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93. Thus, in On the Resurrection Origen interpreted Ezekiel 37 as both a physical resurrection and a spiritual restoration from sin, allegorically expressed as a return of the Hebrews from exile (from Methodius De res. from Photius Bibl. cod. 234, p. 300a). On Origen’s use of allegoresis in his biblical interpretation see, e.g., my “Origen’s Allegoresis of Plato’s and Scripture’s Myths,” received by Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority, 148; by Krulak, “Defining Competition in Neoplatonism,” 80–81; by Urbano, “Difficulties in Writing the Life of Origen.”
94. 1 Cor 15:28.
95. 1 Cor 15:28.
96. As is claimed, e.g., by Holliday, “Will Satan Be Saved?” 1–23.
97. Origen is using the argument of God’s omnipotence, employed by Jesus in Matthew 19:25–26 and Mark 10:26–27, in reference to the salvation of sinners.
98. Universal salvation must not be proclaimed to just anyone, because it would be dangerous for the immature who do good out of fear and not out of love (1 John 4:17–9).
99. “‘Christ is the firstfruits, then those who belong to Christ, at his coming, and then the ultimate end will come’ [1 Cor 15:24]. This ultimate end will indeed take place on Christ’s coming, when he will hand the kingdom to God the Father, after annihilating all principalities, authorities, and powers . . . then, he of whom it is written that ‘He exalted himself before the Lord almighty’ will be among those who submit, conquered because he has yielded to the Logos, and subjected to God’s image, becoming a stool for his feet. Thus, he contemplates the salvific economy, which leads to the good end.” In his Letter to Friends in Alexandria, Origen stated that not even a fool would maintain that the devil is to be saved, since not even sinners will enter the kingdom of God. As long as they are sinners, and have not repented, they will not enter. Neither will the devil, until he repents and ceases to be “enemy and death.”
100. “Likewise, I deem it necessary to investigate whether after this aeon there will be a correction and purification, even bitter and painful, for those who have not wanted to obey the word of God, and, on the other hand, teaching and rational education for others, thanks to which those who already during this life have devoted themselves to this study will be able to make progress. . . . And it is necessary to investigate whether after these facts there will be the end of all, or, for the sake of the correction and purification of those who will still need this, there will be another aeon . . . and whether there will come a stage in which there will be no longer any aeon, whether there has already existed a stage in which there was no aeon, whether there have been and there will be more than one aeon, and whether it will ever happen that there exists one aeon that is perfectly identical to another” (Princ. 2:3:1). Origen’s answer to the last question is clearly negative, in opposition to the Stoics.
101. Princ. 3:3:5. Cf. Comm. in Io. 13:3: “αἰώνιος/aiōnios life” will not be the ultimate stage; it will be the life in the next aeon, in Christ, but that aeon will finish and after “αἰώνιος/aiōnios life” the final restoration will come, in which all will be in the Holy Trinity, and God will be “all in all.”
102. “Whenever Scripture says, ‘from aeon to aeon,’ the reference is to an interval of time, and it is clear that it will have an end. And if Scripture says, ‘in another aeon,’ what is indicated is clearly a longer time, and yet an end is still fixed. And when the ‘aeons of the aeons’ are mentioned, a certain limit is again posited, perhaps unknown to us, but surely established by God” (Hom. in Ex. 6:13).
103. “The perfection and end of all beings will be found in God, when God will be ‘all in all’” (Comm. in Rom. 8:13:9); “Those who will have been reformed and corrected will remain steadfast in its perfection. . . . The fact of closely adhering to the culmination of its perfection is said to take place in God” (Comm. in Rom. 3:10:3).
104. Ps 82:6; John 10:34; 1 John 3:2–3; 2 Pet 1:3–4.
105. Cf. Princ. 4:4:8: “The Godhead, who is good by nature, wanting that there might exist beings to benefit, and such as to be able to rejoice in the goods bestowed upon them, created creatures worthy of Itself, that is, capable of understanding It in a worthy way. In reference to these, God declares, ‘I have generated children’” (Isa 1:2).
106. 1 Cor 15:26.
107. Origen is very much aware that αἰών/aiōn and αἰώνιος/aiōnios in Scripture almost never imply eternity (in fact, they do so only when they refer to God): “In Scriptures, αἰών/aiōn is sometimes found in the sense of something that knows no end; sometimes it designates something that has no end in the present world, but will have in the future one; sometimes it means a certain stretch of time; or again the duration of the life of a single person is called αἰών/aiōn” (Comm. in Rom. 6:5).
108. In Origen, αΐδιος/aidiōs is the technical term for the absolutely eternal. It is only found in reference to God, who alone is eternal and immortal, or to eternal life, when Origen wants to stress that it will be eternal as a participation in the life of God.
109. This is the argument of my studies on the terminology of eternity and time in Origen and ancient Christianity, which I set out in detail in Terms of Eternity and The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis. Besides many other reviewers of my books and my relevant articles, Daniel Heide recognized the force of my arguments in his “’Aποκατάστασις,” 201–20.
110. “La raison essentielle pour laquelle l’expression πῦρ αἰώνιον ne parait pas à Origène impliquer nécessairement l’éternité du châtiment tel que nous l’entendons, c’est que l’adjectif αἰώνιος conserve pour lui tout l’ambiguïté du mot dont il dérive αἰών. Dans le deux Testaments à côté de la signification <éternité> conçue comme une durée sans fin, on trouve celle, que nous traduisons par
111. 1 Cor 13:8.
112. 1 Cor 15:28.
113. The stability of all rational creatures in the Good in the final restoration is indeed attested by Comm. in Io. 10:42:26; Comm. in Matt. 12:34; Dial. cum Her. 26; Hom. in Reg. 1:4.
114. Ramelli, “La coerenza” and “Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of Universal Salvation.”
115. “God takes providential care of all with mercy, and exhorts and pushes all to salvation by means of remedies from which each one can profit. . . . God, pre-ordering everything with Wisdom up to the tiniest details, and distinguishing everything with judgment, with a most just retribution has disposed everything so that every creature may be taken care of and helped in relation to its merit.”
116. Princ. 2:11; 3:6:9.
117. In this perspective, Origen considers even the death decreed by God after the fall as healing and salutary, e.g., in Comm. in Matt. 15:15; Hom. in Lev. 14:4; a fragment preserved by Methodius from Photius Bibl. cod. 234.
118. Princ. 2:10:6; cf. 2:7:3; 3:1:15.
119. “He had me fall with this purpose: in order for me to rise again” (Hom. in Luc. 17).
120. E.g. Comm. in Rom. 8:1; 8:9; 8:12; 8:9. See also Fr. in Luc. 125; Hom. in Ex. 6:9; Hom. in Ier. 5:4–5; Hom. in Num. 7:1.
121. “Jesus’ blood was so precious . . . that it alone was enough for the redemption of all.” In De orat. 27:15, too, Origen, reflecting on Heb 9:26 and Eph 2:7, argues that Christ’s sacrifice was made once and for all aeons, and in Fr. in Iob 387:14 he declares that “the Cross happened once and for all” (hapax).
122. CC 3:49; cf. 4:28.
123. Comm. in Rom. 6:12:64; 67:70–76.
124. “It is not only possible, but also the case that
all rational creatures will eventually submit to one Law. . . . We profess that at a certain point the Logos will have obtained the hegemony over all rational creatures and will have transformed every soul to the perfection that is proper to it, when each one, exerting its own free will, will have made its own choices and reached the state that it had elected. But we hold that it will not happen as in the case of material bodies, . . . it is not so in the case of illnesses derived from sin. For it is certainly not the case that the supreme God, who dominates over all rational creatures, cannot cure them. Indeed, since the Logos is more powerful than any evil that can exist in the soul, it applies the necessary therapy to every individual, according to God’s will. And the ultimate end of all things will be the elimination of evil.”
125. “Christ’s subjection to the Father means the beatitude of our own perfection. . . . If therefore this subjection in which the Son is said to submit to the Father is understood as good and salvific, it is perfectly consistent to interpret also the subjection of the enemies to the Son of God, of which Scripture speaks, as salvific and helpful. In this way, when the Son is said to submit to the Father, this indicates the perfect restoration of every creature. And likewise, when the enemies are said to submit to the Son of God, this means the salvation, in Christ, of those who submit, and the restoration of the lost.”
126. See, e.g., Hom. in Gen. 13:4; CC 4:83; 2:11.
127. Origen quoted by Athanasius, Decr. 27.
128. Cf. Princ. 3:6:1: “The fact that Moses said, ‘God created it in the image of God,’ without mentioning the likeness, indicates that the human being since its first creation was granted the dignity of the image, but the perfection of the likeness has been reserved for the end, in that it must attain it by imitating God with its own industriousness. Thus, having been given from the beginning the possibility of the perfection through the dignity of the image, it can achieve the perfect likeness through the works.”
129. “Although the intellect, out of laziness, loses its capacity for receiving God in itself in a pure and integral way, however it retains in itself the possibility of recovering a better knowledge, when the interior human being, which is also called rational, is restored to the image and likeness of God who created it. This is why the Prophet says: ‘All the earth will remember and return to the Lord and all peoples will knee before him’ [Isa 45:22–23]. If one dares affirm the ontological destruction of what has been made in the image and likeness of God, in my view he extends his impiety to the Son of God as well. For this is called in Scripture ‘image of God’” (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15).
130. Its importance is underlined, e.g., in Princ. 2:1:2; 2:9:7; 3:1:17; 3:5:5.
131. “The length of the punishment is calculated on the basis of the quality and nature of one’s sin. . . . I cannot say with certainty how long we shall remain closed in prison until we have paid our debt. If one who owes a small debt is not let out until one has paid the last coin, certainly for one who owes a very large debt innumerable aeons will be calculated for the repayment of his debt” (Hom. in Luc. 35). If they are calculated, they must have a limit.
132. “‘All flesh will see God’s salvation’ [Luke 3:6]. . . . There is no one that is excepted so as not to see God’s salvation” (Hom. in Luc. 22:5; cf. 32:5).
133. See, for instance, the Apocalypse of Peter.
134. See the Stoic theory of apokatastasis, overtly criticized by Origen.
135. Origen may have thought of Bardaisan as well, but we cannot be totally sure either that Bardaisan used the word apokatastasis or that Origen knew his work.
136. In Princ. 2:3:5, as well as in Comm. in Matt. 17:19.
137. Thus, for instance, he calls the restoration “the perfection of the resurrection” (Comm. in Io. 10:37), when Christ will be with the Father, and thereby God will be “all in all.” Gregory Nyssen will emphasize the link between resurrection and restoration.
138. See Ramelli, “La coerenza” and “Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of Universal Salvation.”
139. See especially Princ. 3:5:5: “Nobody but God the Creator of the universe can calculate and order each one’s merits and at the same time restore all to one end, taking into account the various falls and progressions, rewarding virtue and punishing sins, both now and in the future aeon and in all worlds, before and after. God only knows the reason why he allows some to follow their own will and fall . . . whereas he begins to assist others little by little, almost leading them by hand, and restores them to their original condition, placing them on high. Some, having misunderstood this, unable to grasp that the variety of this disposition has been established by God on the basis of previous causes due to the use of free will, have believed that all that which happens in the world is determined by fortuitous events or fatalistic necessity and nothing depends on our free will.”
140. Demonstration in my “In Illud” and “The Trinitarian Theology.”
141. Pinnock, “Annihilationism,” offers a treatment from the systematic point of view, without a focus on patristic eschatology; he takes aiōnios in the NT to mean “everlasting,” which is not the case unless it refers to God. But he rightly concludes that, as opposed to universalism, annihilationism “maintains the doctrine of hell but without the sadistic aspect. It retains the realism of some finally saying no to God and going to hell but without turning the notion of hell into a monstrosity.”
142. Finney, Resurrection, Hell and the Afterlife, 161.
143. On patristic annihilationism, see, e.g., Bernstein, The Formation of Hell, 205–65. This interpretation of hell has remained an option today, when it is being revived by several theologians. Jonathan L. Kvanvig in a book and in an article for The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology presents annihilation of sinners as one possible alternative to eternal hell (viewed either as punishment or as a way to honor individual choices). (Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell; Kvanvig, “Hell.”) The other alternative is universal salvation, which Kvanvig however, as many others, sees as problematic with respect to individual free will. Against this objection, in the same handbook, Thomas Talbott concentrates specifically on Christian universalism, which has the salvation of all depend on Christ (Talbott, “Universalism”). This, I note, is the doctrine defended by patristic universalists, who were also strenuous defenders of free will, as I have thoroughly demonstrated in The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis. From their perspective, it would be absurd to reject universalism because it jeopardizes human free will.
144. See my “Philo’s Doctrine of Apokatastasis,” 29–55.
145. The same set of ideas underlies another homiletic passage by Origen (Homily 5 on Psalm 36, 5). The impious will no longer exist, because he has chosen not to participate in God, who always is, and is Good itself. But, again, the destruction of the sinner in the next world to which Origen refers will be, properly speaking, the destruction of his sin, of evil, so that the sinner will be no longer a sinner, but a righteous person. For evil, when it is no longer chosen by anyone, will vanish according to its ontological non-subsistence (Commentary on the Song of Songs 4.1.13).
146. For the translation of αἰώνιον/aiōnion as “otherworldly” or “pertaining to the world to come” or “long-lasting,” instead of “eternal,” see the Appendix.
147. On which see also MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, 153–54.
148. See my “Origen’s Homilies on Jeremiah: Resurrection.”
149. For a discussion of biblical support to annihilationism, see Fudge and Peterson, Two Views of Hell, and Powys, Hell.
150. For instance, Irenaeus thinks that those who do not have the Spirit, but are only “flesh and blood,” are dead, because humans are made alive by the Spirit and those who do the works of the flesh will die (Against Heresies 5.9–10).
This position, even if grounded mostly on Pauline passages, comes close to that of Philo of Alexandria.
4
Universal Salvation in Origen’s First Followers and His Apologists
The first Alexandrian Origenians and St. Anthony
Theognostus and Pierius
After Origen’s death the catechetical school in Alexandria was directed by Theognostus (in 265–80) and then Pierius. The former wrote Outlines (now lost, but summarized by Photius) in which he adhered to Origen’s doctrine, including his doctrine of universal salvation, and defended Origen. St. Athanasius, who held Origen and Didymus in high esteem, also praised Theognostus together with Origen. Pierius followed Origen’s thought so faithfully as to be called “Origen the Younger.”151 According to Philip of Side, he composed a panegyric152 on St. Pamphilus, who was a disciple of his and wrote an apology for Origen. Still in the second half of the fourth century, Pierius was admired by the Egyptian Origenian monks dubbed the Tall Brothers, and in particular Ammonius, who read Origen together with Pierius and Didymus, and St. Melania, who read Origen along with Pierius, Basil, and Gregory.153 All of which is to say that Origen’s person and work continued to be esteemed in his native Egypt and wider afield.