What Is Hell, and May We Hope That It Is Empty?

A Real Debate

Few theological questions provoke stronger feelings than this one. The Church teaches firmly that hell exists and lasts for ever. Yet she prays for the salvation of all, and she has never named a single person as damned. (The basic teaching is set out in Is Hell Real, and Does God Send People There?)

This has led to a serious debate among faithful Catholic theologians. Some argue that we may hope, though we cannot know, that in the end no one will be lost. Others argue that Scripture and Tradition make that hope untenable. To understand the debate, we first need to be clear about what is settled.

What the Church Has Defined

Several points are matters of faith.

Hell exists. Jesus speaks of it repeatedly and plainly (Matthew 10:28; 25:41, 46; Mark 9:43–48). The Church has taught it in her creeds and councils, and the Catechism affirms it (CCC 1033–1035).

Hell is eternal. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught that the wicked will receive “perpetual punishment with the devil.” The constitution Benedictus Deus (1336) taught that those who die in actual mortal sin go down immediately to hell.

Those who die in mortal sin go there. Hell is the consequence of dying in a state of deliberate, unrepented rejection of God (CCC 1033).

God predestines no one to hell. It is reached only by a free turning away from God, persisted in to the end (CCC 1037).

Universal Salvation Rejected

One option is ruled out: the claim that all will certainly be saved, including the demons.

In the third century, the brilliant Alexandrian theologian Origen speculated that all spiritual beings, perhaps even Satan, would eventually be restored to God. This idea is called apokatastasis, or universal restoration. Something like it also appears in St Gregory of Nyssa.

In 543, a synod at Constantinople, called by the Emperor Justinian, condemned the Origenist teaching that the punishment of demons and the wicked is temporary and will one day end. The Church has never departed from that judgement. A Catholic may not hold that hell is certainly empty, or that it is a temporary state.

The Question That Remains

But a gap remains. The Church teaches that hell is real and eternal, and that it is a genuine possibility for every human being. She does not teach that anyone in particular is in it.

When she canonises a saint, the Church declares that the person is in heaven. She has no parallel procedure for hell. Not even Judas has ever been declared damned. The Catechism says only that the Church “prays that no one should be lost” (CCC 1058), echoing St Paul: God “desires all men to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4).

So the question is this: given that hell is a real possibility, may we hope that in fact no one ends up there?

The Case for Hope

The best-known argument for hope came from the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (1986). Balthasar was no liberal; St John Paul II named him a cardinal shortly before his death in 1988.

Balthasar insisted that he was not teaching universal salvation. He accepted that hell is a real possibility and that no one can know who will be saved. His claim was narrower: Christians may, and even should, hope and pray for the salvation of all.

He drew on several lines of thought:

Scripture contains two kinds of statements: stern warnings that some will be lost, and statements of God’s universal saving will (1 Timothy 2:4; Romans 11:32; 1 John 2:2). Neither set should swallow up the other.
Christ’s descent among the dead shows how far God’s love goes to reach the lost.
The Church prays for all and condemns no one by name.
Hope is not knowledge. We can hope for something we cannot be sure of.

Some later popes used language that has been read as sympathetic to this view, though none endorsed universalism. St John Paul II taught in 1999 that, without a special revelation from God, we cannot know whether or which human beings are actually damned. Writing earlier about Judas, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), he called the Church’s silence on such questions the only appropriate position for Christian faith.

The Case Against

Other theologians have argued that Balthasar’s hope sits uneasily with the Christian tradition.

They point first to Christ’s own words. “The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many… the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13–14). For most of Christian history, the great majority of theologians, including St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, read such passages as meaning that many are in fact lost. (A long list of Fathers, saints and Doctors who held this view is given in Will Only a Few Be Saved?)

The American theologian Ralph Martin, in Will Many Be Saved? (2012), drew attention to a passage of the Second Vatican Council that is often overlooked. Lumen Gentium 16 teaches that people who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel can be saved. But it continues: “very often” people deceived by the Evil One have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and the Church therefore works urgently to preach the Gospel.

Critics also worry about consequences. If people come to assume that everyone will probably be saved, the urgency of conversion and evangelisation may fade. Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (2007), wrote that there can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and their capacity for love, and that “this is what we mean by the word Hell” (Spe Salvi 45). He presented hell as a real outcome, not only a theoretical one.

What a Catholic May and May Not Say

Setting the debate out carefully, the limits are fairly clear.

A Catholic may not say:

that hell does not exist, or is only a metaphor;
that hell is temporary;
that it is certain that all will be saved;
that any particular person is certainly damned.

A Catholic may:

pray for the salvation of every person, living and dead;
hope for the salvation of any individual, however wicked they appeared;
hold, with much of the tradition, that many are in fact lost;
or hold, with Balthasar, that we may hope that none are, provided this remains a hope and not a claim to knowledge.

What no Catholic may do is treat the question as a reason for complacency.

Hell and Freedom

Underlying the whole debate is a question about freedom. If God respects human freedom, then a person can refuse Him finally. The Catechism describes hell as “definitive self-exclusion” (CCC 1033). C. S. Lewis made a similar point when he imagined the damned as people who, in the end, preferred themselves to God.

Those who hope for the salvation of all do not deny that this refusal is possible. They hope that God’s grace, which respects freedom, is also patient and inventive enough to win every heart. Those who doubt it point out that God has told us plainly that some refuse.

The Right Response

Whatever position a Catholic takes on this disputed question, the practical response is the same. Take Christ’s warnings seriously, especially for yourself. Never presume on God’s mercy, and never despair of it. Pray for everyone, especially the most hardened sinners. And share the Gospel, since it is the ordinary path by which God brings people to salvation.

The prayer of Fatima, said by many at the end of each decade of the Rosary, holds both sides together: “save us from the fires of hell; lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.”