Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom? 161
for those of us who fail to find the right path in this world,
or the right path out of this world into the next. As for Witt-
genstein's animadversions on Origen's views, they are nearly
spectacular in their facile crudity. Certainly nothing in the
genuine thought of Origen suggests that our conduct in this
life does not matter; he certainly believed in and dreaded the
torments of that refining and restoring fire that he believed
awaits practically all of us. Frankly, anyone who thinks that
what we do in this life can be "serious" only insofar as it fig-
ures into some sublimely fatuous game of chance, whose final
stakes are absolutely all or nothing, suffers from a tragically
diminutive moral imagination. It was precisely the absence
of the banality of an eternal hell in Origen's thought that al-
lowed him to believe that all of life and all of creation have a
meaning, one immeasurably richer and more ravishing than
some tawdry final division between the winners and losers of
the game of history: the fullness of reality that will be achieved
when all being is perfectly united to God, and God is all in all.
For Origen 1 Corinthians 15 was the great key to the whole of
the Christian mystery.
I suppose one ought not to judge Wittgenstein too
harshly here, however. His error was no more egregious than
are those of most professed Christians on these issues. Really,
on the whole, Christians rarely pay particularly close attention
to what the Bible actually says, for the simple reason that the
texts defy synthesis in a canon of exact doctrines, and yet most
Christians rely on doctrinal canons. Theologians are often the
most cavalier in their treatment of the texts, chiefly because
their first loyalty is usually to the grand systems of belief they
have devised or adopted; but the Bible is not a system. A very
great deal of theological tradition consists therefore in explain-
ing away those aspects of scripture that contradict the finely