34 The Question of an Eternal Hell
the creature, and from the refusal of God to trespass upon that
freedom, for fear of preventing the creature from achieving
a true union of love with the divine ( though, of course, un -
speakable consequences await those who fail to do just this,
which makes one wonder how neatly such an argument can
discriminate between "pure" love and love motivated by fear).
Over the years, I have encountered this take on the matter in a
remarkable array of variations that are as a totality, even more
remarkably, ultimately essentially identical with one another.
All that really ever seems to change from one iteration to the
next is the relative emphasis placed on one or another aspect
of the argument's language, the method of exposition adopted,
and the relative rhetorical gifts of the author. And this I find
especially instructive, because there could scarcely be a worse
defense of the idea of an eternal hell; it makes no sense what-
soever, no matter how appealing it seems on the surface. Yet
there it is, repeated again and again with surprising frequency
by a number of genuinely able Christian philosophers (and by
a larger number of others who have at least a reputation for
philosophical rigor).
I have only just finished reading, for instance, a recent
restatement of the argument in a book by a venerable Catholic
philosopher at a university with which I have an association;
and I certainly made every effort I could to discover in its pages
some new dimension of dialectical clarity that would make this
entire line of reasoning seem more convincing to me. To no
avail. All I ultimately found was a somewhat greater than usual
reliance on the sentimental obscurantism that so often attaches
to the word "love" when it is employed by theologians. Admit-
tedly, it is a useful obscurantism; exploited to its fullest, it turns
love into so imposingly mystifying and pliant a cipher that one
can safely insert it into almost any gap in one's argument where