The Sheep & the Goats Within

a universalist eschatological anthropology

This, at Fr Al’s Eclectic Orthodoxy, by Bulgakov, way more rigorously & poetically, expresses my own eschatological anthropology. I never read this excerpt before but have been saying the same thing for years.

We all share a primary human nature, which for the Logos was an esse secondarium. That nature thus makes us imagoes Dei, who are enessenced by the eternally conceived logoi, as they were incarnately revealed & creatively multiplied by the Logos.

The esse secondarium of created persons, however, does not refer to our enhypostasization of Jesus' divine nature, such that, like Him, we would become doubly enessenced. Rather, it refers modally, to how we manifest our human nature, to how we transformatively grow in theosis, beyond the shadows, vestiges & images of God, which we each contain per our microcosmic logoi, to become likenesses of God, which we each uniquely realize per our individual tropoi.

What goes awry, then, is nothing essential per the logoi that make us images of God. Rather, it's our tropoi, which, in different degrees, will variously realize or frustrate our theotic trajectories. Our secondary natures will thereby feature both virtuous & vicious habits, habits which situate halfway between our formal acts & final potencies, variously helping or hindering our reductions of theotic potencies to deifying acts, but never substantial enough to obliterate those potencies.

Those vicious habits are nothing less than evil parasitic existences. They are nothing more than that either, for, however unavoidable they may be, however much they may temporally exploit the divine antecedent - consequent will distinction, still, eschatologically, per DBH's game theoretic analysis, that moral distinction undergoes a modal collapse.

As a practical consequence of the divine imperative, which underwrites that collapse, both our primary natures as imagoes Dei & virtuous secondary natures as similitudines Dei transist into eternity. But they transist only as through a fire, which has burned away all kinds & every last degree of our vicious natures, leaving no everlasting residue of evil.