The Question of an Eternal Hellcapnc10us gamester. At other times, however, this alleged
postmortem inalterability of the will is explained in terms
of some hazy metaphysics of the conditions of disembodied
spirits. Supposedly-so, at least, argue a few Thomist philoso-
phers of my acquaintance-the soul detached from its carnal
frame is no longer mutable, and so no longer able to change
its course. Obviously, that too is just a blank assertion, since
any finite rational nature can change the intentions of its will,
even if its physical substance is fixed; how else-presuming,
that is, an orthodoxy that Thomism positively insists upon -
could bodiless intelligences like angels have ever fallen? And
then, of course, there is that matter of resurrection, which any
good Catholic also confesses as a sure promise of the faith. Ac-
cording to my acquaintances, the reason that this latter makes
no difference is that the interval of disembodied existence be-
tween death and resurrection freezes the soul in its final state,
and the risen body, being immune to generation or decay, no
longer possesses a changeable nature. Precisely why this last
claim would be of any significance for the powers of the risen
creature's rational will is not clear to me, nor have any of my
acquaintances quite succeeded in explaining it to me in a way
that does not seem to confuse physical and spiritual categories,
or material causality and mental intentionality. As contradic-
tions go, that one is, if nothing else, amusingly sharp. It would
be a very odd Thomist, after all, who believed that mental in-
tentionality emerges from wholly physical states, since such
a notion runs contrary to the whole of Thomist metaphysics;
so it seems odd for any to suggest that physical immutability
should equate to moral inalterability.
I do not blame my acquaintances for these obscurities,
however. The only reason for their inability to make the argu-
ment clear is that the argument itself happens to be intrinsi-