No human creature will be punished in hell eternally. In this respect, Eriugena definitely follows Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. Likewise, he is persuaded that all rational creatures will return to the enjoyment of their natural goods and will be restored into an angelic state (Periph. 5:32). The eventual restoration will indeed be universal, and will take place in three phases or modalities:
1) the material world will return to its causes or principles, (Medioplatonically) conceived as Ideas in the mind of God (Periph. 5:21 and 5:39).
2) There will be “the general return of the whole human nature, saved in Christ, to the original condition of its creation and to the dignity of the image of God” (5:39).
3) The blessed “will overcome, in a superessential manner, all the limits of nature up to the Godhead itself, and will be one and the same thing in God and with God” (5:39).
It is no surprise that Eriugena contests Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:4, which in his view is distorted and misleading. While that passage reads, “God wants all human beings to be saved,” Augustine claimed that “all human beings” there means “all those predestined.”388 This interpretation is unacceptable, according to Eriugena, who in De praed. 19 opens up the possibility of the eventual restoration.
However, Eriugena does make a distinction between all humans, who will be restored and saved, and the more restricted group (which may be distinguished from the rest either forever or in an initial phase), of those who will eat the fruit of the tree of life and be deified:
This return [reditus] is considered in two ways, one of which teaches the restoration [restaurationem] of the whole human nature in Christ, whereas the other does not limit itself to contemplating the restoration per se, in a general sense, but also the beatitude and deification [deificationem] of those who will ascend to the Godhead itself. For one thing is to return to paradise, and another to eat the fruit of the tree of life; . . . its fruit is the blessed life, eternal peace in the contemplation of the truth, which is properly called deification [deificatio]. (Periph. 5:36)
Like Pseudo-Dionysius, thus, Eriugena too draws an equation between the “return” or reditus (the third metaphysical moment in Neoplatonism) and the restoration or restauratio/restitutio. This return and restoration (apokatastasis) is universal. All beings will be restored to God. However, only some beings—at least at an initial stage—enjoy deification by grace.
Daniel Heide, in an otherwise valid study of apokatastasis,389 supports the widespread view that Eriugena distinguishes apokatastasis and theosis (deification), on the grounds that, unlike Origen, Eriugena distinguishes nature and will. However, I would note that the latter distinction was precisely emphasized by Origen, who availed himself of it in his argument for the salvation of the devil. I suspect Eriugena ultimately overcomes the apokatastasis-theosis divide in the supreme epistrophe or reversal/return, as the resolution of all beings in their principles and of these principles in God. According to Heide, for Eriugena, “the perverse wills of sinners shall be subject to everlasting punishment,”390 but this is not exactly what Eriugena says; he rather states: malitia eorum in aeternum peritura. If evil perishes forever from the will, the will becomes good. It is not the will that is tormented forever, but evil that will be destroyed forever, just as had Origen maintained.
In Periph. 5:929A–30D Eriugena quotes, in Rufinus’ translation, a very long passage from Book 3 of Origen’s First Principles, which comments on 1 Corinthians 15:26. Origen here is speaking of the end/perfection/consummation of the world, which is the supreme good to which every rational nature tends, when God will be “all in all.” This means that God will be all goods for every single creature, once they are purified from their vices. Given this purification, Origen can say that evil will remain nowhere. This will be the restoration of the original state of humanity. Origen, and Eriugena with him, underline that God will be not only in few or in many, but in all, absolutely, once both evil and death have vanished altogether. In such a condition, harmony and unity will reign, and there cannot be disagreement (930C).
And what of the devil? Eriugena notes that death, “the last enemy” (1 Cor 15:28)—an appellative of the devil, i.e. spiritual death—must disappear. But the devil is not destroyed in his substance, which is good in that it is a creature of God; rather, Eriugena explains, using Origen’s very words, that the devil’s perverse will shall be abolished: so he will be destroyed as “enemy and death,” but not as a creature of God. For “nothing is impossible to the Omnipotent, no being is incurable for the one who created it.” The last sentence is that in which, as I have argued, Origen corrected Plato with respect to those who are “incurable.”
Eriugena, who is quoting Origen extensively, remarks that Origen is clearer than Ambrose—his follower—on this score (930D): Ambrose stated that the demons will not remain forever, that their evilness may not be absolutely eternal, but this can mean either that the demons will be eliminated together with their evilness (annihilationism) or that their evilness will perish, while their substance will remain. Origen clearly embraced the latter option, and Eriugena overtly followed him.391
It must be noted that it is Alumnus,392 the disciple, who objects to the doctrine of apokatastasis on the grounds that it conflicts with the (supposedly) “eternal” punishments mentioned in Scripture. Alumnus, as many commentators maintain, represents Eriugena before his encounter with the Greeks, while Nutritor, the master, represents Eriugena illuminated by his Greek theological education.393 So it is clear that finally Eriugena, as Nutritor, sides with Origen, not with Augustine. And indeed he quotes Origen as authoritative on universal apokatastasis.
It is not accidental that it is especially for its universalism, clearly and avowedly influenced by Origen, that Eriugena’s Periphyseon was criticized and even condemned some centuries later, in the thirteenth century. Eriugena, however, like Origen, died in peace with the church and during his life, again like Origen, was even a defender of “orthodoxy” against “heresies” concerning God’s predestination.
329. Reported by Photius Bibl. cod. 232, p. 291b.
330. Bady, “Les Traductions latines anciennes de Jean Chysostome,” 310.
331. Hierotheus is the name, or probably byname, of the venerated teacher of Ps. Dionysius. While some have proposed to identify Hierotheus with Proclus, the “pagan” Neoplatonist, I rather suspect that he was a Christian theologian. There are reasons to suppose that he might have been Origen—or else Ps. Dionysius, following the double reference scheme (Christian + ‘pagan’ Platonism) that is proper to his whole work, might even have referred at the same time to both.
332. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition and Denys the Areopagite; de Andia, Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité; Schaefer, The Philosophy of Dionysius, on DN; Dillon and Wear, Dionysius the Areopagite; Coakley and Stang, Rethinking Dionysius, with my review in RBL 2010. His audience genuinely believed the work to come from Dionysius (or Denys) himself. It is only since the fifteenth century that scholars started to question that attribution. I argue for Origen’s influence in “Origen, Evagrius, and Dionysius,” in The Oxford Handbook to Dionysius the Areopagite, Oxford, forthcoming.
333. Perczel, “Théologiens et magiciens,” 54–75.
334. Both Monad and Henad mean “unity, one” and they were used by Origen to describe God: God is “Monad and Henad.”
335. Perczel, “God as Monad and Henad,” 1193–1209.
336. See Ramelli, “Apokatastasis and Epektasis.”
337. This seems to be a description of apokatastasis in the form condemned in the Fifth Ecumenical Council 553, anathema 14 (which is considered to echo Evagrius KG 2:17) against those who say “that all rational beings will form one Henad . . . and in the restoration that is the object of their myths there will be only pure intellects, just as it was in the preexistence the
y babble about.”
338. “What could one say of Christ’s love for humanity, a love which pours out peace? Jesus operates all in all and performs an ineffable peace, established from eternity; he reconciles people to himself in the Spirit, and, through himself and in himself, to the Father. I have abundantly spoken of these admirable gifts in my Outlines of Theology, where my own testimony is joined to that of the holy inspiration of Scripture / of the wise” (DN 11:5; 221 Ritter).
339. TM 3:1, p. 146:1–9.
340. HE 2:20. In Psellus, Or. 1,784, the expression Outlines of Theology may, or may not, refer specifically to the title of Pseudo-Dionysius’ work. This possibility is all the more interesting in that the passage at stake refers to the evaluation of Origen’s thought: “In their writings [of Origenian authors] there are also some expressions that are full of piety, and Outlines of Theology. . . . [T]he famous Origen, a contemporary of the philosopher Porphyry, was very well steeped in Christian theology, and embraced the Christian life as well, but originated all heresies.” If Outlines of Theology refers to Pseudo-Dionysius’ work, clearly this work is here embedded in the Origenian tradition.
341. Fiori, “The Impossibility of Apokatastasis in Dionysius,” 831–43.
342. See my review of Re-Thinking Dionysius: in RBL March 2010: http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/7361_8021.pdf.
343. Cf. Perczel, “The Earliest Syriac Reception of Dionysius,” 29–30.
344. John of Scythopolis, after Sergius’ translation, prepared the Greek edition of the Corpus Dionysianum, on which all the subsequent editions were based. John’s comments on the corpus often reveal that he is aware of the Origenian interpretation of which many passages in the Corpus were susceptible. He sought to defuse such interpretations in such a way as to determine later “orthodox” interpretations of it.
345. See Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, 724–38. New work is underway by both István Perczel and myself.
346. See Ramelli, “Origen.”
347. See my “Origen.”
348. See my “Constantinople II 553.” Also, Richardson, “The Condemnation of Origen.”
349. The “Three Chapters” in question were the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, certain writings of Theodoret of Cyrus, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Maris.
350. Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Oxford: OUP, 2008.
351. Anathema 11 mentions Origen, but his name appears in the last position in a list of heretics, and it is the only name of the list that is out of chronological order: “Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apollinaris, Nestorius, Eutyches, and Origen.” The draft of this anathema, prepared in Justinian’s Homonoia, had this list, but it did not include the name of Origen, which most probably was inserted into the proceedings of the council later. Several anathemas of the council as handed down, including those that mention Origen, did not belong to the original Acts, but appear to be later interpolations. The original Greek text of the acts of this council is lost, and suspicions had already been raised in 680 CE (at the Third Ecumenical Council of Constantinople) that the original Greek acts of the 553 council were interpolated. For this reason, Norman Tanner SJ (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 106) excludes the anathemas from his edition of the Acts of the Councils, noting that they “cannot be attributed to this council”. This is also one of the reasons why Henri Crouzel SJ (“Les condamnations subies par Origène et sa doctrine”) argued that Origen was never officially condemned by the church and wished that the church could rehabilitate Origen—who spent all of his life in its defense and even, like Maximus, died as a Confessor.
352. This is the reason that some Catholic and Orthodox theologians have been able to reappropriate Origen’s teachings for the twentieth- and twenty-first-century church.
353. See my edition in Gregorio Sull’anima, which also presents and comments on the glosses and interpolations.
354. Quoted by Photius Bibl. Cod. 223. However, we have an important confirmation from the time of Justinian of the presence of this doctrine of apokatastasis in Gregory’s and the other Cappadocians’ writings. It is offered by an ascetic from the desert of Gaza, Barsanuphius’ Letter 604. A monk has asked him why Origen’s doctrines, especially apokatastasis, were supported by orthodox authors, and even saints, such as the Cappadocians. Barsanuphius did not at all deny that the Cappadocians supported the doctrine of apokatastasis, but simply observes that even saints can have a limited understanding of the mysteries of God.
355. Michaud, “S. Maxime le Confesseur et l’apocatastase”
356. Grumel, “Maxime le Confesseur,” 457.
357. Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, 355–58.
358. Daley, “Apokatastasis and ‘Honorable Silence,’” 309–39; Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology, 103: “universal salvation, that is to say, a salvation of all created beings.” See also Ayroulet, De l’image à l’image; Blowers, Maximus the Confessor.
359. The doctrine of the body that Maximus criticizes in Amb. 42 is not Origen’s own. For he did not maintain the preexistence of disembodies souls (see my “Preexistence of Souls?”) nor that “bodies were invented as a punishment for souls due to the anterior evilness of incorporeal beings” (Amb. 42:1328A) nor that bodies will disappear completely after the resurrection (1333A). Origen was clear that only the Trinity can subsist incorporeally (see my “Origen”). Likewise, it is not Origen’s, but a post-Evagrian doctrine, that the initial henad (i.e., substantial unity) of rational creatures fell and acquired bodies as a punishment (1069A).
360. Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, 355–58.
361. Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus.
362. In Ps. 59, PG 90:857A.
363. Some centuries later Jesus will proclaim to Julian of Norwich: “all shall be well” and “I shall make all things well.” See below the section devoted to Julian.
364. Larchet, La divinisation de l’homme, 652ff.
365. E.g., Moreschini, Storia, 733–37. The following are the passages adduced: Carit. 1:55: whoever is outside love is passible of “αἰώνιος/aiōnios judgment” (which is not an “eternal judgment,” but the judgment that will take place in the other world); 1:56: whoever hates his neighbor deserves “αἰώνιος/aiōnios punishment”; 1:57: whoever speaks against his neighbor falls out of Christ’s love and deserves “αἰώνιος/aiōnios punishment”; 2:34: passions and ignorance deserve “αἰώνιος/aiōnios punishment” (these refer not to eternal punishment, but punishment in the world to come). Lib. Ascet. 27 mentions Isaiah’s prophecy on the “αἰώνιος/aiōnios place” or otherworldly place of punishment for sinners, where their fire will not be quenched and their worm will not die. These biblical expressions indicate a qualitative difference between the fire and worm of the other world and those of this world, which can be quenched and killed; they do not imply absolute eternity. In Q. et Dub. 173 all beings are said to have a place in God’s logoi: if some go away from them, renouncing their own logos in order to follow other things that have no ontological consistence (i.e., evil), they will incur the “αἰώνιος/aiōnios judgment” (i.e. judgment in the other world); there is no mention of eternal condemnation.
366. E.g., Amb. 42:1332A; Amb. 20:1237C; Amb. 7:1085A, and Quaest. ad Thal. prologue.
367. By “insofar as possible” I do not think that Maximus is expressing hesitancy about the final outcome. Rather, I think it qualifies the degree to which it is possible to share Christ’s glory. He says, with Origen, that each one will need his time and his providential care, and that no one will reach the same glory as Christ, since Christ is God and no human is.
368. Maximus drew from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa the idea t
hat the distinction of humanity into genders and procreation is secondary; the human being that is in the image of God is neither endowed with a heavy, mortal body nor male or female. See my “Origen” and “Christian Platonists in Support of Gender Equality”, in Otherwise than the Binary, eds. Danielle Layne and Jessica Elbert Decker, forthcoming. Maximus’ concept of the prelapsarian human body (Amb. 45:1353A) is similar to that of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa: a less thick body, harmonious, not liable to passions, and immortal. So will it be also after the resurrection. Maximus highlights the idea of the restoration of the original integrity of the human being thanks to the Logos’ inhumanation (Q. ad Thal. 21).
369. E.g., Amb. 10:1108C: “it is present to all in all” to help all attain virtue.
370. E.g., Myst. 24; Amb. 65:1392D; Opusc. 1, PG 91:25B; Q. ad Thal. 6:280D.
371. Q. 1309C4–11; In Or. Dom. CCG 23:154ff. Maximus emphasizes the voluntary nature of the submission of all to God in the end also in 1076Aff. and the retention of free will even in the final deification. He agrees again with Origen.
372. Trans. Blowers and Wilken.
373. Perczel, “St. Maximus on the Lord’s Prayer,” 239.
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