"He shall be all in
all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be
different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly
in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called
hell? And in what sense is He in hell?
Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between
heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.
May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and
Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline
apocatastasis led him to hope?
When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other
words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they
put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would
appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to
assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is
infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart
from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in
human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the
offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the
intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable
intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this connection those
words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application:
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who
commits an offence against God or his neighbour knows what he does.
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