42 The Question of an Eternal Hell
rational ends, is there such a thing as real freedom. This is, in
fact, an ancient Christian orthodoxy, common to the teachings
of the church fathers and great mediaeval theologians; and,
were it not true, the whole edifice of the Christian conception
of existence and of creation and of God and of the unity of
the ontological and moral dimensions of reality would entirely
collapse. Even the suicide is merely fleeing pain and seeking a
peace that the world cannot give, though he or she might be
able in the crucial moment of decision to imagine this peace
only under the illusory form of oblivion; his or her fault is one
only of perception, in a moment of severe confusion and sad-
ness, and certainly not some ultimate rejection of God. One
cannot even choose nothingness, at least not as nothingness;
to will nonexistence positively, one must first conceive it as a
positive end, and so one can at most choose it as the "good"
cessation of this world, and therefore as just another mask of
that which is supremely desirable in itself. In the end, even
when we reject the good, we always do so out of a longing for
the Good. We may not explicitly conceive of our actions in this
way, but there is no question that this is what we are doing.
We act always toward an end that we desire, whether morally,
affectively, or pathologically; and, so long as we are rational
agents, that end is the place where the "good" and the "desir-
able" are essentially synonymous terms. And our ability to will
anything at all, in its deepest wellsprings, is sustained by this
aboriginal orientation within us toward that one transcenden-
tal Good that alone can complete us, and that prompts reason
to move the will toward an object of longing. Needless to say,
we can induce moral ignorance in ourselves through our own
wicked actions and motives; but, conversely, those wicked ac-
tions and motives are themselves possible only on account of
some degree of prior ignorance on our part. This circle admits