Notes on von Balthasar’s Dare we hope, ‘that all men be saved?’

I.

I recently picked up Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Dare we hope ‘that all men be saved?’ and began reading it with a background that is, frankly, more secondhand than I would like.¹ One early surprise is that von Balthasar does not treat the familiar ‘Origen-as-universalist’ shorthand as an uncomplicated datum, but immediately raises the question whether the widespread attribution is as secure as repetition makes it feel, and he associates that caution with the retrieval work of Henri de Lubac and with more careful modern Origen scholarship.²

The epigraph that frames the book, from Jean Daniélou, sets the tone for the sense in which von Balthasar intends ‘hope’ to be understood, namely, not as a private mood concerning my own prospects, but as a theological posture keyed to God’s action toward the whole of creation and the destiny of all humanity.³ The centre of gravity is displaced from the solitary interior to the ecclesial and cosmic horizon in which, as the Catechism itself intimates, hope is inseparable from the Church’s prayer ‘for all men to be saved.’⁴ In that register the question ‘Dare we hope?’ is not, or not chiefly, a speculative indulgence, but a matter that presses upon the shape of Christian prayer, intercession, and love. It is therefore important to state at the outset what von Balthasar is (and is not) attempting: he is not offering certain knowledge that all will in fact be saved, but arguing for the permissibility — indeed, at points, for something like an obligation — of hoping and praying that hell might be empty of human persons, in a manner that neither denies the Church’s teaching on hell nor converts hope into a guarantee.⁵ What follows, accordingly, will move from von Balthasar’s diagnosis of hope’s corruptions, to his claim that Scripture sustains an irreducible tension, and then to the ethical logic by which hope for others is bound to charity, before ending with a concrete application in which ‘knowing too much’ about judgment shows itself as a spiritual weapon rather than a confession of faith.

Von Balthasar, following Josef Pieper, begins by relocating the question within hope — more precisely, within two corruptions of hope that masquerade as its completion.⁶ He names two kinds of ‘hopelessness,’ despair and presumption, and insists that both are forms of perverse anticipation: despair ‘knows in advance’ that hope will not be fulfilled; presumption ‘knows in advance’ that it will. Hence the ancient severity of Isidore of Seville — ‘to despair is to descend into hell’⁷ — and hence, too, von Balthasar’s treatment of presumption as an anticipatory verdict, an eager and premature claim to have already secured the outcome.

At this point one can hear an echo of Søren Kierkegaard, though it remains unclear whether the resemblance is doctrinal or chiefly psychological: despair appears not merely as an emotion but as a stance, a willed posture of the self against hope, a refusal of mercy that decides ahead of time that one stands outside grace.⁸ Yet von Balthasar’s insistence on pairing despair with presumption presses the analysis further, for it suggests that certainty of condemnation and certainty of salvation can become mirror-images — rival ways of taking judgment into one’s own hands. From this angle ‘presumption’ begins to resemble, however imperfectly, a familiar caricature of predestinarian assurance often associated with John Calvin: the drama is reduced to a binary, and assurance becomes an advance closure of what ought to remain open as petition. The practical effect, in either direction, is the same. Whether I ‘know’ the end is condemnation (despair) or ‘know’ the end is salvation (presumption), I treat the future as already settled, and so evade the posture of prayer by which hope lives.

A particularly sharp line appears early. If one sees humanity from the outset as a massa damnata, what becomes of the promise that Christ, lifted up on the Cross, will ‘draw all men’ to himself? Von Balthasar suggests that the consequence can only be ‘a sort of despairing squirm at the sight of the Cross.’⁹ The phrase is vivid and, to my mind, diagnostic: the Cross is no longer received as the place where hope is given, but handled as a problem to be managed, because its universal address sits uneasily beside an imagination that has already assigned most persons to loss. In this, one sees a compelling feature of the book’s method. Von Balthasar is not primarily amassing proof-texts for or against universal salvation; he is asking what forms of Christian life are quietly generated by different points of departure. If one begins from the thought that others are probably lost, what does that do to love, to intercession, to patience, and to missionary urgency? If, conversely, one begins from the conviction that salvation is inevitable, what becomes of repentance, of vigilance, and of a salutary fear of sin? The argument returns, with deliberate persistence, to a single spiritual diagnosis: eschatological ‘certainty,’ whether bleak or buoyant, tends to deform moral and spiritual posture by closing in advance what ought to remain open to prayer.

II.

Von Balthasar maintains that within the New Testament two series of utterances run strictly side by side, and do so without yielding any synthesis that could be rendered either ‘permissible’ or ‘achievable.’ On the one hand there is the repeated warning of definitive loss; on the other there is the breadth of God’s will and power to save all. His claim, accordingly, is not that Scripture lapses into contradiction in any careless sense, but that it resists the intellect’s recurrent desire to dissolve tension into a manageable formula — and that this resistance, precisely as resistance, calls forth a different mode of response than the construction of a neutral theorem.

What is here named the ‘two series’ is, in truth, the double cadence of the apostolic kerygma itself. On the one side, an unrelenting sobriety concerning the possibility of a final refusal of God, spoken not as a merely pedagogical threat but as a real danger: the creature may ‘perish,’ may be ‘shut out,’ may go away ‘into eternal punishment,’ and may discover that there remains ‘no longer any sacrifice for sins’ but only judgment.¹⁰ On the other side, an equally unembarrassed amplitude in speaking of God’s salvific intention and of Christ’s victorious efficacy, since God ‘wills all’ to be saved, is ‘not willing that any should perish,’ and in Christ purposes to ‘sum up’ all things, even as the Son is said to be the ‘propitiation … for the sins of the whole world,’ and to draw ‘all’ unto himself.¹¹ The point, then, is not that the sacred page contradicts itself in a cheap fashion, but that it refuses the mind’s instinct to convert the drama of salvation into a conclusion already secured in advance.

Among the more illuminating threads in von Balthasar’s handling of this tension is a movement from speculation to prayer: not an evasion of doctrinal gravity, but a reordering of speech in the presence of God. In the account suggested by Helmut Thielicke, certain realities — most pointedly the condition of those whom St. Paul names ‘those who are perishing’ — are not, in the first instance, materials for dogmatic inventory, but burdens for intercession.¹² Such a move does not deny that judgment is real; it denies, rather, that we are positioned to populate hell by ‘knowledge,’ as though the eschaton were ours to administer. The proper stance toward those who reject Christ is therefore not a metaphysical choreography — stage sets of heaven and hell — but pleading: that rejection not be final, that their histories remain open to God, that divine love not draw back even before them. And prayer, precisely because it retains the proviso ‘Thy will be done,’ does not smuggle in a loophole; it makes an act of trust, in which the petition is spoken without reservation and the outcome is surrendered without resentment.

This posture can be anchored in the New Testament’s own way of linking universality and crisis. The revealed will-to-save is universal, and therefore the Church’s prayer for all is not sentimental optimism but obedience that takes its measure from revelation.¹³ Yet in the Gospel of John, universality is interwoven with sharpness: the insistence on faith, the force of ‘if’ and ‘unless,’ the possibility of refusing the light. Here the striking claim is that love itself is κρίσις: love, as the utmost gift, is also the utmost demand, because it calls for reception. Judgment is not portrayed as a divine pleasure in condemnation but as the form truth takes when it is refused; in Johannine terms, one ‘judges oneself’ by clinging to darkness when the light has come.¹⁴

In this way the imperative to universal intercession is grounded not in vague benevolence, but in the revealed θέλημα σωτηρίας, the will-to-save, before which the Church’s speech is most truthful when it becomes prayer.¹⁵ John Chrysostom, expounding the same Pauline passage, takes its universality with full seriousness: precisely because the priestly and ecclesial office is, as it were, ‘common’ to the world, it bears the world in prayer, refusing to exclude even those who are not yet believers.¹⁶ To pray for all, then, is not to assert the outcome; it is to enact the commandment of love in the form most proper to pilgrims who do not yet see.

This distinction also keeps two failures from collapsing into one another. On the one hand, the ‘all’ cannot be reduced to a merely ‘objective redemption’ that hovers above subjective response, as though salvation were a cosmic transaction completed over our heads. On the other hand, the demand for response cannot be made into a warrant for shrinking the ‘all,’ until the universality of God’s salvific will becomes only a manner of speaking. Von Balthasar appears intent on preserving the scandal of both claims at once: that the divine will-to-save is universal, and that human freedom is sufficiently real to render refusal intelligible. Properly used, the shorthand ‘objective redemption’ safeguards Catholic teaching that Christ’s redemptive act is universally sufficient and universally intended: God’s love excludes no one, and the Church teaches that Christ died for all without exception.¹⁷ Yet that same doctrine refuses to depict redemption as an impersonal mechanism that bypasses the personal mystery of grace and freedom. The ‘all,’ therefore, is not a floating abstraction; it names the concrete universality of an offered communion, established in the incarnate Son. And in him, as Athanasius formulates in the classic language of deification, ‘He was made man that we might be made God.’¹⁸ What is offered is participation; what is required is reception; and what is feared is not that God will prove less than love, but that the creature may, tragically, persist in a refusal which love does not coerce.

III.

The book then confronts the relationship between hope for others and love, posing the question whether Scripture and Tradition oblige one to assume, not merely in the abstract but concretely, that even one other besides oneself is in fact in hell or infallibly destined for it, as though one’s moral imagination were permitted — under the pretext of realism — to settle into the thought that the perdition of another is a datum with which charity must learn to live.¹⁹ Von Balthasar suggests, however, that the contrary temptation is often the more spiritually plausible. When the labour of relationship grows difficult, and when the other becomes burdensome to my patience, the notion of his final loss offers itself, almost furtively, as a permission to ‘leave the other to himself,’ to abandon him to his own interior solitude, and thus to convert eschatology into a moral alibi, as though my resignation were but the sober acceptance of divine justice. If hope is forbidden to write any man off, it imposes an ethical demand of almost intolerable amplitude: a patience that refuses to capitulate, a willingness to wait — if need be — ‘infinitely long’ for the other’s conversion, and a refusal to shelter myself behind the ancient evasion, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ as though fraternity could be affirmed in principle and denied in act.²⁰²¹

This moral construal is then connected to a notably Thomistic sobriety. St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly asks whether one can hope for another’s eternal life, and he permits the objection — drawn from St. Augustine — that men are warned against ‘false hopes of impunity,’ lest what is named hope be only presumption in devotional dress. Yet his response turns upon the inner form of charity itself. If love truly unites me to my neighbour, the same infused habit whereby I hope for myself extends, by reason of that union, to the other also, because charity regards him, not as an alien whose destiny may be contemplated at leisure, but as ‘another self.’ Hope, far from being a private possession confined within the frontiers of the ego, is enlarged according to the measure of love.²²

That enlargement is further secured by the communal grammar of Christian prayer. St. Cyprian of Carthage, in his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, insists that we do not say ‘My Father’ but ‘Our Father,’ and that we do not pray ‘give me’ but ‘give us,’ precisely because the prayer of the Church is not the private monologue of isolated souls but the common supplication of one body. What first appears a small liturgical observation becomes, in this context, a rebuke to any individualistic soteriology that would treat the salvation of others as none of my concern, since, if my prayer is ecclesial in its very syntax, my hope must be ecclesial also, intercessory rather than solitary, and therefore intrinsically ordered to the good of those for whom I am bid to pray.²³²⁴

Yet von Balthasar is careful to prevent this from hardening into a cosy universalism, for he repeatedly refuses ‘certitude’ in the epistemic sense, as though hope were a species of foreknowledge.²⁵ Even where scholastic theology speaks of a certitudo proper to hope, he notes — following St. Bonaventure — that its definition is elusive, since what is attained is not evident knowledge, as though the outcome lay open before the mind, but rather a security of trustfulness grounded in God’s fidelity and not in the will’s own instability, and therefore inseparable from living faith and genuine love.²⁶ The apparent firmness of hope must not be confused with the complacency of presumption.

From this personal and ecclesial address it follows that one may be tempted to leave concern for the salvation of others to divine mercy and to concentrate upon one’s own situation before God. The book’s point, however, is that such concentration, if it becomes a refusal of intercession, is already a contraction of charity. The Church teaches at once that each man, at death, receives his recompense in the particular judgment, and that the faithful, while trembling for themselves, are not thereby licensed to pronounce others lost.²⁷

It is here that the Kierkegaardian paradox is allowed to strike with particular force: one may be ‘literally quite certain’ that everyone else will attain heaven while fearing for oneself, not as a theatrical inversion but as a spiritual discipline that denies, on the one hand, the pleasure of condemning others, and denies, on the other, the self-flattery of presumption. Fear is thereby relocated to its proper object, which is not speculative curiosity about the doom of my neighbour, but my own responsibility before God, whose mercy I must not convert into a licence.²⁸

At this point von Balthasar’s historical sketches intensify the same concern by showing how readily the Church’s discourse can drift into ‘knowing too much’ about hell. In the City of God St. Augustine devotes extensive attention to the punishments of the damned and, with a polemical vigilance, closes those apertures through which compassionate readers might deny a populated hell, precisely because compassion is easily accused of disguising moral laxity. Von Balthasar does not caricature St. Augustine, but uses him to mark a trajectory in which suspicion of mercy seeks to present itself as zeal for justice.²⁹

Other figures add nuance in a more modern register. Maurice Blondel, particularly in L’Action, struggles with the possibility of everlasting hell while seeking to absolve God of responsibility for damnation, and therefore emphasises free choice and the terrifying capacity of the will to enclose itself. In that connexion his rejection of Dante Alighieri’s inscription over the infernal gate (‘the work of primal and highest love’) is matched by his preference for Fra Angelico’s depiction of Christ at judgment as simply displaying his wounds, before which the unrepentant turn away and condemn themselves, so that imagery becomes catechesis, training the imagination either toward projection and panic or toward responsibility and sorrow.³⁰

Alongside this, von Balthasar attends to the relation of justice and mercy, refusing to treat judgment as God’s ‘pure’ attribute and mercy as a discretionary add-on. Instead he retrieves, in the Thomistic line (with St. Anselm of Canterbury discernible in the background), the claim that justice is not annulled by mercy but, in a certain manner, is taken up within it, since creation itself is not owed by justice but given by goodness, and divine works therefore manifest both mercy and justice according to God’s simple perfection.³¹

A technically clarifying remark is then introduced by Otto Betz, who cautions against speaking of the ‘eternity’ of hell in the same sense as God’s eternity, since God alone is eternal in the strict sense, whereas the ‘endlessness’ of damnation is better conceived as a fixation in despair than as a parallel kingdom endowed with any theological dignity.³² Even if one does not wholly adopt the terminology, the intuition stands: hell is privation and anti-teleology, not a rival good.³³

Finally, and with an unexpected literary compression, Dostoevsky’s parable of the ‘Little Onion’ in The Brothers Karamazov functions as a severe spiritual anthropology. The old woman is drawn from the lake of fire by the single onion of her one merciful act, yet when others seize her so as to be pulled up with her she kicks them away — insisting, in effect, upon goodness as private property — and the onion breaks, so that damnation appears, not principally as an externally imposed sentence, but as the refusal of solidarity and the will’s anti-communion.³⁴

IV.

As I read those passages, I could not help recalling a memory from high school. A classmate, a Protestant of what I would have guessed was a Pentecostal milieu, once relayed — almost casually, with chilling certainty — that their pastor had spoken of a vision in which Pope John Paul II was burning in hell. What stayed with me was not the claim’s implausibility (though it was that), but the confidence with which the judgment was narrated, as if eschatology were a kind of clairvoyant reporting. Von Balthasar’s book helped me name what disturbed me: the ease with which ‘knowledge’ of another’s damnation can become a spiritual weapon, a way of protecting one’s identity by consigning others to perdition. It felt like despair on someone else’s behalf — a theft of the future — and, more subtly, like presumption as well, inasmuch as it assumed an advance possession of what belongs to the Lord alone, and therefore displaced the Gospel’s call to intercession with something closer to spiritual policing.

In the end, what I take from von Balthasar’s book is less a resolved ‘position’ on universal salvation than a disciplined posture. Hope, as he construes it, is not knowledge; where we try to turn it into knowledge, whether knowledge that most are damned or knowledge that all are saved, the old corruptions of hope reappear under theological clothing, as despair and presumption. This is why his insistence on Scripture’s ‘two series’ matters. The New Testament refuses to grant us the satisfaction of a synthesis that would allow us to speak as administrators of the eschaton; it keeps before us both the real possibility of final refusal and the unembarrassed universality of God’s will-to-save, and in doing so it trains Christian speech toward petition rather than prediction. Certain realities are given to us less as items for cartography than as burdens for prayer, and the Church’s universal intercession is therefore not an ornamental piety but obedience to what has been revealed.

At the same time, the universality of Christ’s saving will cannot be domesticated into a merely ‘objective’ mechanism that bypasses freedom, and the seriousness of freedom cannot be turned into a reason to shrink the ‘all’ into a rhetorical flourish. The point is not to evacuate warning, but to resist the peculiar temptation to treat warning as an invitation to name names. If hope is enlarged by charity, then to refuse hope for another is not simply to adopt a hardheaded realism; it is to permit myself, under the guise of doctrinal sobriety, to ‘leave the other to himself,’ to resign the labour of patience, and to convert eschatology into a moral alibi. The ethical weight of hope is immense. Far from licensing laxity, the refusal to write anyone off binds one to a patience that does not relinquish the other, even when human togetherness grows difficult. And this returns one, finally, to a chastened humility before judgment: not vagueness, but a refusal of the murderous comfort of consigning others to final ruin. As St. Paul says, ‘I do not even judge myself… it is the Lord who judges.’³⁵ If Christian speech about hell has a point, it is first to awaken me to my own responsibility and to press me into conversion, not to give me the authority to speak final words over anyone else. If von Balthasar is right, then the question ‘Dare we hope?’ is a test of whether my theology of judgment has become detached from the Gospel’s command to love, pray, and suffer with others: to hope because love hopes all things, and to leave the verdict where it belongs, before the Lord who brings to light what is hidden in darkness.