Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
way of thinking about God that is clearly antithetical to every-
thing that the healthier Christian tradition says was revealed
about God in Christ, and that simply embraces moral imbe-
cility under the form of an awesome "paradox." Admittedly,
it is a way of thinking adumbrated in theological tradition at
least as early as the late fourth century. Theologians are only
human, after all. But the keener consciences among believers
have always recognized that the Christian story of creation, re-
demption, and cosmic restoration is not a celebration of some
brute display of divine glory, whose ultimate meaning is noth-
ing more than the banal tautology that God can do what God
does; rather, it is a claim about the revelation of God's nature
as a goodness that truly is infinite love, essentially and irre-
ducibly. Hence, the only defense of the infernalist position that
is logically and morally worthy of being either taken seriously
or refuted scrupulously is the argument from free will: that
hell exists simply because, in order for a creature to be able to
love God freely, there must be some real alternative to God
open to that creature's power of choice, and that hell therefore
is a state the apostate soul has chosen for itself in perfect free-
dom, and that the permanency of hell is testament only to how
absolute that freedom is. This argument too is wrong in every
way, but not contemptibly so. Logically it cannot be true; but
morally it can be held without doing irreparable harm to one's
understanding of goodness or of God, and so without requir-
ing the mind to make a secret compromise with evil ( explic-
itly, at least).
IIII have already touched upon the nature of rational freedom,
more than once, but-at the risk of repeating a few points-