DARE WE HOPE for the SALVATION of ALL?
Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian Bishop
Kallistos Ware
The Collected Works Volume I The Inner Kingdom, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press Crestwood, New York 2001, 193-215. Prev. publ. in Theology Digest 45:4 (1998), 303-17.
“God is not one who requites evil, but He sets aright evil”. St Isaac the Syrian
1. “Love could not bear that”
There are some questions which, at any rate in our present state of knowledge, we cannot answer; and yet, unanswerable though these questions may be, we cannot avoid raising them. Looking beyond the threshold of death, we ask: How can the soul exist without the body? What is the nature of our disembodied consciousness between death and the final resurrection? What is the precise relationship between our present body and the “spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44) which the righteous will receive in the Age to come? Last, but not least, we ask: Dare we hope for the salvation of all? It is upon this final question that I wish to concentrate. Unanswerable or not, it is a question that decisively affects our entire understanding of God’s relationship to the world. At the ultimate conclusion of salvation history, will there be an all-embracing reconciliation? Will every created being eventually find a place within the Trinitarian perichoresis, within the movement of mutual love that passes eternally among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
Sin is Behovely, but All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well.
Have we the right to endorse that confident affirmation of Julian of Norwich, as T. S. Eliot does in the last of his Four Quartets?
Let us pose the question more sharply by appealing first to the words of a twentieth-century Russian Orthodox monk and then to the opening chapter of Genesis. The dilemma that disturbs us is well summed up in a conversation recorded by Archimandrite Sophrony, the disciple of St Silouan of Mount Athos:
It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the hell of separation from God... He could not bear to think that anyone would languish in “outer darkness.”
I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, “God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.”
Obviously upset, the Staretz said, “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise, and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire—would you feel happy?”
“It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,” said the hermit. The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance.
“Love could not bear that,” he said. “We must pray for all.”
Here exactly the basic problem is set before us. St Silouan appeals to divine compassion: “Love could not bear that.” The hermit emphasizes human responsibility: “It would be their own fault.” We are confronted by twο principles that are apparently conflicting: first, God is love; second, human beings are free.
With God all things are possible.
Posted by: Ben | July 11, 2016 at 02:50 AM