72 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
there were, this irreconcilable excess would also be something
God has directly caused, as an entailment freely assumed in
his act of creating, and so as an expression of who he freely is.
This is no more than the simple logic of the absolute. Hegel, for
instance, saw the great slaughter-bench of history as a tragic
inevitability in the Idea's odyssey toward Geist through the far
countries of finite negation; for him, the merely particular-
say, the isolated man whose death is, from the vantage of the
all, no more consequential than the harvesting of a head of
cabbage- is simply the smoke that rises from the sacrifice. The
loss of the individual to the needs of the absolute remains in
Hegel's system the "necessary surd," the meaningless remain-
der of a dialectical negation, which can be redeemed never in
itself, but only as the negated, in the eternal identity of the
divine.
Hegel's is a tale, though, no matter how one interprets
it, of divine becoming, the great epic of "God" forging him -
self in the crucible of time. By contrast, the story Christians
tell is of creation as God's sovereign act of love, neither add-
ing to nor qualifying his eternal nature, and so it is also a story
that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the
universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the par-
ticular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of
the particular and the moral nature of God. Precisely because
God does not determine himself in creation-precisely be-
cause there is no dialectical necessity binding him to time or
chaos, no need to shape his identity in the refining fires of his-
tory- in creating he reveals himself truly. Thus every evil that
time comprises, natural or moral (which is, in this context, a
largely worthless distinction, since human nature is a natu-
ral phenomenon), is an arraignment of God's goodness: every
death of a child, every chance calamity, every act of malice;