132 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
Admittedly, it is difficult not to admire the sheer ingenuity with
which, having arrived at dogmatic commitments that no con-
science not cowed by terror could abide, many of them have
striven to make the abominable seem, if not palatable, at least
vaguely reasonable. They have beguiled themselves with those
curious fables I have already mentioned above: they tell them-
selves, say, that an eternity of torment is an entirely condign
penalty for even the smallest imaginable sin, the most triv-
ial peccadillo, the pettiest lapse of plain morality, because the
gravity of any transgression must be measured by the dignity of
the one whom it has wronged, and God necessarily possesses
infinite dignity; or they tell themselves that the revelation of
God's sovereign glory, in dereliction and redemption, is a good
surpassing every other, so good indeed as to make the per-
petual sufferings of rational beings somehow a happy circum-
stance in the optics of eternity. But again, of course, all of this
is nonsense: guilt's "proportion" is not an objective quantity,
but an evaluation, and only a monstrous justice would refuse
to assign guilt according to the capacities and knowledge of
the transgressor; and a glory revealed by cruelty or vengeance
is no glory at all. Whatever Christians have told themselves
to make sense of this teaching, however, the one thing they
have always had scrupulously to avoid thinking about deeply
is what the character of God would have to be for him to have
been willing to create a world of finite spirits on such terms as
these. But I have made that point already at some length. So,
suffice it here to say that there are moments when I find it dif-
ficult not to think that Christianity's chief distinction among
theistic creeds is that it alone openly enjoins its adherents to be
morally superior to the God they worship.
I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered
a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of