Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom? 191
an end. Evil, being nothing in itself, can never be an ultimate
end, but must always subsist only as a privation of what is
real. The irrepressible dynamism of human nature is, accord-
ing to Gregory, simply what rational spirit is; if that nature
were to cease freely to intend and seek an end, it would in
that instant cease to exist altogether as conscious mind or vital
desire. An intellectual and intentional act, being nothing but a
movement toward an end, exists only as movement. Even the
blessed soul's union with God, Gregory insisted, must consist
for the creature in an eternal epektasis, an endless intentional
and dynamic "stretching out" into an ever deeper participation
in the divine nature. For any finite thing possessed of a prin-
ciple of life-psyche, soul- movement is life, stasis death. Even
in hell, a soul would exist as a soul only by freely intending
what it wants. The restlessness of the rational will and intellect
is directly convertible with the very existence of the rational
creature. One can become distracted, I imagine, by the rather
vivid imagery that Gregory uses, of a soul wandering in evil
like a celestial body moving through the earth's shadow, until
it necessarily reaches the shadow's limit; but he has a pene-
trating point to make. Given the dynamism of human nature,
given its primordial longing for the Good, given the inher-
ent emptiness of evil, given the finitude of evil's satisfactions
and configurations and resources, no rational nature could
freely persist forever in its apostasy from the Good. There is
no power in that nature or in evil equal to such an act. As for
whether God might somehow impose upon such a soul a per-
petual delusion, so that the mind and will continue to move
forever in the shadows, Gregory never considered it at all: in
part, I expect, because he believed that the natural movement
of the soul toward an end must be a truly free act in order to be