Now, to be sure, the Church prays for those who are her enemies because they still have time for fruitful repentance. If, of course, she knew with full certainty that some of those who are still living were predestined to go into the eternal fire with the devil, she would pray as little for them as for him. Since, however, she does not have this certainty about anyone, she prays for all who are her enemies and are still in the bodily state, but of course her prayers are not heard for all.

  She also does not pray, by the way, for those “who have kept their heart unrepentant up to their dying day”. The Church does not pray for the devil, “and it is this same reason, too, that precludes praying now for the unfaithful and godless who have already died, even if they are human beings”.48 Receiving the sacraments without undergoing inner transformation of one’s life,49 works of mercy and other good deeds, are of no avail if a man shows no mercy for himself.50 How the unrighteous administrator can be received “into the eternal dwellings” by those saints to whom he has pleaded for intercession “is very difficult to find out and very dangerous to define more precisely. I myself, at least, have so far been unable, after reflecting on the matter, to fathom it”. This is so because “human complacency would lull itself into a sense of security” if it thought “that it could save itself solely through the merits of others”.51 But why should God’s words not be mere threats, since, after all, he unconditionally predicted the downfall of Nineveh, and yet what was foretold did not take place after the Ninevites had repented? “The threat is, in their opinion, truthful for the reason that God predicted something that the Ninevites truly deserved, even if he did not want to bring it about.” And are there not passages in Scripture that allow us to infer this sort of mercy on God’s part, even if they “are not clearly stated so that many people might come to repent out of fear of long, and probably even everlasting, punishment”?52 But Augustine does not allow himself to be misled by such allegedly “unclear” passages, since the “clear” ones provide him with absolute certainty and since “the divine sentence must not be emptied of its force and enfeebled”.53

  The door was firmly closed and carefully fitted with many bolts; and, for the theology of posterity, it has long remained locked. Only a few marginal figures, who had not come into contact with Scholastic book learning, dared to speak another kind of language: we will give it a hearing. But these voices do not suffice. The question is really whether there is not some understanding of an unattenuated hell that goes beyond the alternatives presented here, so that we could say:

  The truth is not simply an either-or: either somebody is in hell or nobody is. Both are partial expressions of the whole truth. Thus, too, Ignatius has a right to make his meditations on hell and to instruct that they be made. . . . The truth consists in a sum total of partial truths, and each of these partial truths must be wholly expressed, wholly thought out and lived through. We do not arrive at the truth if we only bring out one part and cover up the other. In every perspective, the whole must come to expression.54

  This remark provides the occasion for bringing the present chapter to a close with a note on the two great geniuses of patristic theology. In what was said above, there was by no means any intention to place the (in themselves largely opposed) teachings on hell of Origen and Augustine in the center of their theological thinking. Regarding Origen, this is clear enough already from de Lubac’s analyses, and his powerful exegetical writings had a seminal influence, in the most varied ways, on the whole of the following period, all the way into the Middle Ages and beyond (one need think only of Erasmus). But it would be no less foolish to tie the so incomprehensibly rich and many-sided theology of Augustine down to this single point. If his uncountable thought-provoking ideas do not permit being unified into a consistent system, they are, nevertheless, linked to one another in a living way and point together toward a center that is none other than the heart aflame with love that the saint is repeatedly depicted as holding in his hand. If that is true—and the great Tradition has always seen the great “Father of the Western world” in this way—then we are not entitled to regard his hard eschatological statements, which grew still harder in his old age, simply as a turning away from his innermost concern. It was part of his loving care for human souls that he saw himself forced to cast his warning of possibly becoming lost in so extreme a mold. His campaign was directed not only against laxity but also, and quite rightly so, against the presumptuous hope of the great Church Fathers mentioned above that Christians, even when they were grievous sinners, would not need to have any fear of final condemnation. This had to be corrected. It is only regrettable that the great man, to whom posterity owes so much, did not do that within the limits laid down by the Gospel.55

  4. THOMAS AQUINAS

  During the early Middle Ages, Augustine’s teaching on hope, as he had set it out systematically in the little book On Faith, Hope and Love, was the subject of almost countless treatises, published and unpublished, all of which occupy themselves with more-or-less harmless questions: whether faith is possible without hope, or hope without love; whether hope, as Hebrews 11:1 seems to suggest, is an attitude included in faith; and other things of that sort. However, in the eighth section of the above-mentioned work by Augustine, there is a sentence that, even if formulated in passing, must still deeply alarm anyone who reflects on it. Faith, says the author, “is related both to one’s personal concerns and to those of others”, and, furthermore, can be related “to past, present arid future things and to good and evil things”; “hope, by contrast, applied only to good and to future things and, in fact, only to such good things as affect the one who hopes for them”.1 For how could anyone hope for someone else if he cannot know whether that person belongs to the predestined or not? What a frightful restriction of Christian hope! And yet, prior to Thomas Aquinas, “no one had dared to cast doubt upon this claim”.2 Everyone acted as if it did not exist.

  In his Summa Theologiae (II II q 17 a 3), Thomas raised the question: “Can someone hope for the eternal life of someone else?” and uses the cited sentence from Augustine as the objection to his affirmation. His reply is circumspect but at the same time tears to shreds a veil that had been hanging for centuries over Christian hope. If we consider hope “in the absolute” (which seems to mean without regard for any other virtue), then Augustine’s sentence may be valid. On the other hand, if we presuppose the love that unites the one who hopes with another person, then it is invalid. In cases where love prevails, extending directly to one’s neighbor and valuing him as one’s own self, “one can wish and hope the same thing for another that one desires and hopes for oneself. And as it is the same virtue of love through which one loves God, oneself and one’s neighbor, so, too, it is the same virtue of hope through which one hopes for oneself and for the other.” The Marietti edition (1948) adds a note: “This can occur through a natural love or through any other benevolent inclination.” It is fortunate that Thomas’ Compendium Theologiae, presumably his last and therefore unfinished work, gives us a closer indication of who this “other” is that love and, following it, also hope value “as one’s own self”. Thomas quotes from the Letter to the Ephesians (5:1f): “Be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love”, then goes on to say: “God’s love, however, is not limited, but reaches out unrestrictedly to everything; he ‘loves all things that exist’, as is said in Wisdom of Solomon 11:24, and especially mankind, according to Deuteronomy 33:3: ‘he loved his peoples’.” With reference to Matthew 18:19 and the assured granting of any requests agreed upon by two people gathered together, Thomas says: “That the requests made by many do not attain their goal is impossible.”3 Moving on to the virtue of hope, he established that one “has to believe of whatever one hopes that it can be attained; this is what hope adds to mere desire. Man can, namely, also have desire for things that he does not believe he can attain; but hope cannot exist in such circumstances.”4 So far, however, as the object of our hope is concerned, we are instructed about that by the first petition in the Lord’s Prayer: we can and may ask that God “be praised as great in the thoughts and reverence of all [omnium], he who, in himself, is everlastingly great. And so this may not be seen as impossible, since he himself became man precisely in order that man should recognize God’s greatness. We thus ask that what he has begun may also come to fulfillment.”5 Thomas quotes from Cyprian, who insists, at the beginning of his elucidation of the Our Father, that Christ,

  the teacher of unity, does not want prayer to be performed individually and privately, so that the one who prays does so merely for himself. We do not say: “My Father, who art in heaven”, or “give me this day my daily bread”; no one asks that his trespasses alone be forgiven or pleads privately for himself that he not be led into temptation and that he be delivered from evil. We pray, namely, publicly and together with others, not for one alone but for all the people, for as such we are one.6

  What is new in the passage from Thomas’ Summa consists in the fact that he (in contrast to Augustine, to Lombard and his early commentators) derives the universality of hope from that of love. The question that hovers in the background, and remains unstated, is how far this love extends. If one believes in the twofold predestination advocated by Augustine and adheres, on the basis of that, to the certainty that a number of people will be damned, one might object that love would have to stop at this barrier. But we are not forced by Scripture to make such an assumption. Thus, at most, a barrier might be erected at the point where a sinner irrevocably rejects God’s unconditional love. Would not, then, our love, too, have to reach out as far as God’s caritas does? Hans-Jürgen Verweyen, in an essay entitled “Das Leben alley als ausserster Horizont der Christologie” (“The life of all as the outermost horizon of Christology”), has at least posed this question. He puts forward the thesis: “Whoever reckons with the possibility of even only one person’s being eternally lost besides himself is unable to love unreservedly.” And he stresses here, above all, “the effect of this idea on my practical actions. It seems to me that just the slightest nagging thought of a final hell for others brings on moments in which human togetherness becomes especially difficult, as does leaving the other to himself. If there may, in fact, be people who are absolutely incorrigible, why, then, should not those who make my life on earth a hell perhaps also be of that sort?” But would one not, as a Christian, have a duty “to accept every man in his total worth and to seek one’s own final joy in this affirmation of others”? That would be, precisely in view of the “all-embracing mercifulness of God, which excludes no one from his kingdom”, “the severest demand that one can imagine: the decision to have a patience that absolutely never gives up but is prepared to wait infinitely long for the other”. Strictly considered, to be sure, and as Verweyen rightly says, this is only “a judgment of practical reason” and thus not a principle “that can be put to further use to produce theories”, and particularly not theories “external to the confrontation with the Word of the Cross”.7

  Karl Rahner has steadfastly insisted on the non-convertibility of this practical demand into a theory about the outcome of divine judgment for all men. As is still to be shown in what follows, he has pointed out that we “must leave open the possibility of a radical, subjective, and definitive ‘No’ to God . . . as the ‘mystery of evil’ ”,8 However, he adds three things to this. First, Christian teaching says “nothing to indicate in just which concrete individuals, and to what extent in mankind as a whole, this possibility has been realized”. Second, in view of the “surpassed state of equilibrium” in Romans 5, he can say (and others join him in this): “The openness” to two possible outcomes of my life “is, in Christianity, not necessarily the doctrine of two equally ranked paths lying before man, who stands at the crossroads, but rather, this openness. . . stands alongside the doctrine that the world, and world history as a whole, in fact flow into the life eternal with God”.9 Third, from this follows—as will require still closer consideration—that I am obliged to hear, in a thoroughly existential way, the threat of possibly becoming lost as something directed in each case to me in particular. The words of Scripture are “introductions to the absolute seriousness of the decision, . . . an absolutely deadly seriousness”. The Christian message “says to each one of us, not to the other, but in each case to me: You can, through yourself, through the one that you are in your innermost center and irrevocably wish to be, also be the one who shuts himself off from God in the absolute, lifeless, irrevocable desolation of the ‘No’. ”10 The same thing—as will be shown later—is proclaimed by the greatest Catholic philosopher of modern times, Maurice Blondel, in his main work, L’Action (1893).

  We can bring this chapter to a close with a look at our century’s philosopher of hope. I do not mean Bloch but rather Gabriel Marcel, who leads us back to just that point at which Thomas Aquinas had opened the gateway to hope for others; Marcel will rightly say, on the basis of the totality of his analyses: for all others. “For there can be no particularism of hope; hope loses all sense and all force if it does not imply the statement of an ‘all of us’ or an ‘all together’—but this one possible sense can ultimately ground itself, of course, only in the calling of the individual [by God].”11

  In order to understand this concluding sentence, we have to start from Marcel’s denial of an I that is self-contained, self-comprehending and self-sufficient; for a concrete I exists solely from the direction of a Thou and in the direction of a Thou and a We—otherwise, it becomes a hell for itself.12 To step out of enclosedness within the I toward the Thou is to become a person, grounded in love, together with which hope awakens (“love . . . hopes all things”, says Paul [1 Cor 13:7]); indeed, the hope initially for you but also, along with that, for us, and thus ultimately for me. “No love without hope. But I always hope for us; I always declare a communion to be indestructible. . . . In that the hope consists: I believe in your love.” The separation of faith, hope and love can only be a superficial, accidental one. “I have hope in you for us: that is the most adequate and most explicit expression for the mental attitude that the verb ‘to hope’ expresses in a still unclear and implicit way.”13 However, Marcel cautions against the closedness of an I—Thou love that does not open itself to the being of everyone, indeed to the infinite being of God, in order, only then, to develop itself truly through that. Thus he arrives at a definition: “Hope is essentially the open readiness of a soul that has involved itself sufficiently, at the inward level, with the experience of communion to assume the mental attitude—over and beyond mere will and cognition—in which it posits the living everlastingness that lends that experience both its security and pledge.”14 To hope for oneself alone would be unbearable egotism and arrogance; but, regarding the common hope that (as Thomas has brought out) is grounded in love, Marcel repeatedly demonstrates its inseparability from humility and prayer, and, in so doing, rightly refers to the “unforgettable” book on hope by Charles Péguy, Le Porche du mystère de la deuxieme vertu. In pointing out that common hope can exist only in humility and prayer (and with that, only as Christian, indeed, Catholic, metaphysics),15 Marcel also shows that it is the total opposite of any sort of “presump-tuousness”.16 “But a certain patience is inseparable from humility”17—which refers us back to the basic statement by H.-J. Verweyen. For Marcel, this hope that is inseparable from faith and love is beyond the dialectic between “desire” and “fear”; accordingly, as inseparable from love, indeed, as love’s testimony, it would fit in well with the Johannine statement that perfect love casts out fear (1 Jn 4:18).

 

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