200 What May Be BelievedAll of that way of seeing things, as a matter of simple historical
fact, rests on catastrophic misreadings of scripture, abetted by
bad translations and anachronistic assumptions regarding the
conceptual vocabularies of the authors of the New Testament,
as well as (in certain cases) very defective metaphysical rea-
soning. Even if this were not the case, however, that tradition's
sheer moral wretchedness as a vision of the gospel would still
render it unworthy of respect. All that said, however, I know
also that in these pages I have gone far beyond a mere demur-
ral with one particular stream of Christian thought. I have re-
jected every version of the infernalist orthodoxy, no matter
which Christian tradition may have produced it, and no matter
how tenderhearted the reasoning that informs it. To have done
otherwise would have been dishonest on my part.
There was a time, in the early centuries of the church,
and especially in the Eastern half of the imperial world, when
it was still generally assumed that there were mysteries of the
faith that should be reserved for only the very few, the Chris-
tian intellectual elite or pnevmatikoi, "spiritual persons" ( a term
used even by Paul), while the faith of the more common variety
of believers should be nourished only with simpler, coarser,
more infantile versions of doctrine. For the less learned, less
refined, less philosophical Christians, it was widely believed,
the prospect of hellfire was always the best possible means of
promoting good behavior. Even among those who believed in
an eventual salvation of all souls, there was perhaps an overly
pronounced willingness to indulge in a hint of holy duplicity,
if that was what it took to inspire spiritual sobriety in the more
obdurately cruel and brutish of the baptized. Occasionally we
catch a fugitive glimpse of this patronizing amphiboly in the
texts that have come down to us, such as when the great Cap-
padocian father Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390), in the