Framing the Question 31
Julian of Norwich (1342-1416)- "All shall be well, and all man-
ner of thing shall be well." And I believe that at that same level
he also knows that nothing can be ultimately well if the happy
final state of things for any of us has been purchased at the
cost-or even only at the risk-of anyone else's eternal misery.
These, however, are matters to be dealt with below. I can
take leave of them for now. Here I will simply note that there
are plenty of vigorous and intelligent defenders of the received
story who would indignantly reject these characterizations,
and would rebuke me for presuming to know what they really
believe better than they themselves do. And, in fact, I do admit
it: it is presumptuous of me. I am taking their actions as indi-
cations of how I should interpret their words, and I am doing
so because I have made certain assumptions about the deepest
moral promptings of their souls. Perhaps I am getting things
backward. Perhaps, instead of reading the complacency of cer-
tain Christians as a sign of their secret belief in the eventual
rescue of all persons from death and misery, I should learn
instead to interpret their inaction as an indication that those
deep moral promptings do not actually exist. Perhaps what I
should really conclude is that most of those who believe they
believe in an eternal hell really do believe in it after all, at the
very core of their beings, but are simply too morally indolent
to care about anyone other than themselves and perhaps their
immediate families. It seems to me, I have to say, that a per-
son in that condition has probably already lost the heaven of
which he or she feels so assured, but I suppose that that is not
for me to say. Whatever the case, it may be that a sensitive
conscience is not quite so liberally distributed a capacity as we
like to imagine it is. Very well, then; if it is so, then it is so. But
I still cannot grant the coherence of belief in a hell of eternal
torment. Neither do I grant that anyone has ever succeeded in