If All Are Saved, What Happens to the Drama of Life?

'If all are saved—and I do not wish to argue the matter here—what is this life for? Position in Heaven?' Scripture, the Fathers & Doctors, and private revelation all condemn the universalist heresy.

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

Believing that Christ will save everyone calls into question the very meaning of life itself.

“Lord,” said the repentant thief on the cross, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jesus. “Your life was not important. You and the other fellow both will be with me today in Paradise.”

“Father,” said the rich man from the fires of Gehenna, “send Lazarus over to cool my thirst with a drop of water.”
“I will do better than that,” said Abraham. “The road between us is a couple of steps, and souls go back and forth along it all the time. Why don’t you just come on over here?”
“What about my brothers back home?” said the rich man, who had once delighted in all the good things of the world, and who was content to have Lazarus beneath him, trying to catch a crumb or two that fell from his table, while the dogs, more merciful than he, licked the poor man’s sores. “If someone were to rise from the dead, they might listen to him.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Abraham. “They don’t heed the law and the prophets, so they won’t listen to someone who rises from the dead, either. So, what’s the point? We’ll have them over here just like you.”

“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.”

Then the people cast stones at Stephen, and when one of the stones struck him in the head, he came to his senses and said, “What kind of nonsense I have been speaking!” And he cursed his enemies, hoping that God would lay this sin to their charge and destroy them all, and saying that if Jesus wanted to be a fool, that was all right for Him, but he, Stephen, wasn’t going to walk down that road. Then he died, cursing, and denying Jesus in his heart; and doing so, he entered Paradise.

Then the young man went away, sad at heart, because he possessed great wealth. And Jesus said to His disciples, “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for anybody, no matter how rich, no matter how wicked, no matter how much he has hated the light, to enter into Gehenna.”

“If your eye should cause you to sin,” said Jesus, “you should try to shut it once in a while; but if you don’t shut it, don’t worry about it. By all means don’t do anything so rash and foolish as to pluck it out. It will be better for you to enjoy all your sins on earth, supposing they can be enjoyed, and then to waltz into Paradise with both eyes, than to fight against the sin and have a hard time of it here and go squinting into Paradise with just one eye.”

“Father,” said Jesus in the garden, “why should you give me this cup to drink? What does it matter? You will take all souls into Paradise anyway. What is the point of my suffering? Whom am I to save?” And Jesus was troubled in His heart.

I do not delight in the doctrine of eternal loss. I understand that a few of the Church Fathers expressed a hope or a trust in some form of universal salvation: Origen does, and Gregory of Nyssa leans that way too. I have read that Jesus was only warning about the possibility of Hell, while secretly reserving to Himself the knowledge that it was only that; engaging therefore in a rhetorical ploy, which at best seems a double-dealing way to convert people to plain dealing and the truth. He who said, “Let your yes be yes and your no be no” would thus be saying “yes” and meaning “no,” or saying “maybe” and, under his breath, “maybe not.”

If all are saved—and I do not wish to argue the matter here—what is this life for? Position in Heaven? But many of the same people in our time who push the notion of universal salvation also push the notion of equality in bliss; and in any case, the doctrine that some will enjoy “more” bliss than others, when all who are saved enjoy bliss to the fullest measure they can enjoy it, must strike the human mind as vague and distant when the delights in this world are all too tangible. 

Perhaps we can say that what little scrap of a human soul remaining to someone like Adolf Hitler will be saved and not what we in this life would consider to be Adolf Hitler himself, the whole man, the one who drove the engine that murdered so many millions of people, especially the Jews, chosen by God. But that, too, seems but a vague possibility, or a dodge, not suggested by the Gospels themselves.

And what happens to the drama of human life? In Evelyn Waugh’s novel of return and conversion, Brideshead Revisited, Lord Marchmain lies on his bed of death, after so many years of denying the Faith, keeping a mistress, and otherwise sinning against his wife and his family. The mistress is there, as are three of his children, and the priest, and Charles Ryder, the “hero” of the novel, who was brought up to believe in nothing and who has been resisting the pull of the Catholic Faith. 

The priest asks the dying man to make the Sign of the Cross, as a final act of penitence. It is not clear whether Lord Marchmain can hear the words or understand them. And Charles, who has pretended to find the whole scene up to this point utterly barbarous, suddenly longs that the man will make the sign—suddenly prays, despite himself, despite his unbelief. The man does make the sign.  And Charles’ life will never be the same again.

If Lord Marchmain is to be saved in any case, what is the point of this scene? Where is the drama in human life? We are given innumerable moments in which we can, if we will, hear the voice of God. Why should we hear it, when someone is whispering in our ears that it doesn’t matter? How can our turning to God be simultaneously of eternal consequence and of no consequence? 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?

My nation, the United States, has turned from God and therefore has pitched itself into madness. We are now a mission field for nations to whom our own once brought the Faith. But why should anyone from Nigeria, let us say, care to come here to struggle with fat and self-satisfied unbelievers?

“Forty days,” said Jonah, “and Nineveh will be destroyed.” And the people of Nineveh laughed at him and cast him out. No one repented. When the fortieth day arrived, the sun was shining and everything in Nineveh, that great city full of wickedness, was as bright and as wicked as ever. And Jonah got up and knitted his brows and said, “I wonder what that was all about.”

[Image: The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, Workshop of Domenico Fetti.]