Irenaeus too, like Clement and Origen after him, speaks of painful and even drastic treatment applied by God with a therapeutic and educative aim, e.g., in AH 3:20:1, where Irenaeus stresses that God’s aim is the salvation of humanity; God “extracts it from the belly of hell.” In 20:2 Irenaeus adds that God’s plan is the following:
That humanity, passing through every tribulation and acquiring the knowledge of the moral discipline, and then being granted the resurrection from the dead, and learning by experience what is the source of its liberation, may eternally live in gratitude toward the Lord, having been granted by him the gift of incorruptibility, that it might love God even more.
Gratitude, liberation, and love clearly do not apply to people eternally damned in hell.
In this chapter, we have laid out some of the important Christian precursors to the full-blown, theologically systematized doctrine of apokatastasis as presented by its most famous exponent, Origen of Alexandria. Origen did not invent the doctrine ex nihilo, but instead pulled together and developed threads found in Christian texts dating right back into the early second century and, further still, into the Bible itself. It is to his seminal work that we turn in the next chapter.
38. See at least Nautin, “Ignatius.” Now Markus Vinzent 2018 for a revisitation of Ignatius’ corpus.
39. See Ramelli, “Mansuetudine,” 215–28.
40. An examination of so-called “gnostic” apokatastasis leads to the overall conclusion that this notion does not entail universal salvation (although with possible exceptions that deserve further investigation) or the resurrection of the body; therefore, I shall not include a treatment here, not even in abridgement. For a detailed treatment of “gnostic” apokatastasis and all the relevant texts, as well as the problem of the “Gnosticism” category, see my “Apokatastasis in Coptic Gnostic Texts.” Further investigation is underway, though.
41. See my Bardaisan of Edessa.
42. Translation mine from Ramelli, Bardaisan on Human Nature, Fate, and Free Will.
43. This is attested for Origen, e.g., in Hom. in Luc. 36; Fr. in Matt. 571 and Comm. in Io. 10:39: in the end “peace will be perfect, after the years of the providential economy.”
44. See Ramelli, Bardaisan.
45. See Ramelli, “Stromateis VII and Clement’s Hints of the Theory of Apokatastasis.”
46. E.g. Strom. 1:1:4:1; 4:24:153:1–2; 2:14–5:60–64. Clement was especially against “gnostic” determinism. Clement explicitly criticized “the followers of Basilides” because they thought that some people would be saved “by nature” and others condemned “by nature” and not on the basis of their free choices (Strom. 2:3). The same criticism was addressed by Clement to the Valentinians, who thought that they “will be saved by nature” qua gnostics. Salvation must be achieved voluntarily (Strom. 6:12:96:1–3; 3:7:58; 1:1:4; 3:9:65; 1:17:83–84; 2:12:54–55; 2:13:69).
47. Strom. 2:15:69–71.
48. For instance, the anonymous writing under the pseudonym “koine lingua” on the blog https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/, under the title “Aἰώνιος (aiōnios) in Jewish and Christian Eschatology: ‘Eternal’ Life, ‘Eternal’ Torment, ‘Eternal’ Destruction?” from 26–27 April 2015.
49. Strom. 4:13:93–4; see also 1:1:4:1.
50. E.g. Strom. 2:6:26:5; 2:15:62:3; 4:26:168:2; 6:14:113:3; 7:3:16:2, etc. See also my “Was Patristic Sin Different from Ancient Error? The Role of Ethical Intellectualism and the Invention of ‘Original Sin’”, invited lecture, Institute of Advanced Study of the University of Paris, April 2017, forthcoming.
51. See also Strom. 1:17:86:1–2, where Clement states that God’s Providence directs even human beings’ evil deeds to a good end. For God not only does the good, but even turns evil to a good end.
52. Ezek 18:23; 33:11.
53. Strom. 6:6:45–47.
54. Strom. 2:22:134:4.
55. Protr. 1:8:4. Clement with this anticipates Origen, Athanasius, Gregory Nyssen, and others.
56. Strom. 6:6:46ff.; 7:2:7:6.
57. Protr. 1:6:2: Φιλάνθρωπον τὸ ὄργανον τοῦ Θεοῦ· ὁ Kύριος ἐλεεῖ, παιδεύει, προτρέπει, νουθετεῖ, σῴζει.
58. Itter, “The Restoration of the Elect,” 169–74.
59. Le Boulluec, “Filiación y encarnación según Clemente de Alejandría,” n. 107.
60. It is also alien to contemporary theologians such as MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, 32: “the traditional view that there are no chances to repent after death is also very hard to defend.”
61. Bauckham, “The Apocalypse of Peter” and The Fate of the Dead, 160–258.
62. So Grünstäudl, Petrus Alexandrinus, received by Frey, Der Brief des Judas und der zweite Brief des Petrus, 170–73. Grünstäudl associates 2 Peter with the Petrine literature of the Apocalypse of Peter, on which he claims 2 Peter depends, and dates 2 Peter to the second half of the second century, considering it an expression of Alexandrian Christianity.
63. Eusebius HE 6:14:1. The Apocalypse of Peter is included in the Muratori Canon and in that of Codex Claromontanus among the biblical books.
64. The Muratorian fragment contains a copy of perhaps the oldest known list of the books that compose the New Testament, although its dating is now highly debated.
65. See my “Transformations of the Household and Marriage Theory,” 369–96.
66. It is also attested in a quotation from the Apocalypse of Peter by Methodius, Symp. 2:6, known to Gregory Nyssen.
67. Buchholz, Your Eyes; Bauckham and Marassini, “Apocalypse de Pierre,” 745–74; Bremmer and Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter.
68. P. Vindob. G. 39756 folii 1r–2v.
69. This is an element of “pagan” mythology. The Elysian fields were the place of the blessed in the other world.
70. Scholars, however, were able to guess the original text even before the discovery of the Rainer Fragment. Cf. Buchholz, Your Eyes, 342–62; 425–26.
71. So also in 14:2 behind the Ethiopian “eternal kingdom” there lies “αἰώνιος kingdom,” as is proved with certainty by the Rainer Fragment.
72. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds lat. 3832, ed. Pettorelli, “Vie latine d’Adam et d’Ève,” 5–52.
73. See also the Testament of Dan 5.10–11: “The salvation of the Lord will rise for you of the tribes of Judah and Levi: He will wage war against Beliar, and take eternal vengeance on your enemies. He will deprive Beliar of his captives, the souls of the saints, and will convert to the Lord the disobeying hearts.”
74. See Simkovich, “Echoes of Universalist Testament Literature.”
75. 3 Baruch also suggests a universalistic drift, since it presents God’s glory as related to a concern for all people and control over the cosmos. According to Lloyd, “Universalism in 3 Baruch,” the structure and episodes created by the author of the text work to downplay Jewish particularism and halakhic commands as a response to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans.
76. Hübner, Die Einheit des Leibes Christi, 125–29.
77. Briggman, “Revisiting Irenaeus’ Philosophical Acumen” and “Literary and Rhetorical Theory in Irenaeus.”
78. See De Andia, “Irénée, théologien de l’unité,” 31–48; Steenberg, Irenaeus, 44–54.
79. “Christ has recapitulated his own creature into himself, thus saving it.” Cf. AH 5:14:1: the Lord “indicates in this way the recapitulation, in his own person, of the shedding of blood from the very beginning, the blood of all the just and prophets, and shows that by means of himself their blood will be
reclaimed. This would be impossible . . . if the Lord had not recapitulated all this in himself and had not become flesh and blood himself, as in the original constitution of humanity, saving in his own person, in the end, what had perished in Adam at the beginning.”
80. In Greek, ἀποκαταστήσει/apokatastēsei and ἀποκαταστήσεται/apokatastēsetai.
3
Origen of Alexandria
Christian Universalism as Biblical and Orthodox
Origen of Alexandria
Origen († c.255) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into a Christian family and he was enrolled in the catechetical school there. He was a very pious believer, devoting himself to prayer, asceticism, and Bible study, and in time became a celebrated teacher and author. Origen was very well educated, both in biblical and Hellenistic wisdom, and unusually gifted as a thinker and teacher. He could rightly be considered both the first systematic theologian of the church and one of its greatest ever biblical exegetes. After a controversy, he was banished from Alexandria in 231/32 by a synod convened by Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria. He made his home in Caesarea, Palestine, after this. Eventually anti-Christian persecution caught up with him and he was imprisoned and tortured under the Emperor Decius, and later died of the injuries received, aged sixty-nine.
Origen is, together with his faithful follower Gregory of Nyssa, the main theorizer of the doctrine of universal salvation—although by no means the only one. He theorized it not simply as a Platonist, but as a Christian Platonist, such as he was.81 His “anti-Platonism,” which has been stressed by some scholars,82 needs to be qualified. Origen did not oppose Platonism tout court (that is, per se, in itself, or in an absolute sense), but rather “gnostic” Platonism and “pagan” Platonism, in an effort to develop an orthodox Christian Platonism.83 His doctrine of universal restoration and salvation is an excellent example of this nuanced approach to the wisdom of the Greeks.
The principal metaphysical foundation of this doctrine of his consists in the idea that evil is non-being; only God—who, qua supreme Good, is the opposite of evil—is Being (Comm. in Io. 2:13).84 This is why to adhere to evil means to become non-being: “As long as we stick to God and adhere to the One who truly Is, we also are. But if we go far from God . . . we fall into the opposite [i.e., non-being]. However, this does not mean the ontological death of the soul” (Hom. 2 in Ps. 38, 12). The wicked man’s death or reduction to non-being is not a vanishing of the substance of his soul,85 but his spiritual death (see also Hom. 2 in Ps. 38, 1; Hom. 5 in Ps. 36, 5). And the destruction of the sinner at the Judgment will be the destruction of his sin, that he may be a sinner no more, but a just man; the otherworldly (αἰώνιον/aiōnion) fire will indeed destroy, not sinners, but their evil thoughts (Comm. in Matt. 5:10:2).
In fact, an important consequence of the ontological non-subsistence of evil—a Platonic notion—is that it cannot exist forever.86 In the Bible, this is announced in 1 Corinthians 15:24–26 and Revelation. Origen, followed by Gregory Nyssen,87 argued that, if God will be “in all” (1 Cor 15:28), then evil, which is the opposite of God, the Good, will necessarily be found in no being any more.88 Since Origen insists, following this biblical text, that it is “in all” that God will be “all,” and not only “in few or in many,” this means that salvation is definitely universal. But the final vanishing of evil from all humans will be able to take place only thanks to the “inhumanation,” death, and resurrection of Christ, as I shall show below: “One human died, and his death not only represented a paradigm of death by devotion, but also produced the principle and advancement of the destruction of what is evil and the devil, which ruled upon the whole earth” (CC 7:17). Evil has no ontological substance—and thus will have to vanish—because, like death, it was not created by God, the Being.89 It “did not exist in the beginning and will not exist forever” (Comm. in Io. 2:13); “there was a state in which evil did not exist, and there will be one in which evil will not exist any more” (Exp. in Prov. 5; Fr. in Prov. 5). Origen will inspire Evagrius’ famous motto: “There was a time when evil did not exist, and there will come a time when it will no more exist” (KG 1:40).
If evil will disappear from all beings, then—as announced in 1 Corinthians 15:28 and Acts 3:20–21—all beings will be restored into the Good, and thus be saved: “A righteous person keeps her hope in the shadow of the wings of God, until evil will be entirely destroyed. After the abolition of evil and its annihilation into non-being, this person will no longer place her hope in a shadow, but in the Godhead itself” (Sel. in Ps. 56). When every evil is definitely reduced to non-being, all beings will return to the Good, even Satan, who will thus be saved, not qua devil, archenemy, and death, but qua creature of God, after his conversion from evil to the Good.90 “The devil can return to being an archangel”91 because he was created an archangel; he became devil due to a wrong choice of his free will, but since his will remains free, he can return to the Good and be saved. Demons do not turn to the Good because they do not want to, and not because they cannot, and they do not want to while they continue to delight in evil, but when they stop doing so, they will return to the Good (Princ. 1:8:4). The devil and his angels in the end will not disagree with the final harmonic unity of all—a Platonic ideal that Origen also grounds in John 17: “Once things have begun to rush toward the ideal state in which all are one just as the Father is one with the Son, as a logical consequence we must believe that, when all are one, there will be no divergence any more” (Princ. 3:6:4). Even demons will no longer be powers of evil, but will return to their angelic state and ascend the angelic hierarchies,92 after a purification and illumination that can take extremely long:
Every being will be restored to be one, and God will be “all in all.” However, this will not happen in a moment, but slowly and gradually, through innumerable aeons of indefinite duration, because correction and purification will take place gradually, according to the needs of each individual. Thus, whereas some with a faster rhythm will be the first to hasten to the goal, and others will follow them closely, yet others on the contrary will fall a long distance behind. And in this way, through innumerable orders constituted by those who make progress and, after being enemies, are reconciled with God, there will come the last enemy, Death, that this may be destroyed and there may be no enemy left. (Princ. 3:6:6)
Death—which is no creature of God—will vanish; not even the devil will be any longer “enemy” and “death.” This death is not just the death of the body, but that of the soul due to sin (so in Comm. in Rom. 5:7: “once the death of the soul, which is the very last enemy, has been destroyed, the kingdom of death, together with death itself, will be wiped out”). That death will vanish means that all rational creatures will be pure from sin: “We can say that the death of the world comes to an end when the sin of the world dies, explaining the words of the Apostle: ‘And after he has put all enemies under his feet, then the last enemy, death, will be destroyed’” (CC 6:36); “No one will do evil any more, and evil will govern no one” (Hom. in Ies. Nav. 8:5); “There will be no one who does evil any more, as there will be no evil any more” (Exp. in Prov. 5).93 The liberation of creation from death will be a liberation from the devil (Exh. ad Mart. 13); even demons will be freed:
Let us now see what will be the liberation of creation and the end of enslavement. At the end of the world, when souls and rational creatures will be, so to say, pushed by the Lord out of the locks and gates, some will move more slowly due to their laziness, others will fly swiftly with their zeal. . . . But when Christ will have handed the kingdom to God the Father,94 then these creatures too, which earlier had become a part of the kingdom of Christ, along with the rest of the kingdom will be handed to the Father, that this may rule over them. Thus, when God will be “all in all,”95 as these also are part of the “all,” God will be in them as in all. (Princ. 1:7:5)
The importance of free will in Origen does not exclude universal salva
tion.96 For in Princ. 1:6:3, Origen argues that demons and the devil himself will return to the Good in the end precisely because they always keep their free will. The latter does not conflict with God’s providential action and universal salvation, as is clear in Comm. in Rom. 5:10:212–22: “if all the factors that St. Paul listed cannot separate us from God’s love . . . still less shall our free will be able to separate us from God’s love.” In fact,
I do not deny in the least that the rational nature will always keep its free will, but I declare that the power and effectiveness of Christ’s cross and of his death, which he took upon himself toward the end of aeons, are so great as to be enough to set right and save, not only the present and the future aeon, but also all the past ones, and not only this order of us humans, but also the heavenly orders and powers. (Comm. in Rom. 4:10)
Salvation will have to be voluntary, for all, by means of a conversion that will be enabled by the healing action of Christ. For “nothing is impossible for the Omnipotent; no being is incurable for the One who created it” (Princ. 3:6:5). Christ-God, who created all, including the devil, will be able to heal all, even the devil.97 “In souls, there is no illness caused by evilness that is impossible to cure for God the Logos, who is superior to all” (CC 8:72). It is thanks to Christ-Logos that what Origen foresees in Princ. 1:3:6 will be accomplished: “many prophecies mysteriously speak98 of the complete elimination of evil and rectification of every soul.” The ultimate end (telos) is the restoration even of the devil, who will voluntarily submit to Christ-Logos and be saved.99 He will be saved only once he has returned to the Good.
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