The Coherence of Universalism

or The Incoherence of Thomistic Infernalisms

At Eclectic Orthodoxy, Eric Reitan, Ph.D. has just published The Coherence of Universalism: A Response to James Dominic Rooney (Part One), which is splendid.


I hope to join that conversation after wrapping up my own reflections, below, by further explicating my own theo-impasses with Fr JD, as I'd begun (prior to my Lenten cyber-hiatus) in An Open Letter to Rev. Dr. James Dominic Rooney, OP, regarding David Bentley Hart’s Moral Argument for Universalism


Fr JD had written to me: “I myself simply deny that God allowing people to reject His grace indefinitely would count as an instance of Him positively intending that it occur (they are not ‘morally equivalent’), and so I am affirming that it is possible for God ‘merely to permit’ people to reject His grace in that way.”

I had objected and asserted that, analogous to moral principles re double effect & cooperation with evil, when such a permission allows any possibility of disproportionate evils, then it is indeed considered tantamount to formal intent. DBH's game theoretic logic thus holds for me.

But Fr JD had also rejected my disproportionality argument, even invoking the Nyssen: “Nor does it involve frustrating achieving the end of the human being, since the theosis (which we can grant is the end of the human being) continues dynamically forever.”

Here, in my view, Fr JD failed to draw theotic distinctions between purgative (suffering - laden) and epektatic dynamics. In the beatific vision, finite human persons will indeed journey everlastingly into God. That will be because we'll remain relatively perfect, so in an ever-deepening relationship with the infinite One, Who is Absolute Perfection, Godself. Purgation involves, rather, sinful imperfections (not relative perfections).

Denying anyone impeccability would, therefore, precisely frustrate a person's divinely intended end!

Astute Thomists know that their approaches to predestination and impeccability cannot be coherently held with an eternal infernalism. That's to acknowledge that there can be no character-based (intractable habits of sin) beatific contingencies. So, they introduce divine indwelling-based contingencies, where it seems that infernalism could only be true if one employs a mistaken view of the relation between nature and grace.

For his part, Fr JD maintains: “Specifically, I think universalism can only be true if there is a mistaken view of the relation between nature and grace, such that it is literally impossible for anyone to reject God’s grace definitively.”

Well, in my view of the relation between nature and grace, it is indeed literally impossible for anyone to reject God’s grace definitively, because all imagoes Dei and the Christ are mutually constituted & indwelled. In fact, His indwelling is to our intellects - wills as form to matter!

Our many rejections of God's grace will, therefore, be inevitably & absolutely frustrated precisely because they are not eternally intended ends but only transiently permitted evils.