From
The November 2002 St John's Eagle
“Will
We All Get to Heaven?”
by John Harcourt
When
I was about ten, we rented a summer cottage for several years next door to a family
named Redfern. Somehow we children learned that the Redferns were Universalists.
That term was a new one for us, and doubtless our mother, when asked, dismissed
it with “Oh, they believe that everyone ends up in heaven.” That seemed
to settle the matter, and we gave it no further thought.
Years
later, I discovered the Redferns’ small Universalist church not far from
our home in Providence. From the reference books, I learned that Universalists,
as an organized religious group, had been active in the United States and Canada
for a century or more. But the concept of universal salvation had a far longer
history. It turns up sporadically in splinter Protestant congregations at the
time of the Reformation and after. It has proved itself compatible with liberal
thought in our own period. In the twentieth century, the Universalists joined
with the Unitarians so that in Jefferson City, Missouri, my daughter in law and
my granddaughter are members of a Unitarian Universalists Fellowship.
But
Universalism was a most important component of early Christian thought. Clement
of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, perhaps Chrysostom and Jerome are said
to have professed such a belief. It is arguable that Paul had something like universal
salvation in mind when he wrote, in 1 Corinthians 15:28
When
all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to
him who put all things under him, who put all things under him, that God may be
everything to every one. Certainly
Paul pays little or no attention to the possibility of eternal damnation.
The
issue ultimately rests upon a reconciliation of God’s love for us and our
radical freedom to accept or reject that love. Dante’s Inferno is instructive.
The souls he so graphically depicts are not being “punished.” They appear
to us as what they had in fact made of themselves by the moment of their deaths:
they had chosen some partial good as their absolute, preferring to be wrong on
their own terms rather than right with Reality. We see them frozen, as it were,
in that distorted position—literally so in Circle Nine. They are seen as
they freely willed themselves to be.
Yet
something in us draws back from Dante’s existential realism, just as we find
it hard to accept Saint Thomas Aquinas’s view that the blessed in heaven
rejoice in the sufferings of the damned because through them, the justice of God
is made manifest.
An
eternal torture chamber, where pain can produce no good effect in those upon whom
it is inflicted? The idea is simply monstrous. We recall two thousand years of
Christian nightmare—all those sermons, all those books, all those horrific
pictures in which we have gloated over the agonies of our enemies. In A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce treats us to a series of retreat sermons
on hell, truly appalling in their completeness—echoes of which were still
to be heard in my childhood. Many Protestant denominations have sentenced all
unbaptized children to eternal damnation, although the seventeenth century American
poet, Michael Wigglesworth, compassionately assigned them to “the easiest
room in hell.” And we remember those occasional souls tormented into madness
by the conviction that they were damned: William Cowper's “The Castaway”—his
last autobiographical poem—can still terrify us. These nightmarish speculations
remain very much with us in 2002.
Many
years ago, Madeleine L'Engle spent a weekend with us at St. John's. I recall most
vividly a story she told in one of her presentations.
A
man died and checked in at the Gate of Heaven. Saint Peter examined his credentials,
found them in order, and waved him through. After a bit, the man returned in great
agitation. 'But where is Christ? Where is Mary? Where are all the saints and angels?”
“Oh,” replied Peter, “they're all down in hell ministering to the
damned.” Then after a pause, “Would you like to know the way?”
“Ministering
to the damned”—what could those words possibly mean? Let us return to
the tension between God's love for all (including the damned) and our freedom
to accept or reject that love. Imagine someone that had preferred the lesser good,
that had freely chosen to distort the harmonies of being. Suppose such a person
surrounded by examples of genuine, totally nonjudgmental love—embodiments
of the essential truth of things. Not “sign up with us and be saved”
but rather “try to accept the truth about yourself.”
Could
this experience of unconditional love finally prevail? “Yes, I insisted upon
having my own way, using the very freedom that I was freely given. Misusing that
gift—the greatest gift that love can offer—ironically reaffirmed its
reality. Now, I can accept the offer of a love that aims at nothing—absolutely
nothing, but my own total self-fulfillment.”
And
all were at last gathered into one; the halls of heaven were filled. Not one tormented
and lonely soul was left outside. God had become everything to everyone.
Professor Harourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English English
Emeritus at Ithaca College.
