174 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
will. It is not even very sensible to ask, then, whether a free
will might not "spontaneously" posit an end for itself out of
the sheer exuberance of its power to choose, and then pursue
that end out of pure unreasoning perversity. Absolute sponta-
neity would be an unfree act, a mere brute event beyond the
control of mind and desire, while merely partial spontaneity
would still be guided by some kind of purpose. If you wish to
prove this to yourself, you need only attempt freely to posit an
end for yourself without rationale. Then again, do not bother,
since you would not actually be acting without rationale; you
would instead be pursuing the conscious purpose of following
my suggestion that you try to act spontaneously. Anything you
might willfully choose to do for the purpose of doing some-
thing arbitrary would not, in fact, be arbitrary. And you will
find also that even that supposedly arbitrary act, if you con-
ceived of it before doing it, was not really arbitrary after all,
but rather corresponded to some concrete intention that you
knowingly chose, and for some specific reason, out of a strictly
limited range of possible options. This too you can prove to
yourself. You would not, for instance, simply in order to try to
prove me wrong, leap off the top of a high building. Or, rather,
if you did, the rest of us would immediately recognize your
action as a feat oflunacy, and therefore not truly free. You can-
not actually force yourself to behave "irrationally" except in an
ultimately rational way. And to seek to find a first moment of
perfect mindless impulse in any free act is to pursue a hopeless
descent back along an infinite regress.
Hence, the traditional claim that the rational will can
never choose evil as an end in itself, but only as a kind ofter-
minal "good" in which to come to an only provisional rest: the
Good sub contrario, as it were, but the Good even so. The whole
of classical Christian tradition, after all, understands God him-