Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsall the events that constitute each individual life, but also all of
an agent's inner motives and predispositions and desires-all
thoughts, impulses, hopes, preferences, yearnings, and aver-
sions - and so knowing what choice any given soul will make
when confronted with certain options and situated among cer-
tain circumambient forces, God can (if nothing else) so ar-
range the shape of reality that all beings, one way or another,
come at the last upon the right path by way of their own free-
dom, in this life or the next. In a very limited way, of course, we
can all at times do something similar. If I entice a child, whom
I know to be in complete possession of her rational faculties,
to eat a slice of cake when she is hungry by presenting her no
other options except a bowl of sand and a scorpion, I have not
made her choice of the cake any less free even in making it (as
far as I am able to do so) inevitable. Even if I offer her another
slice of cake as well, knowing that it is one she will like con-
siderably less, I can still accomplish much the same thing. And
God, being infinitely resourceful and infinitely knowledgeable,
can weave the whole of time into a perfectly coherent conti-
nuity whose ultimate result is that all circumstances and forces
conduce to the union of every creature with himself, and can
do this precisely by confronting every rational nature with
possibilities he knows they will realize through their own free
volitions. It is true that he might accomplish this by imposing
limited conditions of choice upon every life; but the conditions
of choice are always limited anyway, and deliberative freedom
is always capable of only a finite set of possible determinations.
Neither, though, can God be merely one option among
others, for the very simple reason that he is not just another
object alongside the willing agent or alongside other objects
of desire, but is rather the sole ultimate content of all rational
longing. Being himself the source and end of the real, God can