Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom? 181
destinies, and we have in this life no capacity for the absolute.
To me, the question of whether a soul could freely and eter-
nally reject God-whether a rational nature could in unhin-
dered freedom of intellect and will elect endless misery rather
than eternal bliss - is not even worth the trouble of asking.
Quite apart from the logical issues involved, it is a question
that has no meaning in the world we actually inhabit.
In another sense, moreover, the free will defense fails
even properly to define the terms of the choice it claims a soul
can make. It is hard to exaggerate how large a metaphysical
solecism it is to think of God either as an option that can be
chosen out from a larger field of options or as a discrete cause
that acts upon the will as a kind of external force. And yet,
with surprising frequency, apologists for the infernalist view-
even some trained philosophers-treat him as both. In part
this is attributable to a tendency among certain modern Anglo-
phone Christian philosophers, formed in the analytic tradition,
to abandon the metaphysics of classical theism that Christian
intellectual tradition has unanimously presumed from its early
centuries, in favor of a frankly mythological picture of God:
God conceived, that is, not as Being itself-the source and end
of all reality, in which all things live and move and have their
being (Acts 17: 28 )-but merely as one more being alongside all
the beings who are, grander and older and more powerful than
all the rest, but still merely a thing or a discrete entity. Seen thus,
God would then be, to use the scholastic terminology, some-
one whose essence is distinct from his existence, and there-
fore someone who exists exactly as we do, by dependence upon
some deeper, more general, more encompassing, logically prior
source of existence. That would mean that creation is some-
thing literally in addition to- and the whole realm of being
something larger and more original than - God. This consti-