206 What May Be Believed
now Lord over all things, and would ultimately yield all things
up to the Father so that God might be all in all.
I would not say, however, that the gradual hardening of
the church's teachings on hell into the infernalist orthodoxy,
over half a millennium, was merely an accident of history. It
may have been much more a necessity of culture, or of poli-
tics, or even of psychology. At least, if I allow myself to take the
cynical view of the matter, I cannot help but believe that the
infernalist view was fated to prevail simply as an institutional
imperative (or, at any rate, an institutional convenience). The
more the church took shape as an administrative hierarchy,
and especially as it became an organ of and support for im -
perial unity and power, the more naturally it tended to com -
mand submission from the faithful by whatever permissible
methods of persuasion lay near at hand. I do not mean that
some nefarious conspiracy of bishops and priests consciously
and deviously set about elevating the infernalist view over
alternative theories as a means of subduing a stupid and frac-
tious laity. I mean merely that institutions all but inevitably
evolve into those configurations-structural, ideological, ethi-
cal, emotional-that best fortify their power, influence, and
stability. And fear is a majestically potent instrument. If I were
to take an even more expansively cynical view of the matter, I
would add that the work of "civilizing" barbaric populations
has always been advanced in part- especially among those
persons or peoples whom the patrician classes regard as tem-
peramentally recalcitrant or intellectually feeble- by searing
consciences into intractable natures through the regular ap-
plication of the cautery of terror. By those same means, more-
over, institutions can also render restive and inquisitive minds
docile. Terror, one might argue, works its magic equally well in
natures brutishly indomitable and irrepressibly curious.