New from our Research Blog: “Discovering Universal Salvation"

Little is more exciting to a medievalist than the discovery of a lost text preserved in a forgotten codex in some neglected archive. Or, in some cases, the text is right under our nose: In 1983, the great Syriac scholar Sebastian Brock came across an unknown work of Isaac of Nineveh in a manuscript at Oxford’s Bodleian library. Isaac was a monk who lived in Qatar and Mesopotamia during the seventh century (the first century of Islamic rule). In the Bodleian text, Isaac weighed in on a central topic of medieval thought: What happens after we die?

For many Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the premodern Islamic world, the answer to this question was similar, at least in its basic outlines. After an intermediate period in which souls sleep or have a foretaste of their future state, God will raise the dead and pass judgment on every person who has ever lived. Some will suffer eternal punishment, while others experience eternal joy. Poets, preachers, and artists across the medieval world delighted in imaging the exquisite pleasures of paradise and the equally exquisite pains of hell.

As Brock discovered, Isaac rejected the idea of eternal punishment and argued instead for universal salvation. God, he wrote, punishes as a father does, to teach and correct. Punishment in hell is therefore temporary, and God will have mercy on all people. Even the Devil will be saved! [...]

This is an excerpt from "Discovering Universal Salvation," by John Zaleski, Ph.D., the Medieval Institute's 2026 A.W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow. Read the full piece.