80 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
known it truly, and so never to have been free to choose it. I
can defer the full philosophical argument to my Fourth Medi-
tation. But here I can at least point out that scripture seems to
support my view. ''.And you will know the truth, and the truth
will make you free" (John 8:32): for freedom and truth are one,
and not to know the truth is to be enslaved. "Father, forgive
them; for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:
34): not seeing the Good, says God to God, they did not freely
choose evil, and must be pardoned. "Everyone committing sin
is a slave to sin" (John 8:34): and a slave, needless to say, is not
free. Moreover, it is simply obvious that, under normal condi-
tions, we recognize any self-destructive impulse in any person
as a form of madness. It makes no more sense, then, to say
that God allows creatures to damn themselves out of his love
for them or out of his respect for their freedom than to say a
father might reasonably allow his deranged child to thrust her
face into a fire out of a tender regard for her moral autonomy.
And, as absurd as is the idea of someone "in a right mind"
choosing eternal loneliness and torment rather than eternal
love and bliss, the argument becomes all the more insuffer-
ably ludicrous when one considers the personal conditions-
ignorance, mortality, defectibility of intellect and will- under
which each soul enters the world, and the circumstances- the
suffering of all creatures, even the most innocent and delight-
ful of them -with which that world confronts the soul. But all
of this can wait for now. In a sense, none of it matters at this
point, as the issue of creaturely freedom makes no difference
as regards my argument here.
Again, let me say, I think Reformed tradition is com -
mendable in this regard for the simple intellectual honesty
with which it elevates divine sovereignty to the status of the
absolute theological value, and sovereignty understood as