So I am thinking today about a recent post by Robert Fortuin on “Eternal Hell and Neo-Palamism as a Metaphysics of Evasion.”
“Palamism” refers to the (contested) teachings of St. Gregory Palamas, who sought to make a distinction between God’s “essence” and God’s “energies.” What Fortuin and David Bentley Hart are discussing as “Neo-Palamism” is …
You know what? Nevermind that bit. You can follow the link and then follow Fortuin’s links and read all that to your heart’s content if you like, but that’s not the part of his discussion that matters to me here. Fortuin and Hart both make a strong case that theological misconceptions can lead to bad behavior, and if you want to read a weedy, dense, abstract discussion of why this isn’t all just weedy, dense, and abstract, those guys have you covered. Knock yourself out.
Some days I have the bandwidth to read stuff like that, but today isn’t one of those days.
Today, instead, I’m thinking about how I have a truck to unload at work at 7 o’clock tonight, and how that means I’ll probably be about 10 or 12 panels into that truck at 8 p.m., which is the time our demented, criminal president has stated as his most recent “deadline” for Iran to submit to his will or else, in his words, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
I have called my representatives and asked them to condemn this threat to target civilians, and to oppose it. Congress is, again, on recess. I spoke to one staffer and left two voicemail messages. This seemed necessary, but still inadequate.
I have also been praying, which feels today a lot like leaving more voicemail.
As Tom Ley wrote earlier today, “It’s likely that this is the most proudly and nakedly evil statement ever made by a sitting U.S. president, and now we just have to sit around and see if he actually means it.”
But I won’t be sitting around. Tonight I will be going to work and I will be working, because that is my obligation and my need, and that obligation and need doesn’t go away just because I have been assigned a new, extreme, and urgent obligation by the unstable narcissist my fellow countrymen have installed as our leader.
And this is why I am also thinking now about something else Robert Fortuin wrote in his post about “infernalism” — the blasphemous, extra-biblical folklore and doctrine of eternal conscious torment in “Hell.”
Infernalism is not only a doctrine; it is also a pedagogy of moral accommodation. It teaches people how to accept what they should reject. It teaches them how to describe the indefensible in sanctified language until they can endure it without nausea. … Belief in eternal hell deforms the moral imagination. It trains Christians to call evil good. It instructs them to bless what, under any other description, they would condemn as cruelty. And that charge, however unwelcome, cuts very near the bone.
One must be fair here. The matter is not that every believer in eternal hell is personally vicious. Most are not. Most inherited the doctrine, absorbed it through catechesis, and learned very early that Christian reverence may require them to suppress their moral recoil before it. The deeper problem is more disturbing than simple personal malice. It is that infernalism can conscript decent people into defending a picture of reality they would otherwise recognize as intolerable. The corruption is often structural before it becomes personal. The system bends the conscience first, and only then the person begins speaking in its accent.
Fortuin is correct that this infernal “doctrine” is a “pedagogy of moral accommodation.” But it is not the only such pedagogy.
I think he is also correct that most people are not “personally vicious.” But we have been taught and trained in a thousand different ways to “suppress our moral recoil” and to defend “a picture of reality that we would otherwise recognize as intolerable … to bless what, under any other description, we would condemn as cruel” and to, somehow, “endure it without nausea.”
And so we have allowed those who are personally vicious and who are deliberately cruel to obtain unchecked power and to wield our power on our behalf. And they are threatening to create Hell on earth.
We have so much to unlearn and so little time to unlearn it.
I cannot endure this without nausea, but my nausea doesn’t change anything.
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