A Larger Hope 1

by Ilaria L E Ramelli

  This whole passage is so replete with Origen’s ideas that Augustine felt the need to disavow it in his later Retractations: “That all beings will return to the condition from which they fell should not be understood in the sense of Origen’s theory . . . for those who will be punished in the eternal fire do not return to God, from whom they detached themselves” (1:7:6). Given the closeness of Augustine’s thought to Origen, at least in his anti-Manichaean phase, it is not surprising that a collection of texts from Origen’s On First Principles has been ascribed to Augustine under the title On the Incarnation of the Logos to Ianuarius. Besides Karla Pollmann, István Perczel, and Michael Cameron, Daniel Heide, too, explicitly accepts my reconstruction of Augustine as a supporter of apokatastasis in his anti-Manichaean phase.323

  It is also of interest that a prominent fourth-century Christian Neoplatonist such as Marius Victorinus exerted some influence on Augustine. For Victorinus is likely to have had a penchant for the apokatastasis theory. Marius Victorinus—a Platonist born a pagan who converted to Christianity rather late in his life, becoming a Christian Platonist—composed a treatise against Arianism. Here in 3.8 he states that Jesus Christ “will save all beings into life” and in 1.57 he details that Christ fulfilled the mystery so that all life in flesh, filled with eternal light, should return to heaven, free from all corruption.” Universal salvation performed by Christ is but a consequence of the creation performed by Christ-Logos: “The Logos was made ‘all in all,’ generated all beings, and saved them” (1.26). Victorinus seems to have had some sympathy for apokatastasis, which is not surprising in a Christian Platonist who knew and esteemed Origen. This, and possibly also the influence of Ambrose, and the transmission of Origen’s texts, anthologies, quotations, and translations, as well as the metaphysical monistic needs of Augustine’s anti-Manichaean polemic, may go a little way to explaining Augustine’s early openness to apokatastasis.

  Before leaving Augustine, it is worth mentioning a tantalizing glimpse he offers into the faith of ordinary believers on the issue of hell. Augustine comments that there are “very many” Christians who, on the basis of their beliefs about divine goodness and mercy, react with horror at the thought of eternal torment (Ench. 112). While not wanting to build too much on this brief aside, it at least suggests that in Augustine’s day universalist belief was not some obscure idea hidden away in a few dark corners of the church. Augustine, however, did his part in ensuring that it would become such.

  John Cassian

  John Cassian (c.360–435), who became a monk in Palestine and eventually brought eastern monasticism to the West, founding an Egyptian-style monastery in Gaul, is an important although possibly problematic figure to discuss.324 Here I am concerned with the Conferences that have been handed down under his name and were attacked by Prosperus of Aquitania, who tended to present them as close to Pelagianism—which they are not. Cassian’s Conferences are a series of questions and long answers by Egyptian hermits. Conference 13 in particular diverges from Augustine’s mature doctrine of grace,325 which in more Origenian circles was perceived as a new form of predestinationism, similar to that which Origen had opposed in some “gnostics” all his life long. (Cassian was not alone in opposing Augustine’s theology of human freedom and divine grace, a theology that represented a significant innovation within the Christian tradition to that point—Vincent of Lérin similarly opposed Augustinian predestinationism.) According to Cassian’s Conference 13, God does not predestine some people to salvation from the beginning and in a gratuitous way. Human free will, instead, must choose the Good, and God’s grace will assist it. Even if free will orients itself toward evil, grace will intervene to reorient it toward the Good. Indeed, salvation necessarily requires God’s grace (Ch. 6).

  [God]wants all human beings to be saved and to reach the knowledge of truth [1 Tim 2:4]. Indeed, Scripture says: “Your Father who is in heaven does not want any of these little ones to be lost/to perish” [Matt 18:14]. And again: “God does not want to have a soul perish, but he calls it back” [Ezek 33:11; 2 Pet 3:9], thus demonstrating that even those who have gone far from God will not perish completely. . . . “Because I live—says the Lord—I do not want the sinner to die, but to convert and live” [Ezek 18:23]. . . . If God does not want any of these little ones to perish, how could we imagine without serious blasphemy that God does not want all humans to be saved, but only some instead of all? Should some ever perish, these would perish against God’s will.326 . . . Just as a physician who is benevolent to the utmost degree, for the sake of our salvation God will bring us what is opposite to our will, and sometimes he delays and prevents our bad intentions and mortal attempts, that they may not have their horrible effect. And while we rush toward death, God pulls us back toward salvation and, while we are even unaware of death, saves us from the jaws of hell. (Ch. 7)

  God’s benevolence for the creatures is so immense that God’s providence not only accompanies our will, but it also precedes it, and “shows the way of salvation to those who are in error” (Ch. 8). Indeed, in Chapter 9 God is said to be found by those who were not looking for him, and to always extend his arms toward those who do not believe and refuse him; God “calls those who resist and drags humans to salvation against their own will. To those who want to sin he steals away the faculty of realizing their plans and in his goodness he prevents those who are falling into evilness.” With Origen, the author insists (Ch. 11) that divine grace or providence and human free will are not opposed to each other. If one turns to the Good, divine providence helps him or her; if one is “lazy or cold” (both adjectives reflect Origen’s moral terminology), divine providence exhorts one’s heart, so as to form good will in it. Many a time God snatches people from the danger of spiritual death even without them being aware of this (Ch. 14). Nobody knows all the ways in which God “drags humanity to salvation” (Ch. 15). Cassian criticizes the doctrine of justification by faith, insofar as he thinks that not even that may be necessary, let alone human works of righteousness; with this he does not deny the value of faith or works, but he puts divine grace before anything else.327 And grace, in his view, does not operate only in some, as Augustine thought, but in all:

  God brings salvation to humanity in various and infinite ways, . . . compelling some to salvation even against their will. . . . God is the first who calls us to himself; while we are still ignorant and reluctant, God brings us to salvation. . . . God, the Father of all, works all in all, as the Apostle says,328 like an extremely good father or an extremely kind physician. And now he puts in us the germs of salvation and offers to each of us zeal in each one’s free will. . . . [N]ow God saves people, even against their will and without their awareness, from an imminent ruin and a precipitous fall. . . . God drags those who do not want and resist him, and compels them to want the Good. . . . “You will know that I am the Lord when I have benefited you for the sake of my Name, not according to your bad behavior, not according to your evil works, o house of Israel. . . . The God of all operates in all in such a way as to exhort, protect, and fortify, but without taking away from us that free will which God has given us. . . . Human intellect and reason cannot entirely grasp how God operates everything in us and yet, at the same time, everything can be ascribed to our free will.” (Chs. 17–18)

  305. Although the Vulgate was probably only partially his own; its significance is pointed out in my “The Bible,” in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Word Literature, I, forthcoming.

  306. See Rufinus Apol. c. Hier. 1:34–37; 43–45.

  307. Reported by Rufinus Apol. c. Hier. 1:26–35. We must stress, however, that Origen thought that future falls would only be possible in the ages prior to the apokatastasis, not once the apokatastasis was realized.

  308. Quoted by Rufinus Apol. c. Hier. 2:1–11.

  309. On Jerome switching ideas for political convenience, see my Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, 627–41 (esp. 636–41)
.

  310. Comm. in Matt. 14:10; Ep. 124:3; Comm. in Io. 7.

  311. Rufinus Apol. c. Hier. 2:15.

  312. See Ramelli, “Origen’s Exegesis of Jeremiah”; referred to in Arnold, Der Wahre Logos des Kelsos, 593.

  313. Pelagianism essentially rejected the notion of divine grace and the necessity of grace for the salvation of a human being, while both Origen and Augustine thought that divine grace is indispensable to human salvation.

  314. De gest. Pel. 1:3:9.

  315. See also C. Iul. 5:47 and 6:10, in which Augustine refutes the thesis of the eventual conversion and salvation of the devil, ascribing this idea to Origen. He does not even take into consideration that it was rather Gregory of Nyssa who supported it more decisively and overtly than Origen.

  316. In De haer. 43 Augustine—equally unfoundedly—accuses Origen of teaching an infinite sequence of aeons in which the devil will be purified and rational creatures will fall again and again, with no end.

  317. PL 31:1211–6 = CSEL 18:151–57. See also De haer. 43, in which Augustine insists that Origen learnt the doctrine of universal salvation from the Platonists. It must be noted, however, that Plato himself did not believe in universal salvation.

  318. See Ramelli and Konstan, Terms for Eternity, new edition, 47–80.

  319. This is the same argument as presented in the passage included in Basil’s monastic rules in the form of questions and answers, which is probably interpolated. Origen had already refuted it in his Commentary on Romans, where he demonstrated that, if life is eternal, death cannot possibly be eternal.

  320. See my “Origen in Augustine: A Paradoxical Reception,” endorsed and confirmed by Perczel, “St. Maximus on the Lord’s Prayer,” 229; by Pollmann, “The Broken Perfume-Flask”; and by Cameron, “Origen and Augustine.”

  321. PL 32:1309–78; ed. J. B. Bauer CSEL 90, 1992.

  322. God’s goodness is also at the center of Comm. in Io. 6:57: the eventual universal submission to Christ must be understood as universal salvation because only this will be “worthy of the goodness of the God of the universe.”

  323. Daniel Heide, “’Aποκατάστασις,” 206; Heidl, Augustine, whom I receive and discuss in Apokatastasis and in “Origen in Augustine.”

  324. Panayiotis Tzamalikos maintains that most of the works ascribed to John Cassian (late fourth to early fifth cent.) were originally composed in Greek by a Palestinian monk, Cassian the Sabaite, who lived in the time of Justinian and was well steeped in the Origenian tradition. We will not address this hypothesis here.

  325. In his mature doctrine of grace, Augustine posited that after the original sin, all humanity cannot avoid sinning (non posse non peccare). This is why humanity is a “lump of condemnation” or “damned mass” (massa damnationis, massa damnata). God inscrutably chooses some people and predestines them to salvation, while the others are doomed to damnation. This solution was often perceived as a double predestination, which still Eriugena in the ninth century rejected in his De praedestinatione.

  326. This is hypothetical; Cassian is not stating that some will perish.

  327. “God’s Grace is superabundant and many a time overcomes the restricted limits of a person’s lack of faith” (Ch. 16).

  328. Paul in 1 Cor 15:28.

  9

  The Last Exponents of Patristic Thought

  Various Authors with Hints of Universalism

  Sinesius of Cyrene

  Synesius of Cyrene (373–414) was a Neoplatonist and a disciple of the Neoplatonist philosopher and scientist Hypatia of Alexandria, whom he venerated and to whom he wrote letters. He interpreted the Trinity in the light of Neoplatonic triads of principles. When he was made a bishop, he wrote to his brother (Letter 105) saying that he was unwilling to give up his philosophical convictions:

  Philosophy is opposite to the beliefs of the masses: I shall certainly not admit that the soul is posterior to the body, . . . [nor] that the world is doomed to perish with all of its components. . . . I regard the resurrection as something mystical and ineffable. I am far from sharing the ideas of the multitude.

  That the soul is created either with the body or prior to the body, that the intelligible world is eternal (in God), and that the resurrection is not only of the body but also of the soul and intellect are all aspects of the Origenian tradition that Synesius seemingly takes up, along with the allegorical and spiritual exegesis of Scripture. This allowed him to interpret the resurrection as both physical and spiritual, as a restoration not only of the body, but also of the soul to the Good. And since the resurrection is universal, as Scripture announces, the restoration too will be so. Indeed in his ninth Anacreontic Ode Synesius highlights the salvific consequences of Christ’s descent to hell: “He liberated the souls from their sufferings,” and in his Ode to the Savior he sang: in the tomb, Christ as God has purified the earth, the air, the demons, and hell itself, becoming “the Help for the dead.”

  Isodore of Pelusium and John Chrysostom

  Isidore of Pelusium was an Egyptian monk in the first half of the fifth century who tried in vain to defend John Chrysostom (c.349–407), Archbishop of Constantinople, before Theophilus of Alexandria, who was angry with John because he, together with his deacon Olympia, had received and protected some Origenian monks—supporters of the doctrine of universal salvation—in Constantinople. After John’s death in exile in 407, Isidore exhorted Cyril of Alexandria to rehabilitate John’s memory. Like Origen, he privileged the spiritual sense of Scripture and upheld the Nicene Trinitarian theology. The sixth-century Byzantine theologian Gobar attests that Isidore was accused of “Origenism,” but the accusation, according to Gobar, was groundless.329 John Chrysostom himself, in Hom. Phlm. 3, insisted that Gehenna has an educative function: “But why do I speak of slaves, who easily fall into these sins? But let a man have sons, and let him allow them to do everything they want, and let him not punish them; will they not be worse than anything? Tell me, in the case of men then, it is a sign of goodness to punish, and of cruelty not to punish, and is it not so in the case of God? Since he is good, he has therefore prepared Gehenna.” Chrysostom, although he was not a consistent or explicit supporter of soteriological universalism, was viewed by Jerome as an Origenist sympathizer.330

  Philoxenus and Barsanuphius

  Philoxenus of Mabbug († 523), a Syrian Christian writer, basing himself on Romans 8:22, seems to have attributed to Christ the restoration of the whole creation: “through his renewing activity, which changes death into life and the corruptible into incorruptibility, all creatures obtain an amazing restoration and transformation” (Commentary on Matthew-Luke, fr. 12). But it is especially meaningful that even Barsanuphius of Gaza, who is regarded as an anti-Origenist, in his Letter 569 recommended that Christians should pray for the salvation of the whole world, including “heretics” and “pagans.” He declared that three saints pray for this—one of these being himself—and “they will indeed achieve God’s great mercy.” Therefore, he seems to have embraced universal salvation, although in a somewhat cautious and indirect way.

  Syriac Monasticism: Bar Sudhaili and Pseudo-Dionysius

  Bar Sudhaili’s Pantheism

  Especially through Evagrius and his disciples, Origen’s thought exercised a heavy influence on Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism. Stephen Bar Sudhaili (c.480–c.543) was a monk from Edessa who absorbed an advanced form of Evagrian Origenism in Egypt. He is very probably the author of the Book of the Holy Hierotheus,331 in which he supported a doctrine of universal salvation that came dangerously close to pantheism, in that he claimed that all creatures in the end will join the very substance of God. This goes far beyond the eschatological unity of wills taught in the earlier Origenian tradition. It is arguably the extreme form of Origenism represented amon
g various Palestinian monks in the early sixth century, including Bar Sudhaili, that provoked the reaction against Origen that followed. Unfortunately, their critics made no distinction between the Origenist teaching of the monks and Origen’s own teaching. In their minds, because Origen was the source of inspiration for the monks he obviously taught the heresies that they affirmed. Thus it was that Origen became a “heretic.”

  Pseudo-Dionysius: Apokatastasis as Universal Return to the One

  The texts known as the Corpus Dionysianum were destined to become some of the great works of Christian theology, exerting a large influence in both the eastern and the western churches, right up to this day. The author, probably a Syrian Christian working in the sixth century, presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite332—the first-century Athenian philosopher who converted to Christianity as a result of Paul’s Areopagus speech (Acts 17:34). Pseudo-Dionysius, or simply Dionysius, was an Origenian and Evagrian, as especially Perczel and I have shown, with different arguments. It is arguably to Origen and his tradition that Pseudo-Dionysius refers when he speaks of “theology” and “theologians,”333 and when he describes God as “Monad and Henad”334 (DN 1:4) he is not quoting Proclus (the pagan Neoplatonist), who never refers to God using this couple of terms, but Origen (Princ. 1:1:6).335 Furthermore, the concept of divine love—not only as charitable love (ἀγάπη/agapē), but also as passionate love (ἔρως/erōs), which is so much developed in Dionysius—is a clear example of the influence of Origen (who probably drew not only on the Platonic tradition, but even more on his exegesis of the Song of Songs). Gregory of Nyssa and Methodius had already been influenced by Origen in this understanding of divine love. Pseudo-Dionysius in turn was also influenced by Gregory, another supporter of the doctrine of universal salvation.336