Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

I once (years ago) asked Ludwig von Mises whether he was in heaven and if so, then why he was there, given his apparent lifelong atheism. The only-slightly sad yet brimming with amazement answer I got, from Mises himself (don’t ask me how — it’s none of your business; let it be enough that I am sharing with you a private revelation), was “The Lord spared me.”

It’s only one small reason why I detest this crudest imaginable view that those with faith are necessarily saved, and those without it are just as necessarily damned.

First of all, faith can be alive or dead. If it’s alive, then it is united with hope, charity, other virtues, and good deeds. These things get you to heaven. Secondly, God does not throw His champions like Mises away, even if they held doctrines about God or the afterlife different from the Christian ones. At any rate, how dare we desecrate the delicate, unique, and often marvelous beauty of a man’s inner life by condemning him and stomping on his essence based only on the fact that he was not a “Christian”! How about some sympathy, genuine interest in him, and patience, the qualities that God surely has in abundance?

It may readily be objected that Mises did not remain atheist throughout his entire life: e.g., he writes:

This personal experience of wholeness, unity, and infinity is the loftiest peak of human existence. It is the awakening to a higher humanity. It alone transforms everyday living into true living. It is not vouchsafed to us daily or at all places. The occasions on which we are brought closer to the world spirit must await a propitious hour. Such moments occur only seldom, but they are a thousand fold rewarding, and reflection upon them illumines the passing days, weeks, months, and years.

What we experience in these moments of exaltation fills our deepest and most personal thoughts and feelings. They are so private and personal that we are unable to communicate them to anyone else. They are so deep within us that they cannot make a clear impression on our own consciousness. Whoever in the presence of his beloved or in the contemplation of an aspect of nature or in the stirring of his own strength has experienced the power of the infinite finds it impossible to tell either himself or others what it is that moves him and how it moves him. The whole remains ineffable because reason and language are unable to enter here. (Epistemological Problems of Economics, 1, III, 4)

What kind of an atheist, we may argue, talks about “the world spirit” and “the power of the infinite”? Mises may not have been a Christian but he might well have been a theist. Also, the book from which the above passage is quoted was Mises’s penultimate one, published when he was 79. Maybe at that age he changed his mind from his seeming rejection of theology in Human Action, pp. 69-71.

Interestingly, in Socialism Mises condemns what might have been his own Judaism (and Islam, to boot), while showing a good deal of respect for Western Christianity and especially the Catholic Church:

Today the Islamic and Jewish religions are dead. They offer their adherents nothing more than a ritual. They know how to prescribe prayers and fasts, certain foods, circumcision and the rest; but that is all. They offer nothing to the mind. Completely despiritualized, all they teach and preach are legal forms and external rule. They lock their follower into a cage of traditional usages, in which he is often hardly able to breathe; but for his inner soul they have no message. They suppress the soul, instead of elevating and saving it. For many centuries in Islam, for nearly two thousand years in Jewry, there have been no new religious movements. Today the religion of the Jews is just as it was when the Talmud was drawn up. The religion of Islam has not changed since the days of the Arab conquests. Their literature, their philosophies continue to repeat the old ideas and do not penetrate beyond the circle of theology. One looks in vain among them for men and movements such as Western Christianity has produced in each century. They maintain their identity only by rejecting everything foreign and “different,” by traditionalism and conservatism. Only their hatred of everything foreign rouses them to great deeds from time to time. All new sects, even the new doctrines which arise with them, are nothing more than echoes of this fight against the foreign, the new, the infidel. Religion has no influence on the spiritual life of the individual, where indeed this is able to develop at all against the stifling pressure of rigid traditionalism. We see this most clearly in the lack of clerical influence. Respect for the clergy is purely superficial. In these religions there is nothing which could be compared to the profound influence which the clergy exercises in the Western Churches — though of a different order in each church; there is nothing to compare to the Jesuit, the Catholic bishop, and the Protestant pastor. There was the same inertia in the polytheistic religions of antiquity and there still is in the Eastern Church. The Greek Church has been dead for over a thousand years. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did it once more produce a man in whom faith and hope flared up like fire. But Tolstoy’s Christianity, however much it may bear a superficially Eastern and Russian hue, is at bottom founded on Western ideas. It is particularly characteristic of this great Gospeller that, unlike the Italian merchant’s son, Francis of Assisi, or the German miner’s son, Martin Luther, he did not come from the people but from the nobility which, by upbringing and education, had been completely Westernized. The Russian Church proper has produced at most men like John of Kronstadt or Rasputin.

These dead churches lack any special ethics. Harnack says of the Greek Church: “The real sphere of the working life whose morality is to be regulated by the Faith, falls outside its direct observation. This is left to the state and the nation.” But it is otherwise in the living Church of the West. Here, where faith is not yet extinct, where it is not merely external form that conceals nothing but the priest’s meaningless ritual, where, in a word, it grips the whole man, there is continuous striving after a social ethic. Again and again do its members go back to the Gospels to renew their life in the Lord and His Message. (IV, 29, 1)

Mises finishes with a hope that the Catholic Church would purge itself of its anti-liberal bias. (If only Bendict XVI was also an Austrian economist! Well, you can’t have everything.) But none of that would be enough, according to someone like William Lane Craig.

Now Craig believes that faith in this life is essential to salvation. What of those, then, who never heard the Gospel? Well, answers Craig, they are transcircumstantially depraved; they would not have acquired faith no matter where or when they lived or the circumstances with which they were surrounded. God “does no injustice towards the unevangelized who reject the light of general revelation and are lost because He knows that they wouldn’t have responded to the Gospel anyway, even if they had heard it.” He then tackles the accusation that this view entails “cultural chauvinism,” because his correspondent writes that “swathes of humanity are written off.” This is a mild way of putting it. Whole nations, billions of people sharing the same race or nationality are spiritually destroyed without so much as a hope for eternal life even in some possible world! But surely this result cannot be accidental; their race must be the cause; they must be some sort of subhumans! I seem to remember a medieval justification of the slaughter of the American natives to the effect that, why, living in the New World they couldn’t have descended from Adam and Eve, and therefore they were probably devil’s spawn. Craig’s theory of salvation is quite a bit more implausible, because it does far more than merely call for bodily death to unbelievers; its wrath is not even satisfied with condemning their souls to hell, as though Craig were the all-holy Judge Himself, and they were irredeemable hateful monsters like demons; it consigns these folks to absolute depravity. Condemn people if you must, but do you also have to ruin their reputations?

And according to what mechanism, I ask Craig, have the billions of Asians and Africans turned from being transcircumstantially depraved into willing members of the Church? Ah, he will say, this is because “human persons are individuated by their souls, [and] my soul could have been placed in a different body so that I should have been a person of a different race or ethnicity born at a different time and place in history. On such an understanding of human personhood, bodily characteristics are of much less significance than on a materialistic view.” What he is trying to say is that God used to place evil, i.e., totally depraved, souls in the bodies of the miserable Chinese, and now that some of these Chinese have a chance of becoming Christians, God places good souls into their bodies. It is true that, while human persons are multiplied by their bodies (matter), they are individuated by their souls (form). What Craig wants to convey is that humans are individualized by their personalities, and those are immaterial, and therefore the significance of the body is lessened. But surely, one’s bodily make-up affects one’s personality. Body and soul are enmeshed into one another, creating a psychosomatic unity. Just as a statue is informed marble, so a human is an ensouled body. Elsewhere I suggested that we may distinguish a “spirit,” as well, such that in humans matter corresponds to body, humanity to soul, and personality to spirit. Anyway, I find it hard to believe that souls, being created or implanted into a fetus or developing naturally in it as it gestates can be divided into good and evil. It is well accepted that children are born innocent and capable of becoming either good or evil.

Aquinas seems more reasonable in treating this problem. He argues that the failure of numerous peoples to hear the Gospel is their punishment. God doesn’t have to save anybody. We’re all guilty, he presumes; if God graces you with faith, well, consider yourself lucky (no, Aquinas doesn’t say that in so many words). Otherwise, you have no natural claim to heaven: “By natural knowledge a man is not turned to God, according as He is the object of beatitude and the cause of justification. Hence such knowledge does not suffice for justification.” (ST, II-I, 113, 4, ad 2) One must come to “believe that God justifies man through the mystery of Christ.” (Ibid., ad 3) He further suggests that one cannot merit everlasting life without grace. (Ibid., 109, 5) It seems that Aquinas agrees with Craig here, even goes beyond him in denying the efficacy of general revelation for justification. But nowhere does Aquinas offer an opinion on who is actually saved and who is actually damned. He is not God the Son.

It is true that Craig might dismiss my arguments, because I favor universal salvation. “Of course, he’ll deny trans-whatever depravity.” And I reply to him that he does not grasp (1) the extent of God’s mercy and (2) the horror of hell. Yes, on the one hand, it is hard to imagine what God would do with people who die without knowing Him by faith and communion. But this failure to be uplifted into fellowship with God in life is not sufficient fault to be thrown into hell after life is over. There are intermediate places; we might invoke purgatory, for example. Further, the kingdom of God is within you, just as the kingdom of evil is. No one, upon seeing God, can fail to love Him as much as he is able, just as no one, upon beholding hell, can fail to change his behavior in response to this awful incentive. Therefore, no one needs to be condemned.

Perhaps Craig should ask himself whether he would come up with such an inhuman theory in every possible world. Is his “intellectual depravity” transcircumstantial?