The real question is: how can a soul choose eternal hell over an infinitely good and loving God?

God does not send anyone that He loves to hell. That would be absurd. The answer is that God loves those in mortal sin in this life to the extent that He wishes them to repent, and He gives them graces to do so. But if they remain unrepentant, God does not have any love for them after they die, of any kind. They are God's enemy forever.

I disagree.  God is love, and if He did not love them, they would cease to exist.  You're confusing their refusal to be elevated to the supernatural state with God's love ad extra love for them.  God doesn't SEND anyone to Hell.  People go where they choose to go.  There's the one private revelation where a saint, out of pity, asked God to remove a soul from Hell and put him in Heaven.  He did so.  Very quickly the souls starts cursing saying he can't stand it there and wants out.  So the saint asks that God at least put the soul in Purgatory.  He does so.  At that point the soul curses again that he's neither here nor there.  Finally, God tells the soul, "Go where you wish." ... and the soul dives headlong back into Hell.  That vision or private revelation (I can't recall who it was) illustates that people go to Hell beause it's where they want to go.  In their freedom to fashion their souls into whatever they will them to be, they develop the dispositions where they hate God and it's precisely the presence of God and the continuing love of God that causes them to suffer and causes even the fires of Hell.  I think I heard some other saint/mystic explain that if the soul allows the fire of God's love to pass through it and becomes one with the fire, it does not cause pain, but it's only painful when the soul refuses to let the this fire of God's love inside ... and it's the refusal to accept God's love that causes the pain and the suffering, as souls were made for God.

No one is damned against their will, just as no one is saved against their will. - St. Theresa

"Before man is life and death, good and evil, that which he shall choose shall be given him." - Ecclesiasticus 15:18

A few points I take from "I know Mine, and Mine Know Me":

1. God wants the salvation of every man and the damnation of none.
2. If any man is not saved, it is because he chose not to be saved.
3. No man goes to heaven unless he freely chooses it.
4. A man does not choose Hell instead of Heaven; he chooses his will instead of God's.
5. In Hell, they do not hate God, they resist Him; they hate themselves.
6. It is the teaching of the Church that God gives to all men sufficient grace for salvation; to those who are saved, He gives efficacious grace.
7.  The reason God does not give efficacious grace to those who will be lost is that they would not accept it; this is the same reason God does not give grace to those in Hell.

Very clear!

Our Lord describes the damnation of a soul as God destroying the soul.

That's just a matter of perspective.  God does indeed destroy the soul, as I suggested above, where His love actually becomes the destructive force, with the soul refusing to accept it and therefore being destroyed by the love.  So it's a question of quoad the soul vs. quoad God.

I've heard analogies made to when something is being purified of impurities of steal in fire, where the impurities are burned and scorched, and once they're all gone, the steal almost becomes one with the fire and blends into it.

Perhaps another analogy is like this, where if you let God's love in, the pressure equalizes.  Not sure if you've seen those videos where the rail car is squashed when there's a vacuum inside.  But this would not happen if you opened it up and allowed the atmosphere inside the rail car, where the pressure would equalize.  So in one sense, yes, it's the pressure of the atmosphere that smashes the rail car, but in another sense it's the rail car doing it to itself (in a manner of speaking) by refusing to let the atmosphere come inside of it and equalize the pressure.

This here represents a soul that refuses to let God's love in (God's love being analogous with the atmosphere).  Souls that open up and let God's love in experience no such destruction.



So the big philosophical / theological underpinning for this perspective is that God is perfectly simple and does not change.  If people are affected differently by God it's not because He treats one soul one way and another soul another way.  These differences are due to the souls themselves and their dispositions.  God is love, but if the soul refuses to let God's love in (designed as it was to be filled with God's love), it'll get destroyed like that rail car that refuses to allow atmosphere in (via the vacuum).