Doubting the Answers 43
of no breaks; it has no beginning or end, no point of entry or
exit. When, therefore, we try to account for the human rejec-
tion of God, we can never trace the wanderings of the will back
to some primordial moment of perfect liberty, some epistemi-
cally pristine instant when a perverse impulse spontaneously
arose within an isolated, wholly sane individual will, or within
a mind perfectly cognizant of the whole truth of things; we will
never find that place where some purely uncompelled apostasy
on the part of a particular soul, possessed of a perfect rational
knowledge of reality, severed us from God. Such a movement
of volition would have had no object to prompt it, and so could
never have been a real rational choice. Thus it is, for instance,
that the Eastern church fathers, when interpreting the story of
Eden, generally tended to ascribe the cause of the fall to the
childlike ignorance of unformed souls, not yet mature enough
to resist false notions ( and this, lest we forget, accords exactly
with the Eden story in Genesis, which tells the story of two
persons so guileless and ignorant that they did not even know
they were naked until a talking snake had shown them the
way to the fruit of knowledge). Hence, absolute culpability-
eternal culpability- lies forever beyond the capacities of any
finite being. So does an eternal free defiance of the Good. We
are not blameless, certainly; but, then again, that very fact
proves that we have never been entirely free not to be blame-
less - and so neither can we ever be entirely to blame.
II
None of this should need saying, to be honest. We should all
already know that whenever the terms "justice" and "eternal
punishment" are set side by side as if they were logically com -
patible, the boundaries of the rational have been violated. If