Hell...and a Virile Faith

In pondering the important reality of hell, three sets of polarities have to be held in tension and balance. First, God's Mercy, his immense and unconditional desire for the salvation of every single person, must be answered by his justice, wrath, holiness and absolute rejection of sin. Secondly, our freedom of choice, our free will, must be countered by awareness of the weakness, determinations and limitations of our nature, rooted in our body and the condition of sin...which is to say, our misery. Our spiritual and theological culture has come to emphaize the mercy of God in response to our misery. This is a positive development. For example, we bury suicide victims with full Eucharistic hope in awareness of the suffering and diminished culpability of intellect and will and of God's overwhelming love. But our culture has also come to avoid and deny, implicitly if not explicitly, the justice, wrath and holiness of God and our own responsibility by virtue of our free will. This imbalance can be understood as a domination of a feminine over the masculine dimension of spirituality. The maternal impulse is one of nurture, comfort, understanding, affirmation, unconditional acceptance and inclusion. This is the spirit of our age. The masculine spirit more strongly inclines to transcendence, judgment (which is a bad word in today's world), holiness, demands, conflict, separation, accountability, justice and retribution (a terrible word in today's world). Mention of hell invokes images of a cruel God, of pity for the damned, of an desperate demand that ALL be included in salvation, of a realization of the pain and limitations of those who are victimized by their own choices. This reaction indicates an imbalance of the maternal over the paternal. It was not always so. For example, traditional Catholic mariology looks to our Lady for mercy and comfort as a balance to the harsh but sanctifying standards of the Father and his Son. A balance of mercy and justice is thus set. Ralph Martin, in his critique of Balthasar, appears to be balancing the equation. He appreciatively quotes Balthasar's affirmation that the two streams in Scripture, on the mercy and on judgmental wrath, need to be held in tension without either being evaporated. Martin argues that the Swiss genius did not succeed in keeping that balance. The later's theology of the descent into hell and hope for a depopulated hell appear to have come largely from the Holy Saturday mystical experiences of Adrienne Von Speyr. These need careful scrutiny by the Church. They are quite different and may reflect a mixture of the human and divine: in her case, a deeply feminine nature is painfully vulnerable to the suffering of Christ and his thirst for souls. But it is possible that her confessor and theological collaborator did not bring a masculine balance. Perhaps here the "marian" overwhelmed the "petrine" or, more accurately, was not fully surrendered to God our Father. If so, he is not the only man who has failed to bring a strong but gentle, corrective but affirmative, protective but empowering paternity to an exquisite, sensitive, compassionate feminity.