Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsposal that the saints in heaven will not be bothered in the
least ( as of course they could not be) about the torments of
the damned below. After all, he argued, few of us ever spare a
thought for, say, the serial murderer incarcerated for life, also
out of sight and out of mind, a castaway on one or another
island of misery in the archipelago of America's brutal peni-
tentiary system. There is certainly nothing at all culpable in our
apathy here, he claimed. I should note first that I am not en-
tirely sure how to answer such an argument, because it strikes
me as so profoundly unchristian as to call into question this
philosopher's entire understanding of the faith. Certainly the
closing verses of Matthew's twenty-fifth chapter seem to sug-
gest that Christians are held to a very different standard of
ethical concern. But, more to the point, my critic was reducing
the issue to one of individual psychological engagement, a pri-
vate concern for the fate of one or another individual miscre-
ant. True, most of us do not spare a thought for the murderer
in prison - though, frankly, there is nothing particularly com-
mendable in that dreary emotional fact, nor is it a good guide
to how we should expect to see things from the perspective
of eternity, free from sin and selfishness- but it is also true
that that murderer's brother, mother, father, sister, child, wife,
or friend must think about him, and must suffer grief at the
thought of what he has become and the end he has reached.
This means, I submit, that our indifference to his fate must also
logically be an indifference to their sufferings as well. And it re-
quires little imagination to see how this small, prudent, seem-
ingly rational degree of callousness on our part might be mag-
nified, if carried into the calculus of eternity, into an absolute
moral detachment from all other persons. After all, taken to its
most extreme logical entailments, our willingness to surrender
even the most depraved of souls to a final unrelieved torment