Universal Salvation and Probability

Every so often, another Catholic encourages me to "dare to hope that all are saved". After all, it is not a matter of doctrine that any specific person is damned. We know that God's mercy is great, and given God's mercy and our beliefs about the bliss of heaven and the torment which is hell, it seems reasonable that any soul would choose to embrace God over separating himself permanently from Him.

For me, this idea seems to fall down, however, when applied to the whole of humanity. In a sense, it's a lot like the issue of the probability of sinlessness which I wrote about briefly a while ago: Given that we have free will, it would seem that in any given situation we could choose to do the right thing -- though obviously we in many cases feel a strong urge not to or don't even have a clear understanding of what the right thing is. However paradoxically, while in every individual choice it would seem that we could choose not to sin, it seems like an impossibility that any one person would in fact make the right choice in every single circumstance, thus living a life entirely without sin (except for original sin.)

Similarly, it seems to me that while there's clearly a chance that any given person, no matter how sinful, will repent before death, embrace God's forgiveness, and be saved, I simply can't imagine it as possible that every single person in the history of humanity would do so. We see people so very frequently, in ordinary life, actively choose to do thing which they know will make them unhappy out of anger, pride or even just habit -- I just don't find it persuasive that no one would ever have chosen to utterly refuse union with God and insist that he would "rather rule in hell and serve in heaven."

So I do not hope that all will be saved -- I stick to hoping that each person will be saved.

Choosing Hell

This post originally ran (I've cleaned up a few typos, but otherwise left it unchanged) back in 2006, but the topic has been on my mind, and having found it via Google while researching the topic of the Fundamental Option I decided to rerun this one rather than writing a new one.

Quite some time back, Pontifications ran a post about the theory of "fundamental option", which it seems is the theological term for the idea that one's salvation is based upon a fundamental choice that one makes either for or against God.

This image for the determination of one's salvation has a certain utility in that it is simple and evocative. C. S. Lewis uses it in The Last Battle, where all of Narnia's creatures face Aslan and swerve either to his right (with loving expressions) or to his left (with hate in their eyes). And yet, like any image or illustration, applying it absolutely leads to distortion. The 'encounter God and choose' image helps to emphasize that God's judgment is not some arbitrary judgment imposed upon us. It also helps to explain how someone externally appearing to have sinned many times might be saved, while someone who to all appearances led a virtuous life, yet held pride in his heart, might reject God and be condemned. And yet, taken as an absolute of 'salvation by choice alone' the theory of 'fundamental option' becomes just as much a heresy as 'salvation by faith alone'.

John Paul II said as much in Veritas Splendor:

To separate the fundamental option from concrete kinds of behavior means to contradict the substantial integrity or personal unity of the moral agent in his body and in his soul. A fundamental option understood without explicit consideration of the potentialities which it puts into effect and the determinations which express it does not do justice to the rational finality immanent in mans acting and in each of his deliberate decisions.

It is keeping this integrity between the human agent's identity, will and action that is the difficult balance for most of us, I think. Our culture tends to think of each choice as a totally free activity. Thus, the idea of experiencing for an instant the clarity of the Beatific Vision and in that instant choosing for or against God seems like an isolated decision point, unencumbered by past decisions. Indeed, some use this view to support the claim that perhaps all will be saved, because no one (when truly seeing God for what He is) would reject Him.

And yet, classic Christian moral theology does not support this view of total personal freedom. Virtue is often described as 'the habit of doing good' while attachment to sin is that moral habit which, once one has sinned, makes it hard to make the right choice in the future. Thus, the first time you lie in order to get out of a difficult situation, you struggle to make it come out convincingly and fear for days that your lie will be found out. But with each transgression the lie comes more naturally, until it becomes nearly impossible to tell the truth in a difficult situation -- the convenient lie comes out without even thinking.

It is because we are changed as moral agents by our past choices that our fundamental choice for or against God at the particular judgment cannot be divorced from the moral decisions we have made throughout our lives. Each time we sin or resist sin, makes it harder or easier to make that decision at the moment of personal judgment.

Perhaps, as in so many other things, the analogy of marriage is useful. One can, as a moral agent, choose at any given point in one's marriage to do something that is good for or bad for one's spouse. And yet, a given man with a given history can make it harder or easier to treat his wife well by building a history of good or bad behavior. While, in theory, a man who has lied and mistreated and been unfaithful to his wife can still, at any given decision point, choose to treat her well, he has vastly decreased both his ability to treat his wife well, and also his knowledge of what his wife truly wants, and thus his ability to treat her well even if he wants to.

Hating the Near and Loving the Far

At the risk of being all-books-all-the-time around here, (and really, if one is going to run risks, that's not a bad one to run, is it?) I can't this. I've been working through a lot of analysis at work lately, which involves long periods of sitting at my desk alone wrestling with Excel and Access, and to help stay on task I've been listening to John Cleese reading C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. It's probably been ten years since I read Screwtape, and I'd forgotten how quotable it is.

These two sections particularly struck me. The first about the tactic of getting the temptee to focus on loving those he doesn't actually know, while disliking those he actually interacts with on a daily basis.

[from Screwtape Letter #6]

As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too much on those feelings of hatred which the humans are so fond of discussing in Christian or anti-Christian periodicals. In his anguish, the patient can of course be encourage to revenge himself by some vindictive feelings directed towards the German leaders, and that is good so far as it goes, but it is usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats. He's never met in real life. They are lay figures modeled on what he gets from the newspapers. The results of such fanciful hatred are often most disappointing. And of all humans, the English are, in this respect, the most deplorable milksops. They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door. Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence as well as some malice in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remove circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real, and the benevolence large imaginary.

There is no good at all inflaming his hatred of Germans if at the same time a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer or the man he meets in the train.

Think of your man as a series of concentric circles: his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope at once to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the enemy, but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the will. It is only insofar as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real center, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.

It strikes me that this is a temptation which those of us who are particularly into politics are very much in danger of falling into. After all, we associate with the good guys, and we are in favor of lots of good things: the common good, freedom, democracy, all that great stuff. And certainly, I wouldn't say that one shouldn't be in favor of all these things. But it's terribly easy, once one knows one is on the "right side of history" to then go around despising half the people one deals with in daily life since, after all, they are on the "wrong side of history".

And as if that weren't enough cause to make sure one is careful with one's politics, the next letter zeroes in on the temptations of the Christian political activist in particular:

[from Screwtape Letter #7]

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and towards the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the "Cause" is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. Even when the little group exists originally for the Enemy's own purposes, this remains true.

We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique. The Church herself is, of course, heavily defended and we have never yet quite succeeded in giving her all the characteristics of a faction; but subordinate factions within her have often produced admirable results, from the parties of Paul and of Apollos at Corinth down to the High and Low parties in the Church of England.

If your patient can be induced to become a conscientious objector he will automatically find himself one of a small, vocal, organized, unpopular society, and the effects of this, on one so new to Christianity, will almost certainly be good. But only almost certainly. Has he had serious doubts about the lawfulness serving in a just war before this present war of serving began? Is he a man of great physical courage—so great that he will have no half-conscious misgivings about the real motives of his pacifism? Can he, when nearest to honesty (no human is ever very near), feel fully convinced that he actuated wholly by the desire to obey the Enemy? If he is that sort of man, his pacifism will probably not do us much good, and the Enemy will probably protect him from the usual consequences of belonging to a sect. Your best plan, in that case, would be to attempt a sudden, confused, emotional crisis from which he might emerge as an uneasy convert to patriotism. Such things can often be managed. But if he is the man I take him to be, try Pacifism.

But whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

And as an aside, John Cleese does a pretty brilliant job of reading Screwtape. It's not often one finds such a thing available free (though the quality of the recordings is low) and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who has the time and interest.

Growing Into Morality

Last night I started reading Heather King's Redeemed, her conversion story, which picks up after Parched, the chronicle of her spiral into and final escape from alcoholism. (I read Parched a couple weeks ago and greatly enjoyed it, if that's the right term for a brilliantly written if at times harrowing memoir.)

One of the things that struck me in reading King's account of her conversion is the way in which she describes coming to understand and agree with Catholic moral teaching. She describes how during her time as an alcoholic she had engaged in increasingly promiscuous sex (until her drinking became so single-minded that even sex would have got in the way), taken birth control, had multiple abortions, etc., and how as she was drawn to the Church she came to see how empty and destructive these had been, and how true the Catholic understanding of these topics now seemed to her.

Drama always centers around change, and reading about Heather King's change on these topics both rings true and makes for dramatic reading. Yet it was also striking me how alien this line of discovery was to my own experience growing into an adult Catholic moral sense (something which still requires a certain kind of conversion, or at least adoption.) Both because of her own years away from any kind of religious belief, and perhaps also because she's describing her experience for an audience which is not specifically religious (Redeemed is out from Viking Press), King's growing understanding of morality during her adult conversion is very different from the experience I look back on as I grew from a youthful understanding to an adult one while living within the Catholic sub-culture.

Like most children brought up with a strong moral code, my earliest sense of morality was strictly one of heroes and villains. Bad things were done by bad people, and good people, nice people that you knew, clearly didn't do bad things.

Such illusions cannot last long, and so the next stage was a tribal one. People like us -- people who were Catholic and went to mass and believed in God and such, followed a moral code, and while all people sin, and so one could expect the petty lies and meannesses and betrayals as much in one's on circle as elsewhere, there we things we just didn't do unless we did so in total rejection of all that was good and right. People who did not belong to the tribe, of course, did not know or accept these rules. Those people might join gangs or do drugs or sleep around, but that was because, not being in the tribe, they didn't know (or rejected) what was right.

With a comparatively sedate set of close friends, this kind of illusion can last a long time, but when someone who is "of the tribe" strays, the sense of shock is extreme. How could someone who was one of us and knew it was wrong be so depraved as to sleep around? How could our people have a marriage fall apart? Or get involved in drugs? Or stop going to church?

When your sense of morality is still heavily tribal, the first few times a long-time friend violates the stronger prohibitions of that code the sense of betrayal is extreme. If "people like us" don't do those things, then clearly that friend is rejecting everything you are (and thought he was too) or he was never who you thought he was in the first place.

For me, the maturing process was coming to understand in a human, rather than an intellectual, sense the varying levels of culpability that exist, not only "outside" but within one's own tribe. And seeing that even those "following the rules" often understand them rather poorly.

While for those coming to the Church from unbelief, the difficulty may, at times, be coming to see certain acts (even those as seemingly understandable as using birth control or having sex with the person you love) can be objectively wrong in and of themselves; for those of us who grow up with "the rules" the difficulty is often going beyond understanding the difference between act and culpability to actually internalizing it. Most certainly, some acts are themselves more grave sins than others, and these should be recognized and avoided. But when the great saints accuse themselves of being horrible sinners, this is not merely a matter of excess scrupulosity. The variance in culpability is so great, that there can be those who have committed nearly "every sin in the book" who retain a certain purity of heart, and yearn for God (or, at least, The Good as they know it) while others who externally avoid all major sins can harbor a pride or hate which is no less for being expressed in petty ways rather than epic ones.