Once Loved Always Loved: Chapter Two

“It is evident,” writes Andrew Hronich, “that the traditional depiction of hell as a divinely imposed retribution has been largely supplanted by that of a freely embraced condition.”¹ Absolutely right! This important theological change has happened so quietly, so quickly, so uncontroversially that one might be excused for believing that the free-will model of hell can be traced back to Jesus and his Apostles. We have forgotten that in the Western Church retributive punishment was long the doctrinal point of everlasting perdition, going back at least to the North African apologist Tertullian. In the first decade of the third century, commenting on Matt 10:28, he writes:

But [Christ] also teaches us, that He is rather to be feared, who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell, that is, the Lord alone; not those which kill the body, but are not able to hurt the soul, that is to say, all human powers. . . . whence we learn that the resurrection of the dead is a resurrection of the flesh; for unless it were raised again, it would be impossible for the flesh to be killed in hell. . . . If, therefore, any one shall violently suppose that the destruction of the soul and the flesh in hell amounts to a final annihilation of the two substances, and not to their penal treatment (as if they were to be consumed, not punished), let him recollect that the fire of hell is eternal—expressly announced as an everlasting penalty.²

And later in the third century, Tertullian’s fellow North African, St Cyprian of Carthage, wrote to Demetrianus, the Roman Proconsul of Africa, and rebuked him for his violent anti-Christian polemic:

When the day of judgment shall come, what joy of believers, what sorrow of unbelievers; that they should have been unwilling to believe here, and now that they should be unable to return that they might believe! An ever-burning Gehenna will burn up the condemned, and a punishment devouring with living flames; nor will there be any source whence at any time they may have either respite or end to their torments. Souls with their bodies will be reserved in infinite tortures for suffering.³

The doctrine of eternal damnation became the doctrinal position of the churches in North Africa and eventually in the whole of Latin Christianity, largely due to the influential writings of St Augustine of Hippo. And so it remained for a millennium and a half.

But in the 19th century a new construal of hell, commonly termed the free-will model, emerged, eventually becoming the majority position in much of Protestantism and finally in the Roman Catholic Church. I do not know who in Western theology first proposed the free-will model; but we can safely say that it was C. S. Lewis who popularized it: “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” Each human being freely chooses their eternal destiny, and God has committed himself to honoring their choice. Love invites communion; it never coerces. The damned, therefore, are responsible for their own suffering. The free-will model also neatly solves the conflict between divine mercy and justice inherent to the punitive model. It was as if the Church sighed in great relief: “Thank God! We no longer need believe in divine retribution and hellfire . . . and we can still keep preaching hell!” Two questions immediately come to mind:

• Does the Church’s adoption of the free-will model represent a development of the older doctrine of hell or the invention of a new doctrine?⁴
• Does the free-will model actually eliminate the eliminate the retributive dimension of hell, or does it simply hide it?

Chapter two of Once Loved Always Loved is devoted to an analysis of the self-damnation proposal and the libertarian understanding of freedom that underwrites it.

Hronich summarizes contemporary philosophical discussion of libertarian freedom in the first eight sections, noting various criticisms and solutions that have been offered. He then presents his preferred formulation: rational freedom. Rational freedom, he explains, is “the ability of the moral agent to deliberate amongst different courses of action, which is only made possible by a transcendental final cause or horizon towards which all rational creatures are determined.”⁵ Human beings are teleologically constituted: they are created with an innate orientation to the true, the good, and the beautiful; in other words, they naturally desire communion with God as the fulfillment of their being. “The creature is not an unmoved mover who posits for itself its own ends; rather, its ends are naturally fulfilled in union with God.”⁶ Human beings may not be conscious of their transcendental ordering to God, but unless they are suffering from an addiction or compulsive disorder, they always act in ways to advance what they rightly or wrongly believe will contribute to their happiness. And so Hronich concludes that a free definitive choice against God is ultimately impossible:

If what I have stated is true, then it is true that human beings are naturally ordered towards union with God. God, as the telos and end of human choices, is necessary in order for creatures to act freely, for in order for our choices to be free, they must have for themselves ends (or purposes); otherwise, they would simply be a brute event, indistinguishable from the tremors of an earthquake. When one chooses, therefore, one chooses this or that dependent upon which one believes will better satisfy their natural longings. “What allows one to choose between different possible objects of rational volition is an intellectual orientation toward some rational index of ends that are desirable in and of themselves” [David B. Hart]. In other words, there must be a why, a sufficient reason for making a decision, for any choice to be construed as free. Thus, I do not deny that a creature can temporarily reject God, but I unequivocally affirm that it is metaphysically impossible for a creature to do so finally. To have rejected God is to never have known Him, for if one truly knew God, one would come to realize God as the end that satisfies all the creature’s deepest longings. Thus, with perfect knowledge and perfect freedom, an eternal hell is rendered an impossibility, for it rests on a fictional narrative.⁷

If our happiness lies in loving communion with our Creator, then rejection of him can only be explained by ignorance, disordered desires, psychopathy, and other inhibiting factors. “Sheer choice in and of itself does not equate true freedom,” Hronich elaborates. “Rather, true freedom is not simply the ability to choose; it is when the creature has chosen well, when it is unhindered in its pursuit of the divine.”⁸ Free action presupposes the fulfillment of the relevant conditions of sound judgment. If a person dying of thirst were to find a spring of fresh water and yet refuse to drink, would we consider that refusal sane? Of course not. We would assume that some factor or power is preventing them from acting in their best interests. Perhaps they are convinced that the spring is a mirage. Perhaps their restraint is based on false information that the spring is poisoned. But whatever the reason, their freedom has been compromised and needs to be restored. The same logic applies to the possibility of self-damnation. A choice to embrace the eternal miseries of hell is illogical and therefore unfree; it denies the ultimate happiness for which rational beings are created. If God by his grace were to remove the salvation-inhibiting conditions, then the confused person would necessarily—and freely—choose eternal happiness. The free-will model of perdition is therefore fatally flawed. It presupposes a construal of personal liberty that allows the choosing of absurd and irreparably destructive alternatives.

Jerry Walls has advanced a strong objection to the universalist invocation of rational freedom: the damned believe that definitive separation from the God of love is what they truly want. The Satan of Paradise Lost serves as the exemplar of the libertarian embrace of hell:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

So the damned believe: whatever suffering and privation may follow from one’s act of self-damnation is outweighed by the happiness and satisfaction derived from autonomous existence. “Those who prefer hell to heaven,” Walls writes, “have convinced themselves that it is better. In their desire to justify their choice of evil, they have persuaded them­selves that whatever satisfaction they experience from evil is superior to the joy which God offers. At the very least, they see some advantage to be gained in the choice of evil.”⁹

As it stands, is this a plausible claim? Only, I would think, if we have determined in advance that hell is eternally populated and are struggling to understand how the lost could have freely chosen this doom. “Ahh,” we think to ourselves, “they have deceived themselves into believing that hell offers them greater possibilities for happiness than heaven does.” Self-deception, as Walls explains, is not a matter of lacking information; it is a culpable suppression of what we already know combined with an equally culpable refusal to act upon it. Walls assumes that self-deception must also be operative in hell, thus enabling the delusion of infernal well-being, however threadbare and minimal. But is the assumption sound?

The flaw in Walls’s reasoning becomes apparent upon a little more thought. It’s not as if at the final judgment we are given a choice between living forever in a lovely chalet in Aspen, Colorado, or a spacious villa in the French Riviera. All teloi are not equal. The eschatolog­ical choice is a stark either/or—ecstatic bliss with Jesus Christ or interminable torment in the outer darkness. There is no in-between, no middle ground between light and darkness, no mixing of heavenly beatitude and infernal wretchedness. Hell is the irrevocable loss of the beatific vision, and it is this loss that makes hell hell and constitutes its true suffering (poena damni):

The poena damni, or pain of loss, consists in the loss of the beatific vision and in so complete a separation of all the powers of the soul from God that it cannot find in Him even the least peace and rest. It is accompanied by the loss of all supernatural gifts, e.g. the loss of faith. The characters impressed by the sacraments alone remain to the greater confusion of the bearer. The pain of loss is not the mere absence of superior bliss, but it is also a most intense positive pain. The utter void of the soul made for the enjoyment of infinite truth and infinite goodness causes the reprobate immeasurable anguish. Their consciousness that God, on Whom they entirely depend, is their enemy forever is overwhelming. Their consciousness of having by their own deliberate folly forfeited the highest blessings for transitory and delusive pleasures humiliates and depresses them beyond measure. The desire for happiness inherent in their very nature, wholly unsatisfied and no longer able to find any compensation for the loss of God in delusive pleasure, renders them utterly miserable. Moreover, they are well aware that God is infinitely happy, and hence their hatred and their impotent desire to injure Him fills them with extreme bitterness. And the same is true with regard to their hatred of all the friends of God who enjoy the bliss of heaven. The pain of loss is the very core of eternal punishment.¹⁰

In hell not even a modicum of happiness is possible. To choose final separation from God is to choose an intensity of misery that can never be mistaken for pleasure or satisfaction. Infernal suffering shatters all our delusions. Self-deception is necessarily unsustainable; otherwise hell wouldn’t be hell.

Let us now posit the possibility of post-mortem repentance: every person in hell is given infinite opportunities to repent of their sins and cry out to the all-merciful Savior for their salvation. The majority Christian view denies this possibility, of course, but it is difficult to see why the God of absolute love would arbitrarily determine death as the deadline for repentance. Assuming the hypothesis, is it plausible to think that people, no matter how wicked and corrupt, can everlastingly deceive themselves into believing that they are content in their infernal state, despite their alienation from the creaturely goods for which they yearn and despite the convincing power of their suffering? As Hronich observes: “It may be true for a time that a person might be led to falsely believe that separation from God is more desirable than union with Him, but until experiencing the effects of actual separation, they are perfectly oblivious of what it is they are choosing.”¹¹ Only the direct experience of infernal misery can bring about the knowledge necessary for an informed and free decision, yet it is this very knowledge that will inevitably bring the damned to their senses and encourage them, like the prodigal son, to begin the journey home to their Father. “Those who yet claim that they may continue to choose separation must face the quandary of the damned possessing no strong motive for choosing damnation whereas there is a very strong motive for not choosing it.”¹²

In the end, Hronich avers, a decision to decisively and definitively separate oneself from the absolute Good is incoherent. Only those enslaved by ignorance, delusion, psychological illness, and disordered desires could entertain, and make, such an incomprehensible and self-destructive choice; yet precisely these conditions disqualify them from freely making it. The choice model of damnation is thus refuted. It rests upon a false understanding of freedom:

In short, rational freedom stipulates that true freedom necessitates true knowledge and true sanity of mind to be qualified as such. In the absence of either of these, apart from true knowledge and true sanity of mind, one is not wholly free. In other words: a decision to reject God forever cannot be both free and fully informed. God as supremely loving wills for us that which satisfies our deepest yearnings, but so long as we ‘are mired in ambiguity and subject to ignorance, illusion, and deception, we will no doubt misjudge our real wants and yearnings repeatedly and especially the means of satisfying them’ [Thomas Talbott]. Yet, God, being supremely wise and supremely powerful, will by no means misjudge these affairs but will instead know how to correct our misgivings in a way that does not interfere or violate our freedom to act upon such misgivings.¹³

Yet there is another card for the defenders of self-damnation to play: perhaps rational beings are capable of transforming themselves into beings who choose evil for the sake of evil. Hronich calls this the “hard-heartedness” objection. Let us imagine the damned as those who, through a lifetime of selfishness, iniquity and sin, have become the kind of persons who can only choose evil, not just because of the perverse pleasure they might derive from their wicked acts but because that is who they now are. “A person who has chosen evil decisively,” Walls stipulates, “would be a person who consistently wanted evil at all levels of desire.”¹⁴ For all intents and purposes, the reprobate are irredeemably evil. They no more deserve our pity and concern than do the orcs in Mordor.¹⁵

Drawing on Sören Kierkegaard, Walls directs us to a commonly recognized feature of human life: the good and evil that we do shapes us into either good or evil persons. We call this character formation. Those who acquire a virtuous character have developed a propensity toward virtuous action; those who have acquired an evil character have developed a propensity toward wicked and immoral action. It is thus possible for a person to become so inhabited by sin that it becomes a power within him, possessing him, directing him. Thus Kierkegaard:

The sinner on the other hand is so thoroughly in the power of sin that he has no conception of its totalitarian character, or that he is in the byway of perdition. He takes into account only each individual new sin by which he acquires new headway onward along the path of perdition, just as if the previous instant he were not going with the speed of the previous sins along that same path. So natural has sin become to him, or sin has so become his second nature, that he finds the daily continuance quite a matter of course, and it is only when by a new sin he acquires as it were new headway that for an instant he is made aware. By perdition he is blinded to the fact that his life, instead of possessing the essential continuity of the eternal by being before God in faith, has the continuity of sin.¹⁶

The choosing of evil has so conditioned the damned that it has become the decisive principle of their existence. Conflicts between first- and second-order desires have been resolved and personal incorrigibility established. “At this point,” writes Walls, “evil is present through and through a personality, and there is no place left for good even to get a foothold. It never ‘bottoms out’ so to speak, and thus there is little, if any, prospect for a return to good.”¹⁷ If one is an advocate of the free-will model of perdition, I think one has to say something along the lines suggested by Kierkegaard and Walls, lest one end up shifting responsibility for the infernal suffering of the damned back upon God. It is critical to provide a compelling reason both for their initial choice to definitively reject God and for their everlasting continuance in their rejection. The free-will model depends upon it.

But note the absence of genuine freedom in hell. Not only is the freedom of the damned diminished; it is extinguished. Whatever degree of libertarian freedom they may have once possessed is now lost. The damned are incapable of choosing otherwise, for they lack the desire and power to be other than what they have become and now are. Their decisions and actions are determined by their acquired evil nature. One would think that this consideration, in itself, would refute the free will model of perdition; but its defenders claim that it is sufficient that the actions preceding the formation of the evil character be libertarianly free. The damned may no longer be capable of willing communion with God, but they are nonetheless morally responsible for their incapacity.¹⁸ They have, we may crassly put it, become orcs. Orcs never repent of their wickedness. They cannot be healed of their malice. They cannot be delivered from their hatred and violence. They cannot be converted to the Good. They can only be slain. As the Elvish proverb goes: “The only good orc is a dead orc.”¹⁹

But is this picture of the hard-hearted person eternally rejecting God’s offer of forgiveness and everlasting bliss plausible, particularly in light of their interminable suffering? “We generally associate hard-heartedness with an individual’s callous, dispassionate disposition towards others,” remarks Hronich, “but it is another thing entirely to speak of their hard-heartedness in relation to their own state.”²⁰ Think of an alcoholic or drug addict. Are they oblivious to the pain of their condition? I assure you they are not. And sometimes, by the grace of God and with the help of family and friends, they can reach an existential point where they can acknowledge their addiction and seek sobriety. Yet the hard-heartedness objection requires the damned to be “be unmoved by their own plight: they must eternally resist changing their behavior in spite of its radically harmful effects to themselves.”²¹ Is this credible? I think not. And the credibility diminishes to zero when we remember these four fundamental truths:

• God is absolute love.
• God is omnipotent.
• God has made us with an unquenchable thirst for union with him.
• God never ceases to search for and restore the lost.

The two common objections raised by the supporters of the free-will model of damnation—self-deception and hard-heartedness—lose their persuasiveness when considered in light of these truths. Do we really have the power to eternally lock God out of our hearts and souls? Are our wills so omnipotent and God’s grace so impotent? Hronich concludes:

If it is that hell’s doors are “locked from the inside,” then there is every reason to believe that it shall eventually be left vacant. No rational creature can continue to elect unremitting anguish for itself with no strong motive for doing so. Thus, both the rational and libertarian models of freedom can reasonably affirm that in the end, God will succeed in reconciling all to Himself.²²

Perhaps we just need to remind ourselves that our freedom is a gift of our Father and always operates within his divine providence. We may abuse our freedom in terrible, horrible ways. Even so, we cannot wander so far that he cannot restore us to his love, even if it should take eons and eons.

Christ is risen and hell is emptied!

Footnotes

[1] Andrew Hronich, Once Loved Always Loved [2023], 50.

[2] Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 35.

[3] Cyprian, An Address to Demetrianus 24.

[4] See “How Hot is Hellfire? The Retributive and Choice Models of Hell.”

[5] Hronich, 62.

[6] Ibid., 63.

[7] Ibid., 64.

[8] Ibid., 66.

[9] Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (1992), 129.

[10] J. Hontheim, “Hell,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910). Free-will perditionists are loathe to acknowledge the severity of the loss of the beatific vision, lest God’s goodness be called into question. Walls even speaks of the damned as being “almost happy” (Walls, 126).

It should be noted that modern Eastern Orthodoxy does not think of think of hell as privation of the beatific vision; rather, the damned are fully exposed to the uncreated Light and this is their torment. See George Metallinos, “Paradise and Hell According to Orthodox Tradition.” Also see “Damnation and the Phantasmagoric Effervescence of Passion.”

[11] Hronich, 71.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 69-70.

[14] Walls, 121; quoted by Hronich, 76. We may wonder whether the notion of choosing evil for the sake of evil is coherent. St Thomas Aquinas doesn’t think so.

[15] This is a controversial and perhaps unChristian statement, I know. Tolkien struggled for decades with the moral status of the orcs. Yet the stories speak clearly enough: nobody pities the orcs and nobody regrets killing them. Now compare the state of the damned in the writings of C. S. Lewis. Are they still human or only remains of what once was? And if the latter, do they have a moral status, or are they only detritus to be thrown out with the eschatological trash? See “Taking the Bus to Hell.”

[16] Sören Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, chap. 2; quoted partly by Walls, 120.

[17] Walls, 120. “Nevertheless it is a possibility that a man will let himself be so mastered by his desires that he will lose all ability to resist them. It is the extreme case of what we have all too often seen: people increasingly mastered by desires, so that they lose some of their ability to resist them. The less we impose our order on our desires, the more they impose their order on us. We may describe a man in this situation of having lost his capacity to overrule his desires as having “lost his soul.” Such a man is a prisoner of bad desires. He can no longer choose to resist them by doing the action which he judges to be overall the best thing to do. He has no natural desires to do the actions of heaven, and he cannot choose to do them because he sees them to be of supreme worth. There is no ‘he’ left to make that choice.” Richard Swinburne, “A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell,” in The Existence and Nature of God, ed. Alfred Freddoso (1983), 49.

[18] “Perhaps, for example, the damned consistently chose to prioritize finite commodities over union with God to the point where such became a habit. However, they did not directly choose the habit; rather, the habit was a result of their continual choices.” Hronich, 81.

[19] Does the absolute love of God intend the damned? This is a fascinating question that needs to be repeatedly put to the defenders of free will damnation. What does it mean to love someone who is truly evil and beyond redemption? Does the word love even mean anything in this context? If the hard-heartedness objection defeats the universalist thesis, then annihilationism becomes an option to be seriously considered. Yes, the gift of existence is a great good, but does its goodness outweigh the great evil of irredeemable suffering and torment?

[20] Hronich, 78.

[21] Eric Reitan, “Eternally Choosing Hell,” Sophia 61 (2022): 365-382; quoted by Hronich, 78.

[22] Hronich, 88-89.