190 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
point) that the sinlessness of Jesus of Nazareth was no more
than a special accident of the specific person he was, and that
in every other sense his humanity would have been capable
of sin had it been instantiated in some other person. This is
meaningless. Deliberative liberty is nothing but the power of
any given person to choose one end or another. The point re-
mains, then, that a human being cannot be said to have the
"capacity" for sin if sin is literally impossible for the person he
is; and so, even if this capacity was wanting in just the single
person that Jesus happened to be, while yet that single per-
son truly possessed a full and undiminished human will and
human mind, then the capacity to sin is no necessary or natu -
ral part of either human freedom or human nature. Rather,
it must be at most a privation of the properly human, one
whose ultimate disappearance would-far from hindering the
human will-free human nature from a malignant and alien
condition. What distinguished Christ in this regard from the
rest of humanity, if Christological orthodoxy is to be believed,
is not that he lacked a kind of freedom that all others possess,
but that he was not subject to the kinds of extrinsic constraints
upon his freedom (ignorance, delusion, corruption of the will,
and so forth) that enslave the rest of the race. In Augustine's
terms, he was- as we should all wish to become- incapable of
( or, rather, not incapacitated by) any deviation from the Good.
He had a perfect knowledge of the Good and was perfectly
rational; hence, as a man he could not sin; hence, he alone
among men was fully free.
So it is that we discover at the last, as could scarcely have
been otherwise, that Gregory of Nyssa was right, and his rea-
soning unassailable. For him, all finite existence is change,
and all finite rational will is an intentional movement toward