Lookin’ for hell in all the wrong places! Lookin’ for hell in too many faces!
As I understand Catholic teaching (I never took a philosophy or theology course, so caveat emptor), however one imagines that our free consent is secured, whether via efficacious and/or sufficient grace, that grace will be non-necessitating.
This means to me that –
Volitional freedom can only ever be the fruit of an intellect – will collaboration.
The will would express a freedom for excellence.
The intellect’s operations would be far more broadly conceived beyond, for example, mere discursive reasoning. Knowledge would be both gnoseological & operative.
Our epistemic suite would be furnished by manifold & multiform ways of knowing (e.g. Martain’s ways & Lonergan’s imperatives).
Let me explain.
The irresistable grace of Calvinism as combined with active reprobation is clearly distinct from the non-necessitating grace of Catholicism with its passive reprobation. I say this to point out that my eschewal of the label “nondeliberative” for all accounts of Catholic volition & grace, whether variously in/compatibilist or libertarian & invoking efficacious grace or not, means that “efficacious grace” is not synonomous with “nondeliberative,” at least, not as I understand & approach it.
Does the following fly with anyone’s assessment of what I imagine my own Catholicism to be requiring?
I ask because this is the more salient aspect of a point that I’ve been trying, variously successfully, to get across:
that our consent can be efficaciously secured is an acceptable Catholic position & THAT it is deliberatively delivered is our Catholic position.
HOW may this be the case? cf. Molinists, Congruists, Báñezians, Syncretists, O’Neill, Brotherton, Stump and the Catholic panoply of Thomists, Scotists, Dominicans, Jesuits, Franciscans & Analytics and all their neo-formulations.
This is all to suggest, then, that there is nothing either wholly congenial or entirely repugnant to universalism in any truly Catholic account of nature, grace & freedom.
This is not to say that there won’t be different conceptual tailoring chores that can emerge for the universalist, for example, as she evaluates each different account in order to develop its logical defense for the problem of evil.
This is all to observe that, at least for a Catholic, it is not which account of nature, grace & freedom that one happens to prefer (and I rather like elements of them all!) that will or not, in & of itself, algorithmically drive one to either perditionism or universalism.
This is not to deny that certain accounts might be more or less felicitous for devising logical defenses & arguing evidential plausibilities, but that’s only a measure of how much explaining & adhockery they’ll require and not an evaluation of their logical consistency as defined on THEIR own terms.
I reurge all this to suggest that, at least vis a vis Catholic theology, many may be lookin’ for hell in all the wrong places, lookin’ for hell in too many faces.
An authentically Catholic stance will only ever be moderately libertarian, moderately voluntarist and so forth, variously emphasizing the intellect or will but never negating either.
So, if it’s not in our competing accounts of how nature, grace & freedom relate that we’ll discover the presuppositions that are actually driving any of us toward perditionalism vs universalism, where are those presuppositions located?
I think they are located in our protological & eschatological priors. They are located in our beliefs regarding both where we came from, primally, & where we’re headed, ultimately. And they are grounded, even more primitively, in what we believe about the nature & will of our primal Source – ground, origin, being, support, order, meaning, destiny.
Because protological realities are economic, it matters greatly whether one approaches creatio ex nihilo with a violent ontology, which conceives rational creatures as running from nonbeing to being, or as also grounded in a harmonizing creatio ex Deo ontology, which conceives rational creatures as running, albeit ever finitely & everlastingly epectatically, toward Absolute Perfection, Himself, realizing one relative perfection after another ad infinitum.
A harmonizing logic of being & becoming properly recognizes, while employing an evil as privation thesis, that, as imagoes Dei –
per the logic of our essential being, while our evil acts can partly obscure the divine image, they can never totally eclipse it; and
per the logic of our formal becoming, while our evil habits can transiently hinder our growth in degrees of divine likenesses, they can never everlastingly obliterate that potential.
That the divine will wholly determines our acts of existence, which reduce the potencies of our primary nature, is why our essential goodness is not ever totally eclipsable. We freely co-self-determine our synergistic formal acts of becoming, which reduce the final potencies of our secondary natures. Each free, co-self-determined, synergistic, formal act of becoming precisely represents a cooperation with the non-necessitating divine grace, which necessarily will involve the collaboration of our will & intellect, the operations of which were gifted in our primary natures.
It’s precisely because our essential goodness is not totally eclipsable that our every efficient – formal act will represent some degree of collaboration of the will & intellect, ergo some inalienable degree of freedom. This is to recognize that even errant consents to apparent goods will necessarily involve, also, some reduction of im/material – final potencies, which is to say an ineluctable degree of being & goodness, without which evil could not sustain its parasitic existence. I say this to emphasize that its absurd to suggest that, by defining freedom as for excellence or in defending the absence of mortal sin per universalism, anyone would be denying either our peccability or fact of sinning. We are always sufficiently free to sin, both venially & gravely, but are also adequately determined to manifest some goodness, whether a little or a lot. We aren’t sufficiently knowledgeable to finally & definitively reject God.
Because eschatological realities are of course economic, too, it would be a major category error to frame up our nature, grace & freedom considerations in terms of mere metaphysical necessities of the divine esse naturale, while ignoring questions pertaining to the economic fittingness of the divine esse intentionale (where I’ll invoke a thin passibility needed to block inferences from unrelated counterarguments).
Above, theoanthropologically, we have established what I think are essential protological & eschatological presuppositions.
It’s at this logical juncture that I would draw my inferences regarding the divine will and what would be economically fitting regarding our divine origins & destinies. I employ a double-effect and cooperation with evil-like calculus to define the moral limits of “fitting” divine remedies, which is not wholly unrelated to DBH’s game theoretic calculus and moral modal collapse of the antecedent – consequent will distinction at the eschatological horizon.
If we take those moral arguments as foundational, then we will – up front – jettison
a) postmortem volitional irreversibility,
b) passive reprobation &
c) everlasting perdition
and substitute in their place, respectively,
a) Tom Belt’s Maximian irrevocability thesis,
b) co-self-determined (passive) degrees of theophanic luminosity &
c) transitory purgation.
Also, implicit in the creatio ex Deo logic of the in/finite and Absolute/relative perfection are our divine Logos/logoi & tropoi distinctions as well as an eschewal of any concrete natura pura. A universal hylomorphism makes for a very felicitous fit with post-mortem mutability.
Now, what happens to our competing accounts of how to relate nature, grace & freedom? Per universalism, they can keep competing & speculating on pretty much the same terms even after jettisoning postmortem volitional irreversibility, passive reprobation &
everlasting perdition and, instead, embracing a Maximian irrevocability thesis, co-self-determined (passive) degrees of theophanic luminosity & transitory purgation.
Given the Absolute Primacy of Christ of Maximus & Scotus, we can dismiss the absurd notion that there would be no Incarnation per universalism.
Given the consequences of sin and realities of death as well as our theotic journeys from image to likeness, we can dismiss the absurd notion that grace would lose both its gratuitous nature as well as its soteriological & sophiological efficacies per universalism.
Most absurd of all would be any characterization of universalism as Calvinism-lite just because we reject the violent ontology that introduces an incoherent eschatology with a dichotomy between grace & no grace, which is tantamount to dichotomies between being & nonbeing as well as evil & goodness.
Universalism represents an harmonious ontology where we’re journeying instead, not unaided by grace, from image to likeness, from relative perfection to relative perfecton, purging parasitic vicious natures whose parasitism proves the presence of goodness, the creatio continua of which proves an abiding divine presence, an omnipresencing which, for rational creatures, is necessarily a mutual indwelling (if one accepts that there’s always some degree, however vestigial or small, of collaboration of intellect & will in every human act, even in our sinful, as well as merely mistaken, choosings of apparent goods).
The very same mysteries will perdure regarding nature, grace & freedom, along with logical & evidential problems of evil, just not hell.
So, emphatically no to the absurd notion that the universalism of either DBH or JDW devolve into metaphysical necessity. That doesn’t follow explicitly or implicitly or by entailment. Neither would a Christological monophysitism or cosmological pantheism. Universalism doesn’t follow metaphysically & algorithmically from questions of divine freedom, determination or natural necessity. It is rather grounded in divine volitional fittingness.
The mirror image, anthropologically, is that neither does universalism follow metaphysically & algorithmically from questions of human freedom, determination or natural necessity. It is rather grounded in, well, divine volitional fittingness.
We’ve been lookin’ for hell in all the wrong places, lookin’ for hell in too many faces!
Universalism derives from revelation and that divine-human connaturality which gifts us our parental instincts, aesthetic sensibilities, moral intuitions, common sense & unitive inclinations.
Otherwise, bring your own metaphysic. Bring your own account of nature, grace & freedom. Bring your own parental instincts, aesthetic sensibilities, moral intuitions, common sense & unitive inclinations. And as you relay the latter, look universalists straight in the eye when you’re talking hypothetically about your blessedly damned children & grandchildren.
Regarding Post-Mortem Purgative Graces
My insights regarding purgative graces resonate with many of the storylines in George MacDonald’s Lilith. I believe that purgative graces would ordinarily operate in a way that would seem to match his account of the rather “TOLLSOME” processes of eschatological judgment. They’d mature us for divine communion by purifying & healing us. At least this matches my Catholic understanding of purgatory as – neither spatial nor temporal, but – a personal divine presence that’s blessedly painful.
Per my view, under any Catholic account of non-necessitating grace, purgation never involves either a voltional short-circuiting of the integral collaboration of will & intellect or an evasion of soul-maturation processes, although it very much could involve various rates of acceleration in one’s degree of volitional illumination & one’s level of soul-crafting maturation.
I also believe there’s a superabundant scope of theophanies & range of beatitudes that only our antemortem peccable soul-crafting can deliver, which goes over & beyond what our impeccable post-mortem soul-crafting can attain, although still abundantly so. It will be a loss to be mourned purgatively in terms of missed opportunities, beginning in imperfect contrition, possibly culminating in perfect contrition.
In my view, ultimately, through various ways & extents of divine presencing, tailored for each imago Dei, our vicious natures will be purged with no character-based contingencies barring the way. In this “intermediate state,” it seems to me that even a more intense mediated (not immediate) divine presence could effect our transformation. To the extent it would involve an immediate presence, though, it seems to me that that presencing could be transitory (such as in our death processes, maybe a Damascene-like vision) & still efficacious.
I say that for several reasons:
1) That purgative state’s not the beatific vision, which is an immediate presence.
2) I have no concrete earthly idea what the beatific vision entails psychologically, anyway.
3) I’m, ergo, viscerally attuned to being satisfied by the “mere” thought of enjoying ongoing mediated presencings & secondary beatitudes in an environs of eternal well being. Faith still operating.
4) As long as our capacity for our primary beatitude’s never foreclosed on, I don’t find it morally repugnant to imagine that, for some, it’s realization could be stalled in some virtually interminable way.
On the whole, I’m fully on board with a syncretistic take of Catholic accounts of grace, efficacious & sufficient, extrinsic & intrinsic. And I feel I have an inchoate grasp of how they can work, i.e. somewhat intelligible even though not fully comprehensible. I’m even a subjunctive universalist re the apokatastasis of the beatific vision (although virtually indicative).
I’m only an indicative universalist re the other 2 Maximian apokatastases –eternal life & a Maratainian apokatastenai. I just adamantly reject any notion that our ultimate teloi can ever be permanently foreclosed on & especially at the moment of death.
Some perditionists seem to be straining in my direction with their affirmation of a limited array of post-mortem beatitudes to be enjoyed universally, even by the damned.