138 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
it, and not able to argue it through to his own satisfaction, he
would end his contemplations in the same darkness in which
he began, his glorious discovery would be reduced to a dreary
tautology, and his magnificent vision of divine love's vast reach
would be converted into a ludicrous cartoon of its squalid nar-
rowness. Yet, on the whole, the late Augustinian tradition on
these texts has been so broad and mighty that it has, for mil-
lions of Christians, effectively evacuated Paul's argument of all
its real content. It ultimately made possible those spasms of
theological and moral nihilism that prompted Calvin, as I have
noted, to claim that God predestined even the fall of humanity,
and that he hates the reprobate. Sic transit gloria Evangelii. This
is perhaps the most depressing paradox ever to have arisen in
the whole Christian theological tradition: that Paul's great at-
tempt to demonstrate that God's election is not some arbitrary
act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means
for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons,
has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite lit-
erally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths ex-
plicitly to reject.
IISo it goes. Even Homer nods. And Augustine, for all his bril-
liance, did quite a lot of nodding in his later years. Would that
Christian tradition had- this is my incessant lament, my tire-
less refrain, my cri de creur-heeded Gregory of Nyssa instead.
So many unpleasant confusions might have been avoided,
so many young minds might have been preserved against
psychological abuse, so many Christian moral imaginations
might have been spared such enormous corruptions. When
Gregory looked at the eschatological language of the New Tes-