Disposition, Theology, and the Logic of Universalism

I've been reading through the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite recently, and I find his picture of reality intoxicatingly beautiful. It has a richness and depth that can hardly be fathomed and presents a philosophical theology that I wish was the standard for Christianity. It especially has much to offer those interested, as I am, in the prospects for a Christian monism and dialogue with the Dharmic religions.

But as I've been reading I've also been repeatedly struck by passages which seem to me to imply or at the surface level support a sort of universalism. Over and over again in the Divine Names St. Dionysius stresses that God is the Source and End of all things, that nothing exists without participation in his Goodness and Being, and that all things by nature long for and are attracted to it:

"Is is there at the center of everything and everything has it for a destiny. It is there 'before all things and in it all things hold together.' Because it is there the world has come to be and exists. All things long for it." (DN 593D)

"Truly he has dominion over all and all things revolve around him, for he is their cause, their source, and their destiny. He is 'all in all,'as scripture affirms, and certainly he is to be praised as being for all things the creator and originator, the One who brings them to completion, their preserver, their protector, and their home, the power which returns them to itself, and all this in the one single, irrepressible, and supreme act...it actually contains everything beforehand within itself--and this in an uncomplicated and boundless manner-- and it is thus by virtue of the unlimited goodness of its single all-creative Providence. Hence the songs of praise and the names for it are fittingly derived from the sum total of creation." (DN 596D-597A)

"[This Source] is the cause of everything...it is origin, being, and life. To those who fall away it is the voice calling, 'Come back!' and it is the power which raises them up again." (DN 589C)

"The Good, as scripture testifies, produced everything...In it 'all things hold together' and are maintained and preserved as if in some almighty receptable. All things are returned to it as their own goal. All things desire it: Everything with mind and reason seeks to know it, everything sentient yearns to perceive it..." (DN 700B)

"Whatever there is, whatever comes to be, is there and has being on account of the Beautiful and the Good. All things look to it. All things are moved by it. All things are preserved by it. Every source exists for the sake of it, because of it, and in it and this is so whether such source be exemplary, final, efficient, formal, or elemental. In short, every source, all preservation and ending, everything in fact, derives from the Beautiful and the Good...Here is the source of all which transcends every source, here is an ending which transcends completion. 'For from Him and through Him and in Him and to Him are all things' says Holy Scripture." (DN 708A).

It's hard to refrain from posting even more examples (since I never tire of reading them), but it seems to me that if we were just to read such things in the absence of any dogmatic prejudice, they would clearly tend in a universalist direction. Everything is said to long by nature for Goodness, to be directed towards it, to be created by it and in it and for it in a simple act of perfectly good creation. The fundamental triad of abiding-procession-return would seem to be broken if there were things which forever remain estranged from this one source of being and goodness.

I also just happened to be reading in the Philokalia, Volume 5, and came across some passages by a 14th century Monk, Kallistos Katafygiotis, that seem like direct echoes of St. Dionysius, though in some cases more explicit in the directions gestured at. These are from his treatise "On Divine Union and the Contemplative Life":

"Things produced by a cause, and especially intelligent beings, by nature aspire consciously to grasp that cause through returning to it." (#12)

"All things are irradiated forth, so to say, from the transcendent One, but they are not separated from that which begets them. Just as they come into being within the One, so they continue to be embraced by Him and brought to perfection within Him...And since the One is blazed abroad by all things, and all things are attracted towards the One, and since the One reveals itself through all things to the intellect, the intellect cannot but be led, bound hand and foot, and be drawn to the transcendent One." (#21)

"For the intellect, being by nature and par excellence a lover of the beautiful, does not of its own accord remove itself from that which transcends all, unless some circumstance compels it so to do." (#35)

"Once the intellect has ascended to the One that transcends the mind's grasp, it cannot but be filled with love for it. For there it encounters the indescribable and inconceivable beauty emanating from the One, as from the supreme root of all things." (#24)

"All beings by nature find joy and repose in their own natural qualities, all of which pre-exist in the primordial Source which is their integral cause...From this Source proceed all things, along with their qualities, and in it are to be found the origin of all things, their intermediate state and their consummation. In it all things subsist and are kept in existence, and through it all that is being perfected is led to its proper fulfillment." (#27)

Again, it seems to me that, without any explicit commitment, we nevertheless have all the parts here that together make up the 'logic' of universalism for newer universalists such as David Bentley Hart: If all things are created by, subsist in, and fundamentally long for God; if all things were created by God with the single goal of returning to union with him; if to see God is to desire him above all else--then the idea of someone rejecting God with full freedom and knowledge becomes inconceivable; the idea of a single lost soul means a broken, a thwarted, a less-than-perfect creation by something less than Perfection and Goodness itself.

The problem, of course, is that orthodox Christians do not simply have such statements to go by. They also have the mixed witness of Scripture and tradition. And that got me thinking that perhaps a fundamental divide we see is between those who privilege, on the one hand, fundamental philosophy and creative synthesis, and, on the other, strict adherence to dogmatic tradition. Those who are drawn most to the former (such as, recently, David Bentley Hart and Jordan Daniel Wood) and are pulled to the vast philosophical theologies of St. Dionysius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Maximus, are more likely to be universalists, at the cost of needing to find wiggle room in what sometime seem confining and constraining aspects of tradition. Those who place a higher emphasis on fidelity to tradition conceived mostly as set of clear dogmatic statements, tend to be anti-universalists, at the cost (in my view) of losing or obscuring the depth and beauty of the theological visions of such luminary saints. Others (like myself) often find themselves pulled by disposition in both ways, or alternating indecisively between them...