nts a road toward [himself or herself], an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No [person] has ever been entirely and completely [himself or herself]. Yet each one strives to become that--one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best [he or she] can (From the prologue to *Demian*, by Hermann Hesse). CONCLUSION At the end of Part One, we came to the conclusion that as orthodox Christians, we bow(ed)--albeit, more or less, unconsciously--not to the justice of God, but to his power. Unable to think this thought, however, we insisted (as orthodox believers) on affirming the contradiction intrinsic to judgement that one can conjoin omnipotence and human perdition without attributing evil to God. But of all the "evils" that we can imagine, this conjunction is, perhaps, the only one which it is absolutely impossible to dispel by an appeal to our finite perspective. We attempted to make this contradiction explicit so as to permit the dialectic of the problem to carry us beyond it. In Part Two, we found that we were able to avoid the contradiction by jettisoning the notions of free will and moral responsibility (to any heteronomous law), and by modifying our conception of God's goodness and power, in favor of a more comprehensive view. We realized instead that our only duty is to will our own essence. Furthermore, we saw that God is, indeed, infinitely good, but can be percieved as such only by those who love him with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. His power, too, is infinite, but *he is*, in fact, *that which he is*, and cannot be otherwise. We are justified in bowing before his power because it is the power which grounds us. Our unconditional love of God constitutes perfect self-love. This is not the kind of self-love which leads to self-destruction, but that which, for the tradition, is characteristic of the life of Christ. By bringing this thought to consciousness, we bring before ourselves th...
