Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?

Ware’s 1998 essay on universal salvation is the most influential Orthodox treatment of the question in English, and the most carefully calibrated: he argues that we may hope for the salvation of all, following Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian, but that we may not affirm it, because human freedom is real and the outcome is not ours to know. This file follows the essay’s argument as he actually made it — the two strands of Scripture, the three patristic witnesses, the three arguments for and four against — and marks precisely where his hope stops.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Essay and Its Occasion

“Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All? Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian” was first published in Theology Digest 45:4 (1998), 303–17, and reprinted as a chapter of The Inner Kingdom — the first volume of Ware’s Collected Works (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 193–215. It is a lecture-shaped piece: it opens with a set of unanswerable questions about the life after death, narrows to one of them, and works through Scripture, tradition and reason in turn before arriving at a conclusion of two sentences.

Ware states the problem at the outset as a collision between two things the Church holds simultaneously. He takes the collision from a conversation preserved by Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), in which a hermit told St Silouan the Athonite with evident satisfaction that God would punish all atheists and they would burn in everlasting fire. Silouan asked whether, looking down from paradise on someone burning in hell-fire, he would feel happy; the hermit answered, “It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault”; and Silouan replied, “Love could not bear that… We must pray for all” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000, 193–94, quoting Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, 48). Ware draws the two principles out of the exchange: “first, God is love; second, human beings are free” (ibid., 194). The whole essay is an attempt to hold both without dissolving either — and, in the end, an admission that they cannot be harmonized this side of the end.

The Two Strands of Scripture

Ware refuses to let either side of the New Testament evidence be quietly dropped. He sets out three “hell-fire” texts in the words attributed to Christ — Mark 9:43, 47–48 (the unquenchable fire, the worm that does not die), Matthew 25:41 (the eternal fire prepared for those at the left hand), and Luke 16:26 (the great chasm fixed between Lazarus and the rich man) — and concedes that although these are metaphors, “they have implications that are hard to avoid: the fire is said to be ‘unquenchable’ and ‘eternal’; the worm ‘does not die’; the gulf is impassable” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 195–96).

Against these he sets the Pauline texts of universal scope: 1 Corinthians 15:22 (“As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”), Romans 5:18 and 11:32, 1 Corinthians 15:28 (God “all in all” — Origen’s key text), and 1 Timothy 2:4. His argument here is grammatical and modest: Paul “does not say, ‘All may perhaps be made alive,’ but ‘All will be made alive.’ At the very least this encourages us to hope for the salvation of all” (ibid., 197). He concludes that Scripture holds two contrasting notes together — challenge and divine sovereignty — “and neither strand should be disregarded” (ibid., 197).

The Three Witnesses — and the Anathemas of 553

The historical core of the essay is a treatment of three figures: Origen of Alexandria, St Gregory of Nyssa, and St Isaac the Syrian.

On Origen, Ware is careful to distinguish the man’s humility from his error. He quotes Origen’s own caution that the last things are “matters hard and difficult to understand… We need to speak about them with great fear and caution, discussing and investigating rather than laying down fixed and certain conclusions” (Origen, On First Principles, quoted at Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 198–99).

Then comes the passage on which the essay’s whole permission rests. The first of the fifteen anathemas against Origen reads: “If anyone maintains the mythical preexistence of souls, and the monstrous apocatastasis that follows from this, let him be anathema” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 199). Ware makes two observations. First, there is “considerable doubt whether these fifteen anathemas were in fact formally approved by the Fifth Ecumenical Council”; they may have been endorsed by a lesser council meeting shortly before the main council in the early months of 553, “in which case they lack full ecumenical authority” — though he immediately adds that “the Fathers of the Fifth Council were well aware of these fifteen anathemas and had no intention of revoking or modifying them” (ibid., 199). Second, and for Ware more decisive, the anathema condemns two things together: “Origen’s eschatology is seen as following directly from his protology, and both are rejected together” (ibid., 200). What 553 anathematized is the whole system — the pre-existent logikoi, the precosmic fall, and the cyclic restoration that follows from it. A hope for universal salvation severed from that protology is not, on Ware’s reading, the thing condemned. (For the repository’s fuller treatment of the 553 question, see Origen, Nyssa and the 553 Condemnations.)

St Gregory of Nyssa is then the load-bearing case: a Father who taught a form of universal restoration, whom Ware describes as an uncondemned universalist — never anathematized, and honored by the Church as a saint and as the “Father of Fathers.” St Isaac the Syrian supplies the theology of hell as the scourging of love: hell is not God’s rejection of humankind but humankind’s refusal of God, and even there the wicked are not deprived of God’s love but experience it as suffering (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” on Isaac; and see St Isaac the Syrian). Ware observes, tellingly, that Isaac escaped condemnation in part because he lived outside Byzantine jurisdiction.

Three Arguments For, Four Against

Ware then does something unusual for a partisan of any position: he marshals the case on both sides and rates the arguments.

In favor of universal hope he lists three. (1) The power of divine love: God “compels no one, but He will in fact wait until each and every one of His rational creatures voluntarily responds to His love”; this “appeal to the invincibility of divine love is the strongest argument in favor of universal hope” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 210–11). (2) The essence of hell, following Isaac: since those in hell are still enfolded in divine love, “it remains possible that they may some day open their hearts to this omnipresent compassion” (ibid., 211). (3) The non-reality of evil: evil has no substantive existence, so nothing that exists can be utterly evil; “where there is existence, there is hope—even for the devil” (ibid., 211–12). He notes that this third argument leads as easily to conditional immortality (annihilation) as to universalism, and that conditionalism “has otherwise little support in earlier tradition” (ibid., 212).

Against universal hope he lists four. (1) The argument from free will — “Take away hell, and you deny freedom” — which he calls “certainly the strongest argument on the other side,” noting that “both parties in the debate, although in different ways, seek their main support from the fact that God is love” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 212). (2) The point of no return: the damned retain a residual freedom but have so hardened themselves that all their choices are bad; “The devil possesses freedom—but not the freedom to repent” (ibid., 213). (3) The argument from justice, which he judges “far less strong than the two previous arguments,” since with Isaac he holds that “our human notions of retributive justice are altogether inapplicable to God” (ibid., 213). (4) The moral and pastoral argument: that universalism drains the gospel of urgency. He takes this seriously, citing Origen’s own advice that the doctrine be kept from the immature, and Isaac’s reply that it makes an immeasurable difference whether we respond now or only after countless aeons (ibid., 213–14).

Where the Hope Stops

The conclusion is the most-quoted thing Ware ever wrote on the last things, and it is worth reading in full rather than in summary. Having brought the two principles back into collision, he writes that “for the time being we cannot do more than hold fast with equal firmness to both principles at once, while admitting that the manner of their ultimate harmonization remains a mystery beyond our present comprehension” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 214). He then proposes, with the dry humor characteristic of him, a notice for theologians modeled on the one at the end of the platform at Oxford Station — “Theologians must not proceed beyond this point” — and adds of Origen: “Doubtless, Origen’s mistake was that he tried to say too much. It is a fault that I admire rather than execrate, but it was a mistake nonetheless” (ibid., 215).

Then the two sentences: “Our belief in human freedom means that we have no right to categorically affirm, ‘All must be saved.’ But our faith in God’s love makes us dare to hope that all will be saved” (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” 215). And immediately after: “Hell exists as a possibility because free will exists. Yet, trusting in the inexhaustible attractiveness of God’s love, we venture to express the hope—it is no more than a hope—that in the end, like Walter de la Mare’s Traveller, we shall find that there is nobody there.” The last word he gives back to St Silouan: “Love could not bear that… We must pray for all” (ibid., 215).

Two things must be said plainly about this, because the essay is frequently cited on both sides of a debate it does not settle. First, Ware does not affirm universal salvation, and the essay explicitly denies that anyone has the right to affirm it: the phrase “it is no more than a hope” is his own, and it is the hinge of the piece. Second, hell in Ware is a real possibility, grounded in a real freedom, and he does not soften the “hell-fire” texts of the New Testament or pretend the tradition is univocal. His position is best described as an apophatic one at the eschatological horizon: a refusal both of the confident universalism that presumes to know the outcome and of the confident infernalism that presumes to populate hell.

Reception

The essay circulated the “hope, not certainty” position across the Anglophone Orthodox world, and it is the position against which more confident universalisms have since been measured. In the contemporary debate it functions as the cautious pole: where David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) argues that universal salvation must be concluded, Ware asks only whether we dare to hope — and to many Orthodox readers that difference marks the boundary between a permissible theologoumenon and an overreach (see The Modern Universalism Debate).

[Disputed: how far Ware's "hope" is compatible with the Church's eschatological teaching. (a) The receiving view holds that Ware's formulation stays strictly within the space that Gregory of Nyssa's and Isaac's uncondemned sanctity opened, since it affirms nothing the Church has denied, denies nothing the Church has affirmed, and expressly refuses to make hope into doctrine (Ware, "Dare We Hope," 215; and the treatment of the essay as a responsible mainstream position in the repository's eschatology files). (b) The critical view holds that even a hope so qualified erodes the urgency of repentance and softens the plain sense of Matthew 25 and the tradition's overwhelming consensus, and that Ware's handling of the 553 anathemas concedes too much — a line of objection taken by traditionalist Orthodox writers in Britain and North America, and one Ware himself anticipated and answered under the heading "The moral and pastoral argument" (Ware, "Dare We Hope," 213–14). The collection does not adjudicate; it records that the question is live and that Ware framed it as a hope, not a dogma.]

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, the boundary matters more than the verdict: the Church has defined the general resurrection, the Judgment, and the everlasting Kingdom; it has not defined that any particular rational creature is in fact eternally lost, and it has not received apokatastasis as doctrine. Ware’s essay is theological opinion offered inside that space and labeled as such by its author.

References

Ware, Kallistos. “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All? Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 193–215. (First published in Theology Digest 45:4 [1998], 303–17.) The primary text throughout; all quotations are from this essay, cited by the page numbers printed in it.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (The conversation between St Silouan and the hermit, quoted by Ware at 48 of the edition he used.)
Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940. (Quoted by Ware at 106 as the representative statement of the anti-universalist position: “Some will not be redeemed.”)
Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. (The confident universalism against which Ware’s “hope” is now measured.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993, 262. (Hell as self-imprisonment: “Hell is not so much a place where God imprisons humans, as a place where humans, by misusing their free will, choose to imprison themselves.”)
Scripture cited by Ware: Genesis 1:31 (LXX); Mark 9:43, 47–48; Matthew 18:8–9; 22:14; 25:41; Luke 4:21; 16:26; Romans 5:18; 11:29, 32–33; 1 Corinthians 13:8; 15:22, 28; 2 Corinthians 6:2; 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Timothy 2:13.