Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
claimed it must, with most- or, at any rate, very many ... or,
really, any- beings consigned to eternal torment, and if this
story then also entails that God freely and needlessly created
the world knowing that this would be the result, then Chris-
tianity has no "evangel" -no "good news" -to impart. There is
only the hideous truth of a monstrous deity presiding over an
evil world whose very existence is an act of cruelty, meaning-
lessly embellished with the additional narrative detail- almost
parodic in its triviality- of the arbitrary salvation of a few
select souls who are not even in any special sense deserving
of the privilege ( else grace were not grace, and absolute power
were not absolute power). This is in fact the ghastliest possible
"dysangel," the direst tidings ever visited on a world already
too much burdened by unmerited suffering. To believe it even
in part is to have all the reason one could ever need for refus-
ing to procreate, and for regarding the world with a hatred that
even the starkest "gnostic" dualism could not rival. And, truly
to believe it in its own terms, one must at some level have lost
the capacity to distinguish clearly between love and spite.
Then again, this has often been true of Christian think-
ing, going back quite a way. Once again, there is the glaring ex -
ample of Thomas's defense of Peter Lombard's (genuinely sa-
distic) idea that the saints in heaven receive an increase in their
beatitude from their knowledge of the tortures of the damned.
But it would be disingenuous to displace the blame to so late
a moment in Christian history. Perhaps, as I mentioned in my
First Meditation, one sees this spitefulness well before Augus-
tine's time in an earlier North African father, Tertullian, prom-
ising that one day Christians would not be persecuted, and
indeed would be able instead to rejoice in the spectacle of the
destruction of the wicked. Somehow, though, it is a more chill-
ing thing when one sees it attenuated to the bloodless bland-