I will put the Office of the Dead back up for Lent during the week so you can post your intentions and, hopefully, whether you plan on praying any hours of the Officium, too.
I once knew a Swedish Baptist in Connecticut who followed the Calvinistic determination of salvation: I am saved and I know it; God makes some people to be saved and some to be damned. When I shared the Apostolic view of Salvation he asked, "Am I saved then?" I replied, "I do not know and cannot know, but I'm not optimistic." I do not believe all are saved, although a minority of the Fathers did and so I think we should leave the idea alone as I have written here. We cannot condemn St. Gregory of Nyssa, St Isaac the Syrian, or the Alexandrian saint who believed it, but we should not promote the idea as a given and a false hope either as many in the 20th century have done. Christ has told us through Revelation and the Church what we must do to be saved. For those outside the Church, we must trust in God's mercy and justice—which never conflict and which balance the scales far better than our veiled human ideas about justice or forgiveness.
Why I am writing this is because some traditionalists and neo-cons seem to thrive on as few people getting upstairs as possible, on the elevator being too crowded to bring everyone in the lobby to the penthouse. Objectively, salvation can only be expected within the Church, but is not excluding an extrinsic act of forgiveness telling God what who He can and cannot save?
As with the teetotalling Swedish Baptist-Calvinist, I am neither optimistic nor sure. Stop worrying about those outside the Church and start worrying about your own soul and those you can influence in your own life who are outside of it.
Which is what father Gregory Hesse said in one of his conversations on Tradition. I totally agree!
ReplyDeleteGood post. Work out your salvation in fear and trembling...
ReplyDeleteI think we should leave the idea alone as I have written here.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that plenty of Balthasarians (who usually preach apocatastasis by the back door) and neo-Rahnerians (the latter constituting a large swath of what resides in our theology departments) will *not* leave it alone. The result is that universalism has very wide purchase in the Church (and the world) today. The danger facing us is not a pathology of a microscopic heaven urged by hordes of the overly scrupulous, but a vast antinomian sea marinated in Moral Therapeutic Deism. The Rorate fellows are a tiny drop in that sea. This constitutes a grave pastoral problem for the Church today.
Having said that, if leaving it alone is not an option, addressing the question requires careful handling, something Michael Voris is not generally known for. Ralph Martin, however, is another story, and I thought his recent popular work on the question, Will Many Be Saved? (Eeardmans, 2012) was a helpful tonic (if too rarely read). The Church *has* been clear that hell is real and has a population, even if it is not given to us to know (beyond Judas Iscariot, and the fallen angels) who goes there, or in what numbers; St Gregory of Nyssa and company *are* wrong on this score (albeit not heretics, there having not been a formal dogmatic definition on this point yet) and they are in a tiny minority among Fathers and Doctors on this question; but they were certainly not the only Fathers to have erred on some point.
But we can leave this task to the Ralph Martins (and responsible shepherds) among us, unless we find ourselves catechizing on this question; otherwise, I do agree that what is important for each of us is to "start worrying about your own soul and those you can influence in your own life who are outside of it."
The problem is two-sided. The emergence of universalists who believe "God is big puffy teddy bear" has been accompanied by the opposition going to very far ultra-Augustinian extremes. The Feeneyite nonsense is the one of the worst examples of this pathological obsession with hoping that as few souls as possible are saved and that we personally may be among the few elect. It's very telling when SSPX and FSSP church-goers exhibit Jansenistic or even Calvinistic tendencies.
DeleteI honestly hope as many of these "holy ones" are saved as possible so they are surprised by how large the population of heaven actually is compared to their expectations.
I am curious what you mean by "Calvinistic" tendencies? Do Calvinists, as a rule, reckon the elect smaller than other Protestants?
Delete"And I heard the number of the sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand sealed, out of every tribe of the sons of Israel...After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!'" (Rev 7:4, 9-10)
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteThis quotation implies that the number of the saved is many as opposed to two or three, not that the number is many relative to the number who are not saved. I can't draw the boundaries of the Church, but it seems most probable that there are more who are not saved than who are.
Delete...but it seems most probable that there are more who are not saved than who are.
DeleteReally hard to read this and Christ's words on the subject any other way - that much, at least, we can say, and probably not much more.
Still, the question asked by St. Paul's prison guard remains relevant: "Masters, what must I do, that I may be saved?" It's tempting to simply leave all non-Catholic and openly sinning souls to the mercy of God in order to avoid judgmentalism on our part, and maybe there's some virtue in that. Even the Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange argued for the salvation of most men in a speculative appendix to his work "Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul," quite against Thomas' own arguments on the matter.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's the case that traditionalists, conservatives, jansenites, feeneyites, or whatever, necessarily take any particular pleasure in considering the damnation of the wicked as such. There's a running theme in Dante's "Inferno" that the narrator needs to purge himself of his pity for the damned, because having pity for anyone consigned to Hell implies a distrust in God's just punishment. By the time he has traveled to the last circle, Dante is taking great pleasure in adding to the torments of the frozen traitors. This is not because he is a psychopath, but because his will has become more closely aligned with the Divine Will.
Perhaps some Catholics who insist that the majority of men will be damned do so out of an emotional imbalance or perverse pleasure, but I think most of them simply find peace in accepting Our Lord at his word: "How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it!" If there is any great deficiency in these Catholics, it is surely their lack of evangelical zeal to save as many as possible, and not their belief in the plain meaning of Christ's words.