Final Remarks 203
him either to impose, or to permit the imposition of, eternal
misery on finite rational beings, is simply to embrace a com-
plete contradiction. And, no matter how ingenious the rhe-
torical tricks one devises to convince oneself that the claim is
in fact logically coherent, morally elevating, and spiritually en-
livening, the contradiction remains unresolved. All becomes
mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious
ability to believe impossible things. We all know this to be so,
even if we refuse to know that we know it. To suggest, as it has
occasionally been suggested to me, that I am rashly assuming
that there is some ultimately irreconcilable incompatibility be-
tween the two sides of the infernalist orthodoxy is akin, in my
mind, to suggesting that it is no more than arbitrary prejudice
to assume that something cannot be at once A and not-A. At
that point, I have no hope of convincing my disputants of any-
thing. When the very principles of moral logic are called into
doubt, at the level of their atomic "simples" -the very mean-
ings, that is, of the discrete terms of moral reasoning- then
one can, I imagine, have faith in anything, be it ever so atro-
cious. But again, as I say, I do not think this should need to
be argued at all. If "justice" means anything at all, it cannot be
that. If "love" means anything at all, it cannot be that. If "good-
ness" means anything at all, it cannot be that.
One need only consider what ludicrous strains we must
place upon our imaginations and our reasoning to accept the
very concept of a hell of eternal duration-for it must be a
duration of which we are speaking, not some timeless eter-
nity of the sort possible only for the infinite God. When we try
to think in terms of an eternally successive state of conscious
torment in any soul, are we able even to conceive what sort of
rational content the idea might contain? Can we imagine-
logically, I mean, not merely intuitively- that someone still in