A Dying Universalist’s Speculations on the Intermediate State

© 2019 James S. Cutsinger

I

Universal Salvation

When souls have been ill-taught about God, the true God will not let them gaze too long upon the Moloch which men have set up to represent Him. He will turn away their minds from that which men call Him, and fill them with some of His own lovely thoughts or works, such as may by degrees prepare the way for a vision of the Father.

George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

As readers of my Century of Ruminations will discover, I believe—and have always believed (ever

since I began thinking about such things)—that “God intends all human beings to be saved” (1

Timothy 2:4), and that whatever the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent Source of all

being intends to happen, whatever He desires to accomplish, will in fact necessarily happen. How

could it not? I am, in a word, a universalist, someone who holds that even the morally and

spiritually worst of men will not be subjected to eternal punishment after their death, but will

instead undergo a purgative and recuperative process proportionate to their sinful thoughts and

deeds in this life, and therefore of limited duration.

While I believe there to be no compelling scriptural, theological, philosophical, or

historical reasons to think otherwise—quite the contrary—this conviction of mine was not initially

based upon argument so much as on intuition. My early sense of God’s loving Presence at once

within and around me—the embracing inwardness (if you will permit me this paradox) of the One

who is Love itself, something I’ve been blessed to feel since childhood—has made it impossible

for me to suppose anything else could be true. And I mean “impossible” in as precise a sense as is

possible! I can no more believe that God could have created even a single person while knowing

(as He must have) that this person would suffer eternal conscious torment in a hell of the Lord’s

own devising—the dominant view in the western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, thanks

among others to Augustine and Calvin—than I can believe that 2 + 2 = 5.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as hell. The idea certainly appears in the Bible,

as do any number of images and metaphors clearly meant to describe it and to instill a salubrious

fear in the hearts of the merely complacent. We find, among other ghastly pictures, a lake of fire

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and an outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Confusing for many

Christians is the fact that the fire and the punishment it is meant to inflict are nearly always

described in English translations as “eternal” or “everlasting”, though this is quite clearly a case

of mistranslation. In the Greek text of the New Testament, the adjective in question is aiōnion,

which means lasting for the length of an aiōn, that is, an aeon or age. Such an age could be as short

for the writers of Scripture as a given person’s own lifetime, or as long as something corresponding

more closely to our English term aeon, and thus embracing perhaps thousands of years. Either

way, however, neither the noun nor its derivative adjective would have necessarily signified

something having no end at all—the only Biblical exception being when the term is applied to God

Himself.1

So, no: I do not wish to deny the existence of hell, only its eternality. Mine is a Patristic

reading of the scriptural term and a Patristic understanding of the reality in question, especially as

one finds them expressed by Saint Macrina the Younger (324-379) and her brother Saint Gregory

of Nyssa (335-394), perhaps the most explicit universalists among the canonized fathers and

mothers of the Church.2 But they are by no means alone. Saints as prominent and influential as

Gregory the Theologian (329-390) and Isaac of Nineveh (seventh-century) appear to share this

perspective, and one also finds it, though in a somewhat more muted and circumspect form, in that

veritable giant among the fathers, Saint Maximos the Confessor (c. 580-662).3 All of them taught

1 We are confronted with a surprising juxtaposition of meanings at the conclusion of Romans. The term does mean “everlasting” in Romans 16:26, where Saint Paul speaks about “the command of the eternal God”—the command of the aiōníou Theoū in the Greek. On the other hand, aiōnion clearly has the more common, limited meaning in the immediately preceding verse. In Romans 16:25, the Apostle speaks of the “mystery” of the Gospel, which was kept secret (he says) “for long ages, but is now disclosed”. The phrase “long ages” is an English translation of the Greek chronois aiōniois, which literally means “the long-lasting times”. Obviously, Paul does not mean for us to think of these times or ages as eternal, for if they were, they would have no end, and the Gospel of which Paul is speaking would still be a secret and would have never been revealed. 2 One of the most important sources is Gregory’s dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, composed shortly after the death of his brother, Saint Basil of Caesarea (330-379). Gregory presents himself as the student of “our sister and teacher”, Macrina, who—she herself nearing death—consoles Gregory by presenting (among other points) arguments for universal salvation. 3 In her massive study The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Brill, 2013), and more recently in A Larger Hope? Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich (Cascade Books, 2019), Ilaria L. E. Ramelli finds universalist tendencies, if not outright sympathies and even explicit declarations, in a surprisingly wide range of authoritative Christian figures, including, for example, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (296-373): “Through the union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all…. By His own power He restored the whole nature of man. The Savior’s own inspired disciples assure us of this…. ‘If One died on behalf of all, then all died, and He died for all that we should no longer live unto ourselves, but unto Him who died and rose again from the dead’ [2 Corinthians 5:14-15]…. He made a new beginning of life for all of us. By man

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that there is a hell, that it is a harrowing state of existence we should try to avoid, but that it is

purgative not punitive in character, finite in duration, and penultimate to an ultimate bliss for all.4

Saint Isaac is distinctive in stressing that it is not some separate “place”, but rather the way the

unceasing, ever-forgiving love of God feels to the ego which wants to be God.5

I should add here a word about another Church father whose name almost always comes

up in this context, namely Origen (184-253), upon whom these and other saints relied in their

interpretation of Scripture, but whose teachings concerning the ultimate salvation or restoration

(apokatastasis)6 of all were nonetheless supposedly condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council

in A.D. 553. Ironically, Origen’s universalist inclinations seem to have been the most tentatively

expressed of all the Patristic writers. Anyone who reads him carefully can see very clearly that he

was a dialectician. What he says on the subject of salvation is always cautious and exploratory,

always with the aim of putting forward propositions for discussion, but without insisting on the

dogmatic truth of any given eschatology, as did Nyssa and others. Nonetheless it was he, Origen,

who was condemned and anathematized by the Church, three hundred years after the poor man

death had gained its power over men; by the Word made man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew. This is what Paul says, that true servant of Christ: ‘For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Just as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’” [1 Corinthians 15:21-22]. As for those among the Fathers who are not so explicit, pastoral considerations may well have been in play. One may be a universalist, after all, while at the same time feeling that the prospect of everlasting hellfire is still the best way of encouraging the less reflective, less philosophical among the faithful in living a serious Christian life. One thinks of Saint Paul’s differentiation in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15 between “the natural man” [the psychikos, or “psychical”, man in the Greek], who “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God”, and “the spiritual man [the pneumatikos, who] judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” I myself have found that universalism is often rejected by people who mistakenly think it means that there is no judgment, no accounting for one’s life, not even—most absurdly—any need for Christ’s death and resurrection. Clearly, one does not wish to leave that impression! If someone cannot understand the idea of proportionate justice, perhaps it is better to leave him thinking that hell is eternal than that it is non-existent. The nineteenth-century Pietist theologian Christian Gottlieb Barth remarked, “Anyone who does not believe in the universal restoration is an ox, but anyone who teaches it is an ass” (Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Melody of Theology: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 5. This paper is proof, I suppose, that I am an ass! 4 This understanding of hell is quite different from both the purgatory and the hell of Roman Catholic doctrine. Purgatory also involves a process of purification, of course, but for the Catholic, only those ultimately bound for Heaven will pass through that state, not those destined for damnation; they will never experience anything except an eternal and purely punitive hell. 5 It is a curious fact, largely unknown in most Catholic and Protestant circles, but the farther East one goes—first to the “Eastern” Orthodox churches, but then, even more notably, to the “Oriental” Orthodox Churches—the greater is Patristic (and indeed contemporary) openness to universalism. Saint Isaac is an especially interesting case, recognized as a saint, not only by the Assyrian Church of the East, to which he belonged, but by the Greek, Russian, and other Eastern Orthodox Churches as well. 6 The term is Biblical. “Change your hearts and repent so that your sins might be expunged when the time of renewal comes from the presence of the Lord, so that He might send Jesus Christ, who was preached unto you, whom Heaven must hold until the time of that restoration [apokatastasis] of all things of which God has spoken through the mouth of His holy prophets ever since the world began” (Acts 3:19-21).

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was tortured for his faith and died a confessor’s death—or rather (I’m obliged to use the word

again) supposedly condemned. Most scholars of merit are now agreed: first, that the propositions

attributed to Origen were probably extracted from the writings of Evagrios the Solitary (345-399),

whose universalism was expressed in a less tentative, much bolder tone; and, second, that these

propositions were not in fact debated or perhaps even mentioned at the Council itself, but attached

to its canons (together with Origen’s name) when they were subsequently edited.7 The vagaries of

history being what they are, however, many continue to think that Origen was a heretic, indeed a

heresiarch (if not worse), and that the decrees of the Fifth Council make it impossible for an

orthodox Christian to be a universalist.

A further point needs to be mentioned before I move on, which is that a majority of

Orthodox Christian authorities today, both scholars and clergy—among them respected hierarchs

of the Church, including Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev—may

well be described as “hopeful”, if not confident, universalists. Dare we hope for the salvation of

7 In recent correspondence, the V. Revd. Professor John Anthony McGuckin, an archpriest of the Romanian Church, a member of the theology faculty at Oxford University, and one of the world’s most prolific and respected Orthodox scholars, assured me of this second point, adding that the editors in question seem to have had an anti-intellectualist distaste for raising speculative questions, especially along Origenian lines. What may have been considered and condemned were the efforts of later, sixth-century “Origenists” to link universal salvation with (a) the pre-existence of souls, an idea Origen did advance, but again in a strictly provisional, dialectical way, and (b) a number of quite outlandish notions having an obviously Gnostic provenance, as for example the claim that the resurrection body will at first be ethereal in substance and spherical in shape before giving way to a purely immaterial and spiritual mode of existence, even though Origen himself went to great lengths to repudiate Gnosticism as a dangerous heresy.

“Origen Teaching the Saints”

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all? as Metropolitan Kallistos has asked in an article by that title; and his answer is yes:

Universalism is without doubt an acceptable theologoumenon, that is, a pious opinion that in no

way conflicts with Orthodox dogma, the Church having never unambiguously pronounced on the

question. It’s certainly good to know, being myself an Orthodox Christian, that my intuitive

confidence concerning this matter does not mean I’m a heretic! And it strengthens my sense that

the scriptural, philosophical, and other arguments in defense of universalism—beautifully

summarized in David Bentley Hart’s recently published book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven,

Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale, 2019)—are irrefutable and should alone be enough (in the

absence of intuition) to convince anyone who studies them carefully and without prejudice.

There is no need to rehearse all the arguments and counterarguments here. I do feel I should

say at least something, however, about a common objection to universalism based upon human

freedom. Yes, some will say, God does indeed desire to save everyone, as Scripture affirms (see

again 1 Timothy 2:4). But at the same time, He is obliged, as it were, to respect the “free” decision

of those who “choose” to reject His love and refuse to repent. Having bestowed the gift of “free”

will upon every man, God cannot, or at any rate will not, override or undercut its deployment, even

if this means the eternal damnation of those who remain obstinate in their rejection of Him. In

short, He will not and would not save anyone against that person’s will; God persuades but never

coerces. As I say, this is a common objection, today perhaps the most common of all, an objection

shared, I am sorry to say—at least at one point in his life—by one of my own greatest theological

heroes, C. S. Lewis—though, to his credit, Lewis did waffle a bit on this point. In his theodicy,

The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes:

I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully: “All will be saved.” But my reason retorts, “Without their will, or with it?” If I say, “Without their will”, I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say, “With their will,” my reason replies, “How if they will not give in?”8

As I say, Lewis wavered on this issue. The words I have quoted were first published in

1940. Six years later, he concludes The Great Divorce: A Dream by imagining a dialogue between

himself and the man whom he unabashedly called his Master, George MacDonald, who is now in

Heaven and has come down to the Heavenly narthex, if you will, to meet Lewis, newly arrived.

8 The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 118-19.

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Lewis writes, “‘In your own books, Sir,’ said I, ‘you were a Universalist. You talked as if all men

would be saved. And St Paul too.’” Interestingly enough, the real-life MacDonald, who was indeed

very much a confident universalist, is here made to sound more cautious, as he admonishes Lewis:

“‘Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be,

as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of

things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions.’ ‘Because they are too terrible, Sir?’ ‘No.

Because all answers deceive.’”9 However one reads this artfully ambiguous ending to the later

book, it seems that Lewis was himself no longer quite as sure as he had been in The Problem of

Pain that hell is eternal or that universalism is a heresy.

Mind you, I myself agree—as did Origen and the other Patristic authors I have

mentioned—that salvation requires synergeia or co-operation between man and God. It is not

automatic, but depends upon our willing repentance and free acceptance of God’s help and

forgiveness. But here’s the problem: What exactly do we mean when we talk about our will?

Notice that in the paragraph preceding the quotation from Lewis, I have placed “free” and

“choose” in quotation marks. I did so to get you thinking, if only subconsciously, about what

freedom and choice really are. A first question the Christian must ask is whether God indeed gave

us true freedom from the start, or bestowed instead the possibility of our becoming truly free. After

all, our first human parents, according to the teaching of Saint Irenaeus (c. 130 - c. 202), were as

yet intellectually and spiritually immature: Created in the image of God, and thus with the potential

to become fully what God wished them to be, they had not as yet grown into His likeness, not yet

actualized that potential, before the Fall occurred, a Fall occasioned precisely by their immaturity

and childish ignorance.

But isn’t the same true of any fall—yours or mine, let alone the primordial Fall of Adam

and Eve? In order for me to sin freely and thus responsibly—to make the “free” choice to sin—I

must know what I am doing, and know that it is contrary to the law of God, contrary in fact to the

very goodness that God Himself is. And yet, in the very instant of making such a “choice”, do I

really know this? Am I fully conscious, or am I not also acting out of my own immaturity and

childish ignorance? And if so, am I really accountable for what I have done, accountable enough

to merit eternal punishment? The phrase I have used—“in the very instant of making such a

‘choice’”—is crucial. After the fact, even a split second after the fact, my conscience may tell me

9 The Great Divorce: A Dream (New York: Harper Collins, 1973), 140.

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that what I did was wrong. But in the very instant, I wasn’t acting from conscience. I had somehow

placed my conscience on hold, and was taking the “good” to be whatever seemed to me good,

perhaps the most pleasurable, what I thought was the right thing for me, just as a little child does.

Is this real freedom, or rather an unthinking reaction to urges, inclinations, and other stimuli,

whether within or around me? If I’m not myself in control, am I really choosing? Am I free in that

moment, or a slave?

I find that Hart is especially helpful when countering the argument against universalism

based upon freedom.10 The problem, he suggests, is two-fold. First of all, beginning in the early

modern period, people began to think about freedom as if it meant that, in choosing, we are

obedient to no prior aim or intention, as if a choice were a purely spontaneous act. If this were true,

Hart says, “no fruitful distinction could be made between personal agency and pure impersonal

impulse”11—his umbrella term, if you will, for the urges, inclinations, and other stimuli I was just

speaking of. But this is not in fact freedom. On the contrary, true freedom consists in my coming

to flourish as the kind of being God made me to be, and I can be said to be truly choosing only

when a given decision contributes, however indirectly, to that flourishing. Hart refers to this as the

“classical” understanding of freedom, the way human freedom was understood from ancient times

until the late medieval period. Part of his counterargument is worth quoting at some length:

To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our souls, we ceaselessly yearn. Whatever separates us from that end, even if it be our own power of choice, is a form of bondage to the irrational. We are not free because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. And to choose well we must ever more clearly see the ‘sun of the Good’ (to employ the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly yet we must continue to choose well; the more emancipated from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose…. For anyone to be free, there must be a real correspondence between his or her mind and the

10 He makes telling points in this regard throughout That All Shall Be Saved, but especially in the “Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?” Needless to say, I am greatly oversimplifying a much subtler line of reasoning in what follows. I cannot recommend strongly enough a close and careful reading of Hart’s entire book, with attention focused on his arguments, not on what is (for some) this author’s objectionably combative style! I firmly believe that those who prayerfully study these arguments will end by themselves becoming universalists. 11 That All Shall Be Saved, 172. “An absolutely libertarian act,” as he points out elsewhere in the book, would therefore be indistinguishable from “sheer chance, or a mindless organic or mechanical impulse”, no more “‘free’ in fact than an earthquake or embolism” (79). An earthquake, needless to say, doesn’t know what it’s doing and is therefore not responsible for the damage it causes. No one can “blame” it, and certainly not “damn” it!

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structure of reality, and a rational cognizance on his or her part of what constitutes either the fulfillment or the ruin of a human soul. Where this cognizance is absent in a soul, there can only be aimlessness in the will, the indeterminacy of the unmoored victim of circumstance, which is the worst imaginable slavery to the accidental and the mindless. If then there is such a thing as eternal perdition as the result of an eternal refusal of repentance, it must also be the result of an eternal ignorance, and therefore has nothing really to do with freedom at all. So, no: Not only is an eternal rejection of God unlikely; it is a logically vacuous idea.12

Hart’s language and argumentation here are more philosophical than theological, and a bit

technical at that. But the essential point he is making is in fact a fairly simple one, and fully

confirmed by the words of our Lord in the Scriptures themselves: “Everyone committing sin is a

slave to sin” (John 8:34). Obviously, a slave isn’t free, and if you’re not free, you’re not culpable,

nor therefore deserving of punishment. Or again, and more poignantly, these words from the Cross:

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Not, or not yet,

cognizant of the true Good, but having “chosen” instead what only seemed to them good, those

responsible for Christ’s crucifixion—Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate, even Judas, together with the

nameless rabble—cannot be said to have knowingly undertaken the evil they committed, and are

thus no more deserving of eternal torment than any other ignorant slave.

Hart’s second point in this context has to do with the nature of God. Those who reject

universalism on the grounds that it fails to honor human freedom have mistakenly painted a picture

in which God is simply one more “entity” in the universe alongside all the other entities—more

imposing, more ancient, more powerful, sure—but still just some thing. Instead of “choosing” this

thing, and living lives in obedient conformity to it, those whom God justifiably damns are those

who have chosen some other thing and made it their god. But this, says Hart, is a purely

“mythological” image of who or what God actually is. Christian tradition insists on the contrary

that God is not simply “a” being, but Being itself—or even, in the teaching of Saint Dionysius the

Areopagite (c. 500), the One beyond Being, the One in whom “we live and move and have our

being” (Acts 17:28). Moreover, and perhaps more to the point, He is not simply good, but

Goodness itself. Notice that I have continued to place “choosing” in quotation marks in order to

remind us, again, that true freedom isn’t choice; on the contrary, true freedom overcomes and

transcends our need to choose. But even assuming that “free will” and “choice” were genuine

12 That All Shall Be Saved, 173, 178. My italics.

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aspects of freedom, God is not the sort of “thing” that could ever be an object of choice, nor

therefore of rejection. Insofar as we are always seeking, always desiring, what seems to us good,

albeit “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12), we are in fact always seeking God, however

many mistakes we make along the way. To quote Hart again:

[God] remains forever the encompassing final object that motivates and makes actual every choice, the Good that makes the will free in the first place. Even an act of apostasy, then, traced back to its most primordial impulse, is motivated by a desire for God…. You cannot reject God except defectively, by having failed to recognize Him as the primordial object of your deepest longings, the very source of their activity. We cannot choose between Him and some other end in an absolute sense; we can choose only between better and worse approaches to His transcendence… To reject God is still, however obscurely and uncomprehendingly, to seek God.13

Whatever good I desire, however noble or base, is indirectly a desire for the ultimate Good, for

God. Whatever my “choice”, I am in fact choosing God. There is no escaping Him, finally—not

for me, thank Heavens, nor for anyone else!

II

To Speculate, or Not to Speculate, That Is the Question

The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

These, then, are the “scholarly” thoughts—I suppose that’s what I should call them, given the

overweening plethora of footnotes packed into this little paper thus far!—which I have come to

13 That All Shall Be Saved, 185.

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regard, after a lifetime of reading and study, as providing philosophical and other support for my

early intuitions; just a few of the reasons which have helped to confirm an aging theologian in his

ever-since-boyhood sense of God’s loving, ever-merciful Presence, what I called at the outset His

“embracing inwardness”. This, in short, is why I’m a universalist, convinced that all men and

women will eventually be saved.

But “eventually” is a large word! Or rather, more precisely, it refers to something—a span

of time, perhaps14—that could in some cases, doubtless mine among them, be ever so large, quite

extended, indeed. What are we to suppose comes between? In other words, what comes

immediately after we die, but before we might reasonably expect to begin experiencing in its

fulness the blessed, blissful life we universalists expect us all to enjoy? For nothing is so evident—

nothing more susceptible to empirical confirmation—than that people leave this world in a whole

range of states of readiness, some considerably more prepared than others, having done more to

actualize the image as likeness. I know for myself that I’m going to require a good deal of further

work before I can be said to have truly grown to “mature manhood, to the measure of the stature

of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13) and can hope to “partake” of “the divine nature” (2 Peter

1:4). So, what do you suppose will happen to me, and what will I be expected to do—with God’s

help, of course—when it comes to my many sins and deficiencies? What happens in the

“between”?

In the opening paragraph of this paper, I spoke of a “purgative and recuperative process

proportionate to [our] thoughts and deeds in this life”. This, as I’ve tried to make clear, is my

understanding, my Patristic understanding, of “hell”, an understanding thankfully shared by a

significant number of my fellow Orthodox. Labeling the process “proportionate” means, of course,

that it cannot be eternal. There is, after all, only a certain number of thoughts and deeds that can

be compressed into a finite life on this planet. Even if all of them were unimaginably heinous—

pick your favorite villain: Hitler comes to mind for many of us—it makes no sense to suppose that

their just recompense could be of an infinite duration. Nor, of course, were it infinite and thus

everlasting, could it in any way be considered recuperative or therapeutic. It could only be

14 Whatever “time” may mean, if anything, in the intermediate realm, in our continuing life after life. This question will be considered more fully below.

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punitive—eternal, conscious torment, having no aim except the inflicting of unending pain, and

altogether unworthy of the God who is Love.15

Given not merely my advancing age but the fact that I’m suffering from a terminal illness,

as hinted above in my title, it should come as no surprise to readers of this article that I’ve been

spending a good deal of time and expending a considerable amount of mental and spiritual energy

pondering this “proportionate process” and asking myself any number of (perhaps) unanswerable

questions. The illness? Lung cancer, already deemed “Stage IV” when it was first diagnosed, since

it had metastasized to several bones before being detected. And yet, here I still am, nearly two and

a half years later. Some of my family and friends, a physician among them, like to call my

surprising persistence on this planet a miracle. I’m hesitant to invoke so lofty a term; as far as I’m

concerned, it could be the result of divine intervention, but it could also simply be the unfolding

of a natural process. But I have certainly wondered many times, not how, but why—why I’m not

merely alive at this point, but still able to pray and to ponder, to ruminate and to write.

One answer, of course, and doubtless the best, is that God in His goodness, in the Goodness

He is, is generously giving me more time to prepare, helping me even now to do some much needed

growing up and thus, perchance, shortening my “time” in the intermediate state. But perhaps it’s

also because He wants me to share a few of my reflections before I die. An arrogant notion, you

may say, and well it may be. But maybe, just maybe, it’s because He knows that my words will

now have considerably more existential and personal weight (at least for some readers) than they

did when, as a university professor of theology and religious thought, I was merely talking about

“views of the afterlife” based on what I had read in some books and was not myself under sentence

of a perhaps imminent passing. As I now tell people with some regularity, I’ve been blessed with

a “wake-up call”. We all know, with Hamlet, that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a

sparrow; if it be now, ’tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it

will come. The readiness is all” (Act V, Scene 2). We all know, in other words, that we’re all going

15 Some of my readers may here object by citing Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who advanced the curious claim in his Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Man?) that an eternal hell is just inasmuch as in sinning one dishonors an infinitely honorable God; it’s not how many sins we may commit in an admittedly finite length of time, but the One we sin against that counts. Try as I might, I have never been able to understand how the same man who advanced the subtlest and best of all arguments for the existence of God, the “ontological” argument—see my “Thinking the Unthinkable: Anselm’s Excitatio Mentis”—could, in this case, have said something so silly. Are we really to think that Love (1 John 4:8) could be offended, or would, like some thin-skinned human potentate, require a payback—an infinite payback, no less!—for transgressions against His honor? Would He not on the contrary be the first to forgive, as His divine Son (with Whom He is of “one essence” and shares a single will) requests on the Cross? Still, this so-called “satisfaction theory” of the atonement remains alive and well in Roman Catholic theology.

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to die. Even so, when we’re still strong and healthy, as I myself was right up until that unexpected

diagnosis, it’s unbelievably easy to play the fool and forget—forget our mortality and, as a

consequence, forget to get ready. If nothing else, maybe this little paper of mine can serve as a

bracing reminder, whether its concluding “speculations” concerning what’s next for me (and for

you) turn out to have any relation to the reality at issue or not.

In any case, whatever your reservations as to my qualifications for this difficult job—and

I wouldn’t blame you if your doubts were rather considerable—I hope you will allow me at least

to pose a few questions. Yes, I’m going to suggest a few answers as well, as my title intimates, but

I do so in no way dogmatically, but rather, like Origen, with an implicit invitation that you

deliberate with me, pondering together the journey all of us will one day be obliged to take, I in

all likelihood a little sooner than you. As I’ve explained at some length, I have no doubts

whatsoever as to where we’ll end up, my childhood intuitions having been repeatedly confirmed

by disciplined thought and, as I see it, unanswerable argument. But in opening this new door, I

admit that it’s extrapolations, transpositions, and introsusceptions that I’ll have to rely on. Oh, I’ve

had a few presentiments and intimations, too—brought about, no doubt, by the grace-driven

pressure of knowing that I probably have little time left—but they haven’t been nearly as limpid

or undeniable as those described at the start of this paper concerning the salvation of all.

Which is why I’ve been soliciting some conversational company. During my decades as a

teacher, I found any number of times that a serious question often allowed me to find, deep down

inside myself, an answer which, until that very moment, I didn’t know that I knew. It took a

student’s puzzlement to catalyze a clarity I didn’t know I possessed—and likely didn’t possess

until God took mercy on us both! With that experience in mind, I’ve been inviting my family and

a few friends to become my co-workers, asking them:

What question concerning the intermediate state would you wish to have answered, were it possible, before your own death?

What follows below is therefore a combination of my own questions, those I’ve wrestled and

continue to wrestle with most, and questions that have been put to me by others—together (of

course) with my “speculations” as to what the answers might be.

I think it wise, however—before turning to this collection of queries—to address a more

fundamental question, one that will in all likelihood be on the mind of those readers who chance

to come across these reflections, but who find themselves less well-disposed than my family and

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friends to grant the value or legitimacy of my efforts, let alone their results. I can imagine their

question being posed in the following way:

Saint Paul tells us very clearly, and with no hesitation, that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). To “speculate” on the subject is to trespass into a realm beyond our ken. Aren’t you at all fearful, Professor Cutsinger, of the dangers involved?

I suspect that so skeptical and worried a response to my thoughts regarding the intermediate state

will come mostly from Protestants—those among them, that is, who believe that there is such a

state, since many don’t, being convinced instead that it’s straight to heaven or a punitive hell once

one has died. Still, a certain fideistic fear of going beyond what the Scriptures explicitly teach, or

what has come down to us as dogmatic tradition, is by no means uncommon among Christians in

general, including my fellow Orthodox. Witness, for example, this remark by the recently reposed

Metropolitan Emeritus of Etna, Archimandrite Chrysostomos (1943-2019), a senior scholar of the

Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, and a monk of impeccable academic credentials: “In

modern times, theology—and, alas, to some extent in the Orthodox Church, too—has become the

domain of speculation and creative presumption. We have separated the description of true

spiritual experience, which was once real theology, from the modern practice of theology.”16

Now, of course: I fully agree that experience trumps speculation every time. If I’ve been

to the zoo or on safari and actually seen a giraffe, I don’t need to surmise or guess as to whether

this is an animal with a very long neck. Not having yet died, however, and therefore not yet graced

with any personal experience of the intermediate realm, it seems speculation is my only choice.

You will understand, I hope, that I am speaking here with tongue firmly pressed in cheek!

Obviously, these critics are not talking about my experience, largely inconsequential as they may

justly suppose it to be. Speaking of “true spiritual experience”, they wish to point me instead to

the supra-sensory, clairvoyant, revelatory experience of the saints—or rather, more precisely, to

16 Archimandrite Chrysostomos, “Foreword”, Constantine Cavarnos, The Future Life According to Orthodox Teaching (Etna, California: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1985), 8 (my italics). Professor Cavarnos (1918-2011), who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, taught at several highly ranked universities and colleges, authored over 60 books, and finished his life as schema-monk at St Anthony’s Monastery in Arizona, is at pains in this book to issue much the same warning and critique concerning a merely “speculative” theology.

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those among the saints and holy elders in whose lives and teachings we do find descriptions of the

world after death.

As great as is my respect for those who wish to defend and promote a strictly “empirical”

theology,17 I confess that I have two problems with their line of criticism when it comes to

reflecting on the intermediate state. The first is my hesitation in placing too much confidence in

teachings, however saintly, experiential, and ancient their origin, which are not regarded as dogma

by the Church at large, as for example the descriptions one finds in the Life of Saint Basil the

Younger concerning the “Toll Houses”.18 As it happens, the only eschatological teachings having

dogmatic status for an Orthodox Christian are contained in the Nicene Creed, which tells us that

Christ “will come again, with glory, to judge both the living and the dead”, and that we ourselves

may confidently “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come”.

My second reservation results from the fact that at least one especially noteworthy saint

has given us explicit permission to “speculate” about various questions for which there has been

no dogmatic pronouncement. I have in mind the only Father of the Church who is a member of

three human trinities: he is one of the three Cappadocians, along with his friend Basil the Great

and Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa; more importantly, he is one of the three Holy Hierarchs of

the Church, together with Basil and John Chrysostom (c. 349-407); and, most importantly, he is

one of only three Orthodox Fathers to have been granted the title “Theologian”, along with John

the Evangelist and Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022). I am talking, of course, about Saint

Gregory Nazianzus (329-390). And the permission I have in mind can be found in the first of his

famous Theological Orations, delivered in 379 in Constantinople. Having first admonished his

audience that theological discussion should be engaged in prayerfully and that it is only for those

who approach it as “a serious undertaking” and who “make life a meditation on death”, he proposes

17 These authors’ perspective, which is shared by yet another widely read Orthodox theologian, Father John Romanides (1927-2001), is often labeled “empirical” on the grounds that the teachings of the Holy Fathers of the Church were based on their direct experience of the Truth, not on argument, interpretation, or deduction. His Eminence Hierotheos Vlachos, the Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, has brought this perspective to prominence in such books as Empirical Dogmatics of the Orthodox Catholic Church (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2011), Vols. I and II. I do respect and admire these men, and have learned much from their books. On the other hand, it puzzles me how anyone with any knowledge of the early history of the Church, or of the debates, often heated, at the Ecumenical Councils, could come away thinking that argument was not a part of what led to our Creed—argument based upon premises drawn in some cases from pre-Christian philosophy. Or again: One has only to read the Disputation with Pyrrhus to see that the doctrine of Christ’s two wills was not something simply revealed to Saint Maximos; it required a careful exegesis of Scripture as well as a subtle philosophical distinction between modes of willing: namely, the natural and the gnomic. 18 I shall be discussing the Toll Houses more fully below.

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what he regards as appropriate subjects or aims in such discussion, among them demonstrating the

deficiencies of pagan doctrines concerning the afterlife. If, however, one wishes to confine his

attention to Christian teaching alone, he should feel free, the saint says, to “speculate … about the

resurrection, the judgment, [and] reward and punishment”—in other words, about various

eschatological matters. “In these questions,” Gregory continues, “to hit the mark is not useless, to

miss it is not dangerous”.19

Having often pondered the quite striking divide between this and other like-minded

Fathers, on the one hand, and the contemporary proponents of a strictly “empirical” theology, on

the other, I can’t help but wonder whether one’s degree of comfort with “speculation”—whether

one finds it useful, useless, or downright dangerous—may be a matter, not of education or

intelligence, certainly, but of vocation and temperament. Like me, some of my fellow Orthodox

readily see the value of thinking as it were “outside the box”—the box, that is, of dogmatic and

canonical pronouncements—while others don’t. And this, I believe, is because some of us see

dialectic and argument as potential supports for a deeper life of prayer and a deepened relation to

God, while others perceive only dichotomy, if not opposition, between reason on the one hand and

a more or less unquestioned and unquestioning faith on the other.20

This difference of temperament or vocation that we find in contemporary debates between

Christians is by no means lacking in precedent. One sees it in reading some of the earliest Fathers,

with Saint Justin Martyr (100-165)—also called “the Philosopher”, a telling epithet if ever there

were one!—ranged at one end of the spectrum, and the apologist and polemicist Tertullian (155-

220) at the other. According to Justin, “Christ … is the Reason [the Logos in his original Greek;

cf. John 1:9] of which every race of man partakes. Those who lived in accordance with Reason are

Christians, even though they were called godless, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and

Heraclitus and others like them.”21 Tertullian, on the other hand, bitingly and rather bitterly

counters with his famously rhetorical question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Church

19 Oration 27: 3, 7, 10 (yet again, my italics). 20 I spoke earlier of C. S. Lewis as one of my “theological heroes”. Much of Lewis’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is concerned with the life to come and is of a speculative cast, including the book I’ve already mentioned, The Great Divorce, which deals with the intermediate state, precisely. One also thinks of Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold; the second volume of his “space trilogy”, Perelandra; the concluding tale of the Narnia Chronicles, The Last Battle; and the chapters on “Hell” and “Heaven” in The Problem of Pain. I might mention here, too, Leaf by Niggle, by Lewis’s good friend and fellow “Oxford Inkling”, J. R. R. Tolkien, its author’s clever and deceptively profound contribution to speculation about the intermediate realm. 21 First Apology, 46.

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with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? I have no use for a Stoic or a Platonic or a

dialectic Christianity. After Jesus Christ we have no need of speculation.”22 Something of the same

difference in outlook seems to have driven an unfortunate wedge between two of the three

Cappadocians as they pondered the significance and aims of the monastic life. I was able to call

upon Saint Gregory the Theologian as a witness for the defense—defending, that is, my belief in

the legitimacy of theological speculation. I could not have made quite the same use of Gregory’s

friend and fellow monastic pioneer, Saint Basil:

Basil’s [view of] monasticism … was serious and ascetically Spartan in its tone…. Basil’s demands for a more rigorous and permanent commitment both surprised and disturbed Gregory…. A lifestyle centered around physical labor was not in harmony with his own inclinations or his own dreams for the future of Christian monastic life. Gregory was more interested in theory, the development of the intellectual and spiritual life in reflective solitude…. What Gregory saw as the whole purpose and justification of the monastic life was that it afforded time for the highest level of reflection, speculation, prayer, and reading. It was this he wanted to do, not dig irrigation systems or cultivate turnips.23

So, to speculate or not to speculate: that is the question! With my sincerest apologies to

those who say “no!” to speculation, who feel called to a strictly empirical theology, several of them

monastics from whom I’ve learned much and whom I’m blessed to call my good friends, I find at

this late stage of my life that I cannot but continue along the same reflective, philosophical, and

speculative path that I have followed for decades: the path of Saint Gregory the Theologian, a path

to which I firmly believe I was called, though of course not as a monk but as a professor and family

man.

22 Prescriptions against Heretics, 7. 23 John A. McGuckin, St Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 90, 93, 95. McGuckin adds, “It would be easy to dismiss [Gregory’s] incipient theories of monastic life … as rather weak-kneed dilettantism in the face of Basil’s radical monastic settlement. But this would be too facile a judgment. At stake was not, essentially, a question of ascetical rigor. Gregory was of an ascetical temperament himself, but in moderation, preferring simplicity of lifestyle to the bold feats of ascetic endurance in which some of the Egyptian and Syrian monks indulged. What was really at question between Basil and Gregory’s idea of the life of solitude was not its ultimate point, but rather its methods and proximate purpose” (94-95). To recur to our earlier discussion of universal salvation, Professor McGuckin believes that the alleged condemnation of Origen was the result, at least in part, of “the ongoing conflict in the [sixth-century] Palestinian church (predominantly composed of monasteries) between the intellectual monks (dedicated followers of Evagrios, Gregory Nazianzen, and the Origenian spiritual tradition) and the more simple ascetics, who tended to be also more fundamentalist in their reading of the Bible and who thought all this intellectual stuff was a distraction from solid monastic practices, such as Psalter reading and heavy fasting”; by contrast, for monastics with a more philosophical calling, “asceticism was no use without understanding the mysteries” (personal correspondence, February 2019).

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I do so, however, remembering the saint’s admonition that theological speculation should

be undertaken in a prayerful and serious spirit. This means in turn that I must be careful to answer,

or rather attempt to answer, only those questions concerning the intermediate realm where I feel

that I have at least an inkling of an answer already, or where I think I might be able to build upon

something I do know, something I have “empirically” experienced. As mentioned earlier, in

preparing to write this paper, I invited my family and a few friends to submit some questions of

their own; together with mine, these came to nearly 50 individual queries, far too many for an

article of the length I intended. Not surprisingly, however, many of these were so similar as to be

essentially the same. Therefore, once I condensed and combined, and once I eliminated those

remaining questions for which I knew I had not even an “inkling”—no “ghost of an answer”, if

you’ll allow me this pun!—I was able to reduce the list to five suitably provocative puzzles, five

questions I thought I might usefully answer: with God’s help, of course, and your prayers.

I shall begin with the question I feel most confident in answering, for I know that I’m not

on my own in this case, but can draw upon the insights of a much wiser and more gifted Orthodox

Christian, a scholar-monk whom I first met on Mount Athos, whose knowledge of our tradition far

exceeds my own. It’s also the question whose answer will help to guide us best in pondering the

other four puzzles and speculating as to their most likely solutions.

III

Questions and Answers

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 17:20-21

Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.

John 5:25

Question 1 How are we to distinguish between serious, prayerful speculation, and mere guesswork or flights of fancy? After all, the intermediate state is a future state for anyone who has not yet died, and that includes the author of this paper, who readily

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admits that he does not have the gift of prophecy or precognition. Are there criteria that can help to ensure that my answers are nonetheless grounded in Truth?

To be concluded … if the good Lord grants

the author sufficient time!