Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsencomia to their masters' "divine right" and "absolute sover-
eignty" and squalid nonsense of that kind. Surely, though- so
we might want to tell ourselves-these are aberrations. Surely,
having duly acknowledged the unfortunate contingencies of
cultural history, we need not grant that the larger Christian
understanding of God is morally contradictory. Bad theology
does not invalidate true faith; abusus non tollit usum, after all.
Would that the matter were quite that simple. The truth
is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an in -
coherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian tra-
ditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who
creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the
eternal torment of the damned. It was not merely peculiarity of
personal temperament that prompted Tertullian ( c. 155-c. 240)
to speak of the saved relishing the delightful spectacle of the
destruction of the reprobate, or that prompted Peter Lombard
(c. 1096-1160) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) to assert that
the vision of the torments of the damned will increase the be-
atitude of the redeemed (as any trace of pity would darken the
joys of heaven), or that prompted Martin Luther (1483-1546)
to insist that the saved will rejoice to see their loved ones roast-
ing in hell. None of these good pious souls was doing anything
other than following the only poor thread of logic he had to
guide him out of a labyrinth of impossible contradictions; the
sheer enormity of the idea of a hell of eternal torment forces
the mind toward absurdities and atrocities. But, long before
the moral issues even come into view, the logical deficiencies
in such language should already be obvious: After all, what
is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves,
memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than
all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom
we belong as much as they to us? We are those others. To say