The Question of an Eternal Helldoubt it is true that, as Moses Maimonides once observed, we
are what we have made ourselves, and no one drags us down
the path toward either compassion or cruelty, honesty or guile.
But precisely how true? Up to a certain point, it is undeni-
able; but, past that point, it is a manifest falsehood. There is
no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect under-
standing, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess
limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore we are incapable of
contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always
extenuating circumstances. It might be pleasant ( or might not
be) to imagine that Hitler was so entirely unlike the rest of
us that he was able, while enjoying both perfect sanity and an
unclouded knowledge of the truth, to elect freely to become
just as unimaginably evil as he was, in both his intentions and
his deeds. If nothing else, it might please us to think that we,
no matter what the circumstances and forces that formed us,
would never be capable of any evil remotely as enormous. I
certainly hope that this last is true; but we should not take too
much comfort in the thought even so. There are only two pos-
sibilities here, and neither delivers us from our dilemma: either
Hitler could, if he had been raised differently and exposed to
different influences in his youth, have turned out differently;
or he was congenitally wicked, and so from the moment of his
conception was irresistibly compelled along the path to his full
development as the Fuhrer, so long as no countervailing cir-
cumstances prevented him from reaching his goal. But then, in
either case, his guilt was a qualified one: In the former, he was
at least partly the victim of circumstance; in the latter, he was
at least as much the victim of fate. In neither case was he ever
wholly free. These considerations do not excuse him, of course,
or make punishment for his evils unjust; he was himself in
any event, and the self that he was certainly merited damna-