Make Hell Hot Again

I have a problem with hell that goes beyond squeamishness. The problem is one of inserting the damned into God's endgame, his final fix—creation brought to its triumphant completion. Doesn't the presence of everlasting torment put a damper on the success story?

I went to Aquinas for comfort, only to find the difficulty ­accentuated. Aquinas describes sin as a disturbance of the divine order, in which "so long as the disturbance of the order remains, the debt of punishment must remain also." Hell lasts forever because the disturbance of sin lasts forever. Aquinas makes this explicit when he argues that God "is forever unappeased by the punishment of the wicked."