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Abstract · 1. Two theses, and the mechanisms that hold them together · 2. Will before choice, and choosing by encounter · 3. Choosing is time · 4. Fixation, and exactly two states · 5. Willing without choosing as freedom · 6. The second state, and what the problem was for · Works cited

Free Will in Heaven Without Choosing

The redeemed are free, and they can no longer sin. Purgatory and universal restoration are answered on the same ground. The second state is the being’s own. All of it reached by elimination in a chain that never starts from heaven.
James A. Burrows · ORCID: 0009-0002-6452-4842 · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22723132 · PhilArchive: BURFWI · SSRN: 7449684 · PDF

Abstract

The tradition has been trying to keep two claims in the same room: the redeemed are free, and they cannot sin. On the usual picture of freedom — you are free only where you could have done otherwise — those two claims look like they should evict each other. Its defenders propose various mechanisms. A character freely formed in time that afterwards determines. A set of reasons reweighted until sin no longer even registers. God’s middle knowledge arranging the circumstances. Or a quiet concession on one of the two claims. The critics then walk the same mechanism past death and get purgatory, or they walk it far enough and get everyone restored.

None of that starts from an inspection of choosing.

An eliminative chain of 137 resolutions begins from a smaller observation: non-being requires being. It never starts from heaven, or from freedom, or from the will. What survives is one result that carries both theses, and both extensions.

Choosing enters a being’s knowing by encounter, not by its own willing (R.73). Choosing is time (R.90): each “this, not that” walls off what is, and the succession of exclusions is time. When temporal existence ends, the being’s orientation is fixed (R.131). The being still wills. It does not choose. Its willing is what its choosing made it. The fixation is not imposed. It is the identity of choosing and time.

Exactly two eternal states follow (R.133): permanent orientation toward generative flourishing (R.134), and the being’s own closure made eternal — not imposed, and not punishment (R.135). Freedom without alternatives is not special pleading against a principle. It is what Will is (R.11, R.12).

ie. in response to that: the saints are not free-but-muzzled. They are no longer in the business to which muzzling would apply.

1. Two theses, and the mechanisms that hold them together

Augustine already had both halves. The redeemed will is “all the more truly free, because set free from delight in sinning to take unfailing delight in not sinning,” and this last freedom “shall be superior, inasmuch as it shall not be able to sin.” Aquinas said the ability to do evil is incidental to free choice, not essential to it; the beatified soul is unchangeable in its will; Christ’s will, determined to good, is not determined to this or that good. Anselm keeps the freedom. Gaine, surveying the tradition, treats impeccability as orthodox beyond doubt. Nagasawa, Oppy and Trakakis treat sin in heaven as running against what heaven is.

The two theses are old. Stated together they look inconsistent on the view that a will is free only where it could do otherwise. Sennett named the tension the Problem of Heavenly Freedom in 1999. Pawl and Timpe gave it its current form in 2009: how can someone be free and incapable of sinning, and if their wills are reined in, in what sense are they free?

Every published answer supplies a mechanism.

Sennett’s is proximate compatibilism. Earlier free and undetermined acts form a character that afterwards determines. The redeemed are determined by what they freely became. There is no libertarian freedom in heaven at all. Pawl and Timpe keep more. A character freely formed in time changes both the weight given to reasons and the scale on which they are weighed, until sinful options appear so repugnant that the agent cannot bring herself to will them. The redeemed are derivatively free with respect to what their character precludes — the freedom traces to the acts that formed it — and non-derivatively free among goods: the harp or the choir, whom to pray for. Their reply to Cowan adds that they would still count as free with no morally relevant options open at all, and that God, whose freedom includes no ability to sin, is the model rather than the exception. Timpe’s later statement makes the model primary: true freedom has its source in the outflowing of a good character and need not include the ability to do otherwise. The redeemed, able to do less, are in that sense more free. Couenhoven reaches the same place from the necessities of perfect freedom. Matheson presses the account’s reliance on tracing.

ie. they all treat the problem as a management problem. How do you keep choosing in heaven without letting sin back in. They do not first ask whether choosing is still the right verb.

The answers Pawl and Timpe reject each pay elsewhere. Compatibilism, which Cowan defends, keeps both theses at the price of the free will defence against the problem of evil. The Molinist keeps them by God’s arranging that the redeemed meet only circumstances in which they would freely not sin — at the price of their perfection. A man kept from adultery by a watchful wife is not chaste. Donnelly concedes the second thesis: the redeemed can sin and can be evicted, at the price of a heaven that is not ultimate happiness.

One answer is not a psychology. Gaine, following Pinckaers, sets freedom for excellence against freedom of indifference and, drawing on Aquinas, holds impeccability to be intrinsic to beatitude: the blessed cannot sin because of what beatitude is, not because of a restraint upon them. It is the nearest of the answers to the chain’s. Section 5 says where they part.

Past death the problem extends in two directions, and both extensions turn on one unstated assumption. Walls argues that the transformation heaven requires can continue after death, and that purgatory is the logic of that transformation. Judisch argues for its purpose. Talbott, Kronen and Reitan, and Hart argue that a will freed of ignorance or delusion cannot finally reject the Good, so every being is restored. Purgatory needs change after death that is the being’s own. Restoration needs it too — or else a change that is not the being’s own, which its defenders refuse as coercion.

The traditional view, in the character accounts, needs choosing to stop, or to be so circumscribed that sin is no longer among its options. None of the three says what choosing is, or why it should continue, stop, or narrow when a life ends.

This paper puts the problem on an eliminative chain of 137 resolutions that never starts from heaven, or from freedom, or from the will. The chain begins from one observation — that non-being requires being (R.1) — tests candidates, and keeps what survives. It reaches both theses of the traditional view from one result: choosing is time. It answers the two extensions from the same result. Every number below is an anchor on the interactive edition, so any step can be read with its own test. At five places the test itself is also set out in a sentence.

2. Will before choice, and choosing by encounter

The first fourteen resolutions reach Will. Non-being is the negation of being. Without being there is no negation. So non-being requires being (R.1). What “nothing” designates — non-being without being — cannot be (R.2). Being has no alternative. Possibility cannot be limited (R.4): beyond a limit there would be no possibility of being, which is again what “nothing” designates.

How being comes into being from unlimited possibility is then tested. Necessity dissolves. Randomness dissolves (R.10). What survives is choice: “this, not that.”

This is the first place the test belongs on the page, because all that the problem calls freedom descends from it.

Choice has two components: “this is” and “not that” (R.11). The “not that” requires what it excludes to have a referent. In unlimited potential it has none. To wall off what is not actualised is restriction, and restriction empties “unrestricted” (R.4). The defence — that the exclusion is local and leaves the rest of potential open — dissolves on the distinction between leaving what is unactualised open and actively excluding it. What survives is “this is” without “not that.” The chain names it Will: actualisation without exclusion (Def.2). Will wills as itself, not externally justified and not without basis (R.12, Def.3). Will does not negate. Negation is reactive. It requires what already is (R.14). All being is Will (R.17). Being is willing (R.23). Willing is generative (R.24). Generating is flourishing (R.47).

ie. the primary case of a will is not a chooser standing in a shop of options. It is actualisation that does not have to refuse in order to be itself.

Two things follow that the debate has had to argue for.

First: a will without the ability to do otherwise is not a diminished will. It is Will, the primary case. The ability to exclude is no part of it. Aquinas’s claim that the ability to do evil is incidental to free choice, and Timpe’s that the primary sense of free will is what is found in God, sit on the chain at R.11 and R.12. “This is” without “not that” is what willing is. A “not that” is an addition.

Second: coercion is ruled out before it can be proposed. Necessity already dissolved at R.10. A being whose willing is Will and which is not Will empties R.17. A reorientation that is not the being’s own is not a form its willing can take.

Choosing is what enters later. Where willing and non-willing are present together, the being is with choice: one is, the other is the “not” of what one is, and where Will alone wills, choice selects (R.52). A being does not come to choosing by its own willing. It knew willing first (R.23). Non-being is already willing being-not within the scope the being enters (R.69, R.71), and the being meets “not this” alongside “this.” Knowing is being (R.28), so the being that knows “not this” alongside “this” is with choosing — not by its own willing, but through encounter (R.73). From the encounter onward it cannot separate willing from non-willing in its knowing (R.74). Willing is universal: “this is, and this is,” for all. Choosing is for “this” against “not that.” What Will does for all, choice does for itself (R.79).

ie. the alternative possibility the incompatibilist requires for freedom is, on the chain, the scar of an encounter. It is not the essence of a will. It is Will with a “not” standing next to it, met and not made.

Alternative possibilities are then placed differently from either standard position. The libertarian holds that they are constitutive of freedom. The sourcehood theorist holds that they are inessential to it. On the chain they are met and not made (R.73): non-willing in a being’s knowing, and no part of what willing is (R.11).

The character accounts are right that the inability of the redeemed is, in Pawl and Timpe’s phrase, an internal and freely formed constraint rather than an external one. The chain says why no constraint on the redeemed is external: a reorientation that is not the being’s own is coercion, and coercion empties R.17.

3. Choosing is time

The literature treats time as the arena in which character is formed, and heaven as a later time in which the formed character operates. Sennett’s definitions turn on the laws and the state of the world at some time immediately prior. Pawl and Timpe require alternative possibilities to have been open at some time. Walls’s purgatory is more time.

On the chain the relation runs the other way. Time is not the container of choosing. Choosing is time.

This is the second place the test belongs on the page.

Will wills “this is, and this is,” and all prior willing is (R.26): accumulation without depletion, which the chain calls eternity. Both eternity and time involve succession. The difference is not in the ordering but in the access. In eternity, all prior willing is and is accessible. In time, all prior willing is but is walled off, because choice selects “this, not that” (R.79), and each “not that” is non-being introduced into being — an exclusion of what is. What is excluded has not ceased. Un-generation resolves into what cannot be (R.26). It is inaccessible. Each choosing adds to what is walled off and does not restore it.

The candidate — choosing that is eternal in the way willing is — would require “not that” without exclusion. “Not that” is exclusion. Succession with access is eternity. Succession with exclusion is time. Choosing is time (R.90).

ie. a life in which every act is a selection is a life in which time accumulates as refusal. That is not a metaphor. It is the structure.

Time enters the chain here. Before R.90 the chain has order, the arrangement of successive beginnings (R.13), and accumulation without depletion (R.26). R.90 sorts succession by access, and the kind with exclusion is what it names time. The identity runs both ways. Every choosing excludes (R.79). Only choosing excludes: every “not that” is choice’s (R.11, R.52), Will has none (R.14), and being-not is non-being’s choosing (R.69).

Four modalities follow, and the problem’s cast is distributed among them. The generative willing is eternal. The deceived being that chooses “this, not that” is temporal, and its choosing is its time. The being at un-being, whose single un-willing diminishes without arriving, is beyond temporal: end without end. The fully non-being persists forever, beneath time. The second of these is the human case the problem addresses, and the test above is its derivation. The being at un-being and the fully non-being require separate derivation, which R.90 gives.

Mortality is then the accumulation of exclusion while being persists (R.91). The being is more with each generation and accesses less with each exclusion. Death is not the cessation of being. That would require un-generation. Death is where the accumulation of “not thats” meets fixation — the point at which the temporal framework of choosing ends. What the being has been is not lost. What it has walled off stays walled, because un-walling is reorientation, reorientation is the being’s own choosing (R.123, R.124), and choosing is time.

The framework ends because being-not is determinative wherever capacity is bounded, and what bounds the capacity is choice.

In Willing Being a being’s willing is not bounded. It carries unlimited potential, not closed by the being’s own reality (R.38), and being wills more being (R.24, R.43). Choosing is the other case. Each “not that” walls off what is. The being accesses less with each exclusion (R.79, R.90, R.91). Death is the specific “not” of life (R.59, R.69). Being-not reduces what it negates (R.70). Locally it overpowers: un-willing operates from above, and the being’s own choosing cooperates (R.83). For a capacity bounded by choosing, being-not is determinative. Only unrestricted potential is not terminable (R.81, R.114, R.116).

The deceived being is with choosing (R.73). Its capacity is bounded by its own “not that.” Being-not is determinative for it, and the succession of exclusions ends. R.91 names where.

The being at un-being does not end. Its un-willing is not a succession. It is one willing, directed at All-Being, which does not arrive, because what it would add already is (R.55, R.56). Without succession there is no accumulation and no meeting point: end without end.

Death on the chain is that meeting point. It is not the body’s. The chain does not say when a being reaches it.

ie. the clock stops where the refusals have bounded a life until being-not is determinative for it. A heart stopping is not that. A single un-willing that never arrives is not that either.

This is the result the mechanisms of section 1 lacked. Heaven is not a later time in which a formed character is exercised without temptation. It is willing without exclusion, and its content is all the being has willed, accessible. The redeemed do not lack the ability to sin because their reasons have been reweighted. They do not choose, because choosing is what has ended.

4. Fixation, and exactly two states

When temporal existence ends, the being’s orientation is fixed (R.131). The chain gives three grounds. The third is the one the character accounts reach toward from the other side.

The mechanism of restoration ends with time

The first ground concerns the mechanism of restoration. Within Choosing Being, Anything’s active restoration works with the un-being expressions, not against them (R.120). Working against them would be coercion or un-generation, and the un-being expressions are temporal, because they express choosing. When temporal existence ends, the expressions through which restoration operates end. Capacity and mechanism are distinct: the capacity persists; the mechanism ends.

This is the third place the test belongs on the page, because it is where purgatory and universal restoration are met at once.

The candidate is a post-temporal mechanism of restoration. Any mechanism of restoration requires the being’s own choosing, since a reorientation that is not the being’s own is coercion (R.11, R.17). The being’s own willing after time is willing (R.23), but not choosing (R.90). Reorientation is choosing differently — “this, not that” — a turning from one orientation to another. Willing without choosing is the being being what it is, not selecting among alternatives. A restoration that operated as willing without choosing would be reorientation without choosing, which is either no change — the being remaining what it is — or imposed change, which is coercion. Neither is restoration. The candidate dissolves.

ie. there is no turn that is the being’s own after the thing that makes a turn the being’s own has ended. That is not a policy. Reception was the being’s own choosing, and choosing has ended. The capacity has not.

If reorientation continues, death was not death

The second ground concerns mortality. If reorientation extends beyond the terminal boundary, the boundary is not terminal, and death — which R.91 reached as the point where accumulation meets fixation — becomes a phase. Walls’s purgatory, if it is temporal, is before that boundary, whatever has happened to the body. If it is not temporal, it is not the being’s own act.

The being is what its willing is

The third ground is identity. Being is willing (R.23). The being’s orientation is its willing. After time the being wills, since all prior willing is (R.26), but does not choose, since choosing is time. Its willing after death is its nature as determined: what choice made it. Willing without choosing is the being being what it is. Reorientation would require choosing differently, and post-temporal willing is not choosing. The being is what it is, and its orientation is fixed not by external imposition but by the identity of choosing and time. What is fixed is the being itself. Death is the fixation of the being’s orientation (Def.23). The being’s eternal state is determined by its orientation at death (R.132).

That orientation was determined during temporal existence by whether the being chose toward generative flourishing through operative-orientation (Def.21) — its own choosing toward what it encounters as genuinely operative — and underwent reorientation (Def.22), which is net-directional and oscillatory because being-not does not cease within Choosing Being (R.129), and which does not remove the being from Choosing Being (R.130).

No third state

This is the fourth place the test belongs on the page, because it is where purgatory and limbo are ruled out together. Exactly two eternal states are (R.133). The candidate is more than two, or a stable intermediate. Will is operative — the generative configuration (R.12) — or choosing is operative — the un-being configuration (R.52). These are not two positions on a spectrum. Willing and choosing are distinct (R.11). At fixation the oscillation of reorientation resolves. A stable intermediate would require willing and choosing to merge into one configuration, and they are distinct. The candidate empties R.11.

ie. Timpe’s limbo wants a waiting room that is neither communion nor closure. On this chain there is no third configuration for a being to occupy. You are what you will, and after time you will only that.

The extensions of section 1 are answered here, and answered by their own requirement. Walls’s purgatory is transformation after death that is the being’s own. On the chain, transformation that is the being’s own is reorientation; reorientation is choosing; choosing is time. So a purgatory is temporal or it is no act of the being’s. If temporal, it is more Choosing Being, before death in the chain’s sense, and the chain neither forbids it nor locates it. If not the being’s own, it is coercion. What the chain refuses is not a long transformation. It is a turn after choosing has ended.

Universal restoration, in Talbott and in Hart, is not choosing after death — which its defenders grant would be more of the same — and not coercion, which they refuse. It is the will freed of ignorance or delusion willing the Good by its own nature. That is exactly the candidate the first ground tests: a restoration operating as willing without choosing. It dissolves. Without choosing there is no change of orientation. A change that is not the being’s own requires imposition, and imposition is not willing.

Kronen and Reitan argue from what a loving and powerful God would bring about. On the chain All-Being’s willing is undiminished (R.57) and its restoration meets the being where the being is (R.120). The reason it does not reorient the being is not a limit on its power or a policy of respect. Reorientation that is not the being’s own is not a form of willing at all.

5. Willing without choosing as freedom

The question the traditional view kept asking is whether the redeemed, unable to sin, are free. Each answer in section 1 locates the freedom somewhere: in a character the agent freely formed and now expresses, in Sennett and in Pawl and Timpe; in the source of the willing rather than in alternatives, in Timpe; in the necessities of a perfected will, in Couenhoven; in a will confirmed in good that is determined to good but not to this or that good, in Aquinas.

What the tradition locates in these ways, the chain has at three resolutions.

Will wills as itself (R.12): not externally justified, and not without basis. The debate’s sourcehood is the first half of that. Its refusal of brute self-creation is the second. Coercion is not a form of willing, because a being whose willing is Will and which is not Will empties R.17. And after time the being wills what its own choosing made it (R.131). Where Pawl and Timpe trace, the chain does not. Tracing carries freedom from an earlier act to a later state along a relation, and the relation is what Matheson presses. On the chain there is no relation. The being is its willing (R.23). All prior willing is (R.26). The being is what it chose (R.76). What wills after time is that being (R.131). “What choice made it” is not a state that the choosing produced and left behind. It is the being. The counterpart of Pawl and Timpe’s internal rather than external constraint is “not by external imposition but by the identity of choosing and time.” The counterpart of the claim in their reply to Cowan — that the redeemed are free with no morally relevant options at all — is that post-temporal willing has no options because it has no “not that,” and is the being’s own for that reason and not despite it.

The difference is in the mechanism, and it is the difference between a psychology and a structure. Pawl and Timpe’s redeemed cannot sin because sinful options no longer register as reasons: a psychological incapacity, which Timpe’s reasons-constraint on free choice makes precise. The chain’s redeemed do not choose at all. The “cannot” is not an incapacity of a chooser. It is that “this, not that” is time, and time has ended.

ie. they are not standing in front of the forbidden door with their hands tied. The door was time. Time closed.

This settles the harp and the choir differently from the way the 2009 paper settles them. There, the redeemed retain non-derivative freedom among goods so that their freedom is not trivial, and the objection from Plantinga’s significant freedom is met by a weaker notion — morally relevant freedom — on which a choice among goods that are better and worse carries moral weight. On the chain there is no choosing among goods after time, because a selection among goods is “this, not that” as much as a selection between good and evil, and any exclusion is time. The redeemed will “this is, and this is,” in succession, with no exclusion. The harp and the choir are not alternatives. No good is refused in taking another. Succession is not selection. Order in generative reality is the arrangement of successive beginnings, accumulation without depletion (R.13). To will the harp and then the choir is to have begun with one. It is not to have refused the other. What Will does for all, choice does for itself (R.79). The freedom of the redeemed is not a range of selections but the absence of exclusion. The objection from triviality does not arise, because it presupposes that freedom is selecting.

Timpe’s three marks of divine freedom — that it expresses itself as an inability to sin, is more perfect for including that inability, and has the inability intrinsic to God’s nature rather than imposed — and his claim that the freedom of the redeemed is the closest human expression of it, have their counterpart at R.42 to R.44. The first actualisation from unlimited potential is necessarily full (R.42), and its willing is all Will (R.44): one Will, each being’s own, an identity that is not containment. The full actualisation has no “not that” at all, not as a perfection added but because exclusion did not survive R.11. The being in the first eternal state wills that one Will as its own without exclusion. “More free by being able to do less” becomes, on the chain, more free by excluding none of what is.

Gaine’s intrinsic impeccability is the nearest neighbour, and the difference is in what fixes. For Aquinas the will that sees God cannot turn from him: the vision confirms the will in good. On the chain knowing is being (R.28), not a cause acting on the will, and necessity dissolved before Will was reached (R.10). No cause fixes the redeemed will. It is what its choosing made it, and after time it does not choose (R.131). What the Thomist account has as cause, the chain has as access: in eternity all prior willing is, and is accessible (R.90). Freedom for excellence sits on the chain where Aquinas’s claim already sits, at R.11 and R.12.

The first eternal state is permanent orientation toward generative flourishing (R.134), which the chain names Communion (Def.24): each expression in its generative configuration, within a being that has known un-being. Existence without threat. Activity that completes. Memory without occlusion. Anticipation without terminal direction. Knowledge without false certainty. It is not a return to the innocence before un-being. All prior willing is (R.26), and the being that has known un-being cannot un-know it (R.134). What it knows is not what operates in it: what it walled off is known as having been, without the walls, and its actualisation was never negated (R.118). There was never an un-knowing to perform, only an awareness to restore.

Pawl and Timpe end their 2009 paper with an image: the redeemed “neverendingly coming ever closer to Him,” clinging ever more tightly to the mean. The mean is Aristotle’s, the virtue between two vices. The redeemed are on it, hold it so firmly that they cannot fall from it, and can always hold it more firmly; each morally relevant choice tightens the hold. In 2013 they set the image aside as non-load-bearing. On the chain it is load-bearing and it is a result. Willing is generative (R.24). Generating is flourishing (R.47). A being whose willing stopped would stop being (R.23). Eternity is accumulation without depletion (R.90). Maximus called the same state an ever-moving rest. Its placement on the chain is given in the paper on the gnomic will. Rest, because choosing has ended and with it the succession of exclusions. Moving, because willing is generative.

6. The second state, and what the problem was for

The critics of the traditional view were right that the problem does not stop at heaven. If the redeemed are what their choosing made them, so is every other being. The chain’s second eternal state is permanent orientation under non-being (R.135): the being’s own closure made eternal. The chain names it Separation (Def.25). Not imposed. Not punishment. The fundamental contradiction made permanent.

ie. heaven is eternal. Hell is forever. Eternity is accumulation without depletion. Forever is persistence without accumulation: the word the chain gives the fully non-being, and the closed being shares it, because its closure persists for the same reason. Un-generation is not available.

This is the fifth place the test belongs on the page, because it is where the objection to hell from God’s love is met.

The candidate is separation as imposed by Anything. The being that maintained total closure is oriented under non-being permanently (R.132, Def.23). Actualisation is Will (R.11). Will wills as itself (R.12). The being’s Will determined its orientation. Separation imposed by Anything would require Anything to override the being’s will, which is coercion and empties R.17. Fixation makes the being’s own orientation permanent. The candidate dissolves.

The separated being remains actualised. Un-generation resolves into what cannot be (R.26), and Will persists (R.64). Willing Being is permanently present to it. Being-not is permanently operative in it. The being’s own permanent closure permanently resists what is present.

ie. hell, on the chain, is not God locking a door. It is a being that has become a locked door, and time — which was the only thing that could still turn the handle from the inside — has ended.

Walls’s logic of damnation has this shape: hell is chosen, and God does not impose it. The chain reaches the shape and adds the reason, and the reason changes what the shape means. In Walls the permanence of hell rests on God’s respecting a creature’s freedom, which is why Kronen and Reitan can ask whether a loving God would respect it at that price, and why Talbott and Hart can argue that no one fully informed would choose it, so the choice must be delusion and delusion can be cured.

On the chain the permanence is not a decision and not respect. It is that reorientation is choosing, choosing is time, and time has ended (R.90, R.131). The objection from full information is answered at R.74: within Choosing Being the deception is unrecognisable. The being cannot separate willing from non-willing in its knowing. The way out is not information but the being’s own choosing toward what it encounters as genuinely operative (R.123, R.124), in time. What Hart calls the rational will freed of delusion is, in time, operative-orientation. After time it is not a will freed. It is a will fixed.

The objection from God’s power is answered at R.57 and R.120. All-Being is undiminished. Its Will is with the being that is now non-being as it is with every being. Its restoration works with the un-being expressions, not against them, because against them is coercion or un-generation, and neither is a form willing can take.

Two things the chain does not say should be said. It does not say who is in which state. Four distinct situations are (R.101): the being at un-being, which could stop at any point; the fully non-being, which never had Will; the being that encountered non-being and did not enact it; and the being affected through the care of the deceived. These must not be conflated. The chain assigns no being to a state. Specific content is determined by its own willing choosing within what is established (R.137). And it does not say that Separation is empty or that it is full. It says what the two states are and why there are two.

What the problem was for was to keep two theses that looked inconsistent: the redeemed are free, and they cannot sin. The character accounts keep both by narrowing choosing until sin drops out of its range. The chain keeps both by finding that the redeemed do not choose, and that this is not a loss — because choosing was never what Will is (R.11) and was never what the being is (R.73). It came by encounter. It was time. It has ended.

The two extensions past death asked for choosing to continue: in purgatory as the being’s own change, and in restoration as a change wrought in the being. The chain refuses the first because choosing is time, and the second because a change that is not the being’s own is not willing. What remains after time is willing without exclusion in the one state, and closure without change in the other. In both, the being is what its choosing made it.

Augustine’s superior freedom, unable to sin, is on the chain the ordinary case: Will — “this is” — without the “not that” that a being met in time and took for its freedom.

Works cited

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