192 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
real, and hence must always be concerned ultimately with the
Good; and in part because he did not regard God as a sadis-
tic monster.
Those who argue for the infernalist position from the
principle of the soul's power to reject God freely have already
begun their reasoning from a point located somewhere along
the course of a logical circle. They recognize, correctly, that
this act of rejection can be a perpetual state freely assumed by
a soul only if that soul is free in perpetuity. A fixed state based
on a decision made in the ever remoter past (billions and tril-
lions and whole aeons of years in the past), in a state that logi-
cally could never have allowed for an entirely clear cognizance
of reality, obviously could never truly be a freely assumed con-
dition. The self-condemnation of the damned must be an eter-
nally sustained rational action, not simply a Jait accompli no
longer subject to deliberative revision. But then they fail to
recognize that this is a ridiculous picture of reality. For an act
to be fully free, it must be undertaken compos mentis, uncom-
promised even by personal emotional or intellectual states that
could obscure the soul's knowledge of what it is choosing and
why. And so this notion - that a soul fully aware of who God is,
and of how he alone could fulfill and beatify a rational nature,
and suffering all the most extreme torments consequent upon
turning from God and subjecting itself to an unnatural sev-
erance from the Good, could freely elect forever, successively,
and continuously to dwell in misery- makes a mockery of the
most basic logic of the very idea of created freedom. Now, of
course, the infernalist can devise all sorts of clever evasions
here, such as, say, trying to redefine temporal succession or
intention or rational action in ways that seem to preserve the
essence of each of these things, but that covertly destroy it. If,
however, one undertakes to address the matter reasonably and