Can we hope that all men be saved?

And he shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats.

This topic has been beaten around far too many times for my own taste – however, since the reading for Mass today (Romans 8:26-30) contains what is probably the clearest doctrine on hope in the whole of Scripture, and since the phrase for in hope we were saved inspired our Holy Father’s encyclical letter on Christian Hope (Spe salvi), it seems appropriate to offer a few brief reflections on the nature of hope.

Last Saturday, I offered a word on the nature of the theological virtue of hope over at the Virtuous Planet blog, today I would like to consider the object of hope – For what do Christians hope? Can we properly hope that all men should be saved?

The object and cause of hope

“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (CCC 1817) The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in this simple definition, tells us both the object and the cause of hope.

The object of hope – that for which we hope – is nothing less that heaven, the beatific vision of God himself. Hope is not in the things of this life, but in the glory that awaits in life everlasting. Neither is hope in anything less that God – we do not hope, essentially, in angels or in saints, but in God alone (though, in God, we hope to enjoy that perfect communion of all the blessed).

The cause of our hope – that which makes us to have hope – is, of course, the grace of Christ Jesus and his promise. We hope not in our own strength, nor in the power of men, but in the goodness and mercy of God. The promise of God, which has been revealed to us in Scripture and Tradition, is the cause of our hope.

We hope only for our own salvation

Notice that the definition of hope pertains only to the desire which the individual man has of union with God. Hope, properly so-called, desires heaven for oneself. By hope, we desire eternal life for ourselves specifically.

It is true, as the Catechism points out, that “In hope the Church prays for all men to be saved.” (CCC 1821) Still, if we are precise, hope itself does not touch directly upon our desire of salvation for others. Rather, we have hope of our own salvation and this leads us to trust entirely in the mercy of God. If the good Jesus can save me, then he can surely save all people – for, without his grace, I would be worse than any sinner.

St. Thomas Aquinas speaks well to this point in Summa Theologica II-II, q.17, a.3. There, he tells us that, as diverse from love, hope principally regards the individual who hopes (whereas love unites us to another). Hope is directed to our own movement toward God, and therefore it is more properly by virtue of love that we desire salvation for others.
Moreover, if hope is to be certain (and it must be certain if it is true theological hope), then it cannot bear on things which are beyond the control of the individual who hopes. If the Blessed Mother had true theological hope for the salvation of all, then either that hope was in vain (if all are not, in the end, saved) or we can be absolutely certain that all people will indeed be saved (but this supposed certainty is nowhere found in the tradition).

The cause of hope: Revelation regarding heaven and hell

The cause of our hope is the promises of Jesus, but our Savior never promised that all would be saved. In fact, if we look honestly at his words, the good Lord speaks as though many will be damned. He says that many will say “Lord, Lord”, but will be rejected. There are many who take the path to perdition. There are many wicked who will be divided from the just, as a shepherd divides goats from the sheep.

While it is certainly true that Jesus tells us that, if we are faithful to him, we shall certainly be saved; there is nothing in the Word of God which promises that all people will be saved. Therefore, since there has been no such promise, neither can we hope that all will be saved.

Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, to the contrary, will attempt to settle this by making a distinction: He says that it is in the pre-Resurrection parables that Jesus speaks mostly of hell, but all this talk of hell is absent after the Resurrection. It is as though Balthasar expects us to believe that the message of Jesus changed somehow during the three days stay in the tomb.

Are we to believe that our Savior did not realize (before his death) that all would be saved? Who instructed the mind of Christ in this matter? How did he grow in his knowledge of salvation? Was it Adam or Moses who taught him, when he descended into the limbo of the Fathers? Or are we to believe that, when Jesus descended into the hell of the damned to suffer there (as the Balthasarians foolishly claim), the good Lord was shocked to find that the hell of the damned was empty?!

In any case, we cannot trust the speculations of the modern theologians, we must trust in the promise of Christ. And he never promised that all would be saved, he only said that we will be saved if we continue to follow him. Thus, hope is about our own salvation – and we can only hope (properly speaking) in salvation for ourselves.

The prayer that all may be saved

However, we most certainly must pray for the salvation of each and all – excepting those whom we know to be either in heaven (i.e. the saints) or in hell (i.e. Satan and his demons). We pray for the salvation of all because we are united to all through the virtue of charity.

By the theological virtue of charity, we are united first to God and then to all those who are united to God or who are potentially united to him. Hence, we are united to the saints and to all those in the state of grace, and we are even united to all those who are still living but are not in the state of grace (insofar as they are potentially members of Christ’s body). The only persons to whom love does not unite us are the damned in hell – thus, we do not have theological love for Satan or any of the damned; we have a natural love for them, insofar as we will their existence, but we do not have a supernatural love by which we would will their salvation.

It is this love, which wills the good of the other, which leads us to pray that all men be saved. Hope, in a secondary sense, makes us to be certain that others will be saved insofar as they are united to God and us in love (thus, this is a conditional hope which is not theological hope properly so-called).