The Future of Hell

Part I: That This Doctrine Developed

This is a talk I was invited to give as an endowed lecture in the Catholic intellectual tradition at Mount St. Mary’s University (February 2025). I release it in three parts. This, the longest part, traces the main contours of doctrinal development around hell. Part II will sketch speculative proposals that extend this development towards a Catholic universalism. The final Part (III) will give readers access to the video of the Q&A that followed the lecture, along with some thoughts reflecting on that experience. Each Part will appear one week after the previous.

Introduction

The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms two essential things of hell: its existence and its eternity.¹ Hell, it then says, is a person’s own “definitive self-exclusion” from God and the saints (1033). It also teaches what can justifiably be called a “hopeful universalism” (1058, 1821), as did Vatican II and two of the three most recent popes.² This picture represents a rather massive development in the Church’s teaching about hell. I’ll consider three specific aspects of this development: changes in the doctrine of hell’s cause, character, and census (occupancy). After establishing that the doctrine of hell has developed in these ways, I’ll reflect briefly upon how it might continue to develop in these same ways towards a more “Catholic universalism.”

Let me be very clear upfront about two things.

[1] By “universalism” I mean the eventual salvation of all through the judgment and work of Jesus Christ, which is what scripture unambiguously teaches that God wills for all people (1 Tim 2.4; 2 Pet 3.9).

[2] By arguing towards a “Catholic universalism” I do not thereby claim that such a view is currently the Catholic Church’s official doctrine. It isn’t. Nor should that surprise us: antecedent to any significant doctrinal development in Church history there have always been those who argued for the truth of the development before development occurred. God’s self-revelation in Christ—and so the deposit of Christian faith—was given in the finite conditions of history and given as God’s self-revelation, a revelation whose depths must be infinite if they are God’s own depths (1 Cor 2.10–12). That we are finite and God is infinite means that, as Vatican II put it, “the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her,” and that one essential factor in such progress is “the contemplation and study of believers.”³ I wish here to offer some fruits of my own contemplation and study on the topic of hell.

Part 1: That Hell Developed

There are perhaps two passages in all the OT where something like the image of hell appears (Isa 66.24; Dan 12.2). St. Paul never mentions hell in his letters, nor does it appear in John’s gospel. It’s found neither in the Apostles’ nor in the Nicene Creed except to say that Christ, after his burial and before his resurrection, “descended” to it (ad infernos). The NT’s images of hell are notoriously and extremely varied, from unceasing smoke of sulfuric fire to utter annihilation (Jude 7; Matt 10.28//Lk 12.5).⁴ And in some early Christian literature hell fails to appear at all. The Didache and 1 Clement, for instance, envision two possible final fates for us: either we “perish” entirely or we’re raised to life eternal.⁵

Not that hell was a later or marginal doctrine. The fifth-century Pseudo-Athanasian Creed confesses that at Christ’s Second Coming, all will rise and be judged: “those who have done good will go on to eternal life, but those who have done evil will go into eternal fire [in ignem aeternum]” (DS 76). In 473 CE, a synod at Arles required a certain priest to renounce his former errors, among which was “that fire and hell do not exist.” Rather, it taught, “eternal fires and the flames of hell” are prepared for “mortal sins” (DS 342). That hell is the merited destination for all ungraced sinners—whether for those afflicted with original sin alone or those who add actual, personal sins to this original state—would appear to be the constant doctrine of the premodern ordinary and extraordinary magisterium.⁶ Even so, hell has gone through some striking changes over the ages—changes in its cause, character, and census.

Cause. Upon all that follows, especially here, Augustine’s long shadow falls. For him hell’s cause is that of all postlapsarian evil: original sin plus God’s inscrutable choice to withhold grace from the damned.

This was not merely an unfortunate overreaction in the heat of later controversy. Already in Ad Simplicianum (c.396 CE) Augustine’s main thesis in reading Romans 9–11 is that God does not foresee the merits of sinner and saint and then judge them on that basis, but rather, in the unfathomable counsels of his own divine eternity, God judges upon whom he will have mercy (or not) and then makes them meritorious (or not). “Jacob I loved; Esau I hated” (Rom 9.13f.). If God loved Jacob because he foresaw Jacob’s future lovableness, then Jacob is the actual cause of his own election, his own salvation—a denial of grace and a reason to boast. Whoever escapes hell and goes to heaven has none but God to thank. Whoever goes to hell simply merits what original and actual sin merit. Where God’s mercy isn’t given, God’s justice is upheld.⁷ Whom “he wills [God] sustains, whom he wills he abandons.”⁸ After all, says Augustine, “all human beings…are a kind of single mass of sin owing a debt of punishment to the divine and loftiest justice.”⁹

Augustine later considers “the reply usually given” to the question why most are damned, namely that sinners themselves freely will it and God respects their free choice. “Who is so irreligious and foolish,” he retorts, “as to say that God cannot turn to good any of the evil wills of men he wishes, when and where he wishes?”¹⁰ No: “the effectiveness of God’s mercy cannot be in man’s power, so that [God] would be merciful to no avail if man were unwilling.” As with the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, it is not as though God “forces” sinners to sin. Born into original sin, all humans are inclined to and will in fact sin. It’s that God doesn’t want to prevent their sin: “God’s hardening is an unwillingness to be merciful.”¹¹ Thus the damned “could have been saved had [God] so willed it.” Most are damned to hell. But it’s not “as if the will of God had been overcome by the will of human beings.”¹²

The Church has almost always rejected an extreme Augustinianism (or Jansenism) that affirms “double predestination”—that God positively wills hell for the reprobate. And yet Augustine is by no means alone in his conviction that God’s unwillingness to show mercy is the decisive cause of hell. Despite the penchant of some analytic Thomists today to overlook St. Thomas’s undeniable development on questions of grace, freedom, predestination, and reprobation, it’s clear that Thomas moved away from his earlier free will defense of the sort Augustine detested and landed on something very much like Augustine’s own view. “This very thing,” Thomas writes in his late lectures on Hebrews, “that someone does not set up an obstacle [to grace], is something that proceeds from grace.”¹³ Roberto De La Noval produces the decisive text from Thomas’s De veritate: “These two are not incompossible: God wills this person to be saved and he is able (potest) to be damned; but these two are incompossible: God wills this person to be saved and he is damned.”¹⁴ If God wills a person saved, she is saved. If God refrains from willing this, she goes to hell. The decisive thing here isn’t her—theoretically she could be saved or damned. It’s God’s own will for her that makes the difference for her.

Today the Church’s teaching seems roughly the opposite. At the Council of Trent, it still wasn’t entirely clear whether hell’s decisive cause is the misuse of free will or God’s unwillingness to elect. Texts such as canon 5 of the decree on justification, for instance, clearly teach that prevenient and cooperative grace can be “rejected.” But others such as chapter 13 on the grace of perseverance say that grace effects “both the will and the completion” of one’s salvation.¹⁵ In the first case, free resistance is decisive. In the second, freely willed perseverance is itself a work of grace.

But now and clearly, as we saw in the current catechism, hell is “definitive self-exclusion,” the dreary result of God judging the “life-choice” of the sinner whose self-destruction of all good within is “irrevocable,” as Benedict XVI put it.¹⁶ Virtually all recent defenses of “traditional” hell argue a non-traditional case based almost entirely on the ability of created free will to frustrate God’s will eternally. This, it’s thought, must be an inherent feature of human freedom; taking it seriously demands nothing less. Although “God and his Christ want all men to be saved,” wrote Jacques Maritain, “this divine will was checkmated” by the wills of the damned “for all time.” This makes the damned “the First Cause of Nothingness…a god from below.”¹⁷ And though Augustine and Thomas and several synods would praise hell as fitting for divine justice, we now read in the General Catechetical Directory that hell “is sad and lamentable,” or in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Catechism that hell is a “tragic reality.”¹⁸ Hell’s decisive cause has changed from God’s just choice to abandon the damned into the natural if tragic consequence of the sinner’s own will. The decisive factor was God; now it is us. The result used to be just and delightful; now it is lamentable.

Character. We won’t be surprised to find that such a drastic change in hell’s cause has been accompanied by a no less drastic change in its character. Drawing especially on the “everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” of Matthew 25 and the “lake of fire” of Revelation 20, hell’s character appears often in magisterial statements as torment by fire.¹⁹ Traditionally there have been two qualitatively distinct types of infernal suffering: the “pain of loss,” the damned soul’s anguish at having forever lost the hope of seeing God (heaven); and the “pain of sense,” the physical tortures proper to a damned body. In book 21 of his City of God, Augustine defends the necessity and justice of both types of pain. The first death, he says, “expels the soul from the body against its will; the second death compels the soul to stay in the body against its will.” No length of time will again sever body from soul, “nor will any form of pain break the connection.” This redoubled pain is God’s ongoing and active punishment of the damned “in retribution for sins.”²⁰

In his Breviloquium, St. Bonaventure, Thomas’s medieval contemporary, follows Augustine in all of this quite closely. The “judgment to come should manifest the severity of the Judge”—this is his guiding principle. Fire proves an especially supple means. Hell’s fire “will torment the damned,” purgatorial fire will cleanse the just, earthly fire “will consume all living things.”²¹ Bonaventure even specifies that hell’s sufferings occur “in a material place beneath us” where all the damned “are afflicted with the same material fire that will burn and torture both their souls and bodies.”²² In Dantean fashion, God actively and artfully matches the character of the damned will with corresponding punishments. Just as the sinner in this life “appointed no end to sinning, so God, in his perpetual will, never suspends the punishment” of hell. “God afflicts [the damned] endlessly” precisely because of “the perpetuity of disordered will in the damned.” In this and many other ways, the damned “are most cruelly tortured.”²³ For Bonaventure no less than for Peter Lombard or Thomas, this enactment of “divine justice”—God’s active retribution through hell’s exquisitely meet torments—makes the saints in heaven “rejoice,” even if per accidens.²⁴

The catechism issued by the Council of Trent is no less insistent upon the necessity and justice of both infernal pains. The pain of loss names “the heaviest punishment.” Fire, which “produces the most intense pain,” is “felt through the organs of sense.” When we realize that this pain compounds the pain of loss, and that both are eternal, “we can see at once that the punishment of the damned includes every kind of suffering.” God is no passive bystander. It is precisely the “divine justice” that “pursues” the damned “with every species of malediction.”²⁵

But now the catechism doesn’t even mention the pain of sense. Nor does the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Catechism, which indeed teaches that “Hell is not so much the punishment of God as it is the condition voluntarily chosen by the person.”²⁶ (Note here that this catechism then cites not Augustine or Thomas for the point, but Origen). Ratzinger sees hell as the decisive sign that the Christian God regards human freedom as “fully serious.” “Heaven reposes upon freedom,” he writes, “and so leaves to the damned the right to will their own damnation.”²⁷ We’ll see later that Ratzinger has more to say here. But this statement is entirely typical of the Church’s current teaching on hell’s character.²⁸ Hell “is not a punishment imposed externally by God,” John Paul II said, “but a development of premises already set by people in this life.”²⁹

Hell used to be characterized as God’s active, retributive punishment through the pain proper to the entire human being, soul and body; now it’s God’s reluctant, passive permission of the natural consequences of the damned’s perverted desire. Hell used to manifest the manifold justice of God’s activity; now it reveals the sad ineffectiveness of God’s grace.

Census. If God saved no one at all, wrote Augustine, “nobody would have any right to criticize God’s justice.”³⁰ True, this would mean “the mercy of grace would appear in none.” But “if all were brought over from darkness to light,” then “the truth of retribution would appear in none.” There are “many more” under retribution than mercy—Augustine’s infamous massa damnata.³¹ For him, hell’s census includes vastly more occupants than heaven’s. Wide is the gate….

A notion, moreover, which enjoyed considerable staying power in Christian tradition. True, such eschatological pessimism never achieved unambiguously official status as dogma. And yet we read at the Synod of Valence (855 CE), itself meant to mollify Augustine, that God’s foreknowledge of the damned does not cause their damnation; rather God foresees their unwillingness “to be good” such that “they have remained by their own vice in the massa damnationis, either by original sin or actual sin.”³² That most are damned was the opinion of many medieval luminaries, from Francisco Suarez to Peter Canisius and St. Robert Bellarmine.³³ As late as 1956, Martin Henry observes, a certain Canon Georges Panneton of Paris published a book on hell including a census of its denizens: the usual suspects such as Lenin and Hitler, but also freethinkers such as Voltaire and modernist theologians such as Alfred Loisy.³⁴

The 17^th ecumenical council, at Florence (1442 CE), draws up a handy catalogue of groups who have hell as their destination:

“[The Church] firmly believes, professes, and preaches that ‘none of those who are outside of the Catholic Church, not only pagans,’ but Jews, heretics, and schismatics, can become sharers of eternal life, but they will go into the eternal fire ‘that was prepared for the devil and his angels’ [Mt 25.41] unless, before the end of their life, they are joined to her.”³⁵

Pagans, Jews, heretics, and schismatics—these four groups, unless they “are joined” to the Church before death, occupy hell. The interior quotation comes from Fulgentius of Ruspe, an avid follower of Augustine, who also taught that God “willed to save those to whom he gave knowledge of the mystery of salvation,” and “did not wish to save those to whom he denied” it.³⁶ The intent here seems plain: if any from these groups fails to become visible members of the Roman Church, they merit hell. In Boniface VIII’s 1302 Bull, Unam sanctam, we read that there is “only one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” outside “of whom there is neither salvation nor remission of sins,” and that being inside means something concrete: “we declare, state, and define that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of all human creatures that they submit to the Roman pontiff.”³⁷ This was clearly the teaching of Clement VI in his 1351 letter to the Armenians (DS 1051), and was defended as late as 1854 in Pius IX’s allocution on the day after solemnly defining the Immaculate Conception (though he left room for “invincible ignorance”).³⁸

So “pagans” means all non-Christians, alongside Jews, and “heretics and schismatics” means all non-Catholic Christians (Orthodox, anti-Chalcedonians, later on—Protestants). I’d add here another group: dead, unbaptized infants, who were often thought to go to “Limbo”—a place in hell without the added torture of the pain of sense, but a place in hell nonetheless. Limbo, it’s true, never became official dogma. But as late as 1794 Pope Pius VI was still defending it against the Jansenist Synod of Pistoia.³⁹ Pagans, Jews, Orthodox, Protestants, unbaptized infants—you see why many imagined a rather sizeable census for hell.

I need not here trace the long history of the Church’s ever deepening and ever expanding vision of what “outside of the Church there is no salvation” means. Francis Sullivan has done so admirably in his book on the subject.⁴⁰ It’s enough to note that since Vatican II, pagans of good will can be united “invisibly,” by “unconscious desire,” to the Church; Jews need not explicitly confess faith in Christ to receive the salvation promised them;⁴¹ Eastern Orthodox possess saving sacraments and might better perceive aspects of the central mysteries of Christian faith than the Latins;⁴² Twenty-one Coptic martyrs appear in our own martyrology (feast day: Feb 15);⁴³ and Limbo for unbaptized infants has vanished from the catechism and magisterial teaching: this group is instead entrusted to God’s mercy, “who desires that all people be saved” (1261). John Paul II went further here. In a text later scrubbed from the encyclical’s official Latin version, he consoled women agonizing over having had an abortion. “You will come to understand,” the original text read, “that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord.”⁴⁴

Perhaps the most obvious evidence of the change in hell’s census is Gaudium et spes 22:

“All this holds true not only for Christians, but for all men of goodwill in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way. For, since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.”

As Pope St. John Paul II put it, there are two truths here that must be held together: [1] that salvation comes through the Church and [2] that salvation “is a real possibility for all people.”⁴⁵

Avery Dulles once claimed that the development here traced “is not as dramatic as some imagine,” since the previous pessimism simply rested “on the unwarranted assumption that explicit Christian faith is absolutely necessary for salvation.”⁴⁶ We’ve seen on the contrary that it rested on much more: that hell came from God’s inscrutable unwillingness to show mercy; that its actively inflicted punishments manifest divine justice; that Christ’s salvific work through the Spirit is confined mostly or entirely to the Roman Church—all of which the Church now denies or heavily modifies. Dulles and others undersell the radicality of the development in nearly every respect.

But in every respect the unmistakable trend has been development towards:

[1] assurance of God’s universal salvific will being the effective cause of the eschaton;

[2] mere permissiveness of God with respect to the character of damnation;

[3] the expansion of heaven’s occupancy to the detriment of hell’s.

The Church’s teaching has developed from the massa damnata to a hopeful universalism. In the next Part (II) I’ll consider how it might develop further still.

1. Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, 479–82; Harvey D. Egan, S.J., “Eternal Love and Eternal Obduracy,” 60 n.50: “Although never solemnly defined by a council or a pope, on the basis of church documents, I maintain that the doctrine of hell’s existence and its eternity has been taught definitively by the ordinary universal magisterium.” All references to Denzinger (DS) = Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. Latin-English, 43^rd ed. Edited by Peter Hünermann, Robert Fastiggi, and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012).

2. Cf. Lumen Gentium §13; Gaudium et Spes §22; John Paul II, Redemptoris missio 9; Pope Benedict XVI, Spe salvi 45–6, where he seems to indicate that at least some “of our own history” are lost even as “the great majority of people” are likely not.

3. Dei Verbum §8; cf. Mysterium ecclesiae, esp. §5.

4. Heikki Räisänen, “Jesus and Hell,” in Jesus in Continuum. Edited by Tom Holmén (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 357–83.

5. Did. 7: “there will be the resurrection of the dead, but not of all.”

6. E.g. Pope Innocent I to Bishop Exsuperius of Toulouse (DS 212); Pelagius I’s Fides (DS 443); Innocent III’s Letter to Archbishop Humbert of Arles (DS 780); Lateran IV (DS 801). This names the main contention of Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), who insists the Lumen Gentium §16’s pessimistic ending puts V2 in continuity with premodern tradition.

7. Augustine, ad Simplicianum (Ep 37), 2.11.

8. Augustine, ad Simplicianum (Ep 37), 2.17.

9. Augustine, ad Simplicianum (Ep 37), 2.16.

10. Augustine, Enchir. 98.

11. Augustine, ad Simplicianum (Ep 37), 2.13 & 15.

12. Augustine, Enchir. 95 & 97.

13. Aquinas, Lectura in epistolam ad hebraeos, c.12, lect.3 (689): “Hoc ipsum quod aliquis non ponit obstaculum ex gratia procedit.” See Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., “Contemporary Thomism Through the Prism of the Theology of Predestination,” in Thomism and Predestination, 29–50. Cp. SCG III.159: “[commenting 1 Tim 2.4]: But those alone are deprived of grace who offer an obstacle within themselves to grace….”

14. Aquinas, De Veritate 23.5, ad 3. See Roberto De La Noval, “Pelagianism Redivivus: The Free Will Theodicy for Hell, Divine Transcendence, and the End of Classical Theism,” Modern Theology 40.3 (July 2024): 530–50.

15. Council of Trent, Decree on Justification, DS 1525 & 1541.

16. Benedict XVI, Spe salvi 45.

17. Jacques Maritain, “Beginning with a Reverie,” 11 n.13.

18. GCD 69 (cf. CCC 1056); Christ Our Pascha, 2^nd ed., 251.

19. Quicumque (DS 76); Synod of Arles (DS 342); Pelagius I’s Fides: “that they may burn without end” (DS 443).

20. Augustine, De civ. Dei 21.3 & 14.

21. Bonaventure, Brev. VII.4.4.

22. Bonaventure, Brev. VII.6.2.

23. Bonaventure, Brev. VII.6.4–5.

24. Peter Lombard, Sent IV, d. 47 & 50; Aquinas, ST III, Suppl., q.94, art.3, resp.

25. Council of Trent, Catechism, Art. VII.

26. Christ Our Pascha, 251.

27. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology, 216.

28. See esp. Egan, “The Mystery of Eternal Love and Eternal Obduracy.”

29. John Paul II, “General Audience,” Wednesday, 28 July, 1999, 1.

30. Augustine, Enchir. 99.

31. Augustine, De civ. Dei 21.12.

32. Synod of Valence, can. 2 (DS 627): “sed quia boni esse noluerunt, suoque vitio in massa damnationis vel merito originali vel etiam actuali permanserunt.”

33. Avery Dulles, “The Population of Hell,” First Things (May 2003); accessed here.

34. Martin Henry, “Does Hell Still Have a Future?” The Heythrop Journal (2015): 134 n.50.

35. Council of Florence, Cantate Domino / Eugene IV’s Bull of Union with the Copts/Ethiopians (DS 1351).

36. Fulgentius of Ruspe, De Veritate praedestinationis 3:16–18 (PL 65, 660–1).

37. Boniface VIII, Unam sanctam (DS 870 and 875): “Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni humanae creaturae declaramus, dicimus, diffininums omnino esse de necessitate salutis.”

38. Clement VI, Letter to the Mkhithar, Catholicos of the Armenians (DS 1051): “We ask whether you believe…that no man in the wayfaring state outside of this Church and obedience to the Roman pontiffs can finally be saved”; Pius IX, Singulari quadam, quoted by Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1992), 113.

39. Pius VI, Auctorem fidei (DS 2626, against the Synod of Pistoia); cf. John XXII’s 1321 letter to the Armenians, Nequaquam sine dolore, which alludes to Limbo by mentioning hell’s “different pains and diverse places” (DS 926).

40. Sullivan, Salvation.

41. Reflection published on 10 December, 2015, by Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “The Gifts and Callings of God Are Irrevocable (Rom 11:29),” §36: “From the Christian confession that there can by only one path to salvation, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God.”

42. Unitatis redintegratio, §§ 3 and 17.

43. “Vatican marks first Feast of Coptic Martyrs,” accessed here. Cp. 16^th Synod of Toledo (693 CE), which expressly promises that those who reject Chalcedon “will be punished by the sentence of everlasting damnation, and they will burn on flaming pyres with the devil and his associates until the end of time” (DS 575). Both St. Cyprian and St. Augustine rejected the idea that the martyrdom of any outside the Catholic Church could unite them to salvation; see Cyprian, De unitate, 14: “the grievous irremissible sin of schism is not purged even by martyrdom”; Augustine, De bapt. 4.17.24: “The fact of dying outside the church proves that he did not have charity”; cf. Sullivan, Salvation, 21 and 32.

44. John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, §99. It now reads: “You can commend your infant with hope to the same Father and his mercy.” See Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., “The Development of Doctrine About Infants Who Die Unbaptized,” TS 72 (2011): 3–14.

45. John Paul II, Redemptoris missio, §9.

46. Avery Dulles, “Population of Hell.”