Doubting the Answers 39
tion. They do, however, oblige us to acknowledge that he was
finite, and so could never have been capable of more than what
finitude allows. Prometheus may have been able to provoke
the tireless wrath of Zeus, but only because he was, after all, a
titan, while his tormenter was merely a god: two very formi-
dable but still limited beings, distinguished from one another
only by differing degrees of finite power. Hitler, by contrast,
was only human, and scarcely even that, while his final judge
will presumably be the God of infinite goodness and infinite
might; the disproportion between them is that of creature and
creator, and so the difference in their relative powers, being
infinite, dictates that a properly proportional justice for the
former cannot exceed the scope of the moral capacities with
which he has been endowed by the latter.
It can be painful- sometimes abhorrent- to us to admit
this, but the character of even the very worst among us is in
part the product of external contingencies, and somewhere in
the history of every soul there are moments when a better way
was missed by mischance, or by malign interventions from
without, or by disorders of the mind within, rather than by
any intentional perversity on the soul's own part. So no one
could ever fulfill the criteria necessary justly to damn himself
or herself to perpetual misery. Not even angels would have the
power to condemn themselves to a condign eternity of suffer-
ing; as rational beings, they could never turn away from God
entirely if they were not subject to some misapprehension re-
garding the Good in itself and their true relation to it, inas-
much as only the Good could ever really have the power to ful-
fill and satisfy their spiritual natures ( though, admittedly, the
dominant mediaeval theology of angels, which differed mark-
edly from that of the early Christians, did occasionally make
the entirely incoherent claim that the fallen angels had done