330. The need for two judgments
330. THE NEED FOR TWO JUDGMENTS
Why must there be two Last Judgments, a “particular judgment” and a “general judgment”? If each of us is judged as soon as we die, why do we need a general judgment? And if all of us are to be judged at the general judgment, why do we need a particular one? Is God a Platonist, who believes in the separate reality of general terms like “humanity”?
It is necessary that there should be . . . a general judgment . . . in order that just as all things proceeded immediately from God, so at length the world will receive its ultimate complement (completion). . . . Hence at this judgment the divine justice will be made manifest in all things, whereas now it remains hidden, forasmuch as at times some persons are dealt with for the profit of others, otherwise than their manifest works would seem to require. For this same reason there will then be a general separation of the good from the wicked because there will be no further motive for the good to profit by the wicked, or the wicked by the good, for the sake of which profit the good are meanwhile mingled with the wicked so long as this state of life is governed by divine providence (S88,1).
The problem of justice is at the heart of the “problem of evil”, which is the strongest argument against the goodness of God. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, and bad people use and abuse good people, and good people often have to lose good things (like life) in order for bad people to be stopped from taking good things from good people.
So there is such a thing as social sin as well as individual sin. The whole system is broken. We are no longer living merely in the world-garden God created—in gaia, “earth”—but in the fallen world-culture we create—in aion (in Latin, saeculum), the “age” or era infected by sin. Gaia is a space-word, a matter-world; aion is a time-word, a history-word. Aion, not gaia, is the word Scripture uses for “the world” when it speaks so negatively about it (e.g., 1 Jn 2:15).
This social sin, this fallen world-order, is what needs to be judged and corrected, at the general judgment, as well as individual human souls being judged at the particular judgment, if we are to be happy and perfect in Heaven. If and only if this is done, “at length the world will receive its ultimate complement.”
St. Thomas uses the fact that “at times some persons are dealt with for the profit of others, otherwise than their manifest works would seem to require” as the crucial example of injustice. It is not injustice simply; it is the temporary hiddenness of eventual, inexorable divine justice. God uses some people’s evil for other people’s good. The most glaring example is Judas Iscariot, and even more, the Devil himself, who strategized his own apparent supreme victory in Christ’s crucifixion, which was the supreme triumph of evil and yet was also used as the cause of our redemption!
God does not separate the good from the wicked in this world because His mysterious providence keeps using the wicked for the profit of the good in many hidden ways. He did that with Judas and Satan in a revealed way; in the crucifixion He lifted the curtain that usually hides His providential wisdom. He gives us little glimpses under His curtain at other times too, and some are higher “liftings of the curtain” than others (e.g., the Joseph story in Genesis: see Gen 50: 20). At the General Judgment, the curtain will be torn from top to bottom. We cannot see that now, but we can believe it, and we can live it. For we are in the same story whose final end and point is that Beatific Vision of perfect divine justice providentially using and judging even the evil for the sake of the good.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam wonder “what kind of a story we’re in”. It is a wonderfully concrete way of asking what is the meaning of life. And the answer is that we are in a perfect story, which is an adventure story, a war story, a detective story, a psychological novel, and above all a love story. That is why God inspired the Bible: to show us the story we are in, to reflect a little of the light of the Last Judgment on our present wayfaring.