Dueling Doctrines

About Freedom and Salvation (§15-21)

(§1-7 ; §8-14)

§15. Dual Meanings of Freedom

The word “freedom” masks two very distinct concepts under one label. The first is conditioned freedom: such freedom has an inevitable telos, or an end state for which it is continually striving, no matter in how weak or delusional a fashion. People can choose their routes and take as long as they want, but ultimately, all paths would have to end up in the same place, convergent despite any meandering. The second concept, however, is radical freedom: the freedom to actually choose the final ends, and not only the means. Radical freedom does not necessarily end in the harmonious union of all possible paths at the same nexus. Rather, such freedom would mean that people could choose for or against an actual destination, and that different persons could permanently end up in different places. This dynamic may even involve the ultimate rejection of God and His plan for the mortal soul—which is to say, the choice of damnation. Conditioned freedom implies that all must be saved, since there is only one place to ever end up, which is God. But if radical freedom is real, then some might end up somewhere else.

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§16. A Final Mystery

Rationally considered, it shouldn’t be possible for radical freedom to exist. If freedom is conditioned, then that means it is not capable of choosing its own ends; it is inevitably drawn to ends that have always already been set. But if freedom isn’t conditioned, then in that case it would be totally random and arbitrary, with no premises whatsoever to impel it to choose one object or value or path over any other. In neither case would radical freedom emerge. And yet those are the only two strictly logical possibilities. As such, radical freedom—if it is presumed to exist—would be a true and final mystery, a reality utterly inaccessible to the powers of reason. It would be an axiom that we can only accept and then reason from, and never an implication that we can derive via the exercise of reason itself. We may thus wonder whether the airtight, logically perfect arguments against radical freedom are simply the result of reason pursuing its rightful ends; or, if they are instead the result of reason failing to stand down when it should.

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§17. Uncreated Darkness

Radical freedom would need to be uncreated, a thing as old as God and not made by Him. Perhaps it is from the waters that were there before the First Day, before the fiat of light: an abyss outside of God, which is the source of both freedom and evil. Anything made by God would need to have a telos that will one day bring it back to Him; even freedom could only be conditioned, with the journey only ever ending in the only place there is. More than that, if He created freedom with full knowledge of what humans would inevitably do with it, then that would be tantamount to handing a child a loaded gun—a crime for which He could not but be held culpable. Suppose, however, that freedom is radical and from uncreated darkness; suppose further that such freedom is intrinsic to spirit, and that a creature of spirit cannot ever be made without it. In that case, God is only light, and there is no darkness in Him; He invites us to use our radical freedom to participate in His grand creative project; and yet, He has no means to coerce us or to inevitably lead us to Him, for our freedom itself is altogether outside of His jurisdiction.

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§18. Against Automata

Conditioned freedom means that we all ultimately end up in the same place; it would only be a matter of the specific paths taken and the amount of time wasted. But is that really freedom? It would seem to be more of a conceptual sleight of hand, emptying freedom of its genuine content, which is the power to truly choose the ends. The doctrine of universal salvation thus inadvertently renders humans as automata who are programmed for communion and love, unable to escape this fate if given an endless timeframe. Phrased in this way, universal salvation takes on a darker, dystopian shade. It is good to be averse, now more than ever, to any notion that man is akin to a machine. We also know, from experience, that there are people in this life who are radically averse to light and truth. Do we have any good reason to presume that this basic orientation will be forced to change in the next life, or that Wisdom will be received by those who constitutionally despise Her? Radical freedom opens up a dualism of sorts between God and the Nothing, where some persons may well opt in favor of the latter; and as such, this doctrine is intrinsically locked in conflict against the promise of a necessary universal salvation.

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§19. Atman and Jiva

Universalists are typically talking in a different register than their theological counterparts. The Vedantic concepts of atman and jiva are useful here. (They nicely map onto the orthodox words hypostasis and prosopon, which sure are a mouthful.) The atman is the pneumatic core of a person, and in a way, it is beyond any talk of salvation or damnation. It is the uncreated ground of identity, with no meaningful personal features. But the jiva is the psychical being, the substantive living content of the human soul, for which the atman is but a type of structural vessel. We can posit that at the cusp of the next life, we will be obliged to pass through a wall of fire—and our sins are highly flammable. The man of impure jiva, attached to what must burn, may experience this transition as a kind of torture; whereas a saint will detest his own impurities and be happy to watch them burn, thus experiencing the fire as a gentle cleanse. Hellfire and holy fire would thus turn out to be one and the same fire, as subjectively experienced by two different sorts of people. The two options for the jiva that can be weighed and judged—they are then salvation or annihilation. And the atman is not a real part of this question.

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§20. A Hopeful Wager

In no case could a soul be damned to eternal conscious torment; such a notion is an abomination, a crime against the Creation, an ontologically perverse thing that cannot be. But a permanent return to the nothingness whence we came is a real possibility. Is there a power in man that could resist God for all of eternity? And is there a malice and an abyss in the metacosmos that is as ancient as God Himself? We can hope that the answer is negative on both counts, while nevertheless conceding that these things are possible, insofar as radical freedom is a new axiomatic premise. Perhaps we would simply do well to not try and find out for ourselves, and to stay sufficiently close to the Light to not become liberty’s potential casualties. As a matter of praxis, at any rate, it would behoove us to imagine that all other human beings are surely saved, and that only our own souls are at risk of damnation. Such a perspective defuses the presumptions both of judging others’ eternal fates and of putting oneself on a pedestal; it opens the doors of communion and love, makes space for us to compare mythologies and not just talk over each other. If we are actually concerned about where we might end up (and not just about feeling right and scoring ego points), then we could do a lot worse than to adopt this ethos.

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§21. The Happy Fall

The Fall produced a new dimension of immanence that never did exist before; things never were any better down here. Perfection is an idealized memory that we have of another dimension—the metacosmic space on the far side of the wormhole at the center of reality’s circle. Eve and Adam couldn’t even have understood their own situation in the Garden; this anxiety of infinite possibility made the Fall inevitable. But it was ultimately a happy thing, a plunge into a risky venture of achieving greater Being. The project now is to re-create within the clay flesh the intimations we have of what it must have been like in a condition of pure yet disincarnate spiritual light. A modal shift, then: we are worse now than an ideal, but not worse in actuality than we ever have been at any past point in time within the created parameters of this place, our cosmos. God is continually inviting us to participate in His Creation, to choose His generative light over the pull of the entropic abyss—the pull that is the occupational hazard of being a free, uncreated spirit. If radical freedom is real, then it is always possible that some won’t choose well, driven as they are by an ill will beyond reason and from the far side of time. We may merely hope that this possibility represents an empty set, and then consider the rest of the problem to dwell above our paygrade. We have work to do, anyway.