Sex and the Unreal City by Anthony Esolen

Author:Anthony Esolen [AUTHOR, FIRST]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality & Religion
ISBN: 978-1-64229-129-2
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2020-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Spiritual Chasm

It is fashionable in progressive Christian circles to decry the notion that there might be a hell. I will not enter here into the theological arguments surrounding universal salvation. I wish to specify only what it is we are affirming or denying. When in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth, says the sacred author, “the earth was without form, and void” (Gen 1:2), in Hebrew tohu w’vohu, a fine rhyming pair, and the first figure of speech in Scripture. The words suggest inanity, nonbeing. Vohu in fact is used only as a rhyme for tohu, never otherwise, and the pair is used also to describe what idols are. It is not simply that the gods are false. They are inane. They are without meaning.

Evil, says Augustine, is not a thing in itself but an absence, a vacuity. Moral evil is a freely willed turn toward that vacuity. Milton’s Moloch fairly gives the secret away when, among the assembled devils newly damned and pretending to meet to figure out a way to recoup their losses, he recommends armed rebellion against the Almighty. His war cry begins in bravado and ends in a hope for nothingness. If the Almighty should defeat them again? Moloch seems almost to long for that to happen:

More destroyed than thus,

We should be quite abolished, and expire.

What fear we then? What doubt we to incense

His utmost ire? Which to the height enraged

Will either quite consume us, and reduce

To nothing this essential, happier far

Than miserable to have eternal being;

Or if our substance be indeed divine

And cannot cease to be, we are at worst

On this side nothing.1

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