A Foil to my Universal Restoration: Not a Hope in Hell by James Dominic Rooney
A Foil to my Universal Restoration: Not a Hope in Hell by James Dominic Rooney
This is neither a review of nor an over against Fr Rooney’s Not a Hope in Hell.
Rather, I am using his felicitous phraseology to articulate my own outlook. As we’re coreligionists, perhaps it is unsurprising that I’ve never moved past my own indicative apokatastenai & subjunctive apokatastasis. Yet, our convergences & divergences remain subtle & nuanced — not terribly straightforward.
This will be relatively brief.
In Chapter One, wherein Fr Rooney discusses ‘Infinite opportunity’ arguments, ‘Essence of Freedom’ Arguments and libertarian freedom, he sets forth three conditions:
Failing to achieve union forever, through one’s own fault, is what it is to be ‘damned.’ Damnation then consists simply in persisting in a state of sin forever, and God ‘reprobating’ a person is to permit them to persist in sin forever. The following three claims are therefore sufficient for damnation to be possible:
Nothing about created persons makes it necessary that they love God and achieve union.
Nothing about created persons makes it impossible that they fail to love God and achieve union through their own fault.
Nothing about God makes it necessary that He ensure that created persons love Him and achieve union with Him.
I would, instead, stipulate to the following conditions:
Nothing about created persons makes it necessary that they love God and achieve union to the same degree or know God in all the same modes or to the same extent, e.g. natural felicity, theophanic vision, supratheophanic vision, etc
Nothing about created persons makes it impossible that they fail to completely & wholeheartedly love God.
Concretely, nothing about created persons makes it possible that they could so exhaustively know God such that they could possibly reject Her in a definitive way to a thoroughgoing extent through their own fault. This remains true even if, in some abstract sense, metaphysically, created persons could definitively reject God, while, at the same time, exhaustively knowing Him. Created persons, though, in principle, remain finite, fallible & relatively perfect in both knowledge & goodness, so that abstraction cannot successfully refer. It’s in that principled sense that we can say that we can be “responsible enough” to sin & to persist in sin, even seriously & gravely, just never “knowledgeable enough” to do so in an “absolutely culpable” measure.
While it's necessarily possible that not all spiritual creatures will attain a supratheophanic vision & necessarily possible that all persons remain essentially peccable per their primary nature, which is to say always "responsible enough" to sin & to persist in sin, it's also necessarily impossible for any to be absolutely culpable for such sins & vicious habits as could amount to a definitive rejection of God. Spiritual creatures can rather be only sufficiently culpable for relative rejections of the Beautiful, Good & True, Godself. It is necessarily possible that spiritual creatures can become practically impeccable per their secondary natures, even as they remain essentially peccable per their primary natures, metaphysically. This is to say that spiritual creatures, for a variety of reasons, can become providentially situated per unique combinations of both intrinsic & extrinsic factors such that, even though they could, they would not sin. It is divinely fitting & just, which is to say God owes it to Himself, to eventually gift all spiritual creatures a practical impeccability in God's own due time & in a unique way as providentially crafted per the exigencies of each spiritual creature's place in the Kingdom.
All created persons are naturally inclined to a self-interested relationship with God, because God, owing it to Himself to be just, has ensured that all created persons know God, essentially & unalienably, in certain modes to some given extent even though not maximally so. Such natural inclinations are not repugnant to our freedom & autonomy. We can, even with sufficient knowledge of what’s a higher good, willfully disregard that knowledge and culpably choose a lesser good, just never with an absolute knowledge of Absolute Goodness, Herself, in an absolutely culpable way. All extrinsic influences on the will of created persons, otherwise, remain sufficiently non-necessitating.
Nothing about God makes it necessary that He ensure that all created persons love God and achieve union to the same degree or know God in all the same modes or to the same extent.
I use the editorial “we” below to reflect the fact that many of these thoughts are the fruit of our Aopkatasking on the Bayou study-group.
We are not appealing to facts about human beings that would, for example, make a supratheophanic vision rather than natural felicity necessary. Neither would those alternative outcomes rest on considerations regarding God’s character.
Nor are we defending the implicit assumption that nothing could possibly be of higher value than God’s desire for the highest degrees & deepest kinds of intimacies with us.
We are arguing that God would fail to exemplify His essential properties of love or goodness if He were to fail to restore all to their natural felicity, that an everlasting deprivation of the experience of the goodness of one’s essential nature would be disproportional, either as a punishment or natural consequence, to finite offenses.
We are not defending a principle which affirms that no good of any kind could outweigh or compensate the everlasting punishment of a single soul. We don’t even approach that greater good appeal.
We are, instead, arguing that such a punishment is unjust because disproportional and that God owes it to Himself to be just. The use of unjust acts can’t be defended by greater good appeals. They simply cannot be instrumentally deployed.
Allowing someone to be deprived of their natural felicity is to allow someone to put themselves in a position where they experience everlasting disvalue as they cease to be able to enjoy their essential goodness. If they don’t achieve a supratheophanic vision, it’s not that they’ll cease to be able to enjoy any good whatsoever, but to achieve less good than they could have achieved. And, even though God is not promoting each person’s welfare as much as He could, it would be unreasonable to hold God blameworthy simply for failing to promote welfare ‘maximally,’ as God could literally always do more.
There’s a distinct asymmetry in ‘skeptical theistic’ responses to the problem of evil versus the problem of hell. We don’t and can’t know why God allows sin, even if He could prevent it entirely and ensure our natural felicity without sin occurring. If we stipulate that allowing anyone to persist in sin such as to suffer everlastingly is unjust because it’s a disproportional punishment or consequence, then, as a prima facie moral evil, it can’t be employed in a greater good defense.
Lonergan, Molina, Banez, Maritain, Garrigou-Lagrange, et al wouldn’t have gotten tied up in knots about God’s causal relation to our free decisions (including how efficacious grace & predestination work) had they adopted that providential paradigm, which couples an indicative restoration and subjunctive supratheophanic vision.
Fr Rooney writes in Chapter 5:
Universalists unnecessarily suppose, however, that personal union with God, and the consequent defeat of sin by means of union, can only occur in one way (i.e., the Beatific Vision). Yet, e.g., faith is a mode of personal union with God that does not involve having the Beatific Vision. In particular, the Christian doctrine of atonement relies on the fact that God achieves personal union with us by means of Christ’s humanity, to prepare us for eventual union by means of Christ’s divinity in the Beatific Vision. Believers unite with Christ’s human mind and will by personal faith in Him, and that union is real as well as personal. It has effects on the lives of believers, such as bringing them peace and joy through the indwelling of God in their hearts.50 However, if faith permits a mode of personal union with God in virtue of unity with Christ, there is nothing in principle which prohibits other modes of union by means of Christ’s humanity.
We are in general agreement that created persons, even as we intrinsically desire the True, Beautiful & Good, Godself, don’t spontaneously long for one mode of union versus others, each which may have its own sort of rest.
One way or another, there must necessarily be situations under which the evils of sin shall be defeated for all created persons, both objectively and subjectively, even if short of their experiencing a supratheophanic vision of God.
In a nutshell, it is our belief that:
All are transcendentally determined to be God’s friends and in infinite potency to becoming God’s lovers – everlastingly growing in divine intimacy.
A Neo-Chalcedonian, Franciscan Cosmotheandric Universal Apokatastenai
Addendum: My Axiological Epistemology
I want to say “yes” to logical defenses but “no” to evidential theodicies. I feel like that, more or less, squares with DBH’s approach. I’m unsure though.
Even if our mysterian greater good appeal succeeds as a logical defense for evils, generally speaking, evidentially, we have no plausible explanations, whatsoever, for any particular evils?
We do have on offer existential consolations gifted personally by Christ, which seem to variously satisfy many, now, and will fully satisfy all, ultimately?
There’s a good reason that theodicy objections don’t succeed against universalism. While, at most, universalism, properly conceived, might entail the weaker claims of a logical defense, it would otherwise positively eschew evidential theodicies.
While God’s ultimate intention could provisionally & unavoidably entail the mere possibility of transient but fully reparable evils (which, nevertheless, would serve no Godly purpose or be inherent parts of creation), it could never include everlasting evils as necessary possibilities.
In any case, not only everlasting evils but even fully reparable transient evils serve no Godly purpose, play no instrumental divine roles, are utterly unnecessary and in no sense ever intended by God.
The best of our analytic logics – are not just artificially coupled to, but – existentially emerge from our Franciscan knowledge.
Reflecting on the primacy of the aesthetic –
Perhaps the reason it should be so decisive over against perditionism, in particular, is that, prior to that consideration, it’s the rhetorical strategy we best employ over against nihilism, in general!
Perditionism, by that standard, entails, at least, a partial capitulation to Nietzsche, more than a rhetorical nod.
Of course, as a pragmatic realist following Peirce, consistent with my stances over against perditionism & nihilism, my epistemology relies on an aesthetic primacy, period. (So, too, I resonate with an aesthetic teleology, cf Haught & Hartshorne).
How people choose to live their lives has never really ever boiled down to how we might variously argue from infinite regress or adjudicate some alleged fallacy of composition? Our appeals to sufficient reason, transcendental arguments, logics of simplicity & greater good defenses haven’t ever been finally decisive, either. Propositionally, while none of the best of Christianity’s stances regarding such metaphysical inquiries has ever been shown to be unreasonable, it’s just that, however suggestive they are, none are demonstrably conclusive.
Still, existentially, which is to say, vitally, we’re forced to choose; we can act as if our ontological foundations are, at bottom, harmonious or violent. Dispositionally, there are two options, then, only one of them “live” in the sense of being performatively consistent & existentially actionable.
If we properly subscribe to an axiological epistemology and epistemology adequately models ontology, then our primary norm must be aesthetic (cf. Hartshorne, Peirce, Lonergan, et al). And our primary ontological appeal must therefore be rhetorical, which is to argue that, ultimately, it must advance a narrative that juxtaposes the greatest story ever told over against competing tales told by idiots?
To Whom, then, shall we go?
If Christianity’s harmony is to persuasively out-compete the narrative of a Nietzschean nihilism, it must then exhaustively abandon every last vestige of Manichean violence, especially that everlasting variety of evil vestiges, you know, which finds a home in the rhetoric of Christianity’s perditionist storylines.
I’m decidedly fallibilist. And in no way meant to suggest that our aspirations to be rhetorically persuasive & performatively consistent could deliver the “demonstrably conclusive.”
I do mean to emphasize over against fideism & pietism that, while faith must go beyond reason, it shouldn’t go without it.
And I was setting forth how it is that I imagine my own epistemic suite operates.
I hope what seems transcendentally significant & metaphysically suggestive to me turns out to be the case but, by temperament & nescience, remain too often haunted by nihilism & tempted by angst.
John Knasas puts it well: “[P]hilosophically the nagging suspicion remains that ineluctability is just what you would expect if the a priori are simply ways you have to think rather than ways reality has to be. The screeching of performative self-contradiction could quite well indicate a grinding of merely mental gears and not any manhandling of reality.”
Perfect love casts out fear? If so, I’ll not abandon the belief that I, like the saints, may some day have a much more confident assurance in the things for which I hope. You see, consistent with a rather well known manner of putting it, a perfect love is not something I’ve even tried yet, such that I could’ve found it wanting.
I should add that I do see our ultimate concerns as inviting us always to existentially “act as if” …
When we ask: What can I know? What can I hope for? What must I do? — I do believe we can enjoy a “practical certainty,” which is that we can hope to know what we must do, which is to love.
The amount of confidence in my “acting as if” does wax & wane with consolations & desolations. The amount of certainty I have that acting as if the man from Nazareth is God is what I must do is unwavering & admits not the slightest doubt.
The fundamental nature of our hope and even of our understanding (openness, attentiveness, reasonableness, intelligence, responsibility & being in love) is faith?
The distinctions drawn by DBH regarding his personal faith journey remind me of those implicated by Lonergan regarding the different contexts in which we formulate our questions of God.
To paraphrase DBH, we cannot simply become the metaphysical optimists we wish to be when confronted with innocent suffering even though reason otherwise points in that direction.
While from the ‘de jure’ context, as explicated in Lonergan’s _Insight_ , some metaphysical optimism does seem warranted, still, from the ‘de facto’ context of his _Method_ , we further realize that our essential openness will also need outside assists that are worthy of belief, initiatives of God from which our faith might ensue.
In his article, Philosophical Aspects of Bernard Lonergan’s _Method in Theology_ ,
Giovanni B. Sala, S.J. draws a distinction between the ‘de jure’ context of _Insight_ and the ‘de facto’ context of _Method_:
“Lonergan is not content with the ‘de jure’ assertion that, because of the intrinsic intelligibility of the real, a rational and objectively valid path exists by which the human mind, by virtue of its immanent laws, can pass from proportionate being to transcendent being. He also asks how and when man succeeds in following this path. In this ‘de facto’ context, the conditions of inauthenticity in which man finds himself are kept in view.”
Here, the problem of evil will confront our ‘de jure’ formulations and we “will not in fact arrive at evidence sufficient for the yes of rational judgment: ‘Deus est,’ except through a free decision by which [we will] adhere to the universe of value.”
Sala explains: “This letting himself be found even before we seek him is, on God’s side, love and grace. On man’s side it is faith. Grace places us in an interpersonal relationship with God as subject to subject, and gives us the primary and fundamental meaning of the mystery of God. The human spirit’s natural openness to the transcendent makes possible the gift of God’s love. By virtue of that openness and that grace we are effectively able to develop a rational and objective knowledge of God.”
Sala emphasizes the reversal dynamic, where faith is fundamental, where the factual order precedes the logic order
In the ‘de facto’ context of _Method_, the order in which the various stages of conversion follow one another is therefore reversed. There is no longer the logical order [‘de jure’] considered in _Insight_, according to which God is reached at the end of an expansion of our dynamism that moves from the true to the good, and from there to the infinitely true and holy reality of God. Instead, there is the factual order: from God’s sovereign and merciful initiative in religious conversion to its realization in a corresponding moral life and, eventually, to the reordering of one’s reflective criterion of reality and objectivity in intellectual conversion. The epistemological position of _Insight_ is therefore recognized as valid, but at the same time the conditions of its effective operation are kept in view. Man’s conversion to God, which takes place through God’s initiative, is the cause of man’s seeking to know God.”
In Theological Aspects of Bernard Lonergan’s _Method in Theology_, Sala similarly describes how love, hope & faith are fundamental: “Though religious conversion sublates moral, and moral conversion sublates intellectual, one is not to infer that intellectual comes first and then moral and finally religious. On the contrary, from a causal viewpoint, one would say that first there is God’s gift of his love. Next, the eye of this love reveals values in their splendor, while the strength of this love brings about their realization, and that is moral conversion. Finally, among the values discerned by the eye of love is the value of believing the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such tradition and belief are the seeds of intellectual conversion.”
Finally, Cardinal Newman’s remarks regarding Mivart’s conjectures reminded me of Cardinal Dulles’ remarks regarding Maritain’s “Reverie.”
Both Cardinals recognized that one could remain faithful to the Church’s eschatological doctrine, i.e. that it is necessarily possible that not all spiritual creatures will attain a supratheophanic vision, even while otherwise boldly speculating regarding what those creatures might otherwise experience – not just subjectively & psychologically vis a vis metrics of pain &/or felicity, but – objectively per alternative modes of divine union & mercy.
Stated Differently
All sin is necessarily pardonable and all consequences of sin are necessarily reparable.
Per divine justice, God owes it to Himself to providentially & infallibly guarantee that all rational creatures, in His due time, become morally virtuous & practically impeccable. That impeccability is optimally realized via intrinsic measures as far as possible & by extrinsic measures only as much as necessary.
All deliberative choosing remains non-necessitated.
Our essential peccability & deliberative choosing are always metaphysically possible per our God-given primary nature & substantial being.
Our stability in the good is thus the practical impeccability of our co-self-determined secondary nature & relative/accidental being. As infallibly knowable, it can be providentially gifted via unique combinations (& degrees) of intrinsic & extrinsic factors.
Upshot is that we're always metaphysically equipped to reject beauty, goodness & truth, Godself, but can become practically impeccable, where, even if we could, we would never again reject God.
Because one could choose, indefinitely, to ignore one's intellect & resist becoming practically impeccable, each remains responsible enough for any indefinite persistance in sin. Through a culpable willful ignorance, each would be fully responsible for their failure to ever grow sufficiently free.
What's missing is the distinction which must be drawn between being fully responsible, on one hand, and absolutely culpable, otoh. The latter is necessarily impossible.
Because one could never be absolutely culpable, Fr Rooney has not avoided our proportionality objections.
Per an autonomy ordered toward intimacy defense or even an intrinsic dignity defense, therefore, it would be prima facie unjust for God to allow anyone's substantial being to be everlastingly parasitized & left to suffer unending evil consequences, retributive or otherwise. Rather, each must somehow eventually realize some stability in the good (which can be enjoyed in various shapes & sizes, i.e. modes of divine union).
It would seem that those most intransigently disposed to reject goodness may require the most extrinsic intervention in attaining whatever modicum of intrinsic virtue they come to enjoy.
Per an autonomy defense, a soul-crafting of - not only each one's modes of intimacy, but - each one's degree of intimacy is optimized. That would thereby thus optimize the global realization of a maximal divine - human intimacy. Only that amount of extrinsic influence necessary to guarantee a practical impeccability, globally, is providentially employed. The more intrinsic one's realizations of freedom for excellence are, the greater will be one's degree of virtue.
There's no unpardonable sin, no irreparable consequences of sin and all shall eventually persevere in moral virtue with enlightened self-interests as friends of God.
Neither, however, is there a coerced intimacy and none shall be forced to attain to any degree of supererogatory virtue as a lover of God.
