Universal Salvation, Free Will, and the Determinism of the Good

Society of the Holy Trinity Retreat: Talk #3
5 December 2023

The Free Will Defense of Hell

“Even if we grant you, Fr Aidan, that the Holy Trinity has an overriding gospel reason to bring about the salvation of all human beings, still there remains the question ‘Is it possible given free will?'”  

During my active parish ministry, I defended eternal damnation along the lines laid out by C. S. Lewis, which is often called the free will or choice model of hell. I’m sure that most of you are acquainted with it. Perhaps you too have availed yourselves of this defense in your own preaching and catechesis. 

In his classic book The Problem of Pain, Lewis invites us to picture a person who has freely embraced an evil life,

a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble emotions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus attained success, uses it for the gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by betraying his own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose, further, that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant—a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable.

We would all agree that for such a man God will make every effort to show him the evil of his ways and summon him to repentance. But what if he steadfastly ignores the Lord’s entreaties and admonitions? What if he decisively rejects the divine offer of forgiveness and dies in a state of mortal sin? What then should be his eternal fate? Lewis maintains that he cannot be admitted into heaven, not simply because he has committed great wickedness that deserves punishment, but because he has become the kind of person who is incapable of sharing in the eternal communion of love that is heaven. “The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good,” elaborates Lewis, “is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary contact with an outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish—to lie wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.” A damned individual is satisfied with who and what he has become and will not change to improve his lot. As intolerable as we may find his miserable condition, he does not find it intolerable. Better to live in hell than love in heaven.

What then is God to do? He has made every effort to convert our sinner but has met with implacable resistance. Even if he were to continue his efforts in the afterlife, they will necessarily fail. The damned person is permanently set in his wickedness; he has chosen his fate. At this point, God has no choice but to honor the sinner’s adamant rejection. He will not coerce him against his will, as that would violate his personal autonomy. Mutuality cannot be forced. 

Lewis acknowledges that in this situation God’s omnipotence has been defeated. “In creating beings with free will,” he writes, “omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat.” It’s not that God has withdrawn his love from the damned—he still desires their repentance and happiness—but his love has reached a limit drawn by their free choices. Lewis concludes with his oft-quoted words: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” 

The Free Will Model of Universalist Liberation

Lewis’s version of the choice model has become the standard defense of hell and represents what might be judged the most powerful challenge to the greater hope. How might the universalist respond? As we saw in yesterday’s talk, St Isaac the Syrian rejects the free will defense of damnation: If God foreknew this doom for his creatures, he would not have created this world. It is blasphemous to think otherwise, Isaac would tell us. Yet God did create this world; therefore the free will model of eternal self-damnation must be wrong. Through his scourges of love, God will bring all to repentance and salvation.

Over against the doctrine of eternal damnation, Isaac, as well as Origen and St Gregory of Nyssa, propose a free will construal of ultimate liberation. They are as committed to the gift of free will as Lewis, but they reject the possibility that even the most wicked person will succeed in their rebellion. Not even hell can obliterate the fundamental desire for God that is given to us by our creation. No matter how many post-mortem eons may pass, all will freely embrace God’s forgiveness and mercy. God never withdraws his absolution; never stops wooing the damned into joy. One way or another, Love will find a way to break through our interior fortresses and entice us into the Kingdom of joy. Philosophers call this the model of infinite opportunities. Over the centuries, this model has been the predominant expression of the universalist hope. In the nineteenth century, George MacDonald presented what I consider its most compelling imaginative depiction. C. S. Lewis loved the writings of MacDonald and considered him his spiritual master, yet precisely here their paths departed. Unlike Lewis, MacDonald had no doubts that the Father of Jesus would bring the damned to repentance and faith. 

“Nothing is inexorable but love,” propounds MacDonald. “For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds.” If that loveliness is incomplete, Love will pour out itself to bring the beloved into her intended perfection. If the beloved has been possessed by evil and uglified by sin, love will purify the beloved and restore her to beauty. Our God is a consuming fire.

But what of the damned, of those who resolutely reject God’s love? MacDonald invites us to picture self-damnation as a choosing to abide in the impenetrable darkness of our narcissism. I quote a long passage (in fact, two passages I have combined into one), but MacDonald’s words must be heard as written:

If the man resists the burning of God, the consuming fire of Love, a terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come. He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. What sick dismay shall then seize upon him! For let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him—making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God withdraws from a man as far as that can be without the man’s ceasing to be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless vertigo of existence upon the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end—for the soul has no weapons wherewith to destroy herself—with no inbreathing of joy, with nothing to make life good;—then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door; then, if the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches the ear of the outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable death, for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God—that one living death. . . .

So might I imagine a thousand steps up from the darkness, each a little less dark, a little nearer the light—but, ah, the weary way! He cannot come out until he have paid the uttermost farthing! Repentance once begun, however, may grow more and more rapid! If God once get a willing hold, if with but one finger he touch the man’s self, swift as possibility will he draw him from the darkness into the light. For that for which the forlorn, self-ruined wretch was made, was to be a child of God, a partaker of the divine nature, an heir of God and joint heir with Christ. Out of the abyss into which he cast himself, refusing to be the heir of God, he must rise and be raised. To the heart of God, the one and only goal of the human race—the refuge and home of all and each, he must set out and go, or the last glimmer of humanity will die from him. Whoever will live must cease to be a slave and become a child of God. There is no half-way house of rest, where ungodliness may be dallied with, nor prove quite fatal. Be they few or many cast into such prison as I have endeavoured to imagine, there can be no deliverance for human soul, whether in that prison or out of it, but in paying the last farthing, in becoming lowly, penitent, self-refusing—so receiving the sonship, and learning to cry, Father!

I am tempted to stop right here, so compelling I find MacDonald’s vision. Yet still the defender of free choice damnation might raise the objection: no matter the horror of the outer darkness, the individual can still hold on to their defiance, even if it leads to madness. Can we definitively exclude this possibility, as unlikely as it might seem to MacDonald and others? 

The Transcendental Determinism of the Good

And so I turn now to the philosophical reflections of David Bentley Hart in That All Shall Be Saved. I begin with this Hartian maxim:

No one can freely will the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good, but that does not alter the prior transcendental orientation that wakens all desire. To see the good truly is to desire it insatiably; not to desire it is not to have known it, and so never to have been free to choose it.

Every human being, Hart maintains, is divinely ordered to God under the aspects of the transcendentals of being—the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful. We hunger and thirst for union with him, for only in him can we enjoy supreme and overflowing happiness. The desire for divinity is inscribed in human nature. 

Created in the divine image, we are incomplete without God. Of course, no one is without God. As divine Creator, he acts in the ontological depths of every person. He is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. Yet we suffer from an existential inquietude that evidences both our finitude and alienation. Despite the counsel of the Church’s ascetics and spiritual teachers, we continue to seek our fulfillment in the relative goods and de­lights of the world, with predictable results. We remain dissatisfied, unsettled, restless and discon­tent. Once we obtain that which we hope will fill the hole in our hearts, we find that we need something else, someone else. And so the quest continues, ad infinitum. We are inescapably drawn to fullness of life. There is only one telos and beatitude for mankind—eternal life in the perichoretic Love that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Church calls this theosis. Hart elaborates:

We are created . . . according to a divine design, after the divine image, oriented toward a divine purpose, and thus are fulfilled in ourselves only insofar as we can achieve the perfection of our natures in union with God. There alone our true happiness lies. . . . Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God.

God, and God alone, is the true happiness of the human being. He is our absolute Good and the consummation of all desire. Under our present fallen condition of ignorance, delusion, and disordered passions, we only apprehend the Good partially and defectively through the prism of finite goods. We therefore find ourselves choosing lesser goods over greater goods, apparent goods instead of real goods; but if we were ever presented with a full and perfect apprehension of the Good, free from all impediments, we would necessarily embrace the Good as our own, for we would recognize it as the true and final beatitude for which we yearn and desiderate. We would then understand that the happi­ness we crave and the happiness God wills for us are identical. Hence the Hartian maxim: to see the Good truly is to insatiably desire the Good. In the beatific vision, there is no longer a “choosing” between different possible happinesses: there is only the eternal bliss of the one God who is Holy Trinity. In this sense, but only in this sense, we are eschatologically doomed to happiness.

If we still balk at our transcendental determination to the Good, perhaps the reason lies in our defective understanding of who and what God is and therefore what authentic freedom must mean. If we think of Deity as a being among beings, then it might appear that we can ultimately choose other gods and other goods instead of him. Why not Baal instead of the LORD? Why not wealth and power instead of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? But once God is properly comprehended as the infinite plenitude and actuality of Being, then he cannot be understood as just one option among many. He is not a discrete object that we can simply choose, as one might choose cake instead of a chocolate sundae. He does not stand alongside other beings and other possible goods. He is the source, ground, and telos of our existence. He therefore does not act upon rational beings as a heteronomous power. “God is freedom as such,” amplifies Hart, 

the fiery energy that liberates the flame from the wood. He is the very power of agency. He is the Good that makes the rational will exist. He is the eternal infinite source of all knowledge and all truth, of all love and delight in the object of love, who enlivens and acts within every created act. 

God the Holy Trinity is Truth itself, Goodness itself, Beauty itself. To be free is to flourish in communion with him. We are not free because we have multiple choices available to us; we become free when we choose well, thereby achieving the happiness for which we are divinely destined. For this reason, Hart rejects the fundamental premise of the free choice model of hell, as well as its construal of libertarian freedom. It is impossible, Hart maintains, for us to definitively reject the Good toward which all our desires and aspirations direct us:

Neither, though, can God be merely one option among others, for the very simple reason that he is not just another object alongside the willing agent or alongside other objects of desire, but is rather the sole ultimate content of all rational longing. Being himself the source and end of the real, God can never be for the will simply one plausible terminus of desire in competition with another; he could never confront the intellect simply as a relative and eval­uative good, from which one might reasonably turn to some other. He remains forever the encompassing final object that motivates and makes actual every choice, the Good that makes the will free in the first place. Even an act of apostasy, then, traced back to its most primordial impulse, is motivated by the desire for God. . . . As I have said, to reject God is still, however obscurely and uncomprehendingly, to seek God.

Human beings desire happiness and always act toward this end, no matter how perverted and twisted the desire has become. The belief that we may reject God absolutely assumes an absolute—but ontologically impossible—divorce between God and Goodness and therefore between God and rational beatitude. As St Augustine prayed: “For Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”

God wills our good, and our good is God. He has created us with an unquenchable thirst for infinite bliss. This natural desire for communion with the Holy Trinity is the secret of the universalist hope. Now imagine, if you will, being presented upon our death with an unclouded vision of the Good. By the power of the Spirit, God frees us from the ignorance, delusions, and disordered passions that have determined and shaped our lives. For the first time in our lives we are granted to see God as he truly is. Will we not find him utterly irresistible?

Hart’s argument can be reframed in terms of reasons: What reasons can be plausibly invoked to defend our final rejection of absolute love. Philosophers John Kronen and Eric Reitan state the argument:

Rational creatures, by definition, can choose based on reasons—that is, they are motivated to act not merely by instinct or appetite, but by the recogni­tion that certain apprehended truths entail that a course of action is good to do. Saying that rational creatures are ordered to the good means two things: first, when they directly and clearly encounter the perfect good in unclouded experience, they will recog­nize it as the perfect good; and second, the perfect good (which, by defini­tion, is the stan­dard according to which all oth­er goods are mea­sured) would, under conditions of imme­di­ate and unclouded apprehen­sion, present itself as overrid­ingly wor­thy of love. Crea­tures’ subjective values will thus spontaneously fall into har­mony with the objective good, with all choices reflecting this proper valuation. Put another way, immediate awareness of the per­fect good will so sing to the natural inclina­tions of the soul that love for the good will swamp all poten­tially contrary affective states. One would have every reason to con­form one’s will to the per­fect good and no reason not to. 

Is this all too philosophical? Let us think of this vision of the infinite Good as what happens to us when we fall in love. Does the lover choose to fall in love? Certainly not. All lovers know the existen­tial difference. Falling in love comes as astonishment and revelation. “Here is the person I have been looking for. Here is the one who completes me.” The choice is embedded in the recognition. To be in the presence of one’s beloved is perfect joy; to be joined in coital congress, rapture. Lovers find each other enthralling. They see each other with the eyes of God. As the poet of the Song of Songs sings: “You are altogether beautiful; there is no flaw in you” (4:7). Lovers are drawn togeth­er, as if by some kind of gravitational or magnetic force. Frequently they will invoke the language of slavery, even madness, when speaking of their mutual attraction—yet it is a slavery of utter freedom and an insanity of delight and truth. They are filled with an intensity of life they have never known. Their one joy is to give them­selves to their beloved and become one flesh and one soul. As Juliet says to Romeo:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

Lovers know they will adore and cherish each other forever. They cannot imagine a future apart from their beloved. 

Charles Williams speaks of romantic love as a foretaste of heaven: when we fall in love, “a sudden apprehension of the Good takes place.” Human lovers mirror our encounter with the divine. To know the Good is to desire the Good; to know Love is to surrender to Love. The metaphysics of the Good and human consciousness is difficult to grasp, but we know some­thing about the irresistibility of love, if not by direct experience then through literature and poetry.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

Surely this must be what it will be like when we see God face to face. All doubts and hesitations will vanish; all obstinacy and contrary desires forever banished. Here is the true happiness we have been searching for all our lives, though we did not know it; here is the abundant life that conquers death and heals the brokenness of our hearts. Even the ecstasy of lovers will be infinitely eclipsed. For this ravishment John Donne prayed:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Yet still the free will advocate protests. This is determinism! And Hart admits that this is so, but only at the transcendental level to which all human beings are naturally ordered. Because we are oriented to God as our Good, we cannot rationally reject God in definitive, irrevocable fashion. In Hart’s words:

This divine determinism toward the transcendent Good, then, is precisely what freedom is for a rational nature. Even God could not create a rational being not oriented toward the Good, any more than he could create a reality in which 2+2=5. . . . To say that the only sane and therefore free natural end of the will is the Good is no more problematic than to say that the only sane and therefore free natural end of the intellect is Truth. Rational spirit could no more will evil on the grounds that it is truly evil than the intellect could believe something on the grounds that it is certainly false. . . . As on the cross (John 12:32), so in the whole of being: God frees souls by dragging them to himself.

I can still say no to God, can’t I? I can still choose eternity in hell if I want to, right? But can you, could you, and most importantly, why do you want to? There’s something deep in Adamic man that resists the notion that the grace of God is ultimately irresistible. It calls into radical question our illusion of the autonomous self. Consider Gerhard Forde’s answer to the question “But you don’t mean that grace is irresistible, do you?”

Another tricky question. But again the answer can only, in the end, be yes. “Yes, I find it to be so, don’t you?” Remember it is grace we are talking about, not force. Absolute and unconditional grace has by very definition to be irresistible, one would think. Did you ever meet someone with irresistible grace? All that means is that you are utterly and completely captivated and so cannot finally “resist.” Certainly God’s whole purpose in coming was to make grace irresistible, was it not? Do we not hope that in the end all enemies will be overcome, all opposition stilled, grace completely triumphant and God all in all? How can that be if grace is not finally irresistible? 

The irresistibility of grace brings us back to Hart’s claim that humanity innately desires union with the Good. Humanity’s transcendental ordering to the Good informs the patristic vision of God’s triumphant victory over all sin and evil. British scholar Morwenna Ludlow notes that the two New Testament passages most often invoked by patristic universalists are 1 Cor 15:28 (“When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all”) and the Christological hymn in Philippians 2:7-11. St Gregory of Nyssa brings both texts together in his short treatise In Illud:

But it is with reference to the subjection of all human beings to God, when we all, united with one another through faith, become one body of the Lord who exists in all things, that the apostle speaks of the subjection of the Son to the Father, when the adoration given to the Son by all with one accord, by those in heaven and those upon the earth and those under the earth, will be transferred to the glory of God the Father. Thus Paul says, “to him every knee will bend of those in heaven and those on the earth and those under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” The great wisdom of Paul affirms that when this comes about the Son, who is in all, will himself be subjected to the Father through the subjection of all those in whom the Son is. . . . For the subjection of people to God is salvation to those who are subjected according to the voice of the prophet, who says that the soul is subject to God, since from him comes salvation through subjection, so that subjection is a protection against destruction.

Nor should we be surprised, thinks Gregory, that God will be all in all, for it is to this end that the Holy Trinity created humanity and cosmos. In his work On the Soul and the Resurrection, he writes:

God’s 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 . . . 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.

Conclusion

In preparing for these talks, I was reminded of General Loewenhielmʼs speech at the conclusion of the movie Babette’s Feast. Babette, a famous Parisian chef and refugee from post-revolutionary France, one day appears on the doorstep of two elderly sisters in Jutland. The sisters are pastors of a small and dwindling pietist congregation. Desperate for room and board, she offers to work for the sisters as their housekeeper and cook without salary. The sisters, unaware of her culinary skills and background, accept her offer. Years later Babette wins 10,000 francs in a lottery and decides to prepare for the sisters and their congregation a magnificent meal beyond their imaginings, prompting this sublime toast by the General:

Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together. Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another. 

Man, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite.

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. 

See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!

Thank you, my friends, for this opportunity to share with you my vision of the greater hope, which is simply the vision of the universalist saints. I close with the inspiriting words of Dame Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

(Return to first talk)