Framing the Question 11
he was talking about. My reactions to the story had been en-
tirely different, on both occasions. To me, it had been no more
than a conventional ghost story, one whose atmosphere of the
fantastically dismal was all that accounted for whatever small,
ghastly charm it possessed. And I had certainly read enough
folklore, from many lands and many religions, to think I could
recognize the type of narrative it was ( though at the time the
exact description would probably have eluded me): a rustic
fable, meant to terrify refractory children and credulous peas-
ants, and marked by that casual callousness that is so frequent
a concomitant of deep piety. Not for a moment, as far as I can
recall, had it occurred to me to take the story seriously, or to
think that it had anything to tell me either about God or about
the life to come. True, I had approved of the tears that Abba
Macari us had shed for the damned, and of his compassionate,
albeit fruitless, gesture of according the skull a decent inter-
ment. But that was the extent of the tale's human appeal for
me. Even before that Episcopal priest had reached the end of
his sermon, I realized that, if he really wanted me to treat the
story as a serious parable of the faith, the result was not going
to be the one he intended. My principal reaction to it in those
terms would have been perplexity at a fable that seemed to
say-and with so little evasion-that Abba Macarius was not
only extraordinarily merciful, but in fact immeasurably more
merciful than the God he worshipped. It would also have been
exceedingly hard for me not to notice how viciously vindic-
tive the creator of such a hell would have had to be to have
devised so exquisitely malicious a form of torture and then
to have made it eternal, and how unjust in condemning men
and women to unending torment for the "sin" of not knowing
him even though he had never revealed himself to them, or
for some formally imputed guilt supposedly attaching to them