Jesus and loves him from eternity as his coequal Son, owing his existence indeed to God though not created, but, as I suggested, “loved into existence”. It is into this eternal exchange of love between Jesus and the Father that we are taken up, this exchange of love that we call the Holy Spirit. And this means, of course, that we are taken up into equality, the equality demanded by and involved in love. . . .

I am maintaining, then, that the Christian gospel is that we are given equality with God. It is important not to lose sight of either of those words: we are given equality. What we are given is the divine life itself, the Holy Spirit—if we lose sight of that we will be speaking merely of some created gift, like moral excellence or some other human thing, and this could not be the foundation and implication of love, it is only if we really have equality with God that there can be love between God and us. At the same time it is an equality that is given. To lose sight of that would be to make ourselves God, to divinise ourselves. . . .

There is indeed mystery here, but it is not, so to say, an unfamiliar mystery, it is just the mystery we encounter when we try to speak of the relationship of Jesus and the Father. If the Father loves Jesus then there must be equality between them, yet evidently there can be no such thing as two individual Gods—the idea of God as a countable individual or set of individuals is one of the things ruled out if he is to be the answer to our ultimate question. What we found ourselves having to say there is that Jesus is indeed from the Father, owes his being to the Father, but is nonetheless not a creature but wholly equal with the Father. The traditional word for this is “procession”: Jesus proceeds from the Father but not by being created.

Now let us turn to our own divine life. Here again we want to say both that what we have is a divine life and that this is gift from God. Our case is not just the same as that of Jesus and that is why we speak of his divinity as proceeding from the Father, but of ours as gift from the Father. The difference rests on the fact that we have our first existence as creatures, whereas Jesus has his first existence as proceeding from the Father. In our case there is, so to say, a recipient already constituted for the gift of divinity, the human creature. In the case of the eternal procession of Jesus there is nothing there first to be divinised. So we say that we are divinised but Jesus is divine.¹⁹

There can be no other final end for humanity than eternal life in the Holy Trinity.

• To this end we were conceived in the divine mind before the foundation of the world.
• To this end we were made in the image of the eternal and incarnate Son.
• To this end the economy of salvation was actualized in history, culminating in Pascha and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit.

The beginning is love; the end is love. It is this love that is enacted, communicated, shared, celebrated in the Holy Eucharist. Now spin out the implications of theosis for the claim that God unconditionally loves the damned.

At the conclusion of his response, Rooney invokes the crucifixion of Christ as proof of God’s unconditional love for the damned. It’s a clever move, I admit. I’d almost call it Caponian,²⁰ but it requires a radical and liberating understanding of the unconditionality of grace to pull off. As it stands, I find Rooney’s misinterpretation of Scripture gross, perhaps even impious. Christ died for the ungodly in order to save us from our sin, not to forever accept us in our acquired vicious nature. Ultimately, God sees each of us as we are transfigured in Christ in the eschaton. This is our true justification. For this purpose the eternal Son became incarnate, died on the cross, and rose from the dead. The acceptance of which Stump and Rooney speak is neither true love nor true justice; it is indifference. Contrast the incisive words of George MacDonald: “God is bound by his love to punish sin in order to deliver his creature; he is bound by his justice to destroy sin in his creation.”²¹

5) That Stump and Rooney invoke Thomas in support of their free-will defense of hell I admit troubles me just a tad. Full disclosure requires that they share the significant points where Thomas’ theological reflections directly contradict their argument. I am thinking specifically of his doctrine of divine predestination²² and his doctrine of eternal retributive punishment.²³ I’ll also throw in his intimations of efficacious grace.²⁴ It’s difficult, at least for me, to imagine how predestination works absent efficacious grace. Something stronger than grace given in moments of quiescence is needed. I’m sure that Stump and Rooney can offer a reading of Thomas that refutes my own reading, but I’ve read enough Thomistic scholarship to know that these are vigorously contested topics.

6) It is neither surprising nor insignificant that in their writings on hell, both Stump and Rooney pointedly minimize the sufferings of the damned.²⁵ In so doing they seriously depart from Scripture and the tradition of the Church. We do not have to search far for the reason. If God loves the damned even in their irredeemable wickedness, then it’s natural that we would hope, perhaps naïvely and sentimentally, that he will find ways to alleviate their misery. That’s what love would do, right? Perhaps hell isn’t as bad as the Church has long imagined. This is a temptation that all free-will theorists face but must resist. Honesty requires that we acknowledge the severe and horrifying consequences of self-damnation: to reject God is to reject his Goodness and his created goods, to reject his compassionate care, grace, and loving presence, to reject human community and fellowship. It is a seeking for God’s absence, for a place where he is not. The seeking is futile, yet will the God of love force his gracious presence upon those who abhor it and for whom it is a torture?²⁶ Would he not instead grant them their heart’s desire—not total absence of course (the doctrine of divine creation disallows that)—but a relative but maximal absence. Scripture names it “the outer darkness.”²⁷

I commend to Dr Stump, Fr Rooney, and all free-will defenders of eternal perdition the eschato­log­ical reflections of the great Orthodox theologian Dumitru Stăniloae. He shares with Stump and Rooney the belief that the damned freely reject the company of God and his saints. He too denies both the punitive model of hell and the traditional Latin doctrine that the damned are punished with material fire. But following John of Damascus and Maximus the Confessor, he acknowledges the inevitable and terrible torments that the damned suffer as a result of their decisions. Apart from deifying union with the Holy Trinity, a rational being will only experience abject misery and an increasing disintegration of personhood. He first quotes the Damascene:

We say that the torment is nothing other than the fire of unsatisfied passion. For those who obtained changelessness in passion do not desire God but sin. But there in that place the commission of evil and sin has no place. For we neither eat nor drink, nor get dressed, nor marry, nor gather wealth, nor does envy or any other evil satisfy us. Therefore, by desiring and not partaking of the things desired, they are burned by passions as if by fire.²⁸

Stăniloae then comments:

Hell is a double evil: the will to commit sin, and the pain of the inability to commit it. It is attachment to the sin that can no longer actually be committed and thus a refusal to seek out spiritual goods. Through inability the human being is even removed from his relationship with things, and from any egoistic, transitory relationship with another person. Any relation that he has with reality is cut off. He leads a phantasmagoric, nightmarish existence. He is totally imprisoned in the hole of solitude. Only the demons and his passions bite him like serpents. To carry this idea further, it can be said that his subjectivity has grown to monstrous proportions, makes him no longer able to see the reality of others. He can no longer have even sinful, hasty relationships with them. His subjective imagination covers up the reality of objects, because he considers them too humble for his imagination. He falls into a sort of dreamlike existence in which everything becomes chaotic in a senseless absurdity, without any consistency, without any search for an exit out of it, and without any hope for an exit. Everything is a rigorous and hardened consequence of the sins committed in life.²⁹

Stăniloae’s presents an assessment of infernal existence that I deem realistic, accurate, honest, as brutal as it is; and I’m sure that he would say that his language only barely expresses the true nature of damnation.³⁰ Hell is appalling, ghastly, horrifying, intolerable. If we are not filled with terror and abhorrence, if our hearts do not swell with a profound compassion and pity for the lost souls who, as Stump writes, “share something of the condition commonly attributed to Satan,” then there is something terribly wrong with us. Our souls are not filled with the Spirit of Jesus. Yet if the doctrine of everlasting perdition is true, then this is what must be preached for the spiritual welfare of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Hell Lite will not do. To paper over the truth and horror of reprobation for the sake of presenting a more kindly Creator is to engage in pastoral malpractice.

It is precisely this realistic rendering of hell that gives credence and compelling power to the moral argument advanced by Christian universalists against the doctrine of eternal perdition. Would the God of absolute, infinite, and unconditional love create a world where such is the doom of the damned?

 

Footnotes

[1] For those who do not have access to Facebook, I have copied Rooney’s response into the combox of “Predestined to Glory.” My article was written as a response to Eleonore Stump, “The God of Love,” Church Life Journal (23 April 2023). Dr Stump’s piece is abbreviated from her discussion of damnation in The Image of God (2022), 298-305. Having read the relevant pages, I have seen no reason to refer to it.

[2] This is not to say that universal salvation cannot be capably defended on libertarian grounds. Thomas Talbott and Eric Reitan have already done precisely that in their writings (see the listing of their writings in “Readings in Universalism“). For an accessible primer on the philosophical debate on human freedom, I recommend Thomas Talbott, Understanding the Free Will Controversy (2022).

[3] Jesse Couenhoven, Predestination (2018), 162.

[4] Eleonore Stump, Eleonore Stump, “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’s Moral Theory, and the Love of God,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (1986): 194-195.

[5] Eleonore Stump, “The Problem of Evil,” 2 (1985), Faith and Philosophy: 406.

[6] Ibid., 407.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (2005), 394. Cf. Thomas Loughran, “Aquinas, Compatibilist,” in Human and Divine Agency (1999): 1-39.

[9] Ibid., 387.

[10] John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith II.29; emphasis mine. “And the Devil and his demons, and his man, which is to say, the Antichrist, and the impious and sinners will be given over to everlasting fire, which will not be a material fire such as we are accustomed to, but a fire such as God might know” (IV.27).

[11] That evil, both in the form of the wicked themselves and in their “deserved” torments, should continue eternally was powerfully denounced by the 19th century Anglican theologian Thomas Allin as the greatest of heresies: “What are all heresies, all errors, that have stained the church of God, compared with this supreme heresy, this dualism, which seats evil on the throne of the universe, a power enduring as God himself? The torments, physical and mental, of the popular hell, awful as they are, recede into almost nothing as compared with the far more awful spectacle of God vanquished, of God trying to save but failing, and watching his children as they slowly sink beneath the endless sway of evil; of God’s Son returning, not in triumph, but in defeat; of the cross so far prostrate, paralyzed, vanquished.” Christ Triumphant (2015), 36

[12] Bonaventure, Breviloquium IV.6.2. Thomas Aquinas agrees: Summa Theologiae Supplement 99.1. Alexander Pruss has proposed a distinction between non-retributive punishment and retributive punishment: “Many authors in the 20th century have argued that hell is a kind of choice one makes rather than a retribution. But with the distinction, we can say that this is true of the separation from God: that is what the wicked have chosen, and it is just that they get it, but it is not retributive punishment. There is, however, retributive punishment in hell, the chief part of which is the pain of separation from God.” “Separation from God,” Alexander Pruss’s Blog (13 August 2020).

If the invocation of eternal divine retribution troubles, then let me introduce you to St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian.

[13] There is also a fourth option: annihilation at the Last Judgment, but that seems unnecessarily cruel.

[14] See Artemije Radosavljević, “Why Did God Become Man? The Unconditionality of the Divine Incarnation.” On Maximus, see Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ (2022); Oskari Juurikkala, “The Ontology of Theosis,” Theological Research, 8 (2020): 7–21; Samuel Korb, “Whole God and Whole Man,” Scottish Journal of Theology 75 (2022): 308–318.

[15] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection.

[16] Jonathan Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell (1993). For an erudite, and on its own terms compelling, case for annihilation, see Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation (2018).

[17] Aquinas, ST I.19.6.

[18] Herbert McCabe, “Freedom,” God Matters (1987), 17.

[19] Ibid., 20-21.

[20] By “Caponian” I refer to the theological provocateur Robert Farrar Capon. Capon insists the God accepts every human being, no matter how sinful; but he combines his radical understanding of divine grace with an equally radical understanding of realized eschatology. By the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ every person is already reconciled to Christ. See “The Caponian Vision of (Almost) Apokatastasis.”

[21] George MacDonald, “Justice,” Unspoken Sermons.

[22] See Matthew Levering, Predestination (2011), 75-83; Taylor Patrick O’Neill, Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin (2019), 50-67; Joseph G. Trabbic, “Can Aquinas ‘Hope That All Men Be Saved’?” Heythrop Journal 57 (2016): 337-358.

[23] See Aquinas, ST Supplement 99; Matthew Lamb, “The Eschatology of St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Aquinas on Doctrine (2004), 225-240.

[24] See Tobias Hoffman, “Grace and Free Will,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (2022), 233-256; Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Grace (1952), esp. 239-264; Stephen A. Long, “St Thomas Aquinas, Divine Causality, and the Mystery of Predestination,” in Thomism and Predestination (2016), 51-76; O’Neill, 13-50.

[25] See Stump, “Dante’s Hell.” I offer critique in my article “The Infernal Quarantine of Love.”

[26] See “Divine Presence and the River of Fire.”

[27] For a brilliant imaginative rendering of the outer darkness, see George MacDonald, “The Consuming Fire,” Unspoken Sermons.

[28] Quoted by Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God (2013), VI:40-41.

[29] Ibid., VI:41.

[30] “For vice is a psychospiritual disorder. Just as running a machine contrary to its design leads, sooner rather than later, to premature breakdown, so also persistent psychological disorders caricature and produce breakdowns even in the medium run of twenty to seventy years. My own view resonates with C. S. Lewis’s suggestion in The Problem of Pain that vice in the soul preserved beyond three score and ten brings about a total dismantling of personality, to the torment of which this-worldly schizophrenia and depression are but the faintest approximations. Either union with God is the natural human telos, in which case we cannot both eternally lack it and yet continue to enjoy this-worldly pleasures forever; or it is not, because we are personal animals and unending life is not a natural but a supernatural endowment. For God to prolong life eternally while denying access to the only good that could keep us eternally interested would likewise eventually produce unbearable misery. In short, I think that the Swinburne/​Stump/​Dante suggestion that God might keep created persons in existence forever but abandon them to the consequences of their sinful choices collapses into the more traditional doctrine of hell, when such consequences are calculated from a realistic appraisal of human psychology.” Marilyn McCord Adams, “The Problem of Hell,” Reasoned Faith (1993), 322-323.

(Return to “Predestined to Glory“)