Doubting the Answers 35
an intelligible rationale or cogent motive has gone missing. In
fact, used with sufficient suavity and dexterity, love can even
serve, it turns out, as another name for what under normal
circumstances would be called cruelty. But the effect is just so
much verbal legerdemain at the end of the evening; should
the spectators catch so much as a single glimpse of the hid-
den coin in the magician's hand or the elastic thread extend-
ing from his sleeve, the atmosphere of willingly suspended dis-
belief will dissipate immediately. In the case of this particular
philosopher's book, the illusion consists in the combination of
an essentially fantastic model of freedom - both as a rational
capacity in the abstract and as an empirical possibility in the
concrete- and an especially protean language of divine and
human love, producing nothing more at the last than a warm
enveloping fog of moral insensibility, through which the scan-
dal of the traditional idea of hell is no longer visible. I should
have expected nothing better. The reason that all versions of
this argument are equally bad is a very simple one: Its logic
is intrinsically defective, and nothing can be done to remedy
its most essential flaws. But that is also what makes the argu-
ment's enduring popularity so significant. At least, I take it as
compelling evidence that the infernalists' will to believe what
they believe they must believe is so powerful that it can totally
overwhelm reason in even the wisest of them.
It can even entail, when necessary, professing two anti-
thetical principles at the same time, and simply refusing to see
the contradiction. I shall not dwell here as long as I might on
the proper definition of rational freedom, because the issue
will recur below, in far greater detail; but I will allow myself to
anticipate a few points. I have to say, if nothing else, that I have
often been amazed by certain Thomists of my acquaintance
who are committed to what is often called an "intellectualist"