Maximus’ take on Nineveh is a near copy/paste of Origen’s Homily 1 on Jeremiah, arguing that Paul “the persecutor” was destroyed—to save Paul “the apostle.”
Absolutely. This is a move rarely factored in at all in Christian eschatology even though it’s clearly central to soteriology. But ultimately these are the same logic. For what is the end but salvation completed and what is salvation but the end come upon us?
Just reread that homily. Absolutely astounding. He even begins with the Nineveh example. And notice that he thinks this way of construing judgment is the only real response to Marcion. Incredible.
Beautifully written. Reading this made me think of the divine comedy: "The false selves melt away (purgatorio) in the presence of Christ's gaze," until they are utterly destroyed (inferno), "gradually and painfully revealing the true" self. For these true selves, He will "wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (paradiso).
I find this extremely helpful, especially the bit about what free will really means when viewed through personhood of Christ. I will have to read through a couple of times and watch the videos to fully digest it. I have found your focus on the tension and paradoxes in faith and life especially helpful as it has been one of my major revelations this last year.
Thank you. Calls to mind, to me, the Eastern image of heaven and hell as singular, all at once, the "river of fire," perceived as an outpouring of divine illumination on one hand and the warranted purgation of sin on the other.
I appreciate the intricacy of these meditations and their logic, but I find myself reminded of how inadequate our faculties are in fully comprehending and contemplating the mysterious ways of the Absolute.
Thanks for this Jordan. Wonderful reflections. Does Eriugena’s thinking/writings influence your thought? In Book V of the Periphyseon the argument against the eternity of the torments is ontological: they cannot in principle be co-eternal with the God who is Love/Goodness itself.
Indeed. And as he notes even earlier in P, “aeternitas” is always said relative to God, who alone is absolutely eternal. That therefore means that any other of whom eternal is predicated, is always already determined relative to God himself: a broken eternity, as I call it here, is not strictly speaking an impossibility for any but God.
Thank you! Do you think Catholic theology would have developed in a Universalist direction faster had Eriugena’s thought taken hold to the same extent as Augustine/Aquinas?
Certainly would have helped, so that, for instance, Eckhart and Cusanus might not have been so circumspect about their use of him. But I'm also a believer in the "cunning of Reason," also known as divine providence. So perhaps the impassioned yet blinkered infernal fires of the Latin West is itself a necessary moment in coming to see the greater whole. Some would despise such a "Hegelian" impulse in me. And yet the irony is that I'm a much more empathetic reader for having it.
With all due respect, I believe this is an attempt to square the circle. This is not a development; it is, objectively, a contradiction—or more precisely, a reversal of the medieval developments grounded in Augustinian principles that moved the Roman Church away from the neo-Platonic eschatology of the Greek Fathers. The type of eschatological theory you’re describing is fundamentally incompatible with the Roman Catholic developments that took place during the Middle Ages. Francis Sullivan identified similar so-called “developments,” which he acknowledged to be contradictions arising from various factors, in his book Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response with respect to Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.
It is unhelpful to persistently use the term “development” in a way that undermines its ecclesiological meaning as understood by figures such as Vincent of Lérins, John Henry Newman, and Pius X—none of whom suggested that a development could entail a conceptual reversal.
In my opinion, most of what you say here ignores what I say in the first paragraph and is beside the point. Only those who merely invert the Hellenistic thesis in an ahistorical fashion deny the reality that the Church and her doctrine have developed in sometimes really unpredictable ways. And in each case one could have made the same objections you raise (in fact, many did). Is the Son equal in divinity with the Father? Yes. So then, is he not human? He's human. So are humanity and divinity naturally or essentially the same? No. Then how can the same Son be both? Chalcedon says the distinguishing factor lies between nature and hypostasis. But they don't spell out how. At this very moment, though, many anti-Chalcedonians pointed out [1] that many earlier Fathers (not least Cyril) appear to have either said the opposite or never mentioned this distinction at all, not in Chalcedon's sense anyhow; and [2] that this therefore represents a departure from the earlier, pristine tradition. This same pattern played out in every single significant development: the doctrine of Christ's two wills, veneration of Icons, the immorality of slavery, the state of the Jews, religious liberty, the authoritative text of Scripture, and so on and so forth.
In every case people did object just as you do here: This is just a reversal, a contradiction, a defecting from the immutable truth! And in each case those who made such an objection were shown to be wrong. Wrong ecclesiologically, since their supposed defenses of tradition turned out to be betrayals of it. But also wrong logically in the manner your objection here is wrong: it is simply illogical to claim that since an opposition appears contradictory *from an earlier view of the whole*, it must therefore be absolutely contradictory. To prove that, you'd need to prove that the earlier perception of the whole is indeed *the* whole itself, or else that the earlier judgment of a contradiction applies in exactly the same way in light of a new whole. When Nicaea II defended and promoted the veneration of Icons, they didn't therefore deny that the invisible God can be imaged the same way a rock or tree or fictional character can be. Had that been their view, then it would have been an actual contradiction. Rather they said that God has imaged Godself in Christ, and that this reveals a new dimension--the hypostasis--which might be imaged in a way that its "nature" considered abstractly cannot be. Here's the key point: the new perception of the whole *was constitutive of* the very defense of both sides of a prior opposition (between whether the divine nature can or can't be imaged without being idolatrous). This is the way it always goes in actual history: a prior, seemingly contradictory view can be newly synthesized with an emerging perception of the whole, a deepening of it. This is exactly what St. Maximus does, for instance, in his defense of the *necessity* of confessing St. Cyril's one-nature formula alongside Chalcedon's Definition (Ep 12). He didn't say: we will never say "one nature." He said: we will say it *while saying "one person in two natures"*, and *together* these two afford a new, deeper view of the whole mystery that has been revealed in Christ from the beginning. This is the way it's always worked, despite the flat and ahistorical rhetoric of many Fathers and synods and so on (which always attract fundamentalist more than the actual substance of what that rhetoric conceals).
At any rate, I don't even think you're correct about St. John H Newman. In two ways he does not share your static and analytic view of development. First, he did not claim that the "notes" in his Essay were anything but *post-hoc* points for evaluating and illuminating actual developments having already occurred. He knew, in other words, that there can be no theory of development wholly adequate to any actual development, since that would mean development occurs like the unfolding of a syllogism rather than, as he constantly argued, as the history of the development of organic life. And so, second, he explicitly promoted picturing development in organic terms. But that introduces a rather different view of how to evaluate development. If we ask of a tadpole: Does it have a tail? -- the answer is yes. If we ask of a frog the same, the answer is no. But how absurd would it be to conclude that therefore a frog is an aberration from a tadpole! The logic of organic development is a distinct sort of logic from, say, a list of propositions. The latter, at any rate, is the logic of a corpse; Newman's is the logic of life and resurrection.
So whether in Catholic theory or Catholic history, I think your objections fall woefully short of the heart of the matter.
I didn’t ignore your first paragraph. I think your assertion of non-contradiction is objectively and demonstrably false. I think you are eliding a critical distinction: the crucial difference between paradoxical completion and conceptual reversal.
For example, the Christological controversies you referenced — Chalcedon, dyothelitism, etc.—were not instances where the magisterium contradicted or reversed previous dogmatic claims, but clarified how apparently opposing truths could be held together without collapsing into contradiction. Cyril’s mia physis and Chalcedon’s in duabus naturis do not logically negate one another, because, as you correctly noted, they operate on different conceptual planes (hypostasis vs. nature). This is vastly different from claiming that a linguistically formulated proposition with corresponding value meanings that restrict the hermeneutical enterprise such as “eternal damnation is a real and definitive possibility” can be reversed into its negation—“all will eventually be saved”—and still be understood as a “development” of the former. That’s not Hellenistic paradox; it’s a fundamental negation of the core meaning of the doctrinal content.
I think your understanding of Newman is strange. You are overstating the metaphor of organic development. Newman continually emphasized the necessity of continuity in identity amid growth within the species of the thing growing—his criteria for development (preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, etc.) were precisely constructed so as to guard against the dangerous idea that any and all changes could be labeled as “development.” Your tadpole/frog analogy would be viable if the essence remained the same across the transformation. However, if the frog transmutated into a bird, we would no longer be talking about the same being or species of thing in development, but a substitution or mutation.
If a doctrinal “development” overturns the settled meaning of a dogma, and here the expression of dogma is especially important—especially one rooted in ecumenical councils, anathemas, and the ordinary and universal Magisterium—then this is simply a mutation. And by your analogy, that is a pathological rather than vital condition.
Your argument claim that universal salvation, in whatever form that takes, speculatively or otherwise, can constitute a legitimate “development” of the dogma of eternal damnation (cf. Lateran IV, Florence, Trent) is not synthesis, but contradiction. Very simply, what sense does it make that the Church operates in practice and in theory that hell exists and that the majority of people might be headed there for centuries if everyone is ultimately saved? If the Church has definitively taught that the loss of the beatific vision is a real and eternal possibility for the damned, and if that teaching has been consistently reaffirmed in magisterial documents, which is precisely the case, then the affirmation that all will be saved, in whatever way that might be, does not deepen that truth but denies its essential content and the enterprise of dogma itself becomes meaningless sophistry.
Newman, whom you rightly appeal to, was acutely aware of this issue. Levering recently wrote a tome on this topic in relation to Dollinger. Anyway, Newman explicitly argues that “corruption is a development in one sense, but not in the ecclesiastical”. One of his “notes” for distinguishing true developments from corruptions is the “preservation of type”—i.e., the essential identity of the idea must remain intact as above. The frog may look different from the tadpole, but it is still genetically continuous with it. If a dogma undergoes a transmutation so that its original type is no longer preserved, Newman would not call it a development but a deviation. Again, Levering’s tome is timely here.
I will concede that the Church has always recognized that paradox and mystery are part of doctrinal expression, but “mystery” is not a free license for logical contradiction. As Ratzinger put it, development must occur “in eodem sensu eademque sententia”— following Vincent of Lérins.
I appreciate your sophistication and theological work, but your view here is extremely dangerous.
Vatican I:
If anyone says that
it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands:
Since you apparently accept Chalcedon and St. Cyril, the synthesis effected in later thinkers such as St. Maximus is just an instance of "how apparently opposing truths could be held together without collapsing into contradiction," but my synthesis (here admittedly only an esquisse) is "objectively and demonstrably false." This is special pleading. Entire churches and traditions exist to this very day on the supposition that Chalcedon and Cyril are "objectively and demonstrably" irreconcilable. After all, if you want to seek "logical contradictions," it seems on the surface pretty obvious that "one nature" does not equal "two natures" any more than one equals two. Ah, you might say, but "nature" can be understood in different meanings. And presumably, to demonstrate that what seems like an obvious logical contradiction is only "apparent," you'd explore the tradition, both magisterial and theological, along with scripture, and you'd argue for some sort of nuance, some sort of greater "whole" within which the apparent contradiction is shown to be only apparent. Yet you've ruled out this possibility seemingly in principle when it comes to my argument that "eternal" and "existence" not only can be nuanced in a more speculative synthesis, but that it is demonstrably the case that they have been in both tradition and scripture when it comes to key ideas, texts, and images for hell. My procedure is formally identical to any major development in Christian tradition. You might disagree with this one, consider it a mere defection. But you cannot oppose such a procedure in principle without thereby severing off the branch upon which you sit. Since you cannot oppose such a possibility in principle, then that means you'd need to demonstrate its falseness in fact. But you didn't do that. As it stands, then, your objections remain beside the point.
You puzzle over what it would mean for the Church to move towards universalism when it has taught "the real and eternal possibility for the damned" to end up in hell. Well, if I were simply denying that hell were real or eternal, then perhaps you'd have a point. But since my entire proposal rests on extending *already* paradoxical uses of hell's existence and eternality found in both tradition and scripture, then this puzzlement rests on question begging. Why should I not take the logic of Revelation's hell imagery or Maximus's Christo-logic of hell as promising sources for rereading magisterial and scriptural teaching in light of a greater synthesis? Why shouldn't we follow Maximus when he does the same to Cyril, or St. Gregory of Nazianzus, or Dionysius's "theandric activity," or Vatican 2's teaching on the Jews, or its teaching on religious liberty, or many Christian teachings on slavery and usury, or the logic of later Christological controversies, and so on? Why can't I read Florence in light of Vatican 2 if you read Nicaea I in light of Chalcedon, or almost all Church Fathers of the first 600 years in light of Nicaea II? Again: you'd cut down your own perch otherwise.
On Newman, I don't really see what I said as strange at all. It's the obviously correct thesis of, for instance, Owen Chadwick in his remarkable book, *From Bossuet to Newman*. And that the "notes" are all essentially post hoc because they're more general determinations than any specific determination in any actual development in church history--well, I never knew that was a shocking claim, to be frank. Rahner in TI V seems obviously correct to me on this point too.
At any rate, I'll have more to say on all this in the next installment. For now, I must attend other matters! Thanks for the engagement.
Maximus’ take on Nineveh is a near copy/paste of Origen’s Homily 1 on Jeremiah, arguing that Paul “the persecutor” was destroyed—to save Paul “the apostle.”
Absolutely. This is a move rarely factored in at all in Christian eschatology even though it’s clearly central to soteriology. But ultimately these are the same logic. For what is the end but salvation completed and what is salvation but the end come upon us?
Just reread that homily. Absolutely astounding. He even begins with the Nineveh example. And notice that he thinks this way of construing judgment is the only real response to Marcion. Incredible.
Beautifully written. Reading this made me think of the divine comedy: "The false selves melt away (purgatorio) in the presence of Christ's gaze," until they are utterly destroyed (inferno), "gradually and painfully revealing the true" self. For these true selves, He will "wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (paradiso).
I find this extremely helpful, especially the bit about what free will really means when viewed through personhood of Christ. I will have to read through a couple of times and watch the videos to fully digest it. I have found your focus on the tension and paradoxes in faith and life especially helpful as it has been one of my major revelations this last year.
So very glad to hear this is helpful! Thanks for reading.
Thank you. Calls to mind, to me, the Eastern image of heaven and hell as singular, all at once, the "river of fire," perceived as an outpouring of divine illumination on one hand and the warranted purgation of sin on the other.
I appreciate the intricacy of these meditations and their logic, but I find myself reminded of how inadequate our faculties are in fully comprehending and contemplating the mysterious ways of the Absolute.
God bless. Fiat voluntas Dei
Thanks for this Jordan. Wonderful reflections. Does Eriugena’s thinking/writings influence your thought? In Book V of the Periphyseon the argument against the eternity of the torments is ontological: they cannot in principle be co-eternal with the God who is Love/Goodness itself.
Indeed. And as he notes even earlier in P, “aeternitas” is always said relative to God, who alone is absolutely eternal. That therefore means that any other of whom eternal is predicated, is always already determined relative to God himself: a broken eternity, as I call it here, is not strictly speaking an impossibility for any but God.
Thank you! Do you think Catholic theology would have developed in a Universalist direction faster had Eriugena’s thought taken hold to the same extent as Augustine/Aquinas?
Certainly would have helped, so that, for instance, Eckhart and Cusanus might not have been so circumspect about their use of him. But I'm also a believer in the "cunning of Reason," also known as divine providence. So perhaps the impassioned yet blinkered infernal fires of the Latin West is itself a necessary moment in coming to see the greater whole. Some would despise such a "Hegelian" impulse in me. And yet the irony is that I'm a much more empathetic reader for having it.
This upends so much catechesis, in the best way.
With all due respect, I believe this is an attempt to square the circle. This is not a development; it is, objectively, a contradiction—or more precisely, a reversal of the medieval developments grounded in Augustinian principles that moved the Roman Church away from the neo-Platonic eschatology of the Greek Fathers. The type of eschatological theory you’re describing is fundamentally incompatible with the Roman Catholic developments that took place during the Middle Ages. Francis Sullivan identified similar so-called “developments,” which he acknowledged to be contradictions arising from various factors, in his book Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response with respect to Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.
It is unhelpful to persistently use the term “development” in a way that undermines its ecclesiological meaning as understood by figures such as Vincent of Lérins, John Henry Newman, and Pius X—none of whom suggested that a development could entail a conceptual reversal.
In my opinion, most of what you say here ignores what I say in the first paragraph and is beside the point. Only those who merely invert the Hellenistic thesis in an ahistorical fashion deny the reality that the Church and her doctrine have developed in sometimes really unpredictable ways. And in each case one could have made the same objections you raise (in fact, many did). Is the Son equal in divinity with the Father? Yes. So then, is he not human? He's human. So are humanity and divinity naturally or essentially the same? No. Then how can the same Son be both? Chalcedon says the distinguishing factor lies between nature and hypostasis. But they don't spell out how. At this very moment, though, many anti-Chalcedonians pointed out [1] that many earlier Fathers (not least Cyril) appear to have either said the opposite or never mentioned this distinction at all, not in Chalcedon's sense anyhow; and [2] that this therefore represents a departure from the earlier, pristine tradition. This same pattern played out in every single significant development: the doctrine of Christ's two wills, veneration of Icons, the immorality of slavery, the state of the Jews, religious liberty, the authoritative text of Scripture, and so on and so forth.
In every case people did object just as you do here: This is just a reversal, a contradiction, a defecting from the immutable truth! And in each case those who made such an objection were shown to be wrong. Wrong ecclesiologically, since their supposed defenses of tradition turned out to be betrayals of it. But also wrong logically in the manner your objection here is wrong: it is simply illogical to claim that since an opposition appears contradictory *from an earlier view of the whole*, it must therefore be absolutely contradictory. To prove that, you'd need to prove that the earlier perception of the whole is indeed *the* whole itself, or else that the earlier judgment of a contradiction applies in exactly the same way in light of a new whole. When Nicaea II defended and promoted the veneration of Icons, they didn't therefore deny that the invisible God can be imaged the same way a rock or tree or fictional character can be. Had that been their view, then it would have been an actual contradiction. Rather they said that God has imaged Godself in Christ, and that this reveals a new dimension--the hypostasis--which might be imaged in a way that its "nature" considered abstractly cannot be. Here's the key point: the new perception of the whole *was constitutive of* the very defense of both sides of a prior opposition (between whether the divine nature can or can't be imaged without being idolatrous). This is the way it always goes in actual history: a prior, seemingly contradictory view can be newly synthesized with an emerging perception of the whole, a deepening of it. This is exactly what St. Maximus does, for instance, in his defense of the *necessity* of confessing St. Cyril's one-nature formula alongside Chalcedon's Definition (Ep 12). He didn't say: we will never say "one nature." He said: we will say it *while saying "one person in two natures"*, and *together* these two afford a new, deeper view of the whole mystery that has been revealed in Christ from the beginning. This is the way it's always worked, despite the flat and ahistorical rhetoric of many Fathers and synods and so on (which always attract fundamentalist more than the actual substance of what that rhetoric conceals).
At any rate, I don't even think you're correct about St. John H Newman. In two ways he does not share your static and analytic view of development. First, he did not claim that the "notes" in his Essay were anything but *post-hoc* points for evaluating and illuminating actual developments having already occurred. He knew, in other words, that there can be no theory of development wholly adequate to any actual development, since that would mean development occurs like the unfolding of a syllogism rather than, as he constantly argued, as the history of the development of organic life. And so, second, he explicitly promoted picturing development in organic terms. But that introduces a rather different view of how to evaluate development. If we ask of a tadpole: Does it have a tail? -- the answer is yes. If we ask of a frog the same, the answer is no. But how absurd would it be to conclude that therefore a frog is an aberration from a tadpole! The logic of organic development is a distinct sort of logic from, say, a list of propositions. The latter, at any rate, is the logic of a corpse; Newman's is the logic of life and resurrection.
So whether in Catholic theory or Catholic history, I think your objections fall woefully short of the heart of the matter.
Thank you for the detailed response.
I didn’t ignore your first paragraph. I think your assertion of non-contradiction is objectively and demonstrably false. I think you are eliding a critical distinction: the crucial difference between paradoxical completion and conceptual reversal.
For example, the Christological controversies you referenced — Chalcedon, dyothelitism, etc.—were not instances where the magisterium contradicted or reversed previous dogmatic claims, but clarified how apparently opposing truths could be held together without collapsing into contradiction. Cyril’s mia physis and Chalcedon’s in duabus naturis do not logically negate one another, because, as you correctly noted, they operate on different conceptual planes (hypostasis vs. nature). This is vastly different from claiming that a linguistically formulated proposition with corresponding value meanings that restrict the hermeneutical enterprise such as “eternal damnation is a real and definitive possibility” can be reversed into its negation—“all will eventually be saved”—and still be understood as a “development” of the former. That’s not Hellenistic paradox; it’s a fundamental negation of the core meaning of the doctrinal content.
I think your understanding of Newman is strange. You are overstating the metaphor of organic development. Newman continually emphasized the necessity of continuity in identity amid growth within the species of the thing growing—his criteria for development (preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, etc.) were precisely constructed so as to guard against the dangerous idea that any and all changes could be labeled as “development.” Your tadpole/frog analogy would be viable if the essence remained the same across the transformation. However, if the frog transmutated into a bird, we would no longer be talking about the same being or species of thing in development, but a substitution or mutation.
If a doctrinal “development” overturns the settled meaning of a dogma, and here the expression of dogma is especially important—especially one rooted in ecumenical councils, anathemas, and the ordinary and universal Magisterium—then this is simply a mutation. And by your analogy, that is a pathological rather than vital condition.
Your argument claim that universal salvation, in whatever form that takes, speculatively or otherwise, can constitute a legitimate “development” of the dogma of eternal damnation (cf. Lateran IV, Florence, Trent) is not synthesis, but contradiction. Very simply, what sense does it make that the Church operates in practice and in theory that hell exists and that the majority of people might be headed there for centuries if everyone is ultimately saved? If the Church has definitively taught that the loss of the beatific vision is a real and eternal possibility for the damned, and if that teaching has been consistently reaffirmed in magisterial documents, which is precisely the case, then the affirmation that all will be saved, in whatever way that might be, does not deepen that truth but denies its essential content and the enterprise of dogma itself becomes meaningless sophistry.
Newman, whom you rightly appeal to, was acutely aware of this issue. Levering recently wrote a tome on this topic in relation to Dollinger. Anyway, Newman explicitly argues that “corruption is a development in one sense, but not in the ecclesiastical”. One of his “notes” for distinguishing true developments from corruptions is the “preservation of type”—i.e., the essential identity of the idea must remain intact as above. The frog may look different from the tadpole, but it is still genetically continuous with it. If a dogma undergoes a transmutation so that its original type is no longer preserved, Newman would not call it a development but a deviation. Again, Levering’s tome is timely here.
I will concede that the Church has always recognized that paradox and mystery are part of doctrinal expression, but “mystery” is not a free license for logical contradiction. As Ratzinger put it, development must occur “in eodem sensu eademque sententia”— following Vincent of Lérins.
I appreciate your sophistication and theological work, but your view here is extremely dangerous.
Vatican I:
If anyone says that
it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands:
let him be anathema.
Since you apparently accept Chalcedon and St. Cyril, the synthesis effected in later thinkers such as St. Maximus is just an instance of "how apparently opposing truths could be held together without collapsing into contradiction," but my synthesis (here admittedly only an esquisse) is "objectively and demonstrably false." This is special pleading. Entire churches and traditions exist to this very day on the supposition that Chalcedon and Cyril are "objectively and demonstrably" irreconcilable. After all, if you want to seek "logical contradictions," it seems on the surface pretty obvious that "one nature" does not equal "two natures" any more than one equals two. Ah, you might say, but "nature" can be understood in different meanings. And presumably, to demonstrate that what seems like an obvious logical contradiction is only "apparent," you'd explore the tradition, both magisterial and theological, along with scripture, and you'd argue for some sort of nuance, some sort of greater "whole" within which the apparent contradiction is shown to be only apparent. Yet you've ruled out this possibility seemingly in principle when it comes to my argument that "eternal" and "existence" not only can be nuanced in a more speculative synthesis, but that it is demonstrably the case that they have been in both tradition and scripture when it comes to key ideas, texts, and images for hell. My procedure is formally identical to any major development in Christian tradition. You might disagree with this one, consider it a mere defection. But you cannot oppose such a procedure in principle without thereby severing off the branch upon which you sit. Since you cannot oppose such a possibility in principle, then that means you'd need to demonstrate its falseness in fact. But you didn't do that. As it stands, then, your objections remain beside the point.
You puzzle over what it would mean for the Church to move towards universalism when it has taught "the real and eternal possibility for the damned" to end up in hell. Well, if I were simply denying that hell were real or eternal, then perhaps you'd have a point. But since my entire proposal rests on extending *already* paradoxical uses of hell's existence and eternality found in both tradition and scripture, then this puzzlement rests on question begging. Why should I not take the logic of Revelation's hell imagery or Maximus's Christo-logic of hell as promising sources for rereading magisterial and scriptural teaching in light of a greater synthesis? Why shouldn't we follow Maximus when he does the same to Cyril, or St. Gregory of Nazianzus, or Dionysius's "theandric activity," or Vatican 2's teaching on the Jews, or its teaching on religious liberty, or many Christian teachings on slavery and usury, or the logic of later Christological controversies, and so on? Why can't I read Florence in light of Vatican 2 if you read Nicaea I in light of Chalcedon, or almost all Church Fathers of the first 600 years in light of Nicaea II? Again: you'd cut down your own perch otherwise.
On Newman, I don't really see what I said as strange at all. It's the obviously correct thesis of, for instance, Owen Chadwick in his remarkable book, *From Bossuet to Newman*. And that the "notes" are all essentially post hoc because they're more general determinations than any specific determination in any actual development in church history--well, I never knew that was a shocking claim, to be frank. Rahner in TI V seems obviously correct to me on this point too.
At any rate, I'll have more to say on all this in the next installment. For now, I must attend other matters! Thanks for the engagement.