186 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
knowledge and all truth, of all love and delight in the object
of love, who enlivens and acts within every created act. As an
infinite and transcendental end, God's goodness may be inde-
terminate as regards proximate ends, and that very indetermi-
nacy may be what allows for deliberative determinations. There
may be conflicts and confusions, mistakes and perversities in
the great middle distance of life; as Duns Scotus says, we fre-
quently must deliberate between which aspect of the Good to
pursue, whether to be guided in any moment by our affectio
iustitiae ( our sense of what is just) or the affectio com modi ( our
sense of what is suitable or convenient); but the encircling hori-
zon never alters, and the Sun of the Good never sets. No soul
can relent in its deepest motives from the will's constant and
consuming preoccupation with God. If this were not so, and
if reason had no natural, ontological, and necessary relation
to God as the final rationale in all desire and agency, then God
would himself be something separate from the Good as such,
and from rationality as such, and could attract the rational will
merely in the manner of a predilection. But then he would not
actually be God in any meaningful sense. In truth, he gives his
creatures freedom always by making them freely seek him as
the ultimate end in all else that intentional consciousness seeks.
Hence, again, should God providentially arrange the
contingencies of every life, and do so unremittingly till all evil
has vanished altogether- in this world and the world to come,
even if needs be by way of purgation - guiding every soul to
the only final end it can ever truly freely desire, this would be
no trespass upon the sanctity of the autonomous will. It would
be, rather, the act of bringing about the soul's only possible
true liberation, the full flowering of true freedom in a nature
that, till that point, has only ever partly known what it is to be
at liberty. Only the Truth can make you free (John 8:32). And