Why I respectfully return that ticket with the cost of eternal perdition as its price.

properly locating the felices in life's culpae

For our part, it's precisely because "no eye has seen, no ear has heard, & no mind has imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love him (1 Corinthians 2:9)," and because "the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come (Romans 8:18)," and because the "transitory burden of suffering is achieving for us a preponderating, yes, a vastly preponderating, and eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians 4:17)," that we and Ivan (The Brothers Karamazov, Book V: Chapters 1-5) should be forgiven for returning any evidential theodicy tickets however well our logical defenses may otherwise work?


So as not to trivialize them, we best beat a hasty retreat into a defensible mysterianism when confronted with the immensity of human pain & enormity of human suffering. Instead, confronted with same, we best wordlessly & gently plant the same kiss on our neighbor's head that we, ourselves, have received from His & our Cross.

The defense theory goes something like this:

Felix sophisma (from our fallibility) et felix erroribus (our mistakes) are - not only unavoidable, but - indispensable to our theosis. They are the means by which God providentially both constrains finite reason for the sake of growing the freedom of our assent to our own well-being (as the indwelling Spirit in-forms the will's natural inclinations) & advances the created graces of Sophia (from Wisdom's infallibility).


Unavoidably, God providentially permits the possibility of evils (mere subcontrary existents), even knowing that they will "probably" even though not necessarily parasitize that theotic process, above.

While they are neither needed nor intended as theotic means, God can divinely co-opt the effects of evil's temporal consequences & transform such burdens into eternal blessings, which manifest His glory. What's felix about any culpa, then, does not refer to sins but to the redemptions they inescapably occasion.

Per our own fallible interpretations, which can be variously wise, the divine calculus implicit in any antecedent - consequent will distinction certainly looks game theoretic-like, which means that, protologically, God accepts "the cost" that will probably have to be paid, cosmotheandrically, "satisfied" with the entire set of  eschatological outcomes He has foreseen & the weight of the glory they each entail.

From the jury box, then, with Jesus on the witness stand & Our Father in the dock, it's not His accounting for the circumstantial evidence that's gifted me my reasonable, exculpating doubt. Further, way more than any case theory on offer in the interpretations of various logical defenses, Our Father gets out of the dock for me based on the character witness of the One on the Cross (cf. John 3:16), Who's incarnationally planted so many kisses on creation.

How can I not love Him in return and trust that, somehow, "all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well (Julian of Norwich)."

I think I've articulated, above, what's, for the most part, a soteriological consensus.

Eschatologically, however, it's at this juncture that views diverge regarding both the nature & the size of the costs that God would, by tolerating them, demand of us all toward the end of manifesting His Glory & sharing a vision, eternally beatific.

Those views diverge into a group of majority opinions that variously include eternal perdition and a minority opinion that excludes it.

Beyond competing historical, liturgical, exegetic, patristic, conciliar & other claims, much of the hellish discourse, in the end, reduces to competing claims of factual evidence as it pertains to our empirical experiences of what each imagines should be rather ubiquitously shared evaluative dispositions.

Those dispositions are neither arbitrary nor idiosyncratic but derive connaturally from our innate aesthetic inclinations & moral intuitions, as do undergo developmental processes, formatively, including graced affective conversions.

Each competing side, though, must, at the very least, charitably concede to each other, the possibility that one has failed to cooperate with the graces of affective conversion due to either invincible ignorance or cumulative deformative influences, which are exculpating. In short, rather than sinful refusals to thus cooperate we should impute invincible - not willful - ignorance.

Because of the visceral aspects in play, it's not to be unexpected that each side may see the other’s stance (not the other persons) as aesthetically repugnant or morally unintelligible. This can tempt us to go beyond a fraternal polemics of communal discernment to a pugilism of personal ad hominem. Even then, the dynamic's understandable because, after all, "nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity (MLK sermon, Strength to Love, 1963)."

At any rate, while I avoid the pugilists & the forums that enable them, I neither judge nor blame them and haven't felt annointed to admonish them. After all, even a pugilism as cupla can be transformed into a prophetic utterance that's felix! So, I commend it all to the healing presence of the Holy Spirit.

Thus I complete the part that seems to me to be any of my business and respectfully return - not Karamazov’s ticket, but - the ticket with the cost of eternal perdition as its price.