My indicative apokatastenai & subjunctive apokatastasis in a nutshell
Modal distinctions regarding our experience & knowledge of God include descriptors such as mediated & immediate, theophanic & supra-theophanic, gnoseological & operative, effable & ineffable, energeia & noetic identity, etc. They involve dynamics such as creaturely & obediential potencies, emergent probabilities, efficacious graces, conversions & sublations, etc
If we are constitutively graced & indwelled, then we already participate, essentially & abundantly, to some degree, however inchoate, in all of these modes & dynamics.
Maritain’s apokatastenai would refer to the universal purgative restoration of our – not natural felicity, but – supernatural, original beatitude, both theophanic & supra-theophanic.
A theotic apokatastasis would refer to our realization of accidental & superabundant degrees of final beatitude, i.e. increasingly greater ranges of manifested glory & expanded scopes of experienced delight from ever deepening degrees of divine intimacy, both theophanic & supra-theophanic, per a heavenly hierarchy.
That’s my indicative apokatastenai & subjunctive apokatastasis in a nutshell.
My theological vision is here:
A Neo-Chalcedonian, Franciscan Cosmotheandric Universal Apokatastenai
Notes regarding the nature of human freedom, deliberation & epistemic distancing
Even babies can close their epistemic distancings and actualize their relative being, co-creatively & deliberatively growing their freedom.
Human persons as the symbolic species are essentially free in their substantial being, qualitatively distinct from other animals primarily due to the behavioral plasticity they enjoy by virtue of bootstrapping an arbitrary symbol system, which is leveraged into the fast & frugal heuristics of human deliberations (including those tacit dimensions I elaborate on elsewhere). Those deliberations can be largely intuitive & abductive and should not be overidentified with our deductive reasoning or other more formal aspects of rationality.
This is all to affirm that it’s not by crossing the threshold of the age of reason or by actualizing & perfecting further potencies of our relative being that we first (or even most) realize our intrinsic dignity or our divine worth or our essential human freedom or our status as an imago Dei.
Our innate, informal, fast & frugal heuristics are already intrinsically & robustly rational, long before we gain more freedom, more virtuosity & more deductively inferential capacities. Becoming like little children is no idle or facile aphorism.