Note 63 — Chapter III · DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.

“If God had consciously created the human will of such essential perversity as to find its natural expression in thwarting Him, He would be impotent in the face of it; could only show Himself compassionate; could only regret His own act in creating it. His duty would not be to punish mankind but to the utmost possible degree to lighten their sufferings, to show Himself gentle and good directly in proportion to this evil; and the damned, if they were truly incurable, would be in greater need of the joys of heaven than the elect themselves. Either the sinner can be reclaimed; and in that event hell would be nothing more than an immense school, an immense house of correction for preparing the culpable with the utmost possible rapidity for heaven; or the sinner is incorrigible, is analogous to an incurable maniac (which is absurd), and then he is eternally to be pitied and a supreme Goodness would endeavour to compensate him for his misery by every imaginable means by showering upon him every bliss that he was capable of enjoying. Turn it as one will, the dogma of hell stands thus in direct opposition to the truth.

“For the rest, by the very act of damning a soul, that is to say shutting it out forever from His presence, or, in terms less mystical, excluding it forever from a knowledge of the truth, would not God in turn be shutting Himself out from the soul, limiting His own power, and so to speak in some measure damning Himself also? The penalty of the damnation would fall in part on Him who inflicted it. As to the physical torment of which theologians speak, interpreted metaphorically, it becomes even more inadmissible. Instead of damning mankind God ought eternally to gather about Him those who have strayed from Him; it is for the culpable above all others that, as Michel Angelo said, God opened wide his arms upon the cross. We represent Him as looking down upon the sinning multitude from too great a height for them ever to be anything to Him but the incarnation of misfortune. Well, just in so far as they are unfortunate must they not logically be the especial favourites of divine goodness?”—Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 189.