"'How many will go to Hell who'd have been saved if they'd gotten the Word sooner?'"
-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Three, Chapter VII, p. 214.
None, Haakon. If anyone is to be judged, then surely their circumstances should be taken into account especially if, as we are told, the Judge is also the Creator? And, whatever the verdict, how can finite offenses warrant infinite punishment? As a skeptical philosopher, I would be obliged to tell Haakon's missionaries that I preferred the local deities to the one that they were importing.
Haakon heeds wise advice. He considers extending the Yule celebration and linking it to Christ's birthday - which, of course, had been the solstice and Mithras' birthday. He has the good sense to "...listen and learn..." (p. 217) when a skald recites what we recognize as the Voluspa, newly arrived from Iceland:
"'...nine worlds
I knew in the tree...
"'Do you want to know more?'" (p. 218)
The foredoomed, undaunted gods, strong in their homeland, honored by Haakon's father, Harald Fairhair.
Chapter VIII begins:
"A wind from the north went astray in the twisting lanes of York..." (p. 219)
We are about to rejoin Haakon's enemy, Eirik Blood-ax, now King in York, but I am about to go to bed in Lancaster.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm inclined to agree with you, with what you said about King Haakon. God will judge individuals by what they knew and believed was right and true--rather than by a faith they could not have reasonably known. My favorite analogy of this being a Buddhist in some remote corner of Tibet who had never heard of Christ yet still strove to live uprightly. It's when a man has come to know of Christ, and even suspects He might be God Incarnate, that he becomes culpable if he then chooses to reject Him.
Sean
Frank Yerby, in his novel *The Saracen Blade* (1952), has a scene in which a bishop speculates that there might be a "gentler" sort of Hell, one without torments and with a chance to BECOME Christian after death, for those who lived uprightly but weren't Christians in life. He was speaking of people who, even though good, had rejected Christianity for one reason or another, such as some Muslims or Albigensian heretics, but obviously this would also apply to those who never had the chance to accept or reject. At least one of the Crusaders who heard this found it a VERY unsettling notion, and was clearly pondering whether he should accuse the bishop of heresy.
Hi, David!
Thanks for your comments! Alas, I don't think I've ever heard of Frank Yerby.
It is already the general view of Catholic theologians that the souls of the damned suffer in proportion to how evil they were in life. An idea we see worked out with rigorous logic in Dante's poem THE INFERNO, where those who suffer least were those who had no knowledge of God and Christ but were still upright. Iow, they were in Limbo. That may have been what Frank Yerby's fictional bishop was thinking about.
But, I have to disagree with any idea of a person becoming able to convert to Christianity after death. The Church is quite clear, such a choice can be made only in THIS life.
And Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote two very interesting books based on Dante's poem about Hell: INFERNO and ESCAPE FROM HELL. The theological view they seem to favor is not quite orthodox, being based on some of C.S. Lewis' speculations (see his THE GREAT DIVORCE).
It's a pity no SF writer has tried his hand writing similar books about Purgatory and Paradise, based on Dante's PURGATORIO and PARADISO. But I can see how some would find hell easier to write about!
Sean
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