194 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
exists for creatures as what is revealed to them in the very act
of rational intentionality, of dynamic cognizance; intentional
mind is not some narrow, vacant annex of reality, but is rather
the place where the world shows itself, and so where it exists
as that creature's world. Any rational will that does not surren-
der to God as the true end of desire and knowledge is a whole
world from which God is absent, and so is God's defeat.
One cannot conjure this problem away, incidentally,
simply by giving up on the notion of hell as eternal torment
and adopting in its place the notion of a final annihilation for
the damned (which, as I have already noted, has at least the
virtue of conforming somewhat better to the large majority
of the metaphors for eschatological condemnation found in
scripture). The ultimate annihilation of all the wicked souls
that have ever been would still not constitute the total victory
promised in the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians. It would
perhaps demonstrate that God reigns "over all," at least by the
end of the story, and in that sense it might suggest that God,
for all intents and purposes, is "all" that is. But it would never
allow for the reality of God being "all in all." Sub specie aeterni-
tatis-and God is eternal and transcendent of time, after all-
there would always be a fixed number of finite histories that
ended in a divine absence, and so of inner rational wills where
God was present only ever in a relative and partly negative de-
gree. There would exist eternally the residual reality of souls
that never surrendered to him, and within which consequently
he never appeared as the sole and consuming end of knowl-
edge and desire, recognized by the intellect and affirmed by the
rational will-souls in which he was never the all. And then
also, to return to the theme of my First Meditation, from this
same eternal divine perspective these thwarted and ultimately
annihilated rational natures would still constitute that irre-