First Meditation: Who Is God?
somehow preponderant over the evil, limited it must forever
remain; at such an unspeakable and irrecuperable cost, it can
be at best only a tragically ambiguous good. This is the price
of creation, it would seem. God, on this view, has "made a bar-
gain" with a natural evil. He has willed the tragedy, not just as
a transient dissonance within creation's goodness, leading ulti-
mately to a soul's correction, but as that irreducible quantum
of eternal loss that, however small in relation to the whole, still
reduces all else to a merely relative value.
What then, we might well ask, does this make of the story
of salvation-of its cost? What would any damned soul be,
after all, as enfolded within the eternal will of God, other than
a price settled upon by God with his own power, an oblation
willingly exchanged for a finite benefit- the lamb slain from
the foundation of the world? And is hell not then the inner-
most secret of heaven, its sacrificial heart? And what then is
God's moral nature, inasmuch as the moral character of any
intended final cause must include within its calculus what one
is willing to sacrifice to achieve that end; and, if the "accept-
able" price is the eternal torment of a rational nature, what
room remains for any moral analogy comprehensible within
finite terms? After all, the economics of the exchange is as
monstrous as it is exact. We can all appreciate, I imagine, the
shattering force of Vanya's terrible question to Alyosha in The
Brothers Karamazov: If universal harmony and joy could be
secured by the torture and murder of a single innocent child,
would you accept that price? But let us stipulate that, per-
haps, in the context of Dostoevsky's novel, somehow, mys-
teriously- in, say, Zosima's sanctity, Alyosha's kiss of Vanya,
the quadrillion-kilometer march of Vanya's devil, the callous
old woman's onion - an answer is offered that might make the
transient torments of history justifiable in the light of God's