168 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
ness of Thomas's formulation, in a form so demure and tepidly
dispassionate as to make crystal clear just how thoroughly an
indurated moral imbecility can come to seem like simple com-
mon sense, even for a brilliant thinker. And yet Thomas is still
not to blame (not entirely, at least). He was the victim not only
of a defective narrative, but also of the rigor of his own mind.
Accepting, as he felt he had to do, the doctrine of hell's eter-
nity, he was obliged to make sense of it somehow or other. He
believed also, however, that the blessed soul's vision of God
must be nothing less than a direct knowledge of Truth; it could
not, therefore, involve any degree of ignorance of reality. So,
of course, for him it was beyond question that the saints in
heaven, rapt up in their ecstatic contemplation of the divine
essence, must also know therein the fullness of creation in
all its dimensions, including hell. He believed as well that all
God's acts are for an end, and an end proper to God's own eter-
nal goodness. And he was certain, of course, that the joys of
the beatific vision must of their nature be perfect, and hence
wholly unmarred by any shadow of sorrow or pity. Thus, in
order to affirm that the sufferings of the damned- not only in
themselves, but also as known to the saints-must conduce to
some good, he could scarcely have arrived at any other conclu-
sion than the one he reached. It was a horrid and contradictory
conclusion, of course, but a sufficiently nimble theologian can
generally get around that by the simple expedient of evacuat-
ing words like "justice" and "love" of any coherent content, and
then reapplying them to the tale in their now newly pliant and
aptly meaningless forms.
By any rational measure, after all, an eternal hell of tor-
ment would seem to lie wholly outside any order of the good
that is-as the eternal vision of God supposedly must be-
wholly sufficient in itself. Moreover, the idea of a punishment