20 The Question of an Eternal Hell
grounds that it would constitute a kind of parsimony or jeal-
ousy on his part to withhold the gift of being-a gift he pos-
sesses in infinite plenitude-from anyone. For the Thomist,
being is the first good, higher than any other, inasmuch as
God himself is subsistent Being, and so, even for a soul in hell,
nonexistence would be a greater evil than perpetual agony. Of
course, this is ridiculous; but it helps fill in one of the gaps in
the tale. A gift that is at once wholly irresistible and a source of
unrelieved suffering on the part of its recipient is not a gift at
all, even in the most tenuously analogous sense; and, speaking
for myself, I cannot see how existence as such is truly a divine
gift if it has been entirely severed from free and rational par-
ticipation in the goodness of things. Being itself is the Good
itself, no doubt. But, for creatures who exist only by finite par-
ticipation in the gift of existence, only well-being is being-
as-gift in a true and meaningful sense; mere bare existence is
nothing but a brute fact, and often a rather squalid one at that,
and to mistake it for an ultimate value is to venerate an idol
( call it the sin of "hyparxeolatry," the worship of subsistence
in and of itself, of the sort that misers and thieves and those
who would never give their lives for others commit every day).
That, admittedly, is open to debate. But, then again,
there precisely lurks the problem: The entire matter is debat-
able through and through. What I find fascinating about the
Tho mist position here is not that it is "wrong" - it does not
rise to the level of the correct or incorrect- but that it is utterly
devoid of so much as a trace of compelling logical content. It
poses its own premises not as logically established or analytic
truths, but simply as necessary correlates of its own foregone
conclusions. The argument is nothing but a naked assertion,
one that can recommend itself favorably only to a mind that
has already been indoctrinated in obedience to a much larger