Is the bliss of the beatific union with God so transfiguring and consuming and complete as to reduce all subsidiary relations to nothing, and thereby in a single stroke to reduce each personhood to nothing, so that all that remains is an anonymous act of intellection immersed in perpetual, unpitying delight? This is an obvious thing, really: This blessedly “oblivious” account of the afterlife of the elect is incoherent simply because, for salvation to be the salvation of persons—as opposed to the final liberation of something anonymous and “transcendent” of personality, something that must be
...more
