With the promulgation of the latest document from the DDF (Dignitas Infinita) much focus has been on the use of the word “Infinite” in the title as a qualifier for the ontological nature of human dignity. I do not think the use of this term is problematic as I noted in a recent article in The National Catholic Register.
The most problematic thing for me was not the new document as such but rather something Cardinal Fernandez said while announcing its release. At the press conference introducing Dignitas Infinita, Cardinal Fernandez was asked the following question by journalist Diane Montagna: “If man has infinite dignity, how can he be condemned to the eternal suffering of Hell?”
Cardinal Fernandez responded as follows:
Pope Francis has said many times that the affirmation of the possibility of condemnation to Hell is above all is a kind of cult (veneration) of human freedom, that the human being can choose, and that God wills to respect that freedom, even if it is a limited freedom, and even if it is sometimes a darkened or infirm freedom, but God wills to respect it. That is the principle.
But then the question that Pope Francis asks is: “With all the limits that our freedom truly has, might it not be that Hell is empty?” This is the question that Pope Francis sometimes asks.
Setting aside the issue of how many folks are going to end up in Hell (a seemingly interminable debate these days) the deeper problem is the emphasis upon the limitations of human freedom, which are taken to be so extensive that it calls into question the ability of most people to actually commit sins of such gravity that they could lead to perdition. The key point here is that Cardinal Fernandez links this diminution of our freedom to speculation that Hell might, in fact, be empty.
Balthasar and Francis
It is important to understand that this is not the view of the position of Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar that we can at least hope for an empty Hell. His position, regardless of what one thinks of it, is not that we can hope for an empty Hell because our human freedom is so radically compromised that it is almost impossible to commit a mortal sin. His view is, given God’s revealed antecedent will that all should be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), that God can find a way to take even the most hardened sinner and to convert their freedom from within and to engender in them a true repentance in some mysterious way.
Therefore, Balthasar takes human freedom very seriously, affirms mortal sin is indeed possible, and views any hope for the salvation of all as rooted in a true inner conversion of our freedom to the transcendent good that is God. Again, this is a highly debatable proposition—and there are many good people on both sides of this issue—but it is important to understand Balthasar is in no way implying God will grant salvation to all in a kind of “blanket amnesty” owing to the fact we are all so “wounded” that our freedom simply cannot be freighted with such significance.
Similarly, Pope Benedict, in his encyclical Spes Salvi (#45-46) speculates that the vast majority of human beings, despite their sins, continue to have an inchoate orientation to God, no matter how attenuated, and will end up in purgatory. Hell is quite real, but will be populated by only those human beings who have turned away from God in a definitive, and hardened, manner. Once again, and as with von Balthasar, there is no hint here that we can hope for an empty Hell based on a conception of our freedom as something so radically compromised by sin that Hell simply becomes unimaginably “unfair” in a very real sense.
I labor to draw out these differences because the devil is in the details and those details matter when one considers the anthropological significance of the claim, apparently from Pope Francis (according to Cardinal Fernandez), that we can hope for an empty Hell because our freedom is hemmed-in on all sides by every manner of mitigating constrictions. What I find truly significant here is that the views outlined by Cardinal Fernandez are expressive of a set of latent anthropological assumptions that remain hidden and obscured by all kinds of deflections which use the verbiage of traditional Catholic terms but in radically new ways.
A cynical, defeatist anthropology
Specifically, eleven years into this papacy, what is gradually coming into view is an approach to anthropological analysis veering heavily in the direction of the therapeutic mentality of modernity. For example, while it is indeed true that sin “wounds” our nature and stands in need of healing, nevertheless, Catholicism has always heretofore emphasized that the constitutive nature of the wound is moral and spiritual, and that this moral wound then creates defects in our psychosomatic functioning.
Therefore, the remedy is also moral and spiritual and the economy of salvation established by God is one wherein our freedom is the key component requiring from us repentance and conversion to Christ. Our freedom is freighted with an enormous significance and which can neither be magically “bypassed” in a purely forensic notion of an extrinsic salvation “imputed” to us nor viewed, dismissively, as so attenuated that it is impervious to the movement of grace. Justification leads to sanctification and the entire realm of Catholic sacraments and devotional disciplines have been developed in order to slowly build up the transformative life of grace within us in order to heal the real-world wounds sin has inflicted.
By contrast, what we have seen in this papacy is a constant refrain of “pastoral gradualness” and “accompaniment” evincing a cynical, defeatist anthropology of therapeutic reduction wherein human life is viewed as embedded in a mosh pit of deterministic cultural and psychological influences so powerful that we cannot “reasonably expect” real people in their “complex circumstances” to escape.
The Church has long recognized that most people do indeed tend to live merely on the surface of life’s deeper meanings and tend to be shaped and influenced by the dominant culture. It has further recognized the need for pastoral patience, compassion, accompaniment and sensitivity. The sacrament of confession is always there and waiting for us. Grace, repentance and the pursuit of holiness remain as mainstays of this entire process. But what the Church has never done is to adopt an anthropology of therapeutic reduction that evacuates those concepts of their depth of Christian meaning and even construes them as forms of ecclesial oppression and psychological torture insensitive to “how real people actually live”.
We see this in play not only in the recent remarks of Cardinal Fernandez but also as far back as Amoris Laetitia. There is more good in that text than bad and by several orders of magnitude, so I have no desire to undermine the text as a whole which is often quite beautiful. Nevertheless, there is once again at play in the background an anthropology significantly underplaying the nature of the moral law as a set of commandments rather than “ideals” and that the living out of these commandments is not only possible, but required. Throughout the text the “ideal” of Church teaching is held up as a kind of asymptotic goal many people simply cannot even approximate and therefore requires, not just pastoral patience, but a certain blessing and approval. For example, Pope Francis says the following:
Yet conscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal. (#303)
The presumption here is that one should continue on the path to the full realization of the ideal. But this affirmation is then problematized in its core when it says one can in good conscience believe God will bless my decision to remain in a kind of moral and spiritual stasis since “this is the best I can do given my situation.”
This represents a classic example of the therapeutic mindset that views my moral failings as “understandable” given my circumstances and, therefore, morally “excusable”. And they are indeed being portrayed as excusable here since God would never directly will for me to remain in my sins. Indeed, his endless mercy and compassion and his endless will to forgive us are all geared toward calling us out of our sins. It is imperative, then, not to conflate God’s mercy into a statement of “blessing” where I am as “ok for now”. The therapeutic mindset tends to see nothing but mitigating circumstances since its central purview–thoroughly legitimate in its own limited sphere–is the psychological root of why I feel and act the way that I do. But the Church, while taking such things into account, utterly rejects the notion that these roots, for most people, are too imposing to overcome.
The point of division
Some might say I am being too dismissive here of proper pastoral gradualness. But in many ways the therapeutic approach is what is lacking in gradualness since the logic of human nature is such that whatever is countenanced and permitted (for whatever reason) eventually comes to be accepted and normalized. Evils permitted eventually become alleged virtues in a grand act of the falsification of the good into its opposite. And so no progress toward the “ideal” ever takes place. Indeed, the ideal soon vanishes as something “we used to think” but no longer do in our enlightened understanding of things. The concept of “gradualness” therefore, so beloved in this papacy, when combined with an attenuated sense of our freedom typical of the therapeutic mindset, becomes a set of pastoral practices that, in the end, evacuate and nullify the very moral ideals it claims the process is geared toward.
We see this as well in many of the episcopal appointments of Pope Francis. For example, Cardinals McElroy and Hollerich have taken that very leap into a denial of the “ideal” when it comes to the Church’s sexual morality. They have explicitly stated the Church’s teaching is grounded in errors of scientific fact and therefore must change. And, of course, they are not alone in their assertion. Pope Francis may not agree with them. But he has empowered them, and many others like them, even as he has nothing but harsh words for those who would maintain that commandments are commandments and not ideals, and that they are of divine origin and are there for a reason.
Returning to Cardinal Fernandez, it is precisely this downplaying of the central importance of our freedom as being able to rise above its circumstances that underpins much of the thinking of certain forms of universalism. As I said, it is one thing to hope God might find a way to save everyone by redeeming their freedom from within, but it is quite another to say God almost “owes” us Heaven since he has forced us all into an existence we did not choose; an existence that is in reality a little shop of horrors that inflicts upon us one horrific wound after another. It is a bleak figuration of the nature of life where our freedom is construed as a cork bobbing around on the surface of a tempestuous ocean and with nothing but hidden monsters below.
In all of this I am reminded of Dostoevsky’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor leveled the accusation against Christ, as a formal “charge” requiring punishment, that he (Christ) had placed too heavy a burden on human freedom and freighted it with too much significance. Furthermore, in doing so, the Inquisitor charged that Christ had inflicted the most hideous and dehumanizing sufferings upon humanity requiring the Church to step in to relieve people of this awful burden of freedom.
Sound familiar? The charge is that Christ’s demands upon our freedom are anti-human because they are unrealistic about how real people really are. Thus, the call to repentance is equated with a form of spiritual oppression.
It may not appear so at first glance, but there is much at stake in this current moment. The battle lines are there and the point of division is an anthropological one. The Rubicon is a narrow stream, but once Caesar crossed it, history was changed forever. And since our culture is currently in the grips of an altogether insane construal of what it means to be a human being, now is not the time for the Church to abandon her Christocentric anthropology with its theodramatic emphasis upon the pivotal role of our moral choosing, and to adopt instead the pottage of modernity’s de facto denial of free will.
Now is the time for the Church to steel her nerve, double down on her message of redeemed freedom, and to cross the Rubicon.
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