Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
of all evil- natural evil, moral evil, the evil of the hell we bring
upon ourselves-and the invasion of death's kingdom by the
shattering divinity of Christ. It is a tale that can end only in
perfect victory and perfect peace. Then, fourthly, there was his
belief that the punishments of the life to come are (as Paul sug-
gests in 1 Corinthians 3) merely the final, purgative completion
of this act of rescue and restoration, the harsh but necessary
means for bringing about the ultimate purification of every
soul- like the cautery or knife wielded by a surgeon, or like
an implement for stripping clay from a rope. And then, finally,
there was his metaphysical-but also biblical-conviction re-
garding the inherent finitude of evil, the infinite fullness of
God's goodness, and the irrepressible dynamism of the moral
life of rational spirits. He accepted, naturally, the definition of
evil as a purely privative reality, with no substance or nature
of its own, since God alone is the source of all being and "in
him there is no darkness at all." He believed also that finite
natures are necessarily dynamic realities, constituted as much
by change as by formal stability, and that a finite rational being
exists only in its act of moral and ontological desire for the
Good, ever in motion. And he believed, of course, that God
alone is the infinite plenitude of being and goodness that every
soul seeks, by union with whom the soul is transformed into
an eternally expanding vessel of divinity, an infinite capacity
for love and knowledge transfigured forever-again, as Paul
says- "from glory to glory" (2 Corinthians 3:18). For Gregory,
therefore, no rational will could ever be fixed forever in the
embrace of evil, since evil has nothing with which to hold on to
that soul. In On the Making of Humanity, Gregory likened evil
in creation to the shadow cast by the earth (which, according
to the cosmology of the time, was how night was understood):
a diminishing cone of darkness dying away weakly in a uni-