Apokatastasis: Four Meditationsintrinsically sane, and that willing what can only make one
unhappy- if not for some greater good- is intrinsically the
result of some disorder of the mind. Moreover, Christians are
required to believe that the Good is not merely a matter of per-
sonal evaluation, but an objective verity: God himself, in fact,
the very ground of reality, who is not simply one truth among
others, but Truth as such. The mind conformed to him is the
very definition of mental sanity: a purely rational act united
to its only true occasion and end. So, for anyone to be free,
there must be a real correspondence between his or her mind
and the structure of reality, and a rational cognizance on his
or her part of what constitutes either the fulfilment or the ruin
of a human soul. Where this rational cognizance is absent in
a soul, there can be only aimlessness in the will, the indeter-
minacy of the unmoored victim of circumstance, which is the
worst imaginable slavery to the accidental and the mindless. If
then there is such a thing as eternal perdition as the result of
an eternal refusal of repentance, it must also be the result of an
eternal ignorance, and therefore has nothing really to do with
freedom at all. So, no: Not only is an eternal free rejection of
God unlikely; it is a logically vacuous idea.
For those who worry that this all amounts to a kind of
metaphysical determinism of the will, I may not be able to pro-
vide perfect comfort. Of course it is a kind of determinism, but
only at the transcendental level, and only because rational voli-
tion must be determinate to be anything at all. Rational will is
by nature the capacity for intentional action, and so must exist
as a clear relation between (in Aristotelian terms) the "origin
of motion" within it and the "end" that prompts that motion -
between, that is, its efficient and final causes. Freedom is a rela-
tion to reality, which means liberty from delusion. This divine
determinism toward the transcendent Good, then, is precisely