Framing the Question 13real hell of eternal torment (for brevity's sake, we can call them
"infernalists" hereafter) never really get around to addressing
properly the question of whether we can make moral sense of
God's acts in the great cosmic drama of creation, redemption,
and damnation. They invariably imagine they have done so,
but only because they have not sufficiently distinguished that
question from whichever one it is that genuinely preoccupies
them - which these days tends to be the question of whether
a free, rational agent, in order to be truly free, or truly capable
of a relation of love with God, must have the power justly to
condemn himself or herself to everlasting dereliction, and
whether then God will allow him or her to do so out of regard
for the high dignity of this absolutely indispensable autonomy.
That is a perfectly interesting line of inquiry in its own right,
I suppose, or appears to be on its surface so long as one accepts
its premises, and it is in fact one that I discuss at some length
in the meditations that compose the greater part of this book;
but it remains, to my mind, a subordinate issue. No matter
how one answers that particular question, the always more sig-
nificant question must be whether-even if it should turn out
that a rational soul really can in some abstract sense freely and
justly condemn itself to everlasting torture- this fact would
truly permit us to love an omnipotent and omniscient God
who has elected to create a reality in which everlasting torture
is a possible final destiny for any of his creatures. (Do not re-
spond yet, incidentally, especially not if you want to say yes;
anyone who assumes that the correct answer is easy or obvious
has not, in all likelihood, quite grasped the full logical depths
of the problem.)
I should probably note that I may have been predisposed
to react to the tale of Macarius and the skull as I did by early
exposure to influences from entirely outside Christian tradi-