First Meditation: Who Is God?
able than the former; and, for what it is worth, it also appears
to accord somewhat better with the large majority of scrip-
tural metaphors, the dominical metaphors in particular, for
final damnation. But such an eventuality would still be an ir-
reducible price exacted, a sacrifice eternally preserved in the
economy of God's Kingdom. The ultimate absence of a cer-
tain number of created rational natures would still be a kind
of last end inscribed in God's eternity, a measure of failure or
loss forever preserved within the totality of the tale of divine
victory. If what is lost is lost finally and absolutely, then what-
ever remains, however glorious, is the residue of an unresolved
and no less ultimate tragedy, and so could constitute only a
contingent and relative "happy ending." Seen in that way, the
lost are still the price that God has contracted from everlast-
ing- whether by predestination or mere permission - for the
sake of his Kingdom; and so it remains a Kingdom founded
upon both an original and a final sacrificial exclusion. In either
case - eternal torment, eternal oblivion - creation and re-
demption are negotiations with evil, death, and suffering, and
so never in an absolute sense God's good working of all things.
I shall touch on this again.
To be clear, though, I am not attempting to subject God
to an "ethical" interrogation, as though he were some finite
agent answerable to standards beyond himself. That would be
banal. This sort of exercise in "game theory," so to speak- this
unfolding of the implicit "rules" of God's creative acts-relies
upon perilous metaphors and risks silly anthropomorphisms,
granted. But the imagery of the argument is illustrative only
of a single logical point about absolute or relative values, in
either victory or defeat; it should not be taken as a literal de-
piction of how God "behaves," as though he really were some
sort of finite psychological subject deliberating among differ-