I am not a universalist. I believe that Scripture reveals the reality of damnation for both men and angels. Still, there can be good and bad arguments against universalism. Since David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved re-ignited the universalism debate in 2019, we have seen both.
Anthony Esolen recently published a short article in Crisis that falls prey to bad ways of thinking about the position, especially assuming that those who hold to a universalist view (either a Balthasarian hopeful universalism or the necessary universalism of DBH) do so as flouting orthodoxy and virtue. I disagree.
Esolen’s article begins, I am sad to say, with a mocking vignette of the universalist position, taking moments from Scripture and changing them into what, he believes, universalism would require them to say. For example:
“Then the master of the house returned at a time when no one expected,” said Jesus, “and he found the butler drunk and abusing the women, and many of the servants having a grand time of it, and the whole place in chaos. But he shrugged, gave a wink to the butler, who was red in the face, and nodded to a couple in a closet who were being no better than they should be, and he told them all not to worry because he didn’t care about the house one way or the other.”
But this satire is a paper tiger. What about the universalist position requires that God not take sin seriously? Certainly those universalist Church Fathers whom Esolen names are not guilty of such foolishness. It is entirely and simultaneously possible that God hates sin and reforms every sinner. In fact, for many universalists, this is a key part of the argument. Indeed, those of us who believe in an eternal hell ought not to dismiss the difficulty of the question as to why a God who hates sin would, nevertheless, permit it to go on and on and on ad infinitum.
I worry that arguments like the above presuppose an unorthodox and impoverished view of God as ultimately incapable of overthrowing sin within the will of free creatures. The mental image of these sorts of arguments is of God gaily overlooking sin, as if this were the only mechanism by which He might bring a sinner to salvation. Rather, we know that every one of the saved is a sinner brought to salvation by the utterly gratuitous and intrinsically efficacious gift of grace. If such saving work is easy for God, it is a difficulty for our own position as to why God doesn’t eradicate the sinfulness of each man.
Indeed, Esolen admits that he does “not delight in the doctrine of eternal loss.” On one hand, this is an important thing to say, lest those who believe in hell be painted (as they often are) as spiritual sadists. But on the other hand, this raises questions about hell and the wisdom of providence. Does not St. Thomas say that the saints find good in the whole order, even in the existence of hell? Is hell an evil that God cannot get around or is it a good in relation to the whole, created by highest wisdom and primal love?
Esolen worries that universalism evacuates the drama of life. He asks, “Why should Jesus tell us to make disciples of all nations? To make them happier in this life, and that alone? Why should Mother Teresa have undergone the terrible suffering of feeling that God had abandoned her? What was the point of it?”
Why shouldn’t Christ tell us to make disciples of all nations? Does universalism necessitate abandoning the view that Christ is alone the Way to eternal life? Did Origen think so? If all men were saved, would this make the cause of salvation superfluous? The same sorts of arguments are made against Sts. Augustine and Thomas’ doctrine of infallible providence and predestination. If God has caused me to perform a meritorious work, then isn’t my work no longer causal of my salvation but mere window dressing? Of course, in both cases the answer is no: God works through contingent causes without His plan being made subject to their natural contingency. If God should wish to save all men through the Church, we should still have to evangelize every last soul and precisely because our actions are part of the providential plan, not alien to it.
Moreover, what about Mother Teresa’s suffering for sanctification becomes less meaningful if other men undergo it too? For many universalists, long, painful purification is just as normative for the spiritual life as it is for those who believe in hell. The number of the damned does not have any necessary bearing on the process by which the creature is turned away from its own nothingness and abandons itself to God.
Our imagination of “forever” is limited to “a very long time.” We imagine the soul of a particularly bad sinner getting off scot-free if universalism were true. But we should remember, instead, the image depicted in The Brothers Karamazov of a poor soul wearily and painfully marching on a gloomy road toward heaven for thousands or millions of years.
Again, I am not a universalist. Those familiar with this blog are likely aware that much of my own academic work has been defending the traditional Augustinian and Thomistic doctrines of reprobation and damnation (for which DBH has called me an “apostle of evil” and a “pornographer”). But if we are to understand these doctrines well, we must grapple with the real questions that universalism poses. Certainly the great proponents of the traditional account explicitly wrestled with these questions rather than mocking them, something seen in the tradition since St. Augustine through to Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.
In fact, St. Augustine, the Doctor gratiae, was at pains to defend the divine wisdom against the very sensible questions that naturally arise when we say that God permits some men to fall into unending evil. The same questions arise in even my most pious students, and I know that they are understanding St. Augustine’s or St. Thomas’ positions well when they treat these objections with intellectual respect. If one does not see these questions as forceful, then one misses the importance of the answers.
Excellent article, Dr. O'Neill! I agree that the question of universalism should be taken seriously. I have a short article on reconciling God's universal salvific will with intrinsically efficacious grace, with the issue of universalism at the core: https://catholicareopagus.blogspot.com/2022/06/thomism-molinism-and-gods-universal.html
On that note, do you think that a Molinist doctrine of extrinsically efficacious grace has a genuine advantage when it comes to this particular issue? Prima facie, it is easier to see how to reconcile God willing the salvation of all with the falsity of universalism if grace must be made efficacious by the consent of a person's will.