God... in hell. That is, about the hope of universal salvation (Part II)
One may ask, then: How could God, without violating human freedom, realize his plan of universal salvation? How can God save someone who seems to be stuck in a closed circle of despair and hatred?
The meeting of two loneliness
One of the attempts to answer the above questions is Hans Urs von Balthasar's reflection on the event of the death of Jesus Christ, including His descent into hell. This most prominent – next to K. Rahner – theologian of the twentieth century points to two aspects of the death of Jesus Christ: active and passive. The first aspect is expressed in the mystery of Good Friday. The Son of God, dying on the cross, made his own death the supreme act of freedom. The cry of the Crucified One: Father, into your hands I entrust my spirit (Lk 23:46), is a radical expression of hope and entrustment to the Mystery of the Person. The hour of Christ's nailed hands and feet is paradoxically connected with the moment of saving acceptance of reality. Such acceptance is possible only as the deepest act of freedom. In Jesus, moreover, it was the fruit of the whole life understood as the fulfillment of the mission entrusted to him by the Father to the Servant of Jehovah. The Evangelist Luke, for example, shows Christ as going to Jerusalem and therefore heading towards his death. This active dimension of going towards death – as Heidegger would say – Jesus emphasized in the words: “... I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own” (Jn 10:17-18).
On the other hand, there is a passive aspect of the Savior's death, which, according to von Balthasar, is expressed in the truth of Jesus' descent into hell. In the Catechism we read that Christ descended into hell to proclaim salvation to imprisoned spirits (CCC 632, cf. 1 Pet 3:18-19). But how to understand this event? What is the proclamation of salvation to prisoners? Balthasar does not want to interpret the descent into hell as Christ's triumphant victory over sin. Instead, he draws the ultimate consequences from Paul's statement that God made him to be sin who did not know sin (2 Cor 5:21). Follows from it - according to the author, that Jesus identifies himself with a sinner in selfish despair.
In contrast to the active dimension of acceptance of good Friday's death on the cross, the event of Holy Saturday, that is, the descent into hell, turns out to be a passive expression of solidarity with the dead. Christ becomes sin for our salvation. This means that He has actually entered into the experience of the ultimate consequences of sin, that is, what tradition calls hell. God stands in solidarity to the end even with those who seem to be absolutely closed to His love. Jesus' obedience expressed on the Cross is manifested even more radically in the actual acceptance of the passive dimension of the event of Golgotha, in being dead with the dead. In his descent into hell, Jesus stands beside powerless sinners. He no longer actively foretells the news of salvation, he no longer triumphs, in the colloquial sense of the word, over the "powers of hell," but he disturbs the sinner with his powerlessness, his being a sin for our salvation.
This is an incredible vision! A man who turned away from Christ the preacher and did not want to stop at the Crucified One finds in the very center of his hellish loneliness the powerless love of God. A similar vision is shared with us by the psalmist: “Where can I go from your spirit? From your presence, where can I flee? If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are.” (Ps 139:7-8). Perhaps where man's selfish freedom places the limit of God's omnipotence, only the powerless love of Jesus can complete the work of salvation. Perhaps such love is able to break the circle of despair of the sinner without in any way violating his freedom.
God's solidarity with man is so great that von Balthasar does not hesitate to claim that Jesus experienced hell on the cross in his death on the cross. The concept of hell must therefore be interpreted from a Christological perspective. This means that existence without God, which we call hell, can only be understood to some extent in the face of Jesus crucified. Any other perspective threatens to fall into mythology. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46) thus becomes the measure of our understanding of the reality of hell. Experiencing the Father's abandonment, Jesus descends into hell to take our place, to take upon Himself the effects of our sin. In this way, the Christian can have the radical hope that solidarity with every human being, even the greatest criminal, is possible.
Is hell empty?
Commenting on Balthasar's vision, J. O'Donnell states: God really takes human freedom seriously. He allows man to say his "No" to the offer of love to the point of self-destruction. It allows a free man to choose radical isolation and loneliness. On the other hand, God, through the Cross, disturbs with his love the loneliness of a hardened sinner closed in on himself. God does not trample on the freedom of the sinner. However, God's co-presence in the sinner's abandonment violates his narcissistic loneliness. The sinner is in hell, but he is no longer absolutely alone. His loneliness became co-loneliness.
We do not know what will result from the encounter between the loneliness of the sinner and the loneliness of the Crucified One. Here we do not want to develop a naively optimistic or even pride-based vision of universal salvation. Eternal hell remains a real possibility for which the biblical attitude of fear and trembling seems most appropriate, provided, of course, that we do not confuse it with neurotic fear. The discovery of the meaning of Jesus' descent into hell, however, opens up the possibility for us to hope that even the greatest sinner will not turn his back on the God-man whom he will find in his condemnatory – but not yet eternal – loneliness.
We can hope that God's love, through paradoxical solidarity with those who remain closed to any solidarity, is capable of saving every human being precisely at the moment when it is rejected. Balthasar does not deny the possibility of man saying no to God, after which there is only hell understood as an irrevocable state of existence outside of God. But is it not the duty of the Christian to hope, supported by humble prayer, that no one has ever performed such a definitive act of negation? Why should we not wish that in every man the words of Christ from the ancient homily for Holy Saturday should be realized: “With the sleep of death I fell asleep on the cross and the spear pierced my side for you (...), and this wound of mine healed your wound. The dream of my death will lead you out of the sleep of the Abyss. The blow inflicted on Me with the spear broke the spear directed against you”.
In the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World “Gaudium et Spes” we read that since Christ died for all, and since man's ultimate vocation is truly one, namely divine, we must recognize that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of coming to the paschal mystery in a way known to God (GS 22). Should we not, then, trust that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and brought him out of hell will also be able to revive the heart of the most hardened sinner? This question points to an aspect that cannot be lacking in our reflection, namely, the Trinitarian character of the event of Christ's descent into hell. For to speak of God in hell would be meaningless if we did not believe in the one God who revealed Himself as the Trinity: God the Father, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit.
Recognizing Hell as a Trinitarian Event
In our reflections on the Trinity, we often – and rightly so – emphasize the unity of the three divine persons. However, we must not forget that, on the other hand, the Father, the Son and the Spirit are radically different persons. These differences are qualitatively infinitively greater than between people. Personal reality is characterized by the fact that unity between persons paradoxically presupposes separation between them. Love cannot exist without otherness. The more I love, the more I experience that the other is different, not reducible to any whole. Similarly, John's statement that God is love (1 Jn 4:8) means that there is a radical otherness between the Three in God. It would be a mistake to think that since the Divine Persons are not three but one God, they differ only slightly. On the contrary, the personal unity of the one divine nature presupposes the fundamental otherness of the three Persons.
This perspective allows us to understand the possibility of the scandal of the Cross and the descent of Jesus into hell. Without it, the cry of the God-man: My God, why have you forsaken me! it would remain a theatrical gesture. Meanwhile, in the death of the Cross, the Son of God does not experience the Father's abandonment. God, in the incarnate Son, travels the path that leads to total self-alienation: descends into the depths of death, experiences a complete distance from the Father's love. It is precisely the rupture in God himself that constitutes the negative condition of human freedom, which can turn away from its own foundation, that is, God's love. God, if he is a community of three different persons, has this seemingly obvious possibility of creating a real freedom that is not God.
This is the drama taking place between the Three in God, and in particular the central act of this drama, namely the event of Christ's cross, that allows us to understand at least a little how a perfect God can keep a villain rebelling against Him in existence. In this perspective, it is no exaggeration to say that hell is possible because it was possible for the Father to abandon Jesus. The unheard-of story of the Triune God, who entered human history, does not end with the Cross, of course, but is heading towards the Easter finale. Here, the radical loneliness of the Savior, lived in obedience, turns out to be the final victory over death. Jesus, by the power of the personal love that is the Holy Spirit, passes through the deepest alienation, at the same time involving the whole of humanity in his dialogue of love with the Father.
Hans Urs von Balthasar describes this dramatic dialogue between the Father and the Son: If the Father must be considered the creator of human freedom, with all its foreseeable consequences! – thus also judgment and "hell" belong essentially to Him; and if he sends the Son into the world so that the world may be saved and not judged, and to the Son he "gives all judgment" (Jn 5:22), he must therefore bring him, if he is the Incarnate Son, also into "hell" (as the last consequence of human freedom). Christ, on the other hand, carries out the mission entrusted to him in absolute obedience. Through this obedience, Jesus passed through the darkness of hell. Therefore, we can repeat with von Balthasar that hell already belongs to Christ. By rising from the dead with the knowledge of hell, Christ can also pass on this knowledge to us. And with it, he offers us the hope that hell – understood as a state of eternal punishment – will remain empty! It is worth thinking about it over the graves of near and far. It is worth whispering with faith the words: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell; lead all souls to heaven especially those who are in most need of Your mercy.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george