“Even more happiness in hell” is not remotely enough
CONTRA Lembke M. Even More Happiness in Hell, Religious Studies. Published online 2024:1-16. doi:10.1017/S0034412524000404
I reply:
Even if “infinity in itself does nothing to establish a retributive disproportionality between a punishment and an offence (Lembke)” and even if modes of union with God other than the supratheophanic might be eschatologically realizable, there is no universe wherein everlasting foreclosures on potential advances in degrees of interpersonal intimacy would not be considered unjustly harsh tragedies (cf. the timeless expression of this most poignantly painful experience of human passion in the story of the Capulets & Montagues).
In the end, Lembke’s argument beats the same hasty retreat taken by all other perditionist apologists, i.e. with authoritarian & mysterian appeals to doctrine, this one in the form of the so-called “soteriological axiom.”
Discussion
Suppose the punishment of hell would consist in someone’s being denied dessert after dinner once every 10,000 years. The trivial fact that this punishment would be ‘infinite’ (in some strained sense) obviously does not entail that it would be unjustly harsh. Hence infinity in itself does nothing to establish a retributive disproportionality between a punishment and an offence.”
Robert F. wrote: “As it is without ending, it is unjust for it befits not a finite transgression. As it is without ending I cannot see how it wouldn’t be cruel, as it is without purpose. How could it be remedial, redemptive?”
Yes! And as I think back to your objection to the DOA conception of “blissful ignorance,” it occurs to me that Lembke failed to mention that it’s only glucose that the damned are enjoying for dinner each day and that it’s being served intravenously via a saline solution.
I say this because human beings are best conceived in terms of dynamical becomings in infinite potency to the divine. It’s not enough to simply assert that our lights of experience, reason & faith are modes of union with their own sorts of beatitude & rest vis a vis the same formal object, God. It’s not a natural – supernatural distinction that applies, here. Rather, it’s a relatively – absolutely perfect distinction between those modes & the light of glory. For the dynamically becoming rational creature, then, these successive modes of operatively knowing God are sublative (Rahner’s not Hegel’s sublation). In short, to abort this intrinsic human dynamism is to do violence to the human person, whom God loves for her own sake.
Father Al registered his principal objection to the relativity model, that it depends upon an understanding of human nature that doesn’t naturally desire deification in Christ: “Specifically, it depends upon a second millennium scholastic tradition (natura pura) that departs from the teachings of the Eastern and Western Fathers. Father Al further noted that Lembke’s appeal to psychological dynamics requires grounding in a theological anthropology. And he cited Randall Rosenberg’s _The Givenness of Desire (2017)_.
That’s THE theo-rub in a nutshell!
In my view, all that I discussed above can be distilled in one clarification, by answering one question: What’s the proper understanding of obediential potency?
My two favorite responses to that question are given by Lonergan & DBH. I commend two resources to all.
For a more technical threading of the Lubacian-Thomist needle, here’s a discussion of Lonergan’s account (here’s 1 chapter of Rosenberg, Fr. Al!).
Concretely Operating Nature: Lonergan on the Natural Desire to See God” is a chapter in the book The Givenness of Desire by Randall S. Rosenberg. The chapter examines the human desire for God through the lens of Lonergan’s “concrete subjectivity”.
That chapter is available at Muse and not behind a paywall.
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/oa_monograph/chapter/3320774
For a most entertaining & informative discussion of obediential potency as properly conceived, on Apr 17, 2022 David Bentley Hart published an open letter on his substack – “Edward Feser’s Sub-Christian Dualism”
It’s not behind a paywall.
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/edward-fesers-sub-christian-dualism
Not all practical impeccabilities or stabilities in the good are the same. Each person's stability in the good for any particular mode of union has been attained by a blend of intrinsic & extrinsic factors. Generally, the more one's impeccability has been attained pursuant to intrinsic factors, the greater will be one's degree of virtue & capacity for beatitude. Our original epistemic distancing, which requires the light of faith and a life of trust presumably provides each the most optimal extrinsic environment to grow in virtue per intrinsic self-determinations. The more people who come to various modes of divine union via graced intrinsic self-determinations the better, for their own sakes. The greater, too, will be the People of God's overall degrees of virtue & capacities for beatitude, ad majorem Dei gloriam.
To the extent, then, that there would be ongoing post-mortem second chances, it would seem to me that one's extrinsic environment would necessarily play a much larger role in one's attainment of a practical impeccability, thus decreasing the opportunities for contributions by one's intrinsic self-determinations, hence the degrees of virtue & capacities for beatitude which are attainable post-mortem.
God’s permission of sin is ordered to the optimal attainment of personal & ecclesial virtue, beatitude & unitive intimacy. No permission of damnation is necessary for either these optimal ante-mortem attainments of sanctity (maximally intrinsic) or suboptimal post-mortem attainments (variously extrinsic).