Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom? 193
honestly, one has to acknowledge that any truly free condi-
tion could be nothing other than the love of God. As Gregory
understood, evil has no power to hold us, and we have no
power to cling to evil; shadows cannot bind us, and we in turn
cannot lay hold on them. In the end, God must be all in all.
I should note here as well, before finally drawing these
meditations to a close, that for Gregory it would make no sense
to suggest that God-who is by nature not only the source of
Being, but also the Good and the True and the Beautiful and
everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings-
would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were
to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy
over creation. A mere god's reign over a world might consist
in simple sovereignty over all things, and might be deemed
complete if that god's "enemies" were merely objectively con-
fined in some state of penal suffering. It is a horrific picture of
things, but not incoherent. But God is not a god, and his final
victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in
his assumption of perfect supremacy "over all," but also in his
ultimately being "all in all." Could there then be a final state of
things in which God is all in all while yet there existed rational
creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejec-
tion of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming
and fulfilling end of the rational will's most essential nature?
If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eter-
nity, would God's victory over every sphere of being really be
complete? Or would that small, miserable, residual flicker of
Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in cre-
ation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely
it would. So it too must pass away. For one thing, that interior
world is no small thing, really. For creatures, what appears to
the rational will is reality as such, the whole of truth. The world