Basic Contours of a Catholic (as can be) Universalism
We aspire, I believe, to advance a universalist vision that will – not only avoid the systematic incoherencies of all forms of eschatological perditionism, but – cohere with most of our traditional conceptions of grace, predestination, sin both venial & grave, post-mortem impeccability, hell (transiently conceived), purgatorial restoration, heavenly choirs & hierarchies, formative spiritualities, ascetical & mystical theologies, ecclesiologies, sacramental economies, etc
The following theo-anthropological elements are inextricably intertwined. One may tweak any given part but not without risking the coherence of the whole.
1) Recognize the gratuities of creation & grace.
2) Affirm divine sovereignty, freedom & fittingness.
3) Address the logical & evidential problems of evil.
4) Preserve meaningful understandings of human freedom & autonomy.
5) Reconcile protology, history & eschatology.
6) Define the divine generation of opposites per a nonviolent (not Manichean) ontology of absolute & relative perfections, where evils are ephemeral & parasitic subcontraries.
7) Distinguish the divine esse naturale & intentionale, ad intra intrinsic perfections & ad extra economic missions AMDG.
8) Distinguish the divinely determined human primary nature & co-self-determined secondary nature (both natures dynamical) per acts & potencies of essential & accidental being.
9) The choice is not ultimately between being either friends or enemies but being friends or lovers along a continuum of intimacy, where the divine romantic overture will unavoidably permit various risks but only because they are thoroughgoingly remediable, ultimately.
10) Ditch all or nothing and either – or approaches for realities that otherwise truly present in terms of degrees, e.g. with trajectories along continua of abundance to superabundance.
11) It’s precisely their all or nothing and either – or ways of thinking that inescapably lead eschatological perditionists into
a) a divine voluntarism that they seek to mitigate only by invoking mysterian appeals to apologize for stances that are morally unintelligible & aesthetically repugnant, and
b) a vulgar human libertarianism, which defines “perfectly rational freedom” using self-contradictory terms that render various concepts, like mortal sin, rationally incoherent.
It is my belief that the whole of traditional Catholic Christology, pneumatology, Trinitology, anthropology, ecclesiology, soteriology, sacramentology, eschatology, ascetical & mystical theology, formative spirituality & sophiology can more perfectly cohere if we make that single conceptual maneuver of ditching “mortal sin,” while leaving all else virtually intact.
It’s not that our universalism is merely offering competing accounts of divine fittingness over against an extreme divine voluntarism or of a perfectly rational human freedom over against a degenerate libertarianism.
Additionally, our conceptual maneuver of ditching “mortal sin” does not even recognize the reality of mortal sin as a possible world conterfactual. Therefore, our speculative impasses with perditionism writ large are located less so in differences of logic or premises & more so in our rejection of certain perditionistic presuppositions to which we can’t stipulate because we aren’t even using the same basic definitions contained therein.
Too many universalists are conceding far too much to perditionists who employ analytic arguments, which epistemically capture their participants with conclusions that have been embedded in definitions, which don’t even successfully reference theoanthropological realities.
As Catholics, who aspire to faithfulness, our job, in the end, is probably going to come down to demonstrating how a subjunctive universalism can be shown to be conceptually indistinguishable from an indicative universalism.
This can be accomplished if we can articulate & all stipulate to 2 things.
Theologically, we might all stipulate to employing an analogous double effect reasoning (very traditional) to the divine will in order to demonstrate how disproportionate consequences (of sin) would make divine permission tantamount to divine intent (not unrelated to DBH’s moral modal collapse between consequent & antecedent wills at the eschatological horizon).
Anthropologically, we must all together stipulate to a coherent definition of a perfectly rational human freedom (again, cf DBH). While there’s a certain analytical epistemic capture dynamic here, too, which leads rather tautologically to certain conclusions, that’s not a fatal critique. Being tautological doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Rather, our claim is that, as a competing tautology, it’s much more conceptually coherent & evidentially plausible.