Framing the Question 17
us can confirm from experience. And, surely, if the soul does
live on past the grave, as faith claims it does, it must carry the
hell that it has nurtured within itself into the next world. And
so, perhaps, it makes perfect sense to imagine that a will suffi-
ciently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and vio-
lence might be so damaged that, even when fully exposed to
the divine glory for which all things were made, it will abso-
lutely hate the invasion of that transfiguring love, and will be
able to discover nothing in it but terror and pain. It is the soul,
then, and not God, that lights hell's fires, by interpreting the
advent of divine love as a violent assault upon the jealous pri-
vacy of the self. I was briefly content with this way of seeing
things. It seemed to explain the matter quite tidily, without
question. But, in the end, I concluded that even this account
of the matter was plausible only up to a point. And, to tell the
truth, that point is not one that is hard to reach. Once one
has had time to think about it for a little while, one should
notice that, when all is said and done, this very rational and
psychologically plausible understanding of hell still in no sig-
nificant way improves the larger picture of God as creator and
redeemer-at least, not if one insists upon adding the quali-
fication "eternal" or "final" to the condition of self-imposed
misery that it describes. At that point, we find that our two
questions remain as gallingly unaddressed as ever: the second-
ary question of whether this defiant rejection of God for all of
eternity is really logically possible for any rational being; and
the primary question of whether the God who creates a reality
in which the eternal suffering of any being is possible-even if
it should be a self-induced suffering-can in fact be the infi-
nitely good God of love that Christianity says he is. (Again, do
not try to answer yet.)