Our Free Movement toward Stability in the Good Requires – Not a Traverse Across the Abyss, but – Nescience
Our nescience‘s not privative.
Our epistemic distancing‘s not a traverse across the abyss.
Sin & its evil consequences were never providentially necessary or calamitously inevitable but only ever exhaustively redeemable.
Our intrinsic nescience or epistemic distancing – not only is not privative, but – positively gifts us our soul-crafting room to operate with a freedom ordered to excellence & an autonomy oriented to intimacy.
Because nescience enables us to move in trust & obedience by acts of faith, hope & love, it’s a more perfect attribute in a consciousness than knowing.
Ignorance isn’t an act but a material element that our nescience brings into its acts. So nescience pertains to our “acts” of judgment regarding unknowns, while ignorance refers to our “states” of not knowing. We’re obligated to know neither those things of which we’re nescient (e.g. for Jesus, the hows of His mission) nor those things of which we’re invincibly ignorant (e.g. regarding various realities proportionate to one’s nature).
Clearly, nescience requires no passage through evil and no divergence from trust, obedience, faith, hope or love as we freely move toward our divine end & grow into Nyssen’s “stability in the good.”
So, our state of ignorance is an indispensable material element brought into the virtuous acts gifted by our nescience. At the same time, that material element as a state does make sin & transient evil possible because it can be perversely exploited by evil acts & corruptly parasitized by vicious habits, which remain neither providentially necessary nor calamitously inevitable but only ever exhaustively redeemable.
Takeaways:
No, universalism doesn’t make evil metaphysically necessary.
While culpable negligence & vincible ignorance are real and can have a role in both venial & serious sin, our essential human nescience is equally real, which means that we can’t, in principle, know enough to totally & definitively reject God, because knowledge of the divine essence transcends our creaturely agencies.
The interpretation above doesn’t require a radical reinterpretation of the Cross vis a vis death, sin & transient evil.
Note: There are so many thinkers whom I drew on for inspiration, above, it’ll take me some time to cite them all. Most prominently would be Lonergan, Rahner, HuvB, DBH & Milbank.
Note 2:
Certain syllogistic sophistries argue what God can or can’t do per the divine nature or how God could or couldn’t have created our human natures with the pretense that the substance of such arguments turns on affirming or denying modal propositions – possibilities, necessities, etc
The real impasses are located more basically than that — both in our references to divine goodness, justice, mercy & love and how we variously conceive same and in our references to human finitude, nescience, fallibility, relative perfections and how we can thus relate to God, others, the cosmos & ourselves.
Our will & intellect, in principle, can’t absolutely & definitively reject God as knowledge of the divine essence transcends our creaturely agencies. This doesn’t mean that we are disproportionate to God vis a vis a putative noetic identity or that we can’t be raised to see Him directly in His essence. It’s only to say that prior to being gifted that mode & degree of knowledge we couldn’t totally reject God and after being so gifted we wouldn’t.
Greater good arguments regarding the divine will, in principle, can’t validly invoke mysterian appeals for punishments that are prima facie disproportional, hence unjust, without both instrumentalizing & substantializing (practically speaking) evil.