Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsnal nature, some good end for rational intellects and wills that
God in himself would be impotent to accomplish. The good-
ness of the divine essence, as known by a created spirit, would
thus always be a relative value, and always parasitic upon the
substantial difference between heaven and hell. Hell would
then be part of God in an ultimate and therefore original sense:
part of who he is ad extra but also, by virtue of this inherent
dependency on evil for his self-revelation, part also of who he
is in seipso. But this is absurd. As infinite Truth and Goodness,
God must be the whole proper end of the rational will, and
must therefore be able in himself to fulfill the rational appetite
for truth and happiness. The soul needs nothing in addition to
the divine nature in which it is called to partake (2 Peter 1:4),
and certainly not the supplement of either a natural or a moral
evil. And then too, of course, there is something even more
degrading in the notion that creatures fashioned in the divine
image might justly be reduced to an instrumental means to a
didactic end-and this by way of unremitting suffering and
despair. The only knowledge that could be won at that price
would be the knowledge of an evil god.
Curiously enough, this last option too has often been
taken by theologians and believers down the centuries-
though not, of course, in quite such candid terms. I will not
rehearse again the traditional arguments for the infernalist
position from the tedious and grotesque principle of God's
absolute sovereignty. Who cares that God is understood to
be omnipotent? Everyone can grant that. The special Chris-
tian claim, however, is that this omnipotent God is also in-
finite love. There is something coarse and foolish about bor-
rowing our picture of God ( as did so many of the Reformers,
Protestant and Catholic alike) from the early modern ideology
of absolute monarchy and of total sovereignty. It results in a