Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 129crossed between that next or higher aeon and the eternal life
of God "beyond all ages." After all, as so many biblical schol-
ars have noted, the figure of Christ in the fourth gospel passes
through the world as the light of eternity; he is already both
judgment and salvation, disclosing hell in our hearts, but shat-
tering it in his flesh, so that he may "drag" everyone to him-
self. Some things then, perhaps, exist only in being surpassed,
overcome, formed, redeemed: "pure nature" ( that impossible
possibility), "pure nothingness," prime matter, ultimate loss.
Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always al-
ready been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which
we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish,
but where we can never finally come to rest-for, being only
a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to ( as Gregory of Nyssa
so acutely observes). Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the
last terrible residue of a fallen creation's enmity to God, the lin-
gering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered
universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually
in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long
it lingers on in its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to come,
and beyond all ages, all shall come home to the Kingdom pre-
pared for them from before the foundation of the world.