Now in this restorative reorienting of wills, Christ’s role is paramount, in particular through his cross. For the crucifixion “effects the utter abolition of all unnatural qualities and movements that have added themselves to our natures owing to the disobedience, and restores all the original natural qualities and movements. In this apokatastasis, not even one of the logoi of creatures will be found falsified” (Q. ad Thal. 445–51). Not . . . even . . . one. István Perczel agrees with me that this claim “has a strong universalist taint, as normally all of Maximus’ statements about the complete restoration of the human nature in Christ do have.”373 Indeed, writes Maximus, Christ, “having reconciled humans in himself, leads them through the Spirit to the Father” (The Lord’s Prayer 73–74). What he has effected is “the apokatastasis of the impassible nature oriented towards itself” and not towards evil, “the abolition of the law of sin,” and “the destruction of the evil tyranny that had imprisoned us through deceit,” i.e., the devil’s deception of humans by making them believe that evil and sin are good (77–85). Maximus clearly interprets sin according to the doctrines of ethical intellectualism, just as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa had done.
Not only Christ’s cross, but also his inhumanation is pivotal to the restoration. Indeed, Maximus takes over Origen’s motif of the generation of the Son in the heart and will of the believers, who are thus saved. The Son “becomes incarnate through those saved,” in whom the likeness to God is attained, through a voluntary effort, in the reshaping of the will according to the divine likeness. The logos of such a person becomes a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, as well as of the Father, and gives birth to the Son from its will; this makes the soul of this logikon a virgin mother, having no male-female dualism in itself, and therefore no decay (352–402). The ideal of the unified nous is clearly an Evagrian legacy. As Maximus puts it in Questions to Thalassius 60, the ultimate telos, for which all things exist and in view of which all things are ordained is “the recapitulation of all the beings that God has created.” For Christ “has established himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s Goodness.” Due to the mystery of Christ, all beings in all aeons have received their beginning/principle and end/fulfilment in Christ.
István Perczel also agrees with me that Maximus’ thought has much in common with that of Origen and Evagrius and, explicitly referring to my treatment of apokatastasis in Maximus in my 2013 monograph, he concurs that “Maximus partly allowed for apokatastasis and partly even explicitly exposed this doctrine.”374 In many ways, despite his understandable caution, it seems fair to think of Maximus as a true heir of Origen.
Seventh–Eighth Century Syriac Ascetics: Isaac and John
Isaac of Nineveh
A near contemporary of Maximus, the seventh-century Syriac ascetic St. Isaac of Nineveh († c.700), knew Evagrius’ work very well, including his Chapters on Knowledge in their non-expurgated Syriac version, which bristle with passages relevant to the doctrine of apokatastasis. Like Evagrius, Isaac also composed Chapters on Knowledge: these coincide with the third chapter of his Second Part, discovered by Sebastian Brock in 1983 (ms. syr. e. 7, Bodleian Library, Oxford). Moreover, he knew Ephrem, John the Solitary, Macarius, Abba Isaiah, and probably Bar Sudhaili. He retired from his bishopric in Nineveh after just five months and became a hermit in the mountains.375 Like Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac is profoundly convinced that sufferings inflicted by God can only have a therapeutic and pedagogical aim, not a retributive one: “God corrects with love, never inflicts evil in return for evil, but he only wants his image [i.e., the human soul] to recover its good health.”376 In this way, every soul will return pure from passions and evil, as it was in the beginning.377 For God “loves the whole human nature, not the single person” (Third Part 6:31), which means that God loves the creature itself—which is good qua created by God—independently of the sins that the single persons may commit. The love of God surpasses sins and evil.
Even the death decreed by God after Adam’s sin was only apparently a punishment, but in fact it was a benefit (as Methodius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus also maintained): God “established death as though it had been a punishment for Adam, because of his sin, . . . but under the appearance of something fearful, he concealed his eternal intention concerning death and the aim that his Wisdom wanted to reach: . . . death would be the way to transport us to that splendid and glorious aeon” (Second Part 39:4).
Indeed, that God does not reason or act in terms of retribution is demonstrated by the incarnation and the passion of Christ: “Is the coming of Christ in any way commensurate with the works of the generations prior to it? Does this infinite compassion seem to you a retribution for those evil deeds? If God is one who punishes, and does so by retribution, what adequate retribution can you possibly see here?”378 So, hell (Gehenna) cannot be an eternal punitive retribution: “Even regarding the affliction and condemnation of Gehenna, there is some hidden mystery, with which the wise Creator has taken as a point of departure for his future success the evilness of our actions and will. He uses this as a means to bring his salvific plan to perfection. This plan remains hidden to both angels and human beings, and it also remains hidden to those—demons or humans—who are undergoing suffering, for the whole duration of the suffering itself.”379 This clearly implies an end for this duration. Thus, in his definition of a merciful, compassionate heart in Homily 74, Isaac declares that this “burns for the whole creation: for the human beings, the animals, demons, every creature. . . . It cannot stand listening or seeing the slightest evil or sadness in the entire creation. Therefore, this person prays among tears, every moment, for the irrational animals, for the enemies of truth, and for all those who harm her, that they may be saved and forgiven. In the immense compassion that arises in her heart, which is in the image of God, beyond measure, she even prays for snakes,” which are associated with the fallen angels. Indeed,
If we said or thought that what concerns Gehenna is not in fact full of love and mixed with compassion, it would be an opinion tainted with blasphemy and abuse at our Lord God. If we even say that he will hand us to fire in order to have us suffer, to torment us, and for every sort of evil, we ascribe to the divine nature hostility toward the rational creatures that God has created through grace. The same is the case if we state that God acts or thinks out of retribution, as though the Godhead wanted to avenge itself. Among all of God’s actions there is none that is not entirely dictated by mercy, love, and compassion: This is the beginning and the end of God’s attitude toward us. (Second Part, 39:22)
This is among the clearest statements in the Origenian tradition on the nature of torment in Gehenna, all the more striking given that it was written in the seventh century, after Justinian’s anathemas.
John of Dalyatha
Another Syriac monk and abbot with universalist sympathies was John of Dalyatha (c.690–780).380 John was influenced by a number of patristic authors who had been supporters of apokatastasis: Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Evagrius, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Isaac of Nineveh, as well as Babai’s commentary on Evagrius’ Chapters on Knowledge and St. Anthony, who in turn was influenced by Origen. So his theological inclinations are not hard to imagine.
Referring to God’s clothing Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, John wrote that the “garment of light,” which after the original sin was lost to humanity and replaced by the “skin tunics” (which for Origen, symbolized mortality and heavy corporeality), will be recovered, thanks to Christ and the help of angels (Disc. 7). Christ is, for John, just as for Origen, the “physician of souls” (Letter 5:18; cf. 11:1). Christ is God’s purifying fire itself, “in which the Creator has purified the creation” (Letter 4:6). Christ is “the fire that cannot be quenched,” precisely that of hell, which kills to give better life (Letter 15:2). This notion was hammered home by Origen especially in his Homilies on Jeremiah.
In his prayer in Letter 42:1, Joh
n calls Christ “the ocean of our forgiveness.” Evildoers “in the world to come” (αἰωνίως/aiōniōs) will experience God as a dark and mortal ocean (Letter 50:12–4), but not “forever.” Indeed, the Godhead will “regenerate rational creatures in the likeness of its glory” and in Ep. 43:22, John renders well the Gospel expression “αἰώνιον/aiōnion fire” with “heavenly/divine [shmynyt’] fire,” not “eternal fire.” In Letter 47:2 John clearly describes only otherworldly beatitude, and not otherworldly torments, as eternal.
Christ’s blood is that which purifies, shed as it was for the sake of forgiveness (Letter 14:3). It has “entirely paid the debt contracted by our evil will” (Letter 5:3). John often insists on God’s love, which “liberates us from the prison where we have imprisoned ourselves, even when we would not like: may Your power prevail over us!” (Letter 5:4). (The idea that God even goes against our will to save us is typical of the Conferences ascribed to John Cassian.) In Letter 40:7, John of Dalyatha envisages the end as “the reconciliation and unity of all those separated,” since these were “created for that unity.” Those who are too little or lacking forces will be helped (Letter 40:11), because that will be “the unified place, which unifies those who are divided” and which is separated from this world by a boundary of silence (Letter 40:6). In Letter 31:2, Christ’s great prayer for unity (John 17:21) is cited. (I will examine its enormous impact on patristic philosophical theology in Novum Testamentum Patristicum John 13–17.)
In Letter 49:9, John, like Evagrius, places the contemplation of God’s providence after that of the final judgment, and observes that in the contemplation of the “totality of humanity as the image of God in which it was created” there is no longer “either righteous or sinner . . . either man or woman, but Christ fully appears in everyone.”381
With John of Dalyatha we will take our leave of the eastern church in the patristic period and move across to the Latin West. There the outstanding universalist at the end of the patristic period was John Scotus Eriugena.
Eriugena, the Latin Heir of Greek Patristics
John the Scot “Eriugena,” meaning “the Irishman” († 877ca.), headed up the Palatine Academy under Charles the Bald, in Gaul, which prospered under his leadership. He was a gifted scholar, fluent in Greek, which was unusual in the Latin West at this time, and a definitive supporter of the doctrine of universal restoration and salvation. This comes as no surprise if one considers that his main sources were Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. Of Gregory he even translated into Latin the treatise On the Creation of the Human Being, and of Origen he definitely knew and cited the treatise On First Principles. The very structure of his masterpiece, Periphyseon (On Natures), corresponds to that of Origen’s On First Principles, the only anterior synthesis of Christian philosophy that can be compared to it. Both works, not accidentally, begin with the treatment of God as Universal Principle or Cause. Moreover, in both works the argumentative structure is the same: philosophical demonstrations are always joined to biblical support (and patristic support, in case of Eriugena). It is telling that Eriugena’s homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John was long believed by many—including Thomas Aquinas—to be a work of Origen’s! It is equally telling that Prudentius of Troyes accused Eriugena of embracing “Origen’s foolishness.”382 In addition, Eriugena also translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin, adding his own commentary on them.
Let us consider some of the evidence regarding his universalism. In his work On Predestination, John the Scot insists on the ontological non-substantiality of evil (3:2–3; 7 and 10), an idea that by now we are well acquainted with as one of the main metaphysical pillars of the doctrine of universal restoration. For, if evil is basically not, it cannot possibly endure forever.
Eriugena is adamant that the root of all sins is not free will per se, which is a gift from God, but “the perverse movement of the rational substance that makes a bad use of the freedom of its own will” (De praed. 5:5–6). This movement tends to nothingness, which is “the bottom of evil” (De praed. 18:9). But the Godhead does not abandon its creatures; this is why it establishes a limit to the evildoing of sinners—with their death—lest it tend to the infinite (De praed. 18:7). And the very torment of evil wills in the other world (i.e., the torment of hell) is described by Eriugena as “a most secret operation” (De praed. 2:5), which enables the final return (reditus) of all sinners to the Good (i.e. God), the First Cause from which they had their very existence. Even the demons’ evilness will be reintegrated into the final unity.
While the substance of sinners, which was created by God, will live forever (semper permansura) and enjoy beatitude in the end, “the evilness that is found in their perverse will is doomed to perish in eternity.”383 Their evilness, not the will itself, will thus disappear, and what will remain of them will ultimately be their good substance, restored to union with God. Indeed, in his Periphyseon Eriugena envisages a universal restoration as the conclusive cosmic movement: the initial movement was the passage from the unity of God to the division and multiplicity of creation, and the final movement will be (Platonically) the return of multiplicity to unity. According to Eriugena, the movement of reunification of all in God begins with the human being itself: the first distinction that will be eliminated is that between man and woman, which was first introduced because of sin and reduced humanity to a “bestial and corruptible kind of multiplication.” This will be abolished thanks to Christ, in whom there is neither man nor woman (Gal 3:28), and this will happen “when human nature will be restored to its original condition,”384 which is “in the image of God.” After the unification and restoration of human nature, the earth and paradise will also be joined together (Periph. 2:8), and this again thanks to Christ, who in his resurrection united not only man and woman, but also earth and heaven (Periph. 2:10). Eriugena foresees the final restoration of all humanity to its original integrity,385 in which it “will very clearly see the greatness and beauty of the image [of God] created in itself.” In his view—as in Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s—the restoration of humanity is made possible by Christ’s inhumanation: for it is in Christ that human nature has been restored (restaurata est).
The human being was made for life in paradise and not for death on earth (Periph. 5:2), and it will return to life. The death of the body is the death of death (Periph. 5:7) and the beginning of restoration:
The first return to the origin of human nature takes place when the body is dissolved and returns to the four elements of the sense-perceptible world of which it is composed.
The second will take place at the resurrection, when each one will receive his or her own body back, after it has been reconstituted by the concourse of the four elements.
The third will take place when the body becomes spiritual.
The fourth will take place when the spirit—and, to speak more clearly, the whole human nature—will return to the primordial causes that are always and immutably in God.
The fifth will be when nature itself, along with its causes, will proceed toward God, just as the air proceeds toward light. For God will be all in all [omnia in omnibus] when there will be nothing but God alone. (Periph. 5:8)
In Periph. 5:20 Eriugena explains that it is always inferior levels of reality that are subsumed and transformed into the superior ones: “the two genders are transformed into the human being, because the differentiation into sexes is inferior to the human being; the earth, which is inferior, is transformed into paradise; the earthly bodies, because they are inferior, will be transformed into heavenly bodies. Then there will follow the reduction of every sense-perceptible creature to unity and its transformation into intellectual, so that the whole of creation will become intellectual. In the end, the whole of creation will be reunited to its Creator, and will be one in God and with God. And this is the end and perfection of all visible and invisible things, as all visible realities will
be transformed into intellectual ones, and all the intellectual ones into God, with an admirable unification [adunatio].” Apokatastasis will be the universal return of all beings to unity in God. All creatures of God will experience it:
The whole universe has been restored [restitutus est], for now in a special sense, in God’s only-begotten Logos, who got incarnated and became a human being, but at the end of the world it will be restored [restaurabitur] in the same Christ in a general and universal way. Indeed, what he accomplished in himself in a special way, will he perform in all in a general way. And I mean, not only in all humans, but in every sense-perceptible creature. For the Logos of God, when he received human nature, omitted no created substance, which he did not receive in human nature. Thus, by receiving human nature, he received every creature in himself. Christ has saved and restored [salvavit et restauravit] human nature, which he received; therefore, Christ has undoubtedly restored [restauravit] every creature, visible and invisible. (Periph. 5:25)
When Christ took on humanity, he took on the entire creation, and this is why he can restore it. For Eriugena, too, it is clear that universal restoration and salvation depends on Christ. Likewise, he states that it is a matter of both faith and intelligence that “thanks to the inhumanation of the Child of God [i.e., Christ] every creature, in heaven and on earth, has been saved.”386 In Periph. 5:27 Eriugena articulates this more:
If God’s Logos has assumed humanity, it has not assumed only one part of it, but all of it, in its wholeness. Now, if it has assumed all of it, it certainly has restored [restituit] all of it in itself, because in it all beings have been restored [restaurata sunt omnia]. He has left no member of humanity—entirely adopted by it—prey to the eternal punishments and the chains of evilness that cannot be broken, as evilness is followed by the misery of torments.387
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