150 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
feet blessedness of the Kingdom, he will veil the sufferings of
the damned from their eyes, and will even elide all memory of
the lost from their recollections. Think of it as a kind of heav-
enly lobotomy, a small, judicious mutilation of the intellect,
the surrender of a piece of the mind in exchange for peace of
mind. After all, consider how happy we could all be if we never
had to think of anyone's sufferings at all. I suppose that this
is better than the Thomistic picture; it demonstrates a keener
sense of charity, at least; but it is charity of a distinctly tragic
variety, I have to say. How terrible to imagine that the beati-
tude of the saints must consist to some degree in the destruc-
tion of part of their humanity. And surely a blessedness that
subsists only by way of ignorance is one of a peculiarly defec-
tive kind. But perhaps these really are the only alternatives the
infernalist has to choose among: If there really is an eternal
hell, where souls suffer in perpetuity, perhaps the blessedness
of the saved absolutely must in some large measure consist
either in callousness or in ignorance. If so, the latter is the less
appalling of two quite appalling options.
Now, granted, part of the absurdity of such arguments
is the mundane psychologization of heaven and hell they in-
volve, and the somewhat burlesque effects produced when -
ever one attempts to imagine the unimaginable in terms of the
familiar. Whatever the world to come may be, it surely will
not involve the souls of the saved gathering like eager tourists
along steel railings above the Grand Canyon, gazing down into
hell and waving impishly to their aunts and cousins among the
flames. But, that aside, there remains a far larger and grimmer
absurdity in the moral possibilities these arguments ask us to
entertain, and what those possibilities imply about the mean-
ing of any human love. Needless to say, we cannot describe, or
even faintly imagine, what the final state of a redeemed soul