The Question of an Eternal Hellas purely double-predestinarian as just about any school of
Reformed tradition ever succeeded in being: All souls come
into this world already ineluctably destined by divine decree
for eternal bliss or eternal torment, and in either case not in
respect of any divine favor they could ever have merited on
their own, but solely as a revelation of the full range of God's
power and majesty. Admittedly, Thomists of that persuasion
have not generally chosen to speak of this as a strictly double
predestination, in the way a Calvinist might; they have pre-
ferred instead to make a specious distinction between, on the
one hand, God's irresistible predestination of the elect to beati-
tude and, on the other, the "irresistible permissive decrees" by
which he sends the derelict to a damnation they never had the
power to escape. But that need detain no one (for any number
of obvious reasons, moral and logical, as well as any number
of other more philosophically abstruse reasons, none of which
should occupy our attention at this point). Far preferable, I
would think, is the less convoluted and more ingenuous lan-
guage of predestination that one finds in Reformed tradition,
and in the theology of John Calvin (1509-1564) in particular.
There, if nothing else, one encounters perfect candor. Calvin
draws no meaningless distinctions between the way God acts
in predestining the elect to salvation and the way he acts in
predestining the derelict to eternal agony. In Book III of his
Institutes (III.23.7, to be precise), he even asserts that God
predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the
whole of everything- creation, fall, redemption, judgment,
the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and
whatever else-exists solely for the sake of a perfect display
of the full range of God's omnipotent sovereignty (which for
some reason absolutely must be displayed).
It is hard for me to know exactly how to respond to this