Reading Auerbach, I realize the strangeness of the world Dante created in the Divine Comedy. First the impossible coexistence of the eternal presence of souls in the state meted out to them by divine judgment and the limited freedom of those very souls to experience - and to interact with Dante. As Auerbach puts it:

Here we face the astounding paradox of what is called Dante's realism. Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth - among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence. But Dante's inhabitants of the three realms lead a 'changeless existence.' (Hegel uses the expression in his Lectures on Aesthetics in one of the most beautiful passages ever written on Dante.) Yet into this changeless existence Dante 'plunges the living world of human action and endurance and more especially of individual needs and destinies.' (Mimesis, p. 191).

This leads Auerbach to note that those residing in the afterlife - and most especially in Hell, since they are cut off from the divine - retain their contact with earthly life, which is the place where their fate is determined, "[f]or it is precisely the absolute realization of a particular earthly personality in the place definitively assigned to it, which constitutes the Divine Judgment" (193).

Not only are criminals classified in God's penal system according to their crimes only - so that everything else - the peripheral stuff of their character - can shine in the brilliance of its contrast with their eternal neighbors - but, more importantly, the crime, once committed, seals the individual's classification for eternity and, by implication, the identity of the individual himself. People have unchanging identities in God's world, and the choices made by people, inseparable from their identities, determine their eternal fates.

It would seem that justice, as equitable recompense for one's actions, with the idea of eternity as developed in Christian thought, must assume as its condition of possibility the unchangeability of human character - for all eternity. If the possibility that human beings are not identical with themselves over the course of a lifespan would make a mess of contracts and criminal law, just imagine what it would do to Divine Judgment! Human beings, separated from their bodies and earthly life, deprived of the temporality in which one can have concrete feelings, desires, experiences, etc., must, in the afterlife, retain the identity without the temporal condition in which it is possible. Hence, the image of eternal life in which everyone is somehow assigned a particular stage of life in which he or she remains forever (what do transsexuals do in hell or heaven?)

Personal change destabilizes the eternal scheme of creation. Nietzsche's thesis, slightly altered, that personal identity is the prerequisite for power, finds its ultimate realization in the Christian universe. Eternal judgment is the apotheosis of personality, as that which traps people in a state of consistency, allowing them to be subjected to the authority of God.