The Love of God That Leaves Us Free Explains Both Evil and Hell

A Trilemma Attributed to Epicurus

The syllogism has been known since antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (ca. 341–270 BC), via Lactantius who transmits the formulation in the early 4th century (ca. 313), posed the difficulty thus: either God wants to prevent evil and cannot — then he is not almighty; or he can and does not want to — then he is not good; or he both wants and can — then whence comes evil^[1]? David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (posthumous publication, 1779), takes up the formula, asking why an omnipotent and infinitely good God would admit the existence of such a quantity of suffering^[2].

“God, either wishes to take away evils and is unable, or he is able and unwilling, or he neither wishes nor is able, or he both wishes and is able. If he wishes and is unable, he is powerless. If he is able and unwilling, he is envious. If he neither wishes nor is able, he is both envious and powerless. If he wishes and is able, whence then is evil?” — Lactantius, De ira Dei, chap. 13 (ca. 313), quoting Epicurus^[3]

In the 20th century, the philosopher John L. Mackie turned this trilemma into a logical argument: he declared in 1955 that the existence of evil was logically incompatible with that of an omnipotent and infinitely good God^[4]. It is precisely to this hardened version of the objection that the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga (born 1932) replied in 1974 with his free will defense, showing that there is at least one possible world in which God and moral evil coexist without logical contradiction: one in which God creates free creatures^[5]. Since that reply, the philosophical debate has shifted from the logical version to the probabilistic (so-called evidential) version, more modest — why so much evil — defended notably by William L. Rowe^[6].

Three Catholic Clarifications Before the Answer

Before entering into the doctrine, three clarifications are needed to avoid going astray.

First, evil is not a positive being that God would have created alongside the good. That is the Manichaean thesis, condemned by the Church beginning with Saint Augustine: there are not two eternal principles at war, but one God, creator of the good, and evil as the privation of a due good. This first clarification — properly metaphysical — changes the entire framework of the debate.

Second, the expression “God permits evil” is not equivalent to “God wills evil.” The distinction between antecedent will (God wills the salvation of all) and permissive will (God tolerates freedom’s refusal of that salvation) is one of the major technical tools of theology since Saint John Damascene (ca. 676–749)^[7].

Third, hell is not, in Catholic doctrine, an outward vengeance inflicted by an offended God. The Catechism speaks of self-exclusion: it is the soul that separates itself, freely and definitively, from the only love that could fulfill it^[8]. This nuance — the most misunderstood — will be developed further below.

A Dignity of the Person, Not an Accessory Detail

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that freedom is not a secondary attribute of man, but that by which he is the image of God:

“God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. ‘God willed that man should be “left in the hand of his own counsel” (Sir 15:14) so that he might of himself seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him’ (GS 17).” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1730, quoting Gaudium et Spes §17^[9]

The Second Vatican Council had formulated the same thing in 1965: “genuine freedom is an outstanding manifestation of the divine image in man”^[10]. This affirmation has a history: it presupposes, against Luther and against Calvin who maintained that human freedom was destroyed by original sin, that the baptized person remains truly responsible for his acts. The Council of Trent had already defined it as dogma in 1547 in its decree on justification: “If anyone says that man’s free choice was lost and extinct since Adam’s sin, let him be anathema”^[11].

Why a God of Love Cannot Create Automata

The argument runs deeper than it appears. It is not that God refuses to force love: it is that forcing love is, in strict logic, impossible. An act of love is by definition the act of a will that gives itself; a will that is not free to refuse is not a will that gives itself — it is a mechanism executing a program.

Divine omnipotence, as Saint Thomas Aquinas specified, “extends to all that does not imply internal contradiction”^[12]. God can do all that can be done. He cannot create a square circle, because a square circle is not a challenge to power: it is an empty word. Likewise, he cannot freely force someone to love him, because “constraint” and “freedom” are contradictory in the same act.

“Whatever implies contradiction in itself does not fall under divine power, because it cannot even be said to be possible.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.25, a.3^[13]

This precision is not an admission of powerlessness: it is the condition of coherence of the very concept of love. A God who “forced” love would simply have produced something other than love.

“Qui te fecit sine te, non te salvabit sine te”

Saint Augustine (354–430) fixed the most quoted formula in the entire Latin tradition on the cooperation of human freedom in salvation. In his Sermon 169, preached at Hippo around 416, the bishop comments on Saint Paul (Romans 13:14) and declares:

“He who made you without you will not justify you without you. He made you without your knowledge; he justifies you with your willing consent.” — Saint Augustine, Sermo 169, 11, 13^[14]

The point is decisive: creation is unilateral (God alone makes being out of nothing), but salvation is bilateral — it presupposes a free consent of the creature. This formula entered the Catechism as a doctrinal axis^[15]. It excludes both Pelagianism (man would save himself without grace) and strict Calvinism (grace would save without free cooperation).

Divine Love Calls, Enlightens, Attracts — But Does Not Replace

One last precision matters: refusing to force does not mean remaining inactive. God, in the Christian economy, does infinitely more than wait. He creates freedom, maintains it in being, enlightens it through conscience, attracts it through grace, speaks to it through Revelation, sends it prophets and saints, gives it the sacraments, forgives it seventy-seven times (Matthew 18:22), and finally becomes man, dies and rises for it. Everything that can be done without destroying freedom, God does. What cannot be done without destroying it — substituting consent for refusal — belongs to the sphere of the logically impossible, not of divine unwillingness.

Evil Is Not a Substance, but a Privation

This is the most structuring and most misunderstood thesis of the entire Catholic metaphysics of evil. It goes back to the Greek Fathers (Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5th–6th century), passes through Saint Augustine, and receives its classical formulation in Saint Thomas Aquinas:

For Saint Thomas Aquinas, who fixes the classical formulation in his Summa contra Gentiles (Book III), evil is not a nature or a substance, but the privation of a particular good inherent in a particular nature^[16].

In other words: evil does not exist as a thing. It exists as a lack in a thing. Blindness is not a being the eye has gained; it is the absence of the sight it ought to have. Sickness is not a substance added to a healthy body; it is a disorder in health. Sin is not a reality created by God; it is the absence of the rectitude the will ought to have.

Saint Augustine had posited this thesis in his Confessions after his conversion from Manichaeism: “I sought whence evil comes, and found no way out. [...] I examined the other things below thee and saw that they neither absolutely are, nor absolutely are not. They are, since they come from thee; they are not, since they are not what thou art.”^[17]

Radical consequence: God, creator of all that is, is not the creator of evil since evil is not a being. There is privation because there is creation of finite natures, capable of being deficient — but God did not create deficiency as such; he created beings that can suffer from it and, for free beings, cause it.

Physical Evil, Moral Evil, Metaphysical Evil

Tradition classically distinguishes three acceptations of the word “evil,” often confused in public debate.

This distinction is decisive because most atheist objections confuse the three levels: the suffering of a sick child (physical evil, a disorder undergone) is treated as if it were an act directly willed by God (which is never the case in Catholic doctrine), and the moral argument is turned into a metaphysical one.

God Is Never the Cause of Moral Evil

This is the strict dogmatic boundary of every Catholic theodicy. The Catechism states it in clear terms:

“God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil. He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §311^[18]

Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguished with precision: God is the cause of the evil of punishment (the ordained consequence that sanctions disorder) but never of the evil of fault (sin itself)^[19]. The reason is metaphysical: God causes being; yet sin, insofar as it is disorder, is a defect of being — God is therefore not its author.

The Disorder Undergone by Creation: Original Sin

How then to explain physical evil — earthquakes, sicknesses, biological death — which does not originate in a personal fault? Catholic doctrine connects it to the rupture of the original harmony by the sin of the origins, without reducing each individual suffering to a personal fault:

“The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered (cf. Gen 3:7); the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions (cf. Gen 3:11-13); their relations will be marked by lust and domination (cf. Gen 3:16). Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man (cf. Gen 3:17, 19). Because of man, creation is now subject ‘to its bondage to decay’ (Rom 8:20).” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §400^[20]

This doctrine does not deny the reality of natural phenomena; it affirms that what should have been for man a cosmos harmoniously ordered to his end was disorganized by the spiritual rupture with God. Saint Paul expresses it thus: “the whole creation has been groaning in travail” (Romans 8:22).

Permitting Is Not Willing

The distinction is ancient and precise. Saint Augustine formulates it, Saint Thomas systematizes it, the Catechism takes it up. God never wills evil in the sense of being its direct or indirect cause; he permits it out of respect for the freedom he created. To permit means: not to prevent by an act of absolute power what the free creature posits on its own account.

This distinction is no rhetorical artifice. If God willed evil, divine love would be contradictory. But if he prevented all evil, he would abolish the very freedom he willed. Permitting is therefore the only possible course for a God who wills both the free creature and the good of that creature.

Antecedent Will, Consequent Will

Saint John Damascene (ca. 676–749) fixed the most precise technical tool for thinking this mystery. God has two modes of willing:

• an antecedent will (voluntas antecedens) — he wills, in himself and first of all, the salvation of all; he wills, in himself and first of all, that no evil be;
• a consequent will (voluntas consequens) — he takes on, in response to the free acts of creatures, what results from them; he permits the evil that flows from their refusal, and he orders that evil to a greater good^[21].

This distinction is taken up by Saint Thomas^[22] and by the whole Latin tradition. It avoids two symmetrical misunderstandings: “God wills evil” (false: he never wills it antecedently) and “God ignores evil” (false: he consequently integrates it into his universal Providence). Without this grid, half of atheist objections against God’s goodness rest on an equivocation.

Saint John Damascene teaches it thus: in his antecedent will, God wills the salvation of all men; in his consequent will, he permits the punishment his justice requires for sinners who refuse that salvation^[23].

“God Would Never Permit Any Evil If...”

The deepest axis of Catholic theodicy holds in a single sentence, inherited from Saint Augustine and taken up by the Catechism:

“The almighty God [...], because he is supremely good, would never permit any evil in his works if he were not so powerful and good as to bring good out of evil itself.” — Saint Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Charity, 11 (ca. 421), quoted by CCC §311^[24]

This formula entirely reverses the atheist argument. If God permits evil, it is precisely because he is almighty and good — powerful enough to draw a greater good from evil, and good enough not to content himself with avoiding evil at the price of freedom. Saint Thomas takes up the argument: “Since God is the supreme Good, he would not permit evil in his works unless he were so powerful and good as to draw good even from evil”^[25].

Providence Overturns History

Scripture illustrates it through the episode of Joseph sold by his brothers. At the end of the story, Joseph, become viceroy of Egypt, says to his brothers:

“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” — Genesis 50:20, liturgical trans.^[26]

Saint Paul raises this logic to the rank of a universal principle: “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Romans 8:28). Evil is never good in itself; but Providence knows how to integrate it into a larger plan whose scope the creature cannot measure.

The Summit: the Cross Draws Salvation from the Greatest Crime

The supreme proof of the efficacy of this permission is the Cross itself. The greatest crime in history — the putting to death of the Son of God by the Jewish and Roman authorities — becomes through Providence the place of the redemption of the whole human race. Saint Peter formulates it from Pentecost onward: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). God did not will the sin of Judas, of Pilate or of Caiaphas; but he freely took the Passion upon himself to draw the salvation of the world from that sin.

“From the greatest moral evil ever committed — the rejection and murder of God’s only Son, caused by the sins of all men — God, by his grace that ‘abounded all the more’ (cf. Rom 5:20), brought the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §312^[27]

Why God Does Not Immediately Remove the Wicked

The popular objection is almost always formulated thus: “if God existed, he would have stopped Hitler.” But the question contains a trap: where should he stop? Should he also remove all warlords, all mafiosi, all violent fathers? And liars? And the selfish? From what degree of sin should God intervene physically? If the logic is pushed, no one would remain — including the one formulating the objection. The permission of evil in history is not indifference but patience.

“The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” — 2 Peter 3:9, liturgical trans.^[28]

This patience is space for conversion. As long as a sinner lives, he can return: that is what the whole history of the saints says, from the good thief to Charles de Foucauld by way of Augustine himself. Saul of Tarsus, persecutor of the Church, became the apostle of the nations. God does not remove the wicked because he knows that a wicked man can become a saint.

What the Catechism Really Teaches

The central passage of the Catechism on hell fixes the doctrine in a single paragraph of remarkable density, which must be quoted in full because it alone dispels all caricatures:

“To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. And this state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell.’” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1033^[29]

Three words overturn the whole popular doctrine: self-exclusion, by our own free choice, separated from him. Hell is not vengeance, but separation. It is not a place where God locks souls in, but a state in which the soul locks itself in.

The following paragraph confirms it: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (CCC §1037)^[30].

“Hell as Definitive Rejection of God” — John Paul II, 1999

Pope John Paul II, during the general audience of Wednesday 28 July 1999 at Castel Gandolfo, gave the clearest pontifical exposition of this doctrine. The very title of the catechesis is “Hell as Definitive Rejection of God”^[31]. The holy pope summarizes:

“More than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.” — John Paul II, general audience of 28 July 1999^[32]

And further on:

“Damnation, therefore, should not be attributed to God’s initiative, for in his merciful love he can will only the salvation of the beings he created. In reality, it is the creature who closes himself to his love. Damnation consists precisely in definitive separation from God, freely chosen by the human person and confirmed with death, which seals his choice for ever.” — John Paul II, general audience of 28 July 1999^[33]

This catechesis follows two others: that of 21 July 1999 on heaven as full communion, and that of 4 August 1999 on purgatory. The trilogy forms a recent and authoritative magisterial corpus on the last things.

Saint John Damascene, Saint Thomas and the “Pain of Loss”

Saint John Damascene (ca. 676–749), last of the Greek Fathers, teaches that the fall is for angels what death is for men: after it, no return is possible^[34]. The technical distinction between the two punishments of hell — poena damni (the pain of loss, i.e. privation of the vision of God) and poena sensus (the pain of sense, positive suffering) — is the work of Latin scholasticism, fixed by Saint Thomas Aquinas^[35]. The unanimous tradition holds that the pain of loss is the principal suffering: to be for ever deprived of the only end for which one is made.

Catherine of Siena: “They Made Themselves Unbearable to Themselves”

In her Dialogue of Divine Providence (1378), Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) hears God the Father explain to her the mystery of judgment. She describes hell not as God’s outward work but as the fruit the soul fabricates for itself by its refusal:

“My daughter, my tongue will never be able to tell what these poor souls suffer. [...] There are also in hell four torments that surpass all the others: the damned soul is first deprived of my vision, and this pain is so great that, if it were possible, it would rather suffer fire and the other torments, and see me, than be exempt from all suffering and not see me.” — Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, chapter 38^[36]

The logic is rigorously spiritual: what makes hell hell is the clear awareness of having refused the one good. The separation is undergone, but it was chosen before being undergone.

Saint Faustina and the Torment of Refused Light

Saint Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), apostle of Divine Mercy, was led by an angel to see hell on 20 October 1936. Her description, fixed at paragraph 741 of her Diary, restates in mystical terms what the Catechism would teach in doctrinal terms sixty years later.

By God’s order, she records her vision so that no one may say there is no hell, or that no one has been there and knows what it is like: what she writes of it, she says, is but a faint reflection of what she saw, and she notes that many souls are there for having doubted its existence^[37].

The pastoral point is clear: hell exists precisely because human freedom is taken seriously; to deny it would be to deny the real gravity of human acts.

C. S. Lewis and the Now-Classic Formula

The English writer Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), converted from atheism to Anglicanism and a lay theologian of rare lucidity, supplied popular theology with two formulas that have become canonical. The first comes from The Great Divorce (1945), an allegory of a bus going up from hell to heaven:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.” — C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, chapter 9 (1945)^[38]

The second, in The Problem of Pain (1940), sums it all up:

“The gates of hell are locked on the inside.” — C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, chapter 8 (1940)^[39]

A striking image: the damned soul is not a prisoner trying to escape. It is the author of its own enclosure. God does not keep it in hell; it keeps itself there by refusing the only love that could bring it out.

Saint Alphonsus Liguori: The Loss of a Single Eternal Good

Saint Alphonsus Maria Liguori (1696–1787), Doctor of the Church and founder of the Redemptorists, devoted a large part of his preaching to the last things — not to frighten, but to awaken the anesthetized conscience of the 18th century. In the Preparation for Death (1758), his most widely diffused meditation, he returns unceasingly to the incommensurable disproportion between goods freely lost and their irreversible loss:

“But all these pains are nothing compared to the pain of loss. Darkness, infections, howlings, devouring fire — all this does not make hell. What makes hell is the misfortune of having lost God.” — Saint Alphonsus Maria Liguori, Preparation for Death, 26th consideration, Third point^[40]

Alphonsian logic is not vindictive: it is that of a confessor who each day sees souls slipping toward death without having measured the stakes. The pain of loss, for him, is not a punishment added from outside — it is the clear awareness of having lost the only end for which one was created.

Without a Possible Hell, No Real Freedom

The existence of hell paradoxically states the eternal dignity of human freedom: God made man not as a slave, but as a friend to whom he entrusts the choice — “I no longer call you servants [...] I have called you friends” (John 15:15). If man refuses this friendship for ever, he has only himself to blame.

The argument exactly completes Lewis: if hell did not exist, freedom would be fictional. A will that could not lose itself eternally could not save itself eternally either.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: Trust as the Antidote to Despair

Faced with these grave truths, Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus (1873–1897) fixed the other indispensable side: childlike trust in infinite mercy. In September 1896, a year before her death, she writes to her sister Marie of the Sacred Heart about the daring trust that excludes despair before evil:

“What pleases God in my little soul is to see me love my littleness and my poverty; it is the blind hope I have in his mercy... That is my only treasure.” — Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, letter 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart (17 September 1896)^[41]

Hell, for Thérèse, is not first a subject of speculative anguish: it is a call to throw oneself without reserve into mercy. The only evil that would make hell certain is the refusal of trust — the pride that would claim mercy is not strong enough for us.

Objection 1 — “God Should Have Created Only the Saved”

The objection seems unanswerable: an omniscient God knows in advance who will be saved. Why then does he create those who will be damned? Would it not be more loving not to create them at all?

Answer. The objection assumes that God could create a world of free persons in which all would necessarily choose the good. But if the choice is necessary, it is no longer free — back to the automata. The objection therefore asks God to create simultaneously a free creature incapable of refusal, which is contradictory.

The analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga formalized this point under the name of transworld depravity: it is logically possible that in every world of truly free creatures, at least some of them refuse the good at some point. God cannot instantiate a world in which all free beings necessarily choose the good, because such a world no longer contains free beings^[42].

Moreover, one creature’s refusal does not make the gift of existence to all unjust for that matter. To exist, to receive grace, to be called to beatitude, to be able to love God — all this is a good. Damnation does not come from being created, but from the free refusal of the end for which one was created.

Objection 2 — “True Love Should Force Salvation”

If someone rushes into fire, should love not stop him by force? If someone destroys himself, should love not constrain him to live?

Answer. For the outward things of the body, yes: one physically prevents a child from throwing himself out the window. But the ultimate relationship with God is not an outward movement. It engages the center of the person: his will, his love, his consent. One can prevent a physical gesture; one cannot substitute consent for refusal.

The argument further assumes that constraint would be an act of love. But it is precisely the reverse: forcing someone to love me is the very negation of love. “Forced salvation” would be the absorption of a will, not the communion of two freedoms.

Objection 3 — “A Loving Parent Would Not Let His Child Be Lost”

A loving parent does everything to save his child; if God loves infinitely more, he would a fortiori do everything.

Answer. God does infinitely more. He creates, calls, reveals, forgives, becomes man, dies on the Cross, institutes the sacraments, gives the Holy Spirit, sends saints, awaits conversion until the last instant. The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) is the most exact image Christ ever gave of this logic: the father lets his son leave, because he respects his son’s dramatic freedom; but he watches for his return, runs to meet him as soon as he sees him, and sets no condition on forgiveness.

But a parent cannot love in place of his child. He can beg, wait, forgive, open the door. He cannot magically transform a free refusal into free consent. This limit is not a weakness of parental love: it is the very condition of the child’s dignity as a person.

Objection 4 — “If God Knows in Advance Who Will Be Damned, He Is Responsible for It”

The argument confuses foreknowledge with causation. To foresee is not to cause. A meteorologist who predicts the storm does not cause it. God, in eternity, sees all free acts in a single present; but this vision is not the cause of free acts — it is their knowledge.

Saint Thomas Aquinas formalized this point: “Whatever is known by God must necessarily be; but this necessity is not absolute, it is conditional. [...] God knows future contingents not as necessary, but as contingent”^[43]. Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524), had already given the classic answer: divine foreknowledge is non-temporal (God sees all times in a single nunc stans), so it is not before the free act, but eternally contemporaneous with it^[44].

This question is the subject of a separate article: see Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will.

Objection 5 — “A Finite Fault Does Not Deserve Eternal Punishment”

The objection is philosophical: why punish eternally a fault committed in a few years of earthly life?

Answer. The eternity of hell is not the mechanical duration of an outward punishment, but the stability of a chosen state. What is eternal is not the length of the punishment, but the definitive closure of the will. Saint Thomas teaches that the punishment of mortal sin is eternal because the will, fixed against the infinite good, remains irremediably closed^[45]. The disembodied soul no longer has the mutability of earthly being; its last choice is definitive not because God would refuse to forgive — he would always forgive — but because the will that closed itself at the end of life remains closed.

Saint John Damascene, already quoted, expresses it thus: “What death is for men, the fall is for angels. What the return after the fall is for men, the resurrection is for angels — I mean, before death” — that is, death seals for the human soul what the fall sealed for the angels^[46].

Moreover, the gravity of an offense is measured not only by the duration of the act, but also by the dignity of the one offended. A slap given to a beggar lasts a second; given to a president, it can justify months in prison. Mortal sin offends God — not by wounding his impassible nature, but by refusing the one end for which man is made. Its gravity is therefore proportionate to the dignity refused, not to the duration of the act.

Objection 6 — Apocatastasis: “All Will Finally Be Saved”

The reverse objection, defended by Origen in the 3rd century and by certain modern theologians (Hans Urs von Balthasar in a cautious version — a hope, never a certainty — David Bentley Hart more radically), affirms that finally, at the end of the ages, all — demons included — will be saved.

Answer. Universal apocatastasis in the strict sense has been condemned by the Church: the synod of Constantinople of 543 promulgates fifteen anathemas against Origen, the ninth of which states: “If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and impious men is temporary and will have an end at some time, [...] let him be anathema”^[47] — it being specified that the formal reception of these anathemas by the Second Council of Constantinople (553) is debated among historians. The Catechism confirms: “The affirmations of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church on the subject of hell are a call to responsibility [...] They constitute at the same time an urgent call to conversion” (CCC §1036).

The position of a Balthasar — “We may hope for all,” never affirming that all will be saved — remains within orthodox doctrinal limits as hope and not as certainty. But the Church’s doctrine maintains both (a) the universality of God’s salvific will (1 Timothy 2:4: “God desires all men to be saved”) and (b) the real, non-hypothetical possibility of damnation as a consequence of freedom. This hope is never a thesis about the final outcome: it is the disposition of a child who, knowing damnation to be really possible, weeps before God over the possible loss of a soul and continues to entrust it to him, without affirming anything against the Church’s teaching.

The Disorder Undergone by Creation

Moral evil has been explained by bad freedom. But what of physical evil: a child dying of leukemia, an earthquake annihilating a city, an animal slowly dying in agony? Here there is no guilty will.

The Catholic answer holds in two stages. First, the cosmic disorder is consequent upon original sin: creation has become “subject to its bondage to decay” (Romans 8:20). This does not mean that each individual suffering is the punishment of a personal fault (Christ expressly denies this in John 9:3 concerning the man born blind) , but that the cosmos as a whole lost the harmony it should have had if man had not fallen. Second, God permits these physical evils not because they would be good in themselves — they are not — but because he can order them to a superior good which the creature, in its temporal horizon, cannot measure.

John Paul II and the Christian Meaning of Suffering

On 11 February 1984, for the Jubilee of Redemption, Pope John Paul II published Salvifici Doloris, an apostolic letter on “the Christian meaning of human suffering.” The text refuses both dolorism (making suffering a good in itself) and revolt (rejecting the Christian meaning of the Cross):

“In the cross of Christ not only is the Redemption accomplished through suffering, but also human suffering itself has been redeemed. [...] Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished.” — John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, §19 (1984)^[48]

The pope does not give an abstract explanation of suffering; he points to a way out: suffering, united to the crucified Christ, can be transformed into a redemptive gift. Saint Paul had written to the Colossians: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church” (Colossians 1:24, liturgical trans.).

The Final Silence of Job

The biblical book of Job — which ancient tradition attributes to Moses (Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 14b-15a^[49]) — is the great biblical testament on the mystery of the suffering of the just. Part of contemporary exegesis proposes a later writing, between the 6th and 4th centuries BC — a hypothesis founded on internal criteria (language, style), without decisive external attestation^[50]. Job loses his children, his goods, his health. Three friends come to “explain” to him: you suffer because you sinned. Job refutes them. At the end, God speaks — and gives no equation. He questions Job about creation, shows him the abyss between divine wisdom and human intelligence. Job concludes:

“I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” — Job 42:5-6, liturgical trans.^[51]

Christianity has not betrayed this biblical pedagogy. Christ himself, on the Cross, does not give a cold theory of suffering: he bears it. And it is through this participation, not through reasoning, that human suffering receives its ultimate meaning.

Catholic doctrine, taken seriously, excludes three opposed positions that all simplify the problem.

Universalist angelism affirms that all will finally be saved, even the demons. This position, defended by Origen and condemned by the fifteen anathemas of 543 (whose formal reception by Constantinople II in 553 is debated), blooms again in certain contemporary theologies. It has a cost: it denies the reality of freedom by denying that of possible refusal. If all are necessarily saved, earthly freedom no longer has eternal weight.

Jansenist pessimism affirms that the mass of men will be damned. This position, defended by Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) in his posthumous Augustinus (Louvain, 1640) and by certain preachers of the 18th–19th centuries, was condemned by the magisterium: five propositions censured by Innocent X (Cum occasione, 31 May 1653), then one hundred and one propositions of Quesnel condemned by Clement XI (Unigenitus Dei Filius, 8 September 1713)^[54]. It also has a cost: it lessens the universal scope of the divine salvific will clearly affirmed by 1 Timothy 2:4.

Anti-metaphysical determinism affirms that there is no true human freedom, hence no true responsibility, hence no hell. This position, defended in various forms by Spinoza, Laplace, and today certain materialist neuroscientists (Sam Harris), denies the presupposition of the whole doctrine. It refutes itself: if we have no free will, neither does the determinist freely believe what he believes, nor can he reproach us for anything.

The Catholic position holds the three balances: God wills to save all (against pessimism), some can refuse (against universalism), freedom is real (against determinism).

God’s love explains both the permission of evil and the possibility of hell because true love presupposes freedom. God does not will evil; he wills creatures capable of truly loving. He does not will hell; he respects a freedom that can close itself to him definitively.

Christianity therefore minimizes neither evil nor hell. It takes them so seriously that God himself enters into suffering through the Cross to save man without abolishing his freedom. The ultimate answer is not a cold theory: it is Christ crucified, with pierced and open hands, who calls without constraining.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” — Revelation 3:20, liturgical trans.^[55]

Hell’s door is locked from the inside, wrote Lewis. The door of the human heart is too. The difference is that the heart’s door, as long as one lives, can still open. That is what is at stake every day.

A Conclusion in Four Truths Held Together

If Catholic doctrine had to be summed up in four propositions, here are those that no honest answer to the objection of evil can sacrifice:

1. God is not the author of evil — directly or indirectly, never (CCC §311). Evil is a privation, not a creation.
2. God wills to save all — the divine antecedent will excludes no one (1 Timothy 2:4). Hell is not a decree; it is a refusal.
3. Man is truly free — to the point of being able to say no eternally. That is what makes him the image of God, and what makes his yes able to be true love.
4. God draws good from evil — always, up to the summit of the Cross (CCC §312). No evil has the last word in Providence; but it is not man who measures this from his temporal horizon.

Holding these four truths together is not an intellectual exercise: it is the interior attitude to which the whole Gospel invites. The scandal of evil remains, but it is no longer an objection against God — it becomes a call to trust in a freedom that God takes infinitely more seriously than we do ourselves.

Go Further with Via Divina — This article summarizes a major question of Catholic apologetics often covered in the free foundational Via Divina formation. To go further on freedom, evil, suffering and Christian hope, open the dedicated course on /home/formation.

Readers who want to go deeper into each mystery for itself will find two complete dossiers: The answer to evil and suffering, which gathers the logical objection and the lived wound, the definitions, Providence, the seven goods, the Cross and accompaniment; and Hell, why hell exists, with its doctrine, its six objections and its testimonies. The present article remains the place where one sees at a single glance why one and the same love explains both.

• The Answer to Evil and Suffering — complete article on the mystery of evil.
• Hell: Answers to Objections — freedom, justice and the eternity of punishments.
• The Free-Will Argument — philosophical foundation of human freedom.
• Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will — God knows without causing.
• Purgatory — final purification and mercy.
• The Catechism of the Catholic Church — reference text quoted throughout this article.

s (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 19, a. 6): no verbatim text is quoted.