Contemporary popular theology works from several slogans about Hell: “Hell is locked from the inside” “people damn themselves”, “God gives the damned what they want” etc. Slogans are underdetermined, but these ones are taken to mean that God and the blessed either don’t think of the damned or regard them with resignation. So taken, the existence of Hell makes the human arc of salvation ultimately tragic, being a tale of how we did our best but ultimately failed in the face of the unconquerable human will to evil. But it is nonsense that the story of salvation be ultimately tragic, which leaves us logically either with universalism or with the saints rejoicing over the final destruction of the wicked.
The saints are heroic, so therefore is the story of the world. We’ve spent our lives cheering for the death of antagonists in cartoons, action movies, westerns etc since it is as absurd as disgusting that, in the end, antagonists triumph and heroes fail. Universalism, however, demands that the heroic arc is ultimately incomplete, and that what looks like a climactic resolution is only the close of the first act. So what follows? The universalist wants the same heroic arc to cycle again and bring the damned into the courts of the blessed, but it obviously can’t do so. Universalism is trapped in a performative contradiction, wanting the heroic tale to be ultimately incomplete since the damned are not yet saved, while still wanting the story to finish heroically for all. If the world divides into A’s conquering B’s, you can’t then cast B’s in the A role. Either the whole story isn’t heroic or those who are conquered stay conquered. And the saints are heroic, therefore, etc.
Just Thomism 