E.L. Mascall and the Great Divorce: Human Agency and the Eschaton

Abstract

This article argues that E.L. Mascall develops the eschatology of C.S. Lewis to answer three common critiques of the consensual doctrine of hell. First, Mascall argues that human persons are capable of refusing the love of God because their potential reciprocal love depends on a freedom to give the self, or refuse to do so, in an indissoluble union. Second, the perfection of the new heavens and new earth is not a numerical perfection, and the numerical imperfection of finite creation demonstrates that this is not God’s goal in creation. Third, human nature and Christian revelation reveal that persons are made with the capacity to receive grace and participate in glory, but this reception and participation cannot be coerced. In order to test the plausibility of this position, I present David Bentley Hart’s critique of Lewis’s particularism and Mascall’s answer to such objections.

Introduction

Eric Lionel Mascall OSG (1905–1993) taught historical and philosophical theology as tutor and lecturer at the University of Oxford between 1946 and 1962. While in Oxford, Mascall regularly participated in the Socratic Club, a society for the debate of philosophical and theological questions touching on the nature of reality, humanity and knowledge. C.S. Lewis presided over the club with a genius that made Christianity plausible in an era when the ordinary language philosopher, Gilbert Ryle and logical positivist, A.J. Ayer, oversaw the ascent of naturalism and secular humanism in Oxford philosophy. Lewis and the Socratic Club, according to Mascall, ‘did as much as anything to make religion in general and Christianity in particular intellectually respectable in those post-war years’.¹

Mascall entered Oxford during a time of intellectual tumult. The cultural ruptures of two world wars, as well as the rising influence of philosophical and political theories that stood at odds with the theistic and supernatural claims of Christianity, led many theologians and clerics to retreat from the traditional Christian doctrines of Christ, creation and the eschaton to revise Christianity as a non-dogmatic religion of political and ethical benevolence. The metaphysical claims of Christianity appeared untenable in the immanent frame constructed by the logical positivists and scientific naturalists. Before arriving at Oxford, Mascall had encountered both Lewis and correlationist clerics, such as the dean of Lincoln Cathedral, Robert Andrew Mitchell, while teaching doctrine at Lincoln Theological College. Shortly after the release of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis gave a lecture in Lincoln defending the beliefs of traditional Christianity. Michell, a former evangelical turned modernist, believed that ‘modern men, and especially laymen, had no use for orthodox Christianity, which they regarded as offensive to their reason and irrelevant to their lives, but were avid for religion of an entirely undogmatic kind’.² In the course of Lewis’s apologetic, Mascall recalls, ‘the articles of [Michell’s] disbelief were ruthlessly demolished’.³

Mascall himself defended orthodox Christianity against modernist objections in works such as Man: His Origin and Destiny (1940), The Importance of Being Human (1958), Grace and Glory (1961) and The Christian Universe (1966), in which he set out to explain how modern persons should understand God, themselves and their relationship to Christ and the cosmos.⁴ Surveying the predicament of modern persons, Mascall observes that people lack clear beliefs about their origin, purpose, and right end:

[T]he vast majority of men and women today organise their lives on the assumption that the only realities of which they need to take account are those that are perceived by their senses in the brief span of time that lies between their conception in their mother’s womb and their death on the motorway or in the hospital bed. This carries with it two consequences: first, that there is nothing after death that we need bother about, neither heaven, hell nor purgatory; secondly, that there is nothing during this life that we need bother about except the things of this world, neither God nor angels nor devils, neither prayer nor grace nor holiness.⁵

Lewis provides Mascall with imaginative resources to help modern people recover Christian truths to see the reality of creation, the fall the spiritual life of human persons, angels and God, and the two ways to enter eternity, accepting the love of Christ and union with the triune God in the new heavens and new earth, or rejecting the love of God and entering into separation in hell. Mascall, in the course of the closest thing he ever wrote to a systematic theology, Christ, the Christian, and the Church (1946), reveals the extent to which Lewis’s apologetic and imaginative thought influenced his own constructive theology, and more specifically, theological anthropology, as when he argues that ‘Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, utilize the doctrine [of original sin] for the purposes of imaginative writing in a way which perhaps brings out its real significance better than any merely academic discussion’.⁶ This passing comment about Lewis’s imaginative portrayal of the fall, along with Mascall’s reflections on Lewis’s invaluable role as an apologist in Oxford, point toward the shared theological convictions of the two writers, and their complimentary vocations in the post-war Church of England: Lewis, the apologist and novelist, and Mascall, the philosopher of religion and theologian both sought to recover what Lewis elsewhere describes as ‘deep Church’ Christianity, the creedal and supernatural vision of the faith once delivered to the saints and believed by Catholic Christians across the ages.⁷

In this article, I will explore the ways that Mascall and Lewis retrieve the doctrines of creation, the fall and humanity to defend the traditional Christian belief in the two ways to enter eternity and the great divorce between them, the way of life and the way of death and their end in heaven or hell. In contemporary theology, the influence of Karl Barth’s universalist framework for election in reformed circles, and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s hopeful universalism among Catholics, mean that the pluralistic eschatology of universal salvation is ascendent in academic theology.⁸ Lewis and Mascall anticipated this attempt to revise Christian teaching on the last things to correspond with contemporary developments in ethics and social theory, and they opposed it because they believe that the freedom of persons is intrinsic to their nature as creatures made to love God, a reality revealed in scripture and nature. Both authors contend that the freedom of choice to accept or reject the love of God and follow the way of Christ or the way of the world, the flesh, and the Devil provides a through line through creation, the fall, the incarnation, and redemption. Remove personal agency and responsibility, as well as its eternal consequences, and the story of redemption no longer coheres.

In this article, I explain Lewis and Mascall’s theological account of the great divorce, and I seek to demonstrate that Mascall’s explication and development of Lewis’s case for the two ways provides a plausible alternative to universalism. In order to do so, first, I introduce Lewis’s account of theological anthropology and human freedom, and I explain how it relates to the great divorce between the two ways. Second, I turn to David Bentley Hart’s critique of Lewis’s free-choice argument for eternal heaven and hell, and his case for Christian universalism. Hart admires Lewis and Mascall, and he considers their case for Christian particularism the strongest argument for the consensus position.⁹ Nonetheless, he contends that it fails for rational, ethical, and scriptural reasons. Third, I describe Lewis and Mascall’s argument for traditional Christian eschatology, focusing on Mascall’s account of the love of God and the final judgement, and human person’s capacity to receive grace and participate in glory.

The Great Divorce between Heaven and Hell and Freedom of Choice in Lewis

God made the first human persons in his image and likeness (Gen 1.26), and he made them very good (Gen 1.31). Adam and Eve enjoyed fellowship with their creator until they fell into disobedience. God forbade the primal pair from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2.16–17), and they disobeyed and ate the forbidden fruit (Gen 3). Theologians dispute what it means to eat the fruit. Mascall confronts this challenge with the aid of two of the Inklings, Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis. Williams envisions the fall as ‘the desire to know both good and evil from the inside, as it were, and therefore as the deliberate contravention of the will of God in order to gain this interior knowledge of sin’.¹⁰ Lewis offers a compatible but distinct interpretation, arguing that eating the fruit represents the falseness of the self-will of human persons acting contrary to the will of God, and thus acting contrary to their creaturely nature. Synthesizing the two interpretations, Mascall agrees with the historic Christian interpretation of the fall and the allegorical significance of the first humans eating the forbidden fruit, they entertained prideful thoughts, and their indulgence in pride ‘culminated in disobedience’.¹¹

St Paul teaches that the wages of sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ (Rom 6.23).This contrast between two states, earning death in sin, or receiving eternal life in Christ, points back to the problem presented by the original sin of the first Humans. If the gift of God is eternal life in Christ, then it follows that the person who rejects this gift remains separate from Christ in sin. If the wages of sin are death, and the scriptures reveal that eternal death means that God consigns a person, human or angelic, to hell if they reject the gift of life available in union with Christ, then this fate, eternal separation from God, the source of love and life, follows.¹² But the notion that a decision made in time could have eternal consequences strikes modern persons as unjust and unloving. Lewis, an atheist convert to Christianity, feels the force of these objections to the teaching of Christ and St Paul about the great divorce between the two ways. Before responding to these objections to the Christian doctrine of the last things, Lewis considers what the doctrine of hell reveals about human nature. In the Genesis narrative, it is only after eating the forbidden fruit, indulging in pride that leads to disobedience, that Adam and Eve receive God’s curse and find themselves in enmity with one another and banished from the presence of God. They act with responsible wills and consequences follow from their responsible actions. Lewis sees an analogous, and related, dynamic in play in hell: ‘to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’.¹³ Adam and Eve banish themselves from the garden of Eden by choosing to disobey God and eating the fruit. Jesus teaches that if a person loves Him, and in doing so loves God, they will keep his commandments (Jn 14.15). The person who disobeys God refuses love and banishes the self from love. In the case of the garden, God banished the first human persons to a temporal punishment. In contrast, the refusal to obey Christ, to accept the gift of God’s love offered in Christ sacrifice on the cross, means an eternal banishment. Lewis contends that this eternal separation from communion with God is given by God because it is chosen by the rebellious self. This state is one of rejecting the givenness of the image and likeness of God in creation and the reality of creaturehood. Lewis elaborates when he explains that ‘[t]o be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God[.]’¹⁴ The true human person, therefore, chooses and acts in accord with reason and the good, and the source of reason and the good are Christ the Logos, the one in whom humans live, and move, and have their being (Acts 17.28). To enter eternity in a final act of disobedience, an ultimate refusal to accept the love of God, entails rejecting the givenness of human nature—‘to have been a man—to be an ex-man or “damned ghost”—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will’¹⁵ Therefore, when the modern person condemns the cruelty of God consigning the damned to eternal torment, they misunderstand the human condition. As persons with creaturely intellect, will and passions made for communion with God in, first, the good creation, and second, after the final judgement, in the new heavens and new earth, seeing God face to face in the beatific vision, personal agency means that actions and ends must be chosen. After the fall, the relationship between the intellect, will, passions and God are disordered. In Christ, God offers to heal the wounds of sin and order them to right relations and right love. But the reprobate rejects this remedy for sin and chooses to turn in on the self in disordered self-love.

Lewis admits the high risk entailed when God allows the first persons to choose to obey and refuse to eat from the tree of knowledge or choose to disobey and enter into exile from communion with God. Furthermore, he sees that allowing each person to make a comparable choice with eternal consequences, appears beneath the goodness of the triune God of love revealed in Jesus Christ.¹⁶ However, Lewis grounds his anthropology on the reality that God is love, and human persons are made in his image to receive and give love. This vision of love as gift of the self, paradigmatically represented by God’s gift of himself in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, undergirds Lewis’s claim that human persons, as an intrinsic part of their nature, can give the self, or refuse to give the self, as a sacrifice made in love.

If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse. 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?’¹⁷

Right order within the self, with other persons and with the triune God depends on self-surrender. Lewis’s anthropology, his vision of human wholeness, depends on the free response given to love. In this vision, Christ stands at the door and knocks on the heart of each person, and he offers to restore communion with everyone who opens the door (Rev 3.20). This supreme act of surrender, Lewis contends, cannot be coerced by God or other persons and remain free. And if it is not free, it is not love. Nevertheless, Lewis confesses that he ‘would pay any price to be able to say that all will be saved’.¹⁸ But the reality of personal agency means that the possibility of refusing love remains intrinsic to the nature of finite persons capable of disobeying God.

In response, universalists and annihilationists argue that eternal excommunication from God, other persons and self-knowledge is too high a price to pay for this order of personal love premised on freedom. Surely, God could make humans in such a way that they eventually choose life and love, or in the very least, God could snuff out the little light that remains and allow them to cease to exist. Considering the contrast between God’s revelation of the two ways in Scripture and the human desire to create a more perfect and predictable eternity, Lewis calls his readers to adopt a posture of humble creaturehood and accept the limits of finite personhood in time and space—‘[f]or every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom’.¹⁹ To claim that God predetermines human actions, especially the choice to accept or reject incorporation into Christ, without reference to a person’s response to the love of God undermines the theological anthropology revealed in scripture and nature, particularly the experience and narrative of God’s creation of persons with the potential to make responsible choices and take responsible actions. Lewis takes issue with theologians such as Calvin who teach that God predestines the elect for beatitude and the reprobate for damnation on the basis of his arbitrary will. He opposes Origenists and other proponents of universalism who claim that all shall eventually be saved and enter into union with God for analogous reasons. This is why Lewis argues that the doctrine of Predestination (as in the double decree) assumes that ‘eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two’.²⁰ Scripture reveals that God predestines the elect to life. But Lewis implies that the scriptural revelation of predestination must be interpreted in harmony with the deeper truths revealed about human nature in the narrative of the relationship between God and man. Therefore, God’s providence needs to be understood as being compatible with human freedom and the givenness of a responsible will that can choose to act in time in such a way as to have eternal consequences—‘[y]ou cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived’.²¹ The Predestinarian, according to Lewis, seeks to escape the limits of finitude and time boundedness and see from God’s perspective. This misunderstands the temporal human relationship with the eternal God. This attempt to provide a definition of human person’s relationship to eternity in the place of their need to relate in love to the eternal God misunderstands the human condition. ‘And wouldn’t universalism do the same’, asks Lewis, would not the person who assumes that all will enter into union with God in eternity no matter their response to him in time also replace participation in love with the theory of humanity and divinity abstracted from the givenness of personal agency and the revelation of God’s love in Christ.²²

Why did Lewis defend the doctrines of God’s final judgement and hell in an era when others sought to revise Church teaching to correlate with the values of an increasingly secular and diverse culture? Judith Wolfe, reflecting on Lewis’s willingness to defend the hard ethical and eschatological teachings of the Christian faith, cites Lewis’s own words about John Milton, one would ‘be in constant danger of supposing that the poet was inculcating a rule when in fact he was enamoured of a perfection’. Lewis argues that God, who is love and who expresses his love in freely chosen actions, makes human persons to participate in his love and freedom. ‘All [Lewis’s] calls to moral perfection and Christian obedience’, Wolfe continues, ‘have one ultimate motivation: a desire for the last things: for seeing God face to face’.²³ God’s revelation of himself in scripture and nature, both of which testify to the God revealed in Christ Jesus, prepare human persons for their final end. Lewis, according to Wolfe, believes that communion with the God who is love, the God whose judgement is merciful, and mercy is just, is such a perfect end, that everyone should hear the good news of this calling. Moreover, they should be warned against the alternative path revealed to those who refuse the love of God.

Rational Freedom and Hart’s Universalism

In That All Shall Be Saved, David Bentley Hart follows George MacDonald in championing Christian universalism.²⁴ Hart draws on his own translation of the New Testament, the witness of Origen and his followers in the primitive church, the Russian Bulgakovian school, and Eastern theology and philosophy to defend his Platonist conviction that everything that exists does so as it exits the One, and all things that exit the One eventually return to their source in the One.²⁵ MacDonald, a major influence for both Hart and Lewis, plays a comparable role to that of Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy in Lewis’s Great Divorce. For Lewis, MacDonald baptized his imagination and opened the door to the path of the mere Christianity of the Deep Church on pilgrimage.²⁶ For Hart, in contrast, MacDonald opened the door to the path of Origenists and other schools of theology and religions that believe in the eternal reconciliation of all things.

Hart argues that Christianity, rightly understood, teaches that all shall be saved, and that the development of Christian doctrine over the centuries testifies to the Holy Spirit leading the Church into the truth of this reality. He observes that ‘since [the High Middle Ages], even in regard to unrepentant adult souls, Christians have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the thought that God actively wills eternal suffering[.]’²⁷ And he sees Lewis’s eschatology providing Christians with a way to rationalize their more humane and less punitive vision of damnation—‘many have come to adopt the idea that, although hell is eternal, its doors are locked only from the inside (to use C. S. Lewis’s imagery): the damned, that is, freely choose their perdition[.]’²⁸ But the claim free-agents, whether human or angelic, choose whether or not to love God (and in doing so obey his commandments) can hardly be said to originate in Lewis, or in the modern period. Summarizing the Lewisian vision of hell, Hart explains that the derelict lock the door of hell from the inside ‘out of a hatred of divine love so intense that they prefer endless torment; and so God, out of his fastidious regard for the dignity of human freedom, reluctantly grants them the dereliction they so jealously crave’.²⁹ Reason and genuine love, Hart implies, demand that Christians reject Lewis’s attempt to sanitize hell for the modern believer. Hart depicts Lewis’s eschatology as a retreat position taken by Christian infernalists who lack the courage to abandon the erroneous teaching of the consensus doctrine of hell. Hart’s sarcastic depiction of Lewis’s vision of hell underscores his contention that it is a modern untenable rationalization for an irrational doctrine—‘[n]needless to say, in this view the fire and brimstone have been quietly replaced by various states of existential unrest and resentfully guarded self-love. This all sounds quite reasonable (unless […] one thinks about it deeply).’³⁰ The Christian conscience, according to Hart, has evolved to the stage that most Christians have abandoned the vision of God as tormentor held by their medieval ancestors, and Lewis’s depiction of the great divorce threatens to leave them with a half-developed doctrine of hell. But if Christians think more deeply about the nature of love, and in doing so better understand God, then they will abandon their belief in the possibility of eternal damnation altogether.

Lewis arrives at his depiction of hell based on his interpretation of God’s creation of the first human persons and their original sin. In his reading of Genesis, the fall of humans and creation results from the primal pairs prideful choice to disobey God and partake of the fruit of knowledge. Hart sees that if God gave human will such a central place in the story of creation and humanity, it might be possible to accept the free-will defence of traditional Christian eschatology. But he rejects this interpretation of the creation and the fall, and he adopts an interpretation that tells a story of human immaturity, ignorance, and error, rather than one of human rationality, freedom of choice, and responsibility for sinful actions. Hart frames these two interpretations as a difference between Eastern and Western Christianity, as when he explains that ‘Eastern church fathers, when interpreting the story of Eden, generally tended to ascribe the cause of the fall to the childlike ignorance of unformed souls, not yet mature enough to resist false notions[.]’³¹ The very good creation of man and woman, from this perspective, envisions them as ignorant and immature, such that they cannot be held responsible if they believed the serpent’s deceptive temptation. Hart observes that the Eden narrative in Genesis ‘tells the story of two persons so guileless and ignorant that they did not even know they were naked until a talking snake had shown them the way to the fruit of knowledge[.]’³² The distinction between knowledge of moral culpability before God and knowledge derived from the shame of standing naked before God in a state of sin collapses. Hart concludes that ‘absolute culpability—eternal culpability—lies forever beyond the capacities of any finite being. So does an eternal free defiance of the Good’.³³ In the beginning of humanity is its end, and Hart sees human persons beginning in ignorance and error, and whatever their choices, gradually learning more and more about the ‘Good’ until they come to know God.

For Lewis, the freedom of persons to choose to receive and give love explains the potential of persons to sin or choose hell. Hart challenges the definition of freedom implicit in this interpretation of personhood. He argues that freedom without a rational end is not actually freedom. Instead, it is a brute event, comparable to the boiling up of water or an earthquake. The claim that human persons can spontaneously act as causes in irrational ways undermines the claim that God made humans as rational creatures oriented to know their rational creator. ‘A choice made without rationale’, Hart insists, ‘is a contradiction in terms’³⁴ Therefore, whereas Lewis conceives of God making humans for two kinds of freedom, the penultimate freedom to choose between good and evil, and the ultimate freedom to participate in the Good and be set free from slavery to sin, Hart only countenances one definition of true freedom—freedom from ignorance and error to know and love the Good. Based on this univocal definition of freedom, in which agency no longer appears as a constitutive characteristic of the good creation of man and woman, human persons remain unfree as long as they lack perfect knowledge to inform their actions.

So no one could ever fulfill the criteria necessary justly to damn himself or herself to perpetual misery. Not even angels would have the power to condemn themselves to a condign eternity of suffering; as rational beings, they could never turn away from God entirely if they were not subject to some misapprehension regarding the Good in itself and their true relation to it, inasmuch as only the Good could ever really have the power to fulfill and satisfy their spiritual natures (though, admittedly, the dominant mediaeval theology of angels, which differed markedly from that of the early Christians, did occasionally make the entirely incoherent claim that the fallen angels had done just this). Even if a sinner’s deeds were infinitely evil in every objective sense, as Hitler’s were—utterly devoid, that is, of any residual quality of rational goodness—still the intentionality of a finite will, aboriginally prompted into action by a hunger for the Good, could never in perfect clarity of mind match the sheer nihilistic scope of the evil it perpetrates. Nor could any rational will that has ever enjoyed full freedom—which means a full rational awareness both of its own nature and of the nature of the Good as such—resist the love of God willfully for eternity.³⁵

Because all finite persons lack total knowledge of the creation and the creator, they cannot be said to be genuinely free and responsible, at least not in the case of original sin, or eternally. Hart equivocates on the extent to which ignorant moral agents are responsible for their immoral actions on a temporal plane. In this argument, Hart follows his premises to their conclusion, even at great cost, arguing for the eventual beatitude of the Devil and the demons, as well as Hitler. Within Hart’s definition of freedom and vision of creation, universalism appears irrefutable. But he still sees Lewis’s argument of freedom as the greatest challenge to his position—‘hell exists simply because, in order for a creature to be able to love God freely, there must be some real alternative to God open to that creature’s power of choice[.]’³⁶ Is freedom to choose to love intrinsic to the very nature of love? Hart admits the potential of damnation if one accepts Lewis’s definition of love, ‘hell therefore is a state the apostate soul has chosen for itself in perfect freedom, and that the permanency of hell is testament only to how absolute that freedom is’.³⁷ If God is love (1 Jn 4:16), then it makes sense that human destiny hinges on the absolute priority of love. Aware of the reasons why this argument for particularism persuades many Christians, Hart admits that ‘the only defence of the infernalist position that is logically and morally worthy of being either taken seriously or refuted scrupulously is the argument from free will[.]’³⁸ Despite this caveat, Hart nevertheless claims that ‘This argument too is wrong in every way, but not contemptibly so’.³⁹ To be wrong in every way, the argument must fail on exegetical, rational, relational and moral lines. Throughout the course of Hart’s argument, he insists that all forms of Christian ‘infernalism’ (a term that he inherits from Balthasar) fail according to each of these standards.⁴⁰ But it appears, interpreting his argument as a whole, he believes that the primary failure of Lewis and other proponents of Christian particularism is one of charity, and this failure of love reveals a deformed Christian conscience and failure to see the goodness of God.

In the end, Christians believe that Christ will be all in all (1 Cor 1.28). Hart argues that this means that all intellectual creatures, with their intellects made to know the good, true and beautiful, will enter into union with the intelligible God. Infernalists, according to Hart, lack a faith in the genuinely good creation and its perfect end in Christ. This conviction sparks the rhetorical question, could God be all in all if people continue to exist in hell, rejecting him and rejecting their true end? ‘If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity’, Hart questions, ‘would God’s victory over every sphere of being really be complete?’⁴¹ His conclusion comes as no surprise given his premises. Hart argues that the remaining spark of ‘promethean defiance’ of the damned in hell mean that God fails to achieve his end in Christ.⁴² Christ’s ascent to the throne, his being all in all, does not mean that he holds authority over all things, nor that all things that reciprocate his love count as part of the whole. Instead, Hart insists that Christ’s final victory means that all become One in such a way as to ensure no remainder.

But if all roads lead to the beatific vision and union with God, then why does God create persons capable of sin? Why not spare creation all of the pain of sickness and suffering and death and make rational creatures with their eyes immediately and eternally fixed on God? And why do Christ and the Apostles warn that there are two ways, the way that leads to death, and the way that leads to life (Matt 7.13 and Gal 6.8)?

Eschatology in Lewis and Mascall

In The Importance of Being Human, E.L. Mascall argues that created persons, angels and humans, participate in the creativity of God in a finite manner. This claim about personality rests on his conviction that ‘two of the noblest characteristics that personality involves are the capacity to make free and responsible decisions, and the capacity to give oneself in them’.⁴³ This giving of the self allows persons to take up their cross and follow Christ (Matt 16.24–25). It is God who freely chose to become incarnate as a man and make a gift of himself to redeem the world. Christ makes it possible for humans to truly express their personality, and personality most fully manifests itself in the free and responsible choice to offer up the self as a gift to God and neighbor. Mascall explains that this potential is a crucial aspect of what it means to be a human person—‘as God’s vicegerent, bearing on himself the seal of God’s image, man has been given a kind of finite and relative participation in the creative activity of God’.⁴⁴ This participation in the creativity of God, the ability to act as a causal agent with the capacity to act in accord with, or contrary to, the will of God, is most consequential in the inner-life of persons. The ability to make covenants or vows in which a person makes a lifelong bond and gift of the self distinguishes them from other creatures.⁴⁵ Mascall draws on the integral humanism of Jacques Maritain to insist that the potential to take actions of irrevocable self-gift allow humans to participate in Christ in a manner central to the nature of Christian personhood:

It is because it holds this exalted conception of man, and not because it is callous to human suffering, that the great Christian tradition has maintained that a man can bind himself by irrevocable vows in marriage or the religious life, and has dared to insist on the awful doctrine of hell.⁴⁶

Mascall’s concession that the doctrine of hell is ‘awful’ means, on one level, that it should induce awe when we reflect that God gives humans the same potential for self-gift that he exercises in his incarnation in Christ. But it also means awful in the more parochial sense of the term, it is fearful and painful to imagine. And Mascall sees that there is an analog between the Church holding husbands and wives to their marriage vows, or holding monks and nuns to their religious vows, and submitting one’s life to the Lordship of Christ. The freedom to love entails the risk of love gone wrong in a fallen world. Thus, these human vows offer foretastes of the heavenly banquet, but they are imperfect and fallen reflections of the eternal union of Christ and the Church.

There are, therefore, opportunities to glimpse the beautiful potential made possible in a lifelong covenant, and this kind of commitment appears as an image of God’s offer of eternal life. This is why Scripture opens and closes with a marriage, and the eschatological consummation of the union of God with humanity appears in revelation as the marriage of Christ, the bridegroom, with the Church, his bride.

Mascall builds on his analysis of the first humans eating from the tree of knowledge in his definition of sin. The Psalmist asserts that it is God who has made us, and we have not made ourselves (Ps 100.3). The decision to indulge pride that fosters disobedience originates in a denial of this truth—‘[s]in is thus, in its essence, an attempt to undo the creative act of God, but just because that act is wholly God’s, the creature cannot undo it’.⁴⁷ God has made humans to be like him through obedience and fellowship, as in the state of innocence, and through incorporation into Christ and eternal union in the new heavens and new earth. But this likeness differs from the serpent’s temptation of Eve, promising that if she eats the fruit she will be like God in disobedience and autonomous knowledge. Mascall claims that sin depends on the self-delusion that humans are ‘self-existent and self-sufficient. This false relationship to their creator and sustainer can corrupt the will and the intellect such that a person holds false beliefs and develops vicious habits. They desire lower goods rather than the higher. This corruption, however, “cannot penetrate to the ontological root, where it draws its very existence from the creative activity of God”’.⁴⁸ Thus, sinful action entails pretending that one is God, and this posture stands contrary to reason and good order. Mascall finds this insight convincingly portrayed in Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, ‘the enterprise of the fallen angels is fundamentally irrational; it does not make sense’.⁴⁹

But if the desire to be God is sinful and irrational, what can it mean when the Psalmist says to the addressees, you are gods? Mascall quotes Lewis on the distinction between God’s vision for union with persons through theosis and the demonic/sinful desire to be God. Screwtape explains the demons will to power in frank terms—‘[t]o us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense’.⁵⁰ The finite and rebellious demons imagine their purpose in limited and competitive terms. To extend their will and act as they please, they believe that they must master others so they cannot stand in their way or act contrary to their will. Lewis contrast this demonic vision of dominance and absorption of human others with God’s desire that persons obey his will—‘“[o]ne must face the fact that all the talk about his love for men, and his service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth’.⁵¹ Perfect freedom entails acting in harmony with the will of God, and practising a way of life free from slavery to sin. The demons, instead of finding this freedom within the Good desirable, consider it ‘appalling’. And they see God’s desire as part of a larger plan to form ‘loathsome little replicas of himself’. This reflection of the image and likeness of God in creatures distinct from God and united to his purposes opposes the aesthetic and moral preference of the demons for domination and absorption. Even so, they admit that the claim that the service of God is perfect freedom is true—their lives ‘will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his’.⁵² Satan sees humans in a naturalistic light, as ‘cattle to be eaten’, and God sees humans as personal free-agents, capable of accepting his invitation to become his adopted sons and daughters. The demonic posture is one of pride, a desire to compete with God, and greed, a longing to control everything. The demons ‘are empty and would be filled’, whereas God is ‘full and flows over’.⁵³ The infinite God of love gives himself to save the world in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is his nature to give good gifts to his children (Matt 7.11) and pour himself out until the grateful recipient’s cup runs over (Ps 21.5–6). Finally, Screwtape reveals that the demons aim at a different vision of what it means to be God and hold power over everything—‘[o]ur war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to him but still distinct’.⁵⁴ It is this distinction that appears in revelation as prerequisite for persons to love one another.

Therefore Mascall’s anthropology rests on the same conclusions about creation and freedom as Lewis’s own. He cites Lewis’s Screwtape Letters to contrast God’s overflowing gift of love, a love that allows persons to freely reciprocate, or allows them to refuse to participate in his order of love. Since it is the first persons’ pride resulting in disobedience that leads to excommunication from fellowship with God, Mascall and Lewis prescribe humble gratitude resulting in obedience to restore communion. Through finite participation in the infinite freedom of God, human persons can act as secondary causal agents capable of loving, or refusing to love, in response to the love of God in Christ.

The Love of God and the Final Judgement

Scripture reveals that God is love (1 Jn 4.7–8). But the doctrine of hell appears to teach that God ceases to love human persons who reject Christ and refuse the gift of salvation. Mascall refuses this conclusion and insists on the universality of God’s love—‘[h]ell does not, it must be repeated, imply a denial of the love of God; what marks it off from heaven is not anything in God, but the condition of the human soul’.⁵⁵ God, according to this conception, creates and sustains all creatures in love. The state of unrepentant sin, or the state of excommunication from God, is not an example of God’s nature changing:

The joys of heaven, the joys and pains of purgatory, and the pains of hell all proceed from the love of God—in heaven from love returned to its fulness; in purgatory from love returned, but as yet only in part; in hell, from love rejected. ‘It is terrible,’ writes Maritain, ‘to fall into the hands of the living God, for those hands give to each man what his will has settled on’.⁵⁶

The conviction that the will settles on a fixed end after human persons death, resurrection and final judgement appears as a consolation to the faithful who struggle with doubt and sin in this earthly pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem. Mascall interprets the eschaton in terms of the bond of love that exists between human persons and God. The persons who accept the love and grace of God such that their wills are perfect in love enter into the beatific vision. They no longer need to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2.12), nor persevere in the race to receive the crown of everlasting life (1 Cor 9.24–27). Their will, by the grace of God, has been purified such that they experience an eternal and indissoluble bond of love with God. This union with God and the saints in glory is perfect joy. The soul in purgation, in contrast, accepts the love of God, and reciprocates it, in part. Such persons have not given their whole self as a gift to God, and they must see their wills perfected through a final sanctification. The eventual end of the souls in purgation is eternal blessedness—thus whatever the trials and training of this state, they have good reason to give thanks for their eventual admission into the presence of God. The damned, on the other hand, respond to God’s love with hate. Thus, the permanence of the eternal state of alienation from God, the blessed and the self must appear as a scandalous teaching and a stumbling block to those who reject Christ. The good news of the gospel reflects God’s wish that none would perish, but Mascall’s teaching on the eternal divorce between the two ways recalls Christ’s observation that it would have been better for Judas if he had never been born (Matt 26.24) and his story of Lazarus and the rich man, the latter being separated by an unbridgeable chasm from God and the blessed (Lk 16.26). Mascall, thus, follows Maritain in warning that it is a terrible thing for the reprobate to fall into the hands of God.

But how can Christ be said to have become all in all if the rich man who rejects his love stands on the other side of a great chasm? How can the eschaton truly entail the marriage of heaven and earth and the consummation of all things (1 Col.19–20) if sinful persons remain lost in their sin in a place of darkness and weeping (Matt 22.13)? Mascall insists that ‘it is of the essence of the notion of hell that the damned are altogether excluded from the community of the redeemed’.⁵⁷ Therefore, he does not posit the relationship between Abraham’s bosom and hades present in the narrative of Lazarus and the rich man as the eternal state. The damned do not exist on the periphery of the New Jerusalem as a ‘slum’.⁵⁸ Mascall concedes that such a final state would be analogous to the presence of the poor who often live on the edge of the affluent neighborhoods or cities—their presence calling the nation to feel guilt and responsibility for failing to improve their circumstances. To the contrary, Mascall claims that the damned cease to count. Their choice of nothingness rather than the love of God represents a journey into outer darkness. In this vision of the new heavens and the new earth, it is only persons who respond in love to the light of Christ who participate in being in such a way as to count among that final all in all. Mascall recognizes that this answer will not satisfy universalists of Hart’s persuasion, and he rejects the notion that all things come from the One and all things inevitably return to the One. For Christian Platonists, such as Hart, this vision of eternity appears perfect, whereas the received vision of the eschaton appears numerically incomplete. Mascall accepts this critique and points out that creation is not an act of numerical perfection. Reality would be more numerically perfect if only the infinite God existed, and he never made persons capable of alienation. God, however, has made creatures finite and distinct from himself, and this will still be the case in heaven. The consummation of all things, the summation of all things in Christ, must not be a matter of calculation, but one of love. ‘What place could there be in any case’, asks Mascall, ‘in a community transfused and throbbing with love, for beings that are concerned only to assert themselves’.⁵⁹

The Freedom to Receive Grace and Participate in Glory

What does it mean to be human? Mascall contends that the popular view that humans are nothing more than their physical experience from birth in the hospital to their final heartbeat on the deathbed lacks a full vision of the origins and ends of humanity. Each person is made for lasting peace and joy, and this purpose is frustrated by the fallen human condition. But God has made a remedy for sin through the grace channeled into humans through baptism and communion. This new humanity dies to fallen life under the headship of Adam and rises to the new life of faith under the headship of Christ. Persons who accept the love of God and become members of the Body of Christ can look forward to eternal life in the presence of God—‘if we are living in the grace of God, heaven is the destination to which our journey is leading us. It is therefore the merest folly for us to behave as if our whole destiny was contained within the limits of this present life’.⁶⁰ Mascall rejects the immanent frame presupposed by contemporary scholars influenced by the assumptions of the logical positivists and other naturalists. Contra the chronological snobbery prevalent in his day, Mascall appeals to the perennial wisdom of those who ponder their present life from a retrospective angle, what kind of life should one look back on from the deathbed, and from the perspective of eternity—’“‘[l]ook to the end,” is a pagan motto but a very wise one; the only question is what the end may be’.⁶¹ The end includes both the purpose of life and its trajectory when one dies and enters eternity. Secularists, Mascall contends, reject the ternal horizon and aim either at their own “prosperity and happiness” or at that of humanity in general. ‘For the Christian, it is either heaven or hell—either the glad acceptance or the sullen refusal of the beatific vision of the Holy Trinity.’”⁶² This comparison assumes that Christians hold to the consensus view of death, judgement, heaven, and hell. As Mascall saw in the case of Dean Mitchel, and even more often now, many Christians revise their explanation of the purpose of life to fit into the secular ethic and metaphysic. Such people erroneously conflate the message of the gospel with the call to ameliorate poverty and unhappiness in this present age. Mascall wants to insist on the imperative for Christians to store their treasures in heaven (Matt 6.20) and trust that God will add all the good things of the creation on (Matt 6.33–34) if they are willing to sell everything that they have to follow Christ (Matt 19.21–24). These earthly blessings will not necessarily appear as such to the secularist. But persons who choose to live first and foremost as citizens of heaven will be spiritually blessed in this world, and counted among the blessed in the world to come.

God calls Christians to be in and not of the world (Jn 17.11–15) and warns that it is worthless to gain the whole temporal world and allow their eternal soul to be lost in the process (Mk 8.34–35). This is why Mascall warns his readers that if they treat the world ‘as if it is all that there is and as if all that you need is to be found in it, and it will dangle its gifts before your eyes, decoy you, tantalize you, and finally mock and desert you, leaving you empty handed and with ashes in your mouth’.⁶³ This world of changes and chances is passing away (1 Jn 2.17). The secular perspective provides a false image of reality and inspires a way of life that offers fleeting satisfactions. God calls Christians to go further up and further into reality, ‘live in this world as one who knows that the world is God’s and yet as one who knows that his true home is not here but in eternity, and the world itself will yield up to you joys and splendours of whose very existence the mere worldling is utterly ignorant’.⁶⁴ The decision to live life in light of eternity and in union with Christ opens up possibilities to know the Good that supersedes whatever the faithful could ask or imagine (Eph 3.20–21). Human persons who choose to seek the eternal kingdom of God rather than the pleasures and powers of the kingdoms of this world will come to know the God who is the source and end of all that is good and true and beautiful:

Then you will see the world’s transience and fragility, its finitude and its powerlessness to satisfy, not as signs that life is a bad joke with man as the helpless victim, but as pale and splintered reflections of the splendour and beauty of the eternal God—that beauty ever old and ever new—in whom alone man can find lasting peace and joy.⁶⁵

The end of human persons, therefore, is lasting peace and joy. This blessedness is only possible by the grace of God healing the sin of sickness that tempts men and women to indulge base desires and blind themselves to beauty. The broken fragments of reality that reflect the light of God can illuminate the path to redemption. This redemption calls persons to reject the lie that life is a joke and man is a victim and accept the true vision of reality.

Mascall builds on Lewis’s insights about the purpose of human life and the great divorce between the way of life and way of death by which to enter eternity. In doing so, he anticipates two of Hart’s objections to the freedom to love defence of a particularist account of the last things. First, he admits that the new heavens and new earth do not represent a numerical perfection comparable to the numerical perfection found in the infinite God. But he points out that if this were God’s goal, he could have simply chosen not to create anything distinct from himself. It is possible to imagine an outer darkness where persons who ultimately reject the love of God cease to count as part of the unity of all things in Christ’s consummation of all in all. Second, Mascall follows Maritain in answering the claim that rational persons cannot make an eternal choice for irrational reasons. If Hart were correct on this point, human persons could only ever choose lower goods rather than higher out of ignorance. Therefore, given enough time and experience, they would learn to ascend from the lower to the higher and reach the knowledge and love of God. Mascall argues that human persons are capable of making choices based on their own interior creativity, and this use of their causal powers can reflect the personality of God. Since God is the source of all that is good, persons can only make a free choice of love if they can choose otherwise, or choose evil, and this is why they are capable of making an ultimately irrational choice.⁶⁶ God offers human persons grace to choose the good and love, first in the grace of creation, and second, in the grace of redemption offered in the person of Jesus Christ. For those who choose to accept Christ’s redemption and become members of his Body, they will eternally participate in his glory and experience the lasting joy and peace of the beatific vision.

To sum up, then, Lewis and Mascall agree that God has ultimately made humans to love, and genuine love necessitates the freedom to accept or reject the love of God. Therefore, the freedom of choice, the potential to take meaningful uncaused actions, exists for the sake of communion. Because the highest free action that can be taken by persons is the choice to enter into eternal union with God and the blessed. Mascall, thus, accepts the framing for the great divorce between heaven and hell rejected by Hart, namely, God allows for the possibility of permanent union or separation because of the absolute priority of love, and the need for human persons to express this love in an eternal choice for or against God.