Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 151
might be like. But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take
seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture; and there
all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beat-
itude - a Kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a
city of the redeemed, the body of Christ- which means that
the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the
preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to
personality, rather than a perfect escape from personality.
But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances;
they are dynamic events of relation to what is other than them -
selves. And this poses a problem. For me, all attempts to imag-
ine the conditions of God's Kingdom over against the reality
of the eternal torment of those outside its demesne irresistibly
summon up a single recurrent image: that of a parent whose
beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who
remains a parent nevertheless and therefore keeps and cher-
ishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delight-
ful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that
damaged soul. Is all of that- those memories, those anxieties
and delights, those feelings of desperate love- really to be con-
signed to the fire, as just so much combustible chaff? Must it
all be forgotten, or willfully ignored, for heaven to enter into
that parent's soul? And, if so, is this not the darkest tragedy
ever composed, and is God not then a tragedian utterly mer-
ciless in his poetic omnipotence? Moreover, who then exactly
is that parent when he or she has achieved union with God,
once those memories have been either converted into indiffer-
ence or altogether expunged? Who or what is that being whose
identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?
I cannot help but feel that this is something like the paradox
of the ship of Theseus, except that in this case-in which the
deepest emotional and personal elements that compose a soul