APOKATASTASIS: PART I

On Destiny, Deliberation and Person

INTRODUCTION

The issue of Universalism verses Infernalism today is at root an issue of theological anthropology and ontology just as much as it is of theology proper. Jonathan L. Kvanvig is right, in his defense of eternal damnation, to argue that “a satisfying account [of eternal damnation], we might put it, is one that maintains that we have a destiny… that human beings have a destiny of their own making.”[1] This truth brings the issue of freedom to the forefront, but also problematizes any arguments based on facile abstractions of freedom. It is not an abstract theory of freedom that must underpin Kvanvig’s Infernalism, but the freedom of human beings as destined by their own destiny making, and thus a theological or philosophical ontology of the human being is the real issue. In short, “freedom” is a vacuous category on its own, as Fr. Sergius Bulgakov succinctly explains in his The Bride of the Lamb:

 In considering freedom, one must first take into account the extraordinarily wide range of meanings of this concept and therefore the great imprecision with which the term is used. As a result, the meaning of freedom can change within the scope of a single discussion. It is a kind of logical chameleon, and this has a fatal effect on the final conclusions. The primary reason for this chameleon character of the concept of freedom is that it does not have a positive content. It is inevitably correlative to something, expresses not what but how. In this sense, freedom is not an ontological substance but only a modality, which differs in different cases of its manifestation, depending both on its object and on its specific relation to its object. This is the main difficulty in interpreting freedom and the reason for endless misunderstandings concerning this question.[2]

It is then necessary to move beyond appeals to or naïve reifications of freedom and do the work of articulating the ontological substance which is free so that we can understand what it is for it to be free. In this series the being that is under discussion is the human person/hypostasis, and the ontology of this person will be argued for and constructed as a Neo-Chalcedonian Personalist Ontology informed especially by the thought of figures such as Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, David Bentley Hart, Jordan Daniel Wood, etc. I will be clear; it is for this ontology and its implications that I will be arguing and endeavoring to persuade the reader that this is the proper path forward for Orthodox Christian theology.  

The above said, I will be engaging Dr. Jonathan L. Kvanvig’s Destiny and Deliberation, which represents a rigorous philosophically Libertarian defense of the doctrine of eternal damnation resulting from free-will, so as to fairly represent the other side of the issue. While Kvanvig does not at any single point exhaustively lay out the ontology he is working with, his clarification of Libertarian views and his arguments throughout the book are enough to understand what ontology he is operating upon, or what ontology and its implications are necessary when his view is examined with this criteria, and assess it. It is apropos that we begin this series by doing just that, clearly explicating the Libertarian defense of eternal damnation as an ontology of the human person and freedom.

Before beginning, however, I must elucidate the points Kvanvig makes with which I am in agreement. A merely possible Universalism is no Universalism at all because it leaves open the possibility that eternal damnation is possible, which is nothing other than affirming that God’s character is capable of eternal damnation of human beings capable of being so damned, which undermines every argument for Universalism.[3] A proper Universalism must also not admit of degrees of salvation in any ultimate sense because a permanent lesser degree of union with God is just a “nicer” version of hell,[4] and since ultimate union with God is a union reached and consisting in the full freedom of the creature any Universalism that posits an overriding of freedom to achieve its ends is unacceptable and reduces to hell for any of the creatures so overridden.[5] Finally, I agree with Kvanvig’s criterion for his own defense of eternal damnation that it must affirm and be able to support a finality for the human being in damnation, a freely chosen and reached destiny as damned which is finally irreversible. I also accept this criterion of finality for my own arguments for the contrary position.

EXTRACTING AN ONTOLOGY

What then is Kvanvig’s, or should I say the theologically Libertarian Infernalist’s, ontology of the human person and freedom? According to Kvanvig the human being is defined as fundamentally free according to the principles of PAP (Principle of Alternative Possibilities) and this freedom is an ontological principle which is non-coerced (not dictated or controlled by an external power) and a power always capable of choosing from alternative possibilities including between good and evil.[6] Using this to construct an ontology of person means the human person is a fundamentally neutral or amoral existence, as well as inherently individualistic, capable of fully actualizing itself as what it is across the spectrum of good and evil rather than, for example, being inherently good and only fully actualizable as itself towards the Good. It is evident then that this ontology as a whole requires a completely voluntarist metaphysics in which the only substance or being of things is will, with good and evil being opposite but equal poles of this reality, so equally existent and ultimately relativized ontologically. In ontologically idealist terms, the human person is a self-enclosed “I” with no structure to give it content and definition other than a continually returning self-referential will willing itself vacuously.

The above is not an unfair unfolding of the ontological implications of Kvanvig’s defense of eternal damnation on Libertarian grounds. When arguing for the possibility that human beings can reach a state of finality in damnation Kvanvig appeals to the LOST theory, that is, the view that humans can “lose their soul” by their free choices leading them to a point where they legitimately desire evil (which is to desire absolute annihilation) without any possibility of them reforming their willing faculties so as to backtrack to desiring the Good.[7] Ultimately, Kvanvig says that this theory is not enough to prove finality and instead turns to trying to justify the finality of damnation by appeal to divine omniscience and providence,[8] but I will not grant this cop out. If we are arguing for the reality of eternal damnation based on a Libertarian ontology of the human person then eternal damnation must be grounded precisely here in human ontology, what Kvanvig calls the “fundamental laws” underlying and prior to mere psychological states.[9] This leaves us with the inevitable conclusion that the human person, on this scheme, is just as much fully itself in movement towards evil as in movement towards good. Damnation then is not a loss but a gain of soul, a full actualization of the person as will.

The above is the only consistent way to say that a person can reach finality in evil, and to say this is to affirm the fundamentally amoral nature of the human being and existence as such. An ethics of pure will to power inevitably follows. The only good is that reached through self-determination towards ones own ends willed without coercion and towards any moral direction. However, the introduction of the Christian God into this universe imbalances the ethical imperative towards damnation. God’s claims on the human being, His calls to live according to the Good to attain Heaven, are no longer the internal Good of the human being himself, they are external impositions upon human freedom which arbitrarily condition one path of freedom as painful and the other as bliss (again, rather than the Good being the natural bliss of the creature and evil being perverted non-being and ontologically alien to the creature). This being the case, the creature has an ethical imperative towards rebellion to be authentic in his self-determination, rather than choosing the path of least resistance to a God who is only another arbitrary willer alongside the creature, except bigger and more powerful.

This Luciferian picture is not changed by trying to affirm a more classical vision of God as the natural Good of all beings and of evil as non-being, if we retain the ontology of the human person elucidated above, which necessarily follows from affirming its freedom as essentially morally neutral and affirming the possibility of its eternal damnation. A creature cannot reach a final state unless that final state is either a full actualization of the creature as what and who it is, in other words, the full realization of it as Being, or simply annihilation, which is not a final state but a cessation of being. Any other rationale for “finality” fails because, as Kvanvig admits, anything (such as psychological states) that fall short of the “fundamental laws” of being, that is ontology, are inherently and volatilely mutable and therefore cannot give metaphysical grounding or certitude of metaphysical finality.[10] Thus, in trying to affirm the classical Christian view of God and eternal damnation based on an ontology of the human being and freedom, all that results is a dualism in which the damned are eternally of another principle to God, the darkness to God’s light. This is what logically follows because an eternal finality in damnation cannot be the full actualization of a being that is at root God as the being of beings, therefore the damned do not have God as their being, but as they exist they have being, so they are of another opposing being to God.

ABSOLUTENESS AND CONTINGENCY

The above ontology I have constructed from Kvanvig’s defense of eternal damnation could be called a “Libertarian Infernalist” ontology of personhood, or perhaps simply a “Luciferian” ontology. It may be objected that my construction is ultimately unfair because Kvanvig and other Christian libertarian defenders of eternal damnation cannot possibly mean to believe or imply such an ontology, whether in its monist or dualist variants. I would answer that what I have constructed is the only possible interpretation of Libertarian Infernalism when one asks the question of theological ontology of the human person, which is to move from quibbling over freedom as mere choice to an engagement with the ground of freedom, what human freedom is as such. It is a failure of Libertarian arguments for eternal damnation that they, more often than not, do not make this intellectually necessary move.

This failure is especially evident when one recognizes the “freedom” of making choices between one option or another is not really freedom at all when oppressive influences and counter-agencies come into the picture, and so our definition of freedom consequently needs to deepen. When the Green Goblin gives Spider-Man the choice of saving Mary Jane or the trolley of children, Spider-Man is only free because he is powerful enough (and has the help of a bridge-full of New Yorkers) to save both, which is the only choice that truly reflects his character and allows him to carry out an action according to his authentic motivations. Choosing to save one or the other would be an unfreedom that would force Spider-Man to be less than who he is, and while one could argue that he chose and so is culpable for the deaths of whoever he did not save, the reality would be that Spider-Man was enslaved in that situation into being less than who he is and could be.

Moving from comic book media to the grim realities of our world, what does a Libertarian Infernalism unequally yoked to Christianity have to offer the children who grow up into Hamas fighters, or the Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and brainwashed to be turned back against their homeland? Yes, they are technically “free” in that they can choose between options, but their choices have been warped by horrific contexts and influences so that there are no feasible reasons or power by which they can choose except between bad and worse.[11] This is and has been the fate of much of humanity across history, context bound whether horrific or not, which means that much of humanity (perhaps all except for the Theotokos) have never had the power to realize themselves as who they really are for themselves and all others, that is, they have never been free. Often, Libertarian Infernalists say in response that they were all free enough, they deserve eternal punishment for the finite actions of their unfinished, unfree, unrealized selves, and even that God is the author and part of that context of influences which makes up a story of damnation He knows completely and is pleased with. This is, of course, nonsense.

A Libertarian work that does however make the proper move to ontology is Mike Carey’s Lucifer, a graphic novel series published by Vertigo from 2000 to 2006. The protagonist, Lucifer, is on a quest to escape the confines of predestination through moving beyond Yahweh’s creation into his own. Over the course of seventy-five issues of high-fantasy scheming and warfare Lucifer comes to realize that ultimate freedom is to be found outside the confines of all cosmoses, that is, outside the scope of all competing wills especially that of his Father, and so, cutting all contextualizing ties the Morningstar sets off into the void beyond all creations and the series ends with these final words:

 On into the void he flies. Unafraid. There is nothing in mere absence that might cow him. Or loneliness. Or the lack of maps or charts. For he has his own path. And he sees by his own light. We watch him from a great distance. From a vantage point no less subjective, no less absolute. And so its hard to tell whether he imposes himself on the emptiness… or becomes it.

This is the only possible ending for Mike Carey’s Lucifer because he is the embodiment of sheer amoral willpower and self-determination, in this series and its cosmology the archetypal revelation of what real freedom is, “growing up” and becoming self-determinate by moving beyond the power and influences of ones parents, society, and ultimately creators. According to the author, the freedom Lucifer seeks is something we all experience, “It's the complaint of a contingent being who wants to be absolute.”[12]

There is no more poignant way to summarize what freedom really is and must be for the Libertarian, absoluteness, transcendence of contingency. If one understands this then all Libertarian defenses of hell are immediately evidenced as fraudulent precisely on the grounds of the Libertarian metaphysics used to construct and justify them. A finality at odds with a person’s wishes and self-realization, and comprised by external influences and constraints, whether the person was technically free in their choice-making on the path that led them to their destination, is finally an unfreedom. If we wish to argue that this state of slavery continues infinitely then we do so only at the sacrifice of the ability to affirm all are ultimately free, which is to lose the favored argument against Universalism. And contrariwise, if the final state of a person is a result of their willful self-determination, then it can only be bliss.

THE MORNINGSTAR IS IN THE DETAILS

All the above said, and while I believe my characterization of the ontology following from and undergirding Libertarian Infernalism is sound, I would challenge this ontology for the titles of “Libertarian” and “Luciferian.” To begin with, I am not willing to part with the view of freedom not only as freedom of choice between options but also and more importantly as absoluteness and freedom from contingency, which definition includes and necessitates the real unconstrained power of creatures in self-determination. I want to affirm precisely all of these things in my Universalist ontology, and more than that argue that these understandings of freedom are more fully understood and better affirmed in a Universalist ontology. The issue is not freedom of choice and absoluteness, it is freedom of choice defined as inseparable from a good-evil dialectic (which ultimately relativizes both) and absoluteness viewed as an amoral solipsistic atomism, these problems being the result of the “Infernalism” following “Libertarian.”

As for the title of “Luciferian,” those whose views I have labeled such would not want it, especially with the connotations it caries when their view is explicated, but really this title should not belong to them or their views any more than the name “Lucifer” should be applied to the Devil. Lucifer as a religious figure, as is the case with most gods and demons, is an evolving amalgamation.[13] The serpent in Genesis originally bore no relation to a fallen angel, nor did the Accuser of the heavenly court. The Leviathan or Rahab was the Hebrews’ primordial Tiamat or Yamm who fought Yahweh over the deep, only later becoming the crooked serpent to be vanquished on the eschatological waters. No fall of angels was in view for the longest time except that of Samyaza and the Watchers, and while these all begin to be united in the New Testament’s mentions of the Archon of this Age or the Great Dragon, the figure of Lucifer the fallen angel would only emerge centuries later because of the Vulgate’s translation and new interpretations of scenes from the Apocalypse as past rather than future. Remaining a dark sprite in Iconography for a millennium the amoral hero Lucifer, representing humanity’s will and emancipatory rebellion against a God whose cognitive image became the Grand Inquisitor, was finally born from the Romanticist’s interpretations of Paradise Lost.  

The above is not to deny the reality of such a figure, complex as the relationship between humanity’s story-making and the spiritual realms must be, but rather to point out that the actual figure of Lucifer in Scripture is Jesus Christ, the Morningstar who is to rise in our hearts (Rev 22:16, 2 Pet 1:19). Thus, if the above explicated Libertarian Infernalist ontology has the fallen angel Lucifer as its exemplar then a Universalist Personalist ontology must have the true Morningstar as its exemplar. In short, I will attempt to demonstrate an ontology in which freedom as absoluteness and self-determination for all is found in and revealed by and as the God-Man. If anyone will shine as the stars forever and ever (Dan 12:3), which is to say, if anyone will reach the full realization of their being, it is because all will do so when the eschatological day dawns and the Morningstar rises in and as all.

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[1] Jonathan L. Kvanvig, Destiny and Deliberation: Essays in Philosophical Theology. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 18-19.

[2] Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb. Boris Jakim, trans., (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 125. Italics mine.

[3] Kvanvig, Destiny and Deliberation, 43-45.

[4] Ibid, 28-29.

[5] Ibid, 51-54.

[6] Ibid, 15, 48, 50-51.

[7] Ibid, 32-34, 35-37.

[8] Ibid, 37-40.

[9] Ibid, 38-39.

[10] Ibid, 37-40.

[11] And I would especially emphasize that they have “no power.” They are thrown into a context in which all they know is bad and worse, and so they effectively cannot choose better or best. The mere reality that humans can choose between options is not freedom in itself (though it is a manifestation or mode of freedom) because prior to and conditioning such choices are ones’ historical, social, etc., context, and prior to that is ontology.

[12] Matthew Peckham, “A Conversation with Mike Carey” SF Site, October 2004. https://www.sfsite.com/10b/mc186.htm.

[13] For a very brief summary of the misinterpretations of Scripture referenced here that gave rise to the figure of Lucifer see David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), 28-29. For another overview see Shawna Dolansky, “How the Serpent in the Garden Became Satan,” Bible History Daily, September 30, 2023. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/how-the-serpent-in-the-garden-became-satan/#note01. For a short overview of the Romanticist’s Lucifer see Erik Butler, “The Devil You Don’t Know: The Satan of the 19^Th Century,” Psyche, October 26, 2022. https://psyche.co/ideas/the-devil-you-dont-know-the-satan-of-the-19th-century.