Douthat's Inferno...
Ross Douthat, April:
A Case for Hell: Doing away with hell… threatens to make human life less fully human…. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score…. The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so…. [T]he idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death… salvation or damnation”…
Ross Douthat, December:
The Believer’s Atheist: [Christopher] Hitchens’s antireligious writings… he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel…. His last word on the possibility of conversion…: “Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice.”…
[R]igorous atheism… leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.” Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.
I must say that most unfavorable obituaries of Christopher Hitchens confined themselves to saying that he (a) wasted his great talents and, (b) tried to lead the North Atlantic public sphere into supporting policies that were objectively destructive.
This one by Douthat is the only one I have seen that--when read against the background of Douthat's theology of last April--actually hopes for Hitchens's eternal damnation. Most Americans, at least, pray that the dead are in Heaven rather than that the choices the dead made in this life have Eternal Consequences…
