Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 155
miserable empirical ego that so often struts and frets its hour
upon the stage of this world- is a diminished, contracted, lim-
ited expression of spirit, one that must ultimately be reduced
to nothing in each of us if we are to be free from what separates
us from God and neighbor; but the unique personality upon
which that ego is parasitic is not itself merely a chrysalis to be
shed. There may be within each of us (indeed, there surely is)
that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or Atman that is the
abiding presence of God in us-the place of radical sustain-
ing divine immanence, "nearer to me than my inmost parts,"
interior intimo meo-but that light is the one undifferentiated
ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal
existences in and with one another. As spiritual persons, we are
dynamic analogies of the simplicity of the divine life of love,
and so belong eternally to that corporate identity that is, for
Gregory of Nyssa, at once the "Human Being" of the first cre-
ation and also the eternal body of Christ.
But, then, this is to say that either all persons must be
saved, or none can be. According to the traditional picture of
a dual eternity, a final division of the saved and the damned
(whether the latter be tortured forever or merely forever an-
nihilated), God could in fact save no persons at all. He could
of course erase each of the elect as whoever they once were, by
shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of
hell, and then raise up some other being in each of their places,
thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of
the loves that made him or her this person - associations and
attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. But per-
sons, it seems, could not be saved; they could only be damned.
Only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal
destiny: tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we
squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether.