212 Acknowledgments and Bibliographical Notes
fiction, but professes to like it. In my mind, there is no higher
virtue than this; her high place among the saints in paradise
is already assured. As for all the other delightful persons I met
during that visit, I hope it suffices simply to add that I am in -
debted to them and to everyone else who was involved in the
event. I should also note that a somewhat different version of
the first of those lectures-or, at least, of its general content-
is the one that I delivered in July 2015 at the University of Notre
Dame, mentioned in my introduction, under the title "God,
Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex Nihilo";
the text of that lecture was subsequently published, first in the
Fall 2015 issue of Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Poli-
tics, and then in my book The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays
in Theology and Metaphysics (Eerdmans, 2017).
I have dedicated this book to Narcis Tasca, a friend and
frequent correspondent, in gratitude for what, to him, was a
chance remark, made in passing, but to me was an indispens-
able reminder not to neglect the issue of orthodox Christology
in my Fourth Meditation. He had been annoyed by a Christian
philosopher's claim that the real ability freely to reject God
absolutely, in infinitum, is a necessary dimension of human
nature. "Then Christ was not wholly human," was his terse
but sufficient answer to the argument. It is obvious, of course,
that if there is so much as a single human being who is per-
sonally incapable of rejecting God, without the fullness of his
humanity being thereby impaired, then such a capacity need
not logically be a real personal possibility for any human being.
But the obvious is often so obvious that we fail to remark it, or
to mention it if we do.
In this volume, I touch on many of the more conventional
discussions of the question of universalism only to the degree
that they have some relevance to my project here, and with as