Useful journal article with some very interesting insights, albeit some unwarranted conclusions.
Excerpts
67
Perhaps it is true that God loves fully; nonetheless, there’s good reason to deny that God loves equally. Why? As we’ve seen, if God has deep attachments, it follows that God does not love equally. And being a perfect being, God would have loves of the deepest kind. Would moral perfection require maximal flatness of the divine love? More generally, does morality require impartiality in every case?
67
One loves his beloved more than others, and without that partiality an important intrinsic good is lost. In short, intimacy of a certain significant kind implies exclusion and inequality. So, wideness and flatness of human love would imply the loss of a great intrinsic good. Put simply, in its deepest forms and manifestations love precludes wideness and flatness.
69
Rahner also views hell as an obstinate self-enclosure. Created for communication with others, but freely contradicting the deepest demands of their social nature by immuring themselves in their own willful isolation, the damned suffer because they are eternally loved by the saints. As stated in 1 Corinthians 6:2, “the saints will judge the world.” The damned will be in the presence of the entire communion of saints who will love them throughout eternity—a love they will find horrific because of their willful obduracy. The saints will eternally love whatever God has created and loves, and this includes the damned. The lost ones will also suffer from their realization that many saints during their lifetime would have gladly suffered the pains of hell on earth, if they could eliminate a postmortem hell for others. Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “hell is the other” is true for the damned. Catherine of Siena maintains that the eternally tormented rich man of Luke 16:19–31 begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers—not to do them a good deed, but to prevent his suffering even more at their hands, should they end up where he is.