Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 147
spared, and not that the blessed will take sadistic delight in the
spectacle as such. Needless to say, this is a meaningless dis-
tinction, since the ability to find pleasure in seeing another
suffering pains to which one is oneself immune is in fact what
sadism is. But why debate the point? Most of us today are not
going to defend the argument, no matter how it is qualified.
We simply lack the phlegm of a mediaeval Italian noble, living
in an age when torture and dungeons and summary execution
for minor offenses were inextricably woven into the coarse fab-
ric of life. Our tenderer consciences today require somewhat
more emollient formulations. As it turns out, however, this is
nowhere near as simple a matter as one might imagine. Many
of today's gentler infernalists, in their efforts to make emo-
tional sense of the idea of a heaven forever suspended above
hell's abyss, and of a paradise in which the bliss of the saints
is undiminished by the misery of those they left behind, end
up making proposals scarcely any less chilling. I recently read
an Evangelical apologist for the infernalist orthodoxies argue
that it is morally correct for the saved to cease from pity for
the damned simply because such pity is fruitless, just as it is
forgivable to avert one's eyes from a frightful accident on the
roads from which one cannot rescue the victims, and to cease
to think about it entirely. This, it should be needless to say, is
nothing more than a counsel of moral imbecility. Neither can
my pity for a little girl dying of cancer cure her, for what that
is worth; but what an atrocity of a man I would be if I ceased
pitying her for that reason.
Perhaps, though, I am illicitly tipping the scales here by
choosing an example so fraught with bathos. Maybe there are
more pardonable forms of indifference to the sufferings of
others. At least, one Catholic philosopher recently reproached
me online for exaggerating the scandal in the traditional pro-