Doubting the Answers 37Tho mists must say also that any rational will that ends its pere-
grinations in an eternal hell has found its way there by freely
rejecting God as the Good, and by seeking another good in
his place, knowing full well ( or sufficiently well, at least) what
it was doing, and so justly inviting God's final condemnation
upon itself. To deny the former claim, after all, would be to
deny that God is himself the transcendent Good who is the
true ultimate object of rational love, and who is in fact himself
that transcendent horizon of all rational desire that permits
love to fix upon any finite objects as well. But to deny the latter
would be to deny that God is wholly just in his dealings with
his creatures. And so they simply affirm both propositions,
even though each contradicts the other. I cannot make the least
sense of this, I have to say. As far as I can see, something like a
transient and wavering balance can perhaps be struck between
the two claims, but only insofar as each side of the equation is
weighed against the other as its opposite-its counterweight,
so to speak- and therefore in purely relative degrees; and this,
of course, can yield only the certainty that the relation between
the soul's transgressions and the punishments they might elicit
must ultimately be a just proportion between two intrinsically
finite and qualified realities. It takes an almost heroic suspen-
sion of moral intelligence, it seems to me, to think instead that
this picture permits us to believe that any soul could possibly,
under the inevitable conditions of existence in this world, earn
for itself a penalty that is at once both "eternal" and "just." It
requires, at the very least, an almost total failure of imagina-
tion - by which I mean, principally, a failure to think through
what the word "eternal" actually means.
I am not saying that we do not, in some very significant
sense, make our own exceedingly substantial voluntary con -
tributions to our estrangement from the Good in this life. No