Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
that does not serve an ameliorative purpose-as, by definition,
eternal punishment cannot- should be a scandal to any sane
conscience. Endless torture, never eventuating in the reform
or moral improvement of the soul that endures it, is in itself an
infinite banality. A lesson that requires an eternity to impart is
a lesson that can never be learned. So, if one must make sense
of the senseless here, then one must find some "greater good"
in what to all appearances would be an unmitigated evil. So it
was that the Lombard and Thomas arrived at their "amplifi-
cation of beatitude" argument, since this endues hell with at
least an extrinsic value. It was a poignantly desperate attempt
to find some purpose in what would otherwise obviously be
recognizable as an endless act of needless vindictiveness. But
it is an absurd and depraved argument from every imaginable
angle. To begin with, there is something inherently silly about
the notion that God-the infinite wellspring of all Goodness,
Truth, Beauty, and Being-would not be sufficient in himself
to communicate the perfect knowledge of the Good and the
happiness it entails to rational natures, formed for no other
end than seeking union with him, when they are joined to him
in eternity. It is nonsensical to think that the knowledge of
his goodness could require or even allow for rational clarifi-
cation - or that the soul's rational pleasure in that knowledge
could be susceptible of increase- by way of some negative
contrast, such as the sufferings of the damned. If a rational
creature formed in the divine image required such a contrast
fully to know God's goodness, then God's self-revelation as the
Good in creatures could never be complete in itself. It would
of its nature always require the "negative probation" of what is
contrary to the Good. There would then, it seems, be some de-
ficiency in the divine essence, some lack that would prevent it
from supplying immediate and perfect satisfaction to a ratio-