As for the problem of the ‘second death’ and the final hell after the Last Day, a solution, existential rather than doctrinal, is to be found in the high Eastern spirituality associated with St Antony. A cobbler in Alexandria, to whom Christ had sent Antony to show him a degree of holiness greater than his own, confessed to the famous hermit that he used to think, as he watched the passers-by, ‘May they all be saved! I alone deserve damnation.’ And all this without despairing. This attitude has become a constant part of the Orthodox spiritual tradition; Staretz Silhouan, who died at Athos in 1938, heard Christ say to him, ‘Keep thy spirit in hell, but do not despair’.
Of one thing we may be sure, that hell is not something to speculate about, in a detached and logical way, while making the mental reservation that hell is for other people. When speaking of hell we must use only the language of I and Thou, of repentance and expectation; for, as Ambrose of Optino said in the last century, ‘we are saved between fear and hope’. The warnings in the Gospel are addressed to me, my response to them will have momentous and eternal consequences; they drive me to profound repentance, to the awareness that I am in hell, that I am responsible for hell – and equally that, if I can keep from despairing, my humility brings me into the presence of Christ, who has conquered hell for eternity. But as for you, the innumerable Thou, my neighbour; I can only serve, pray, and hope that you will be saved, that Christ will so overwhelm you with his tenderness and beauty that your doubts, your hesitations, your fears will disappear to make room for the ‘great joy’. Apocastasis cannot be a certainty, it must be the end to which our spiritual combat is directed. Let us pray and exercise discernment so that the fire of Judgement, which is the fire of divine love, consumes not the wicked person but the encroachments of evil within each one of us. For the Judge is also the defending Counsel, and the Cross, according to Maximus the Confessor, is the ‘judgement of judgement’. Isaac of Syria says, ‘A handful of sand in the vast sea, that is what the sin of all flesh is in comparison with the mercy of God’; and for him, true sin consists in not paying sufficient heed to the Resurrection which restores us from the bottom of hell ‘to the joy of the love of Christ; what is hell in the face of the grace of his Resurrection?’
Thus it was that the undivided Church rejected universal salvation as a doctrine, but adopted it as something to hope and pray for. This is the view of many of the Eastern Fathers, as well as several in the West. St Ambrose of Milan says that ‘the same person is simultaneously saved and condemned’ (PL, XV, 1502). And what must we do to be saved? We are to remember that we are condemned but must not give up hope. We must be opened to the Paschal joy by the communion of saints.
The last word of Christianity is not hell but victory over hell; God does not promise us universal salvation because he can only offer it to us and wait for our response, our love, to let it happen. The last word belongs to the feast.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
