188 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
must be the case that Christians are obliged to regard Jesus
as having been a truly free creature during his life among
human beings. Whatever powers he may have possessed by
virtue of his divine nature, insofar as he was wholly human
he must have lacked nothing intrinsic to whatever it is that
makes human beings rational agents. I mention this only be-
cause one does occasionally hear it argued that the liberty to
reject God absolutely, and to turn with finality toward evil, is a
necessary and precious element of human nature, apart from
which one would not be a true moral agent. Now, as I have just
made clear, I regard the entire account of human freedom on
which such a claim is based as logically incoherent and meta-
physically confused. But, considered theologically, the claim
may very well be an even more egregious contradiction of the
whole tradition of orthodox Christology; it may, in fact, entail
heresy. This certainly should pose something of a problem for
anyone who professes belief in the teachings that define the
faith. Maximus the Confessor, among the subtlest and most
rigorous thinkers on the doctrine of Christ in the history of
either Eastern or Western Christianity, was quite insistent that
our "gnomic" will- our faculty of deliberation - is so wholly
dependent upon our "natural" will- the innate and inextin -
guishable movement of rational volition toward God- that
the former has no actual existence in us except when the de-
fect of sin is present in our intellects and intentions. As such,
the gnomic will may in fact be dependent upon the natural, but
the absence of a gnomic will is in no sense a deficiency of our
nature. More to the point, not only is the actuality of a distinct
deliberative will an unnecessary dimension of our natures; so
in fact is the very capacity for such a will. If this seems an ex-
travagant supposition, it is no more than the conclusion that
must be drawn from the entire logic of the Incarnation.