Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom? 195
ducible tragic historical surd, that sacrifice that God was will-
ing to throw away to secure the limited, relative, necessarily
contingent goodness of his creative acts. This is not enough.
This would be, frankly, an almost farcically drab, depressingly
ambiguous anticlimax. Sergei Bulgakov, the most remarkable
Christian theological mind of the twentieth century, was per-
haps the nearest modern Orthodox thinker in sensibility to
Gregory of Nyssa ( and, really, to all the greatest of the early
church fathers). For him, as a modern man, the imagery of in-
ward landscapes- the territories of the soul- seemed more
natural than the cosmological metaphors- heavenly bodies
moving through the earth's ecliptic shadow-preferred by
Gregory. His way of making Gregory's point, therefore, was
to argue that heaven and hell exist within every rational na-
ture, and that they do so in every case in a unique but dynami-
cally altering balance. Freedom consists in the soul's journey
through this interior world of constantly shifting conditions
and perspectives, toward the only home that can ultimately
liberate the wanderer from the exile of sin and illusion. And
God, as the transcendent end that draws every rational will
into actuality, never ceases setting every soul free, ever and
again, until it finds that home. To the inevitable God, every
soul is bound by its freedom. In the end, if God is God and
spirit is spirit, and if there really is an inextinguishable ratio-
nal freedom in every soul, evil itself must disappear in every
intellect and will, and hell must be no more. Only then will
God, both as the end of history and as that eternal source and
end of beings who transcends history, be all in all. For God,
as scripture says, is a consuming fire, and he must finally con -
sume everything.