474.-475.

474 – Calvin, who justified eternal Hell, knew not God but made one terrible mask of Him His eternal reality. If there were an unending Hell, it could only be a seat of unending rapture; for God is Ananda and than the eternity of His bliss there is no other eternity.

475 – Dante, when he said that God’s perfect love created eternal Hell, wrote perhaps wiselier than he knew; for from stray glimpses I have sometimes thought there is a Hell where our souls suffer aeons of intolerable ecstasy and wallow as if for ever in the utter embrace of Rudra, the sweet and terrible.

The divine splendours are too marvellous for human littleness, which finds it hard to bear them, and an eternity of delight may well be intolerable for a human being.

14 April 1970