Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsmurderous, and who eventually dies unrepentant and there-
upon descends to an endless hell. Well, no doubt this brute
chose to become what he became, to the extent that he was able
to do so, conscious of the choices he was making; so maybe he
has received no more than he deserves. And yet, even then,
I cannot quite forget, or consider it utterly irrelevant, that he
was born into a world so thoroughly ruined that a child can
be born one day in poverty, suffer from some horrible and in-
curable congenital disease, die in agony ... What precisely did
that wicked man, then, ever really know of the Good? And
how clearly, and with what rational power over his own will?
Certainly he did not know everything, at least not with per-
fect clarity, nor did he enjoy complete rational discretion or
power over his own deeds and desires. Not even a god would
be capable of that. This thought alone is enough to convince
me of the sheer moral squalor of the traditional doctrine.
Yet this still is not my principal point. I want to say some-
thing far more radical, something that I touched upon lightly
in my First Meditation above. I want to say that there is no
way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and
with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim,
but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of cer-
tain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exi-
gency of all that makes us who and what we are. I assume, or
at least hope, that none of us is able to agree with the argu-
ment of Thomas (among others) that the knowledge of the tor-
ments of the damned will increase the felicity of the blessed in
heaven (see Summa Theologiae, supplement to the third part,
qu. 94)-even if, as the more irrepressibly eager of Thomas's
apologists will always helpfully observe, he means only that
the saints will derive pleasure from the contrast between their
beatitude and the damnation from which they were graciously