Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 149
is, tacitly, a willingness also to ignore the sufferings of poten -
tially everyone. And, as I have noted above, what one is willing
to sacrifice to achieve a certain end, even if only potentially, is
a price that, morally speaking, one has already paid, whether
or not the actual eventuality of that sacrifice should ever arise.
We cannot choose to cease to care for any soul without thereby
choosing to cease to care for every soul to which that particu-
lar soul is attached by bonds of love or loyalty, and for every
other soul attached to each of these, and, if need be, for every
soul that has ever been - if that is what it takes to be perfectly,
blissfully indifferent to the damned. No soul is who or what it
is in isolation; and no soul's sufferings can be ignored without
the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls
being ignored as well. And so, it seems, if we allow the possi-
bility that even so much as a single soul might slip away un-
mourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out
to be "every soul for itself" -which is also, curiously enough,
precisely the ethos of hell.
I know of another Evangelical writer-this one a phi-
losopher (of sorts) who periodically insists on perpetrating
theology, always with catastrophic results-who is wholly
committed to the infernalist orthodoxy, but who at least has
the instinctive decency to recognize that indifference is not
sufficiently distinct from malice to count as a genuine moral
stance. And apparently he also grasps that talk of a final be-
atitude that might involve specifically averting one's thoughts
from certain persons one has loved in the past is, at the very
least, counterintuitive. He therefore proposes just the opposite
of the Thomistic picture: not that God, in order to increase the
felicity of the blessed, will provide them with the delectable
diversion of watching the damned writhing amid the fire and
brimstone, but that instead, in order to grant them the per-