Origins of Universal Salvation

[Thomas]

Nontrinitarian barbarian hordes at the gates? I didn't know it was that bad...

That bad, My God, I've got nontrinitarians living next door! Actually, I've got 'em under my roof!

 

[Ahanu]

And, if one's substance is fabricated entirely out of illusion, then that evaporates and there's nothing left ... this was an idea supported by Augustine, that if one lives a life of sin, then one constructs a body of sin, and when all that is burned away, what of 'me' is left? The popular notion is of 'me' languishing in hell. One migbt argue that Christ's use of the term Gehenna is more accurate ... that 'me' simply has no place in the order of the Real and the True and simply ceases to be.

Philo supported annihilation too. It is certainly a preferable stance that stands in stark contrast to eternal hell - a doctrine that holds sinners will be liquefied in the flames for trillions and trillions of years. What kind of God creates such a pointless torture chamber?

So you're telling me Augustine accepted annihilation? That's news to me, and I think John Calvin would be shocked by that tidbit since he relied heavily on Augustinian thought and didn't accept annihilation.

Evil was not created by God so, yes, it goes into non-being. Human beings, however, are created entities and, therefore, cannot cease to be since the Creator willed them into being in the first place. God, says Origen,

"made all beings that they might exist, and what was made in order to exist cannot fail to exist. Therefore, creatures can receive transformations and variety of aspects, so that, with respect to their merits, they will be found in better or worse conditions. However, the beings that God created in order for them to exist and endure cannot undergo a destruction in their very substance."​

Irenaeus, according to Ramelli, shares the same belief (that is, non-being for created beings is impossible):

"Neither the substance nor the essence of what has been created can be annihilated […] But when the present state of things passes away, and humanity has been renewed and flourishes in an incorruptible state, so to preclude any possibility of decay, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, in which the new humanity will remain forever, living with God" (AH 5.36.1).​

 

[Thomas]

It is certainly a preferable stance that stands in stark contrast to eternal hell - a doctrine that holds sinners will be liquefied in the flames for trillions and trillions of years. What kind of God creates such a pointless torture chamber?

Quite.

So you're telling me Augustine accepted annihilation?

I think at one point. Eriugena uses Augustine to make the point in his treatise Against Predestination. I'll see if I can dig out the references.

Human beings, however, are created entities and, therefore, cannot cease to be since the Creator willed them into being in the first place.

I'm not sure I agree with that, or rather, it needs qualification.

As I see it, there is what God creates, and there is what man creates, and there lies the distinction.

Eriugena argues that God does not predestine souls to damnation.

Human, however, can damn themselves through their own free choices. Sin, death, suffering is not willed by God. Human nature is a rational nature, and rationality requires freedom. Human nature is therefore essentially free, free to choose truth or illusion.

Man sustains his illusions by his own effort. Life has the unhappy effect of holding a mirror to our illusions, or demolishing them in quite a cold-hearted way, but throughout all this, there is no greater illusion than the one we spin regarding ourselves, and it's the pursuit of this chimera that is the cause of sin, and the root of the corruption that can lead the soul to perdition.

Thus our view of the world, ourselves, and all stages in between can be deeply flawed and inevitably unsustainable, because it is neither real nor true – the Buddhist, for example, declares all this ephemeral and transient.

The question of 'substance' and 'essence' aside, after the passage through the refining fire, the Interview with Christ, the question is what remains, if most of what we believe we are and we know has been extinguished?

For me the answer is encapsulated in the phrase, "There but for the grace of God, go I"

 

[Ahanu]

I think at one point. Eriugena uses Augustine to make the point in his treatise Against Predestination. I'll see if I can dig out the references.

I'd be interested in seeing those. I'd also like to respond more to your previous posts, but I've been extremely busy these days.

 

[Thomas]

No rush ... I'll look into the Eriugena ...

 

[Ahanu]

Eriugena argues that God does not predestine souls to damnation.

Human, however, can damn themselves through their own free choices.

Sin, death, suffering is not willed by God. Human nature is a rational nature, and rationality requires freedom. Human nature is therefore essentially free, free to choose truth or illusion.

Man sustains his illusions by his own effort. Life has the unhappy effect of holding a mirror to our illusions, or demolishing them in quite a cold-hearted way, but throughout all this, there is no greater illusion than the one we spin regarding ourselves, and it's the pursuit of this chimera that is the cause of sin, and the root of the corruption that can lead the soul to perdition.

Are "free choices" fully informed? As David Bentley Hart would say, "sin requires some degree of ignorance." All choices are attempts to grasp for the transcendentals.

But, on any cogent account, free will is a power inherently purposive, teleological, primordially oriented toward the good, and shaped by that transcendental appetite to the degree that a soul can recognize the good for what it is. No one can freely will the evil as evil; one can take the evil for the good, but that does not alter the prior transcendental orientation that wakens all desire. To see the good truly is to desire it insatiably; not to desire it is not to have known it, and so never to have been free to choose it. It makes no more sense to say that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love for them or of his respect for their freedom than to say a father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her face into a fire out of a tender respect for her moral autonomy.

David Bentley Hart. “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilho.” Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics, Vol. 3, Number 1 (September 2015): 1–17.​

The more one is in one’s right mind—the more, that is, that one is conscious of God as the Goodness that fulfills all beings, and the more one recognizes that one’s own nature can have its true completion and joy nowhere but in him, and the more one is unfettered by distorting misperceptions, deranged passions, and the encumbrances of past mistakes—the more inevitable is one’s surrender to God. Liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude. We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered; we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings in our true final end, a transcendent Good lying behind and beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue. This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently conceived; it is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent Good: a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in him. A rational nature seeks a rational end: Truth, which is God himself. The irresistibility of God for any soul that has been truly set free is no more a constraint placed upon its liberty than is the irresistible attraction of a flowing spring of fresh water in a desert place to a man who is dying of thirst; to choose not to drink in that circumstance would be not an act of freedom on his part, but only a manifestation of delusions that enslave him and force him to inflict violence upon himself, contrary to his nature. A woman who chooses to run into a burning building not to save another’s life, but only because she can imagine no greater joy than burning to death, may be exercising a kind of “liberty,” but in the end she is captive to a far profounder poverty of rational freedom.

So, yes, we can act irrationally, but that is no more than a trivial deliberative power; it is not yet true liberty. Only because there is such a thing as a real rational terminus for intentional action, which is objectively distinguishable from irrational ends, is there such a thing as real freedom. This is, in fact, an ancient Christian orthodoxy, common to the teachings of the church fathers and great mediaeval theologians; and, were it not true, the whole edifice of the Christian conception of existence and of creation and of God and of the unity of the ontological and moral dimensions of reality would entirely collapse. Even the suicide is merely fleeing pain and seeking a peace that the world cannot give, though he or she might be able in the crucial moment of decision to imagine this peace only under the illusory form of oblivion; his or her fault is one only of perception, in a moment of severe confusion and sadness, and certainly not some ultimate rejection of God. One cannot even choose nothingness, at least not as nothingness; to will nonexistence positively, one must first conceive it as a positive end, and so one can at most choose it as the “good” cessation of this world, and therefore as just another mask of that which is supremely desirable in itself. In the end, even when we reject the good, we always do so out of a longing for the Good. We may not explicitly conceive of our actions in this way, but there is no question that this is what we are doing. We act always toward an end that we desire, whether morally, affectively, or pathologically; and, so long as we are rational agents, that end is the place where the “good” and the “desirable” are essentially synonymous terms. And our ability to will anything at all, in its deepest wellsprings, is sustained by this aboriginal orientation within us toward that one transcendental Good that alone can complete us, and that prompts reason to move the will toward an object of longing. Needless to say, we can induce moral ignorance in ourselves through our own wicked actions and motives; but, conversely, those wicked actions and motives are themselves possible only on account of some degree of prior ignorance on our part. This circles admits of no breaks; it has no beginning or end, no point of entry or exit. When, therefore, we try to account for the human rejection of God, we can never trace the wanderings of the will back to some primordial moment of perfect liberty, some epistemically pristine instant when a perverse impulse spontaneously arose within an isolated, wholly sane individual will, or within a mind perfectly cognizant of the whole truth of things; we will never find that place where some purely uncompelled apostasy on the part of a particular soul, possessed of a perfect rational knowledge of reality, severed us from God. Such a movement of volition would have had no object to prompt it, and so could never have been a real rational choice. Thus it is, for instance, that the Eastern church fathers, when interpreting the story of Eden, generally tended to ascribe the cause of the fall to the childlike ignorance of unformed souls, not yet mature enough to resist false notions (and this, lest we forget, accords exactly with the Eden story in Genesis, which tells the story of two persons so guileless and ignorant that they did not even know they were naked until a talking snake had shown them the way to the fruit of knowledge). Hence, absolute culpability—eternal culpability—lies forever beyond the capacities of any finite being. So does an eternal free defiance of the Good. We are not blameless, certainly; but, then again, that very fact proves that we have never been entirely free not to be blameless—and so neither can we ever be entirely to blame.

David Bentley Hart. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation.
​

 

[Bulletcatcher]

"The great fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea (c. 329-379) once observed that in his time, a large majority of Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking Eastern Christian world that he knew) believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all in the end would attain salvation."
-David Bentley Hart

What I do not understand is how the conecpt of hell as torment which comes from egypt could get so popular with the West. It must be really the poisoned legacy of the catholic church.

 

[Ahanu]

What I do not understand is how the conecpt of hell as torment which comes from egypt could get so popular with the West. It must be really the poisoned legacy of the catholic church.

How do you know the idea originated from Egypt?