Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 145
asmuch as we are all bound in disobedience (as the Apostle
says) precisely by being bound to one another in the sheer con-
tingency of our shared brokenness, and the brokenness of our
world, and our responsibility one for another. Consequently,
I cannot even say where - at what extremity of pious despair-
I could possibly draw a line of demarcation between tolerable
and intolerable tales of eternal damnation. Some stories, of
course, are obviously too depraved to be credited and may be
rejected out of hand: A child who, for instance, is born one
day in poverty, close to the sun in lonely lands, suffers from
some horrible and quite incurable congenital disease, dies in
agony, unbaptized, and then - on some accounts, consecrated
by theological tradition - descends to perpetual torment as
the just penalty for a guilt inherited from a distant ancestor, or
as an epitome of divine sovereignty in election and dereliction,
or whatever. Now most of us will recognize this to be a degen-
erate parody of the gospel, so repugnant to both reason and
conscience that-even were it per impossibile true-it would
be morally indefensible to believe it. But, then, under what
conditions precisely, and at what juncture, does the language
of eternal damnation really cease to be scandalous? For me, it
never does, and for very simple reasons. Let us presume that
that child who dies before reaching the font does not in fact
descend into hell, and is not even conveniently wafted away
on pearl-pale clouds of divine tenderness into the perfumed
limbo of unbaptized babes, but instead ( as Gregory of Nyssa
believed such a child would do) ascends to eternal bliss, there
to grow forever into a deeper communion with God. This is a
much cheerier picture of things, I think we can all agree. But
let us not stop there. Let us go on to imagine also another child
born on the same day, this one in perfect health, who grows
into a man of monstrous temperament, cruel, selfish, even