I have been making my way through Denys Turner's book on Julian of Norwich's soteriology, which is, like so many of Turner's books, about so much more than its title would imply: Julian of Norwich, Theologian. I could go on about what an amazing book it is, but I thought I would just share a few passages that might be of interest to those who followed our recent discussion of Ross Douthat's column on Hell a few weeks ago. In general, Turner argues that Julian, and a large part of the medieval Christian tradition, is flatly against the view that hell is primarily about people getting their just deserts for the sins they committed in life. In fact, Turner claims that thisquid pro quo story is precisely the hellish one that sin tells of itself. It is the story that torments the Prodigal Son on the way back to his father's house, convincing him that the requirements of justice dictate that he only be granted a place among the servants. This story evaporates the faith that the son should have in his father's forgiveness, which, as Turner writes, "was always there before the event of the son's betrayal, because forgiveness was in the very nature of his [father's] fatherhood." It is the story that also forces the elder brother out of the party in obtuse indignation over the egregious lack of justice shown by the father. According to the story sin tells, the radical love of the father is seriously "out of order." Turner continues, "In that elder son's resentment of the father's unconditional love, disruptive as it is of the world's compromised complacency, lies the source of the wrath and violence that is 'only within us,' and is not to be found otherwise except as projected by that wrath onto God as its dialectical counterpart." This, Turner says, is the story of sin as "told by idiots, its sound and fury signifying nothing."The true tale of sin, Turner says, is perhaps best told in Dante's Inferno, which presents hell as created in the first and last instance out of God's radical love, and out of that love alone. Turner writes:

No misreadings of the Commedia as a whole have a greater tendency to distort Dante's cosmic vision of the love that moves all things than those that assume that, whereas purgatory and paradise are expressions of the divine love, hell issues from something else, perhaps from divine justice or even from divine vindictiveness, as distinct from divine love. Such a reading of the universe of the Commedia is impossible, for that very reason that it is precisely that misunderstanding of things that characterizes the misperceptions of the damned. Besides, Dante makes his meaning plain at the very gates of hell, in the words of that famous inscription wherein we are told that it was not a vindictive and resentful tyrant but an infinite and eternally wise love, inseparable from justice, that made it: "Through me you go to the grief-wracked city/Through me to the everlasting pain you go/Through me you go and pass amongst lost souls/Justice inspired my exalted Creator/I am a creature of the Holiest Power/of Wisdom in the Highest and Primal Love." It is this paradox, then, that the lost souls can never see, or if they can see it cannot admit, or if they can admit it must reject. The ultimate gift of an all-loving God is the gift of freedom to reject the love through which alone their freedom is in the first place made possible. That love is "primal," therefore, because it precedes and contains within itself the possibility of the sin of its refusal. In that sense, Dante's hell, just as much as his purgatory and paradise, represents not the defeat of love but its victory, a victory that the free rejection of it ironically concedes. Sin's defeat is ultimately its self-defeat. Sin is a defiance that concedes victory to that which it defies in the very act of its rejection--just as does the defiance of Satan in that other "divine" epic, Paradise Lost. Milton's Satan, for all his heroics, is in the end reduced to proclaiming even his evil is his good. Thereby, he concedes, for all his bluster, that he is but a parasite on what he defies.

Of course, as Douthat illustrates, the idiocy of sin's story that God is both justice and love, as if the two could be separated such that the exercise of the latter must then harmonize with the former as its other, is hard to shake. As Turner concedes:

It is fair to say, however, that Julian knows how exceedingly difficult it is for us to take this proposition seriously, that God is nothing at all except love. It is quite beyond our understanding because it is quite beyond our own experience of the practical and constraining need to compromise in the conduct of our own affairs. It is difficult to conceive of a being wholly otherwise from us, a wholly unconstrained lover. [...] We at any rate know of other means than love. And we take care to use them, because for all that we would like to believe that all you need is love, we think it unwise to abandon all resort to prudential calculation and practical expediency, just in case love should let us down.

The fear that love will let us down, however, is the very lack of faith that causes the younger brother to expect that he ought to settle for the scraps given to the pigs, and it is this fear that causes the elder brother to cry foul at the seemingly capricious show of generosity on the part of the father towards the prodigal. Perhaps, the elder brother, like Douthat, is afraid that there won't be enough to go around, if we start giving people the love that, by the dictates of justice, they don't deserve. What will be left for the dutiful, if so much is heaped on the profligate? This, however, reduces God and the Love that is God's Being to the scale of human pettiness that parades as prudential judgment. As Turner says:

The story that sin tells, which both issues from and tells of wrath and violence (that are, in truth, 'only on man's side') projects that wrath onto God, who can then be seen as condemning us, so that within that story we can see nothing of that divine love for whom sin is nothing. Nothing, that is, except the persistent telling of the false story of God. The god of wrath and vengeance is the petty little tyrant godlet we choose out of the wrath of sin within us, a fabrication concocted as the objectivized counterpart to our own resentment. Such a god is truly diabolical and in two senses: first, this is god only as the devil can see him, and second, such a god is but the devil's--sin's--angered self-projection. But concoction that such a god may be, the god we choose is the god we get, and hell is but the consequence of our sticking to a delusional story of divine anger and of God's vindictive desire to punish us.

In light of this, Douthat's suggestion that hell is important for underwriting the meaning of our free acts so as to give them the significance of "salvation or damnation," seems to get things just the wrong way around. Hell is God's final embrace, which renders all of our attempts to reject God's love impotently comical. Hence, Dante's Commedia. Hell is reserved for those who refuse to admit that their own activity is and always has been predicated on and sustained by the Creator, without whom there would be absolutely nothing. It is those who insist on making sure their own agency is affirmed who are granted the perverse freedom to exist apart from God. As Turner says, "But hell's existence is more or less self-created: to sin is to choose hell, to choose that there be hell, to live in an infantile world of unreality." In short, hell is for those who need it to give their individual lives meaning, because God's creative love is not enough. Or, is it too much?