The Doors of the Sea

For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

the New Testament also teaches us that, in another and ultimate sense, suffering and death - considered in themselves - have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts.

When you enter into [the world], it is an illimited field of variety and beauty: where you may lose yourself in the multitude of wonders and delights. But it is an happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one's own felicity; and to find GOD in exchange for oneself. Which we then do when we see Him in His gifts, and adore His glory.

The Christian vision of the world, however, is not some rational deduction from empirical experience, but is a moral and spiritual aptitude - or, rather, a moral and spiritual labor.

The Christian eye sees (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere "nature:' and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy.

Christian thought, from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or spiritual meaning at all. It claims that they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may - under the conditions of a fallen order - make them the occasions for accomplishing his good ends.

However one chooses to interpret the "powers;' and indeed whether one believes in the Christian God or not, one must acknowledge that the solicitude shown by some Christians for total and direct divine sovereignty in all the eventualities of the fallen world is not shared by the authors of the New Testament canon.

At the heart of the gospel, of course, is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the will of God cannot ultimately be defeated and that the victory over evil and death has already been won: "When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men" (Eph. 4:8); "And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Col. 2:15). But it is also a victory, we are assured, that is yet to come. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light, falsehood and truth, death and life. This world remains afield where the wheat and the tares have been sown side by side, and so they must grow till the harvest comes (Matt. 13:38). Until then, as Paul says, all creation languishes in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things:

that it is impossible for the infinite God of love directly or positively to will evil (physical or moral), even in a provisional or transitory way: and this because he is infinitely free.

A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness.

Evil is born in the will: it consists not in some other separate thing standing alongside the things of creation, but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called.

evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease. Born of nothingness, seated in the rational will that unites material and spiritual creation, it breeds a contagion of nothingness throughout the created order.

he subverts death, and makes a way through it to a new life. The cross is thus a triumph of divine apatheia, limitless and immutable love sweeping us up into itself, taking all suffering and death upon itself without being changed, modified, or defined by it, and so destroying its power and making us, by participation in Christ, "more than conquerors" (Rom. 8:37).

what we call hell is nothing but the rage and remorse of the soul that will not yield itself to love. The natural will must return to God, no matter what, but if the freedom of the gnomic will refuses to open itself to the mercy and glory of God, the wrathful soul experiences the transfiguring and deifying fire of love not as bliss but as chastisement and despair.

For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn howGod relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

For Christians, though, to be is the first good, the first gift of God's gratuitous love, and the highest good is to be joined to God in the free movement of the soul. But, again, to believe in the infinite goodness of being, one must be able to see it; and this no mere argument can bring about.

God's gracious will for his creatures - his willing of all things to his own infinite goodness - is the creative power that makes all things to be and the consummate happiness to which all things are called; but this does not (indeed, must not) mean that everything that happens is merely a direct expression of God's desire for his creatures or an essential stage within the divine plan for history.

For if we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them;

all of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness.