A Larger Hope 1

by Ilaria L E Ramelli

  Origen’s insistence on the importance of free will informed his polemic against “gnostic” (Valentinian) determinism as well as his criticism of the Stoic notion of apokatastasis, which was characterized by an endless sequence of aeons/ages in each of which the same people will always behave in the same way. Origen’s idea of apokatastasis, on the contrary, entails a limited number of aeons, after which the universal restoration will take place (e.g., Princ. 2:3:1: “a stage in which there will be no aeon any more”). Moreover, in each aeon, rational creatures’ moral choices will not be identical to previous aeons, but different (e.g., CC 4:67–8), and the aeons will see the rational creatures’ spiritual development. They will offer to all rational creatures the time to get purified, illuminated, and thus voluntarily adhere to God.100 Soon after accusing the Stoic theory of apokatastasis of annihilating human free will (Princ. 3:3:4), Origen claims that aeons/ages will come to an end; this end will coincide with universal restoration and salvation, “when all will be no more in an aeon, but God will be ‘all in all.’”101 All creatures will pass from being in the aeons to being in God. We ought to stress here that when the Bible mentions aeons, it does not refer to eternity, for only God is truly eternal, while aeons have a limited duration.102 This implies that all Scriptural expressions such as “αἰώνιος/aiōnios death,” “αἰώνιον/aiōnion fire,” or “αἰώνιος/aiōnios punishment,” which refer to the death, fire, and punishment in the next aeon (αἰών/aiōn), cannot be interpreted as “eternal” fire, death, or punishment, because the next aeon, and all aeons, will come to an end, when there will be the passage from the aeons to God.103 In Comm. in Io. 10:39, Origen describes apokatastasis as a passage into the Trinity at the end of time: “the [scriptural] expressions that refer to the preparation of the stones, which are pulled up and prepared for building up the construction, seem to me to certainly indicate the totality of time, that is, the extension that is necessary (for rational creatures) to finally come to be in the eternal Trinity.” Origen, indeed, identified the ultimate end with restoration and “deification” (Sel. in Ps. 23), “communion with the divine” (CC 3:80). It is Christ-Logos who makes the eventual “deification” possible (Ex. ad Mart. 25; De orat. 27:13). The theology of deification itself, according to Origen, is grounded in Scripture.104 Origen bases his argument on 1 John 3:2 in Hom. in Luc. 29:7: “‘We shall be like God, and see God as God is.’ You, too, will have to become God in Jesus Christ.” And he explicitly relies on Psalm 82:6, as interpreted by Jesus in John 10:34, in Hom. in Lev. 9:11:1: “Those who will follow Christ and enter with him the inner parts of the temple and ascend to the heights of heaven will no longer be humans, but, according to Christ’s teaching, will be like angels of God [Matt 22:30] It is even possible that there is realized what the Lord said: ‘I have said, You are gods, you are all children of the Most High.” Then, one “must have become an angel and even God” (Sel. in Ps. 23).105 Thus, there will be a passage from being in time to being in God, i.e., in eternity. For God alone is eternal; none of the creatures is (Hom. 2 in Ps. 38, 11).

  This is why the life that will be a participation in God’s life truly is eternal. Death, on the contrary, which is a consequence of sin and no creature of God, is not eternal:

  I do not think that this reign of death is eternal as that of life and justice is, especially in that I hear from the Apostle that the last enemy, death, must be destroyed.106 For should one suppose that the eternity of death is the same as that of life, death will no longer be the contradictory opposite of life, but equal to it. For “eternal” is not the contradictory of “eternal,” but the same thing. Now, it is certain that death is the contradictory of life; therefore, it is certain that, if life is eternal, death cannot possibly be eternal. . . . When the death of the soul, which is the very last enemy, has been destroyed, also this common death—which, as I said, is a sort of shadow of the death of the soul—will necessarily be abolished, and the kingdom of death, along with death itself, will be wiped out. (Comm. in Rom. 5:7)

  If the death of the soul, due to sin, must be destroyed in the end, then all rational creatures will return to life, free from sin. Origen knew that death is only called αἰώνιος/aiōnios (“otherworldly; of the next aeon”) in Scripture,107 and never ἀΐδιος/aïdios (“eternal”), which is rather reserved to life and beatitude; and indeed the Bible explicitly speaks of the eventual destruction of death (1 Cor 15:26). Therefore, Origen is certain that life and justice will be eternal, but death will not. For “the whole aeon [αἰών/aiōn] is long in relation to us, but it is quite short, and is only tantamount to a few years, in relation to the life of God, of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit,” which is eternal (Comm. in Matt. 15:31). Hebrews 1:2, indeed, declares that the aeon was created by Christ, and on the basis of this verse Origen claims that the aeons are but a creature of the eternal God (Comm. in Io. 2:10). Eternity characterizes only the Trinity;108 creatures can become eternal only by grace and as a participation in the life of the divine Trinity. Thus, Origen never describes otherworldly death, punishment, or fire as ἀΐδια/aidia, “eternal.” He only calls them αἰώνια/aiōnia, because they last in the future aeon or aeons, but not after the end of all aeons, in the eternal restoration.109 Henri Crouzel, an authoritative scholar in Origen studies, makes the same point: “The essential reason why the expression πῦρ αἰώνιον did not seem to Origen to necessarily imply the eternity of punishment as we understand it, is that the adjective αἰώνιος retains for him all the ambiguity of the word from which it derives, αἰών. In both Testaments, besides the meaning ‘eternity’ conceived as endless duration, there is another, which we translate ‘age,’ meaning a long period of time, especially the duration of the present world—hence the synonymy between ‘world’ and ‘age’ (saeculum)—or the world to come.”110

  In Hom. 4 in Ps. 36, 8 Origen clearly distinguishes between the future aeon, which will be a temporal interval (tempus vel saeculum), and the absolute eternity that will come after the end of all aeons (deinceps in aeternitate). At the end of all aeons, in the eternal restoration, all will come to be, no longer in any aeon, but in God, who will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28, commented on in Princ. 3:6:2–3).

  From that perfect condition, in the eternal restoration, no one will fall again. For the perfection of love, reached in the very end, will admit of no falls, while at the same time rational creatures will keep their free will. Origen argues for all this in Comm. in Rom. 5:10:158–240. He begins with a refutation of those who thought that Christ’s sacrifice would have to be repeated over and over again, due to the possibility of ever new falls. Origen responds that it needn’t be repeated: it occurred once and for all, and its effect extends to all rational creatures and all aeons (Comm. in Rom. 5:10:235–36; 187–95). Origen then goes on to demonstrate that rational creatures will not continue to fall without end, because there will come an end of all aeons, in the eternal restoration; from that condition no one will fall, since perfect love will prevent this:

  What is that in the future aeons that will prevent the freedom of will from falling again into sin? The Apostle tells us this quite pithily, when he states: “Love never falls.”111 This is why love is greater than faith and hope, because it is the only one that will prevent all sin. For, if the soul has reached such a degree of perfection as to love God with all its heart, with all its mind, and with all its forces, and its neighbor as much as itself, what room will be left for sin? . . . Love will prevent every creature from falling, when God will be “all in all.”112 . . . So great is the power of love that it attracts every being to itself . . . especially in that God has been the first to give us reasons for love, since he has not spared his only child, but he offered him for all of us. (Comm. in Rom. 5:10:195–226)

  Love could not impede Satan’s or Adam’s fall, because their falls occurred before the manifestation of Christ’s love (Comm. in Rom. 5:10:227–30). But the end will be better than the b
eginning, because in the end rational creatures will adhere to God voluntarily, in so strong a love that they will never fall again as they could fall at the beginning.113 Indeed, “one who is found in the Good eternally and for whom God is ‘all things’ does no longer desire to eat (the fruit) of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil” (Princ. 3:6:3). And in reference to the Song of Songs:

  If the girls [i.e. rational creatures] will reach Christ’s true being, which is incomprehensible and ineffable, they will no longer walk, nor run, but they will be, in a way, tied by the bonds of Christ’s love; they will adhere to it and will have no longer the force to move again, because they will be one and the same spirit with Christ, and in them the saying will be fulfilled, “Just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, and we are One, so also may they be one in Us.” That this may happen and all creatures may incessantly and indissolubly adhere to the One who Is, Wisdom must necessarily instruct them on this point and bring them to perfection.

  Origen elaborated his doctrine of apokatastasis on the basis of his defense of free will against “gnostics.”114 Thus, Origen’s theory of universal salvation, far from eliminating human free will, is in fact grounded in it. Book 3 of his masterpiece On First Principles meaningfully begins with a defense of free will against “gnostic” determinism—dictated by his concern for theodicy—and ends with the theory of universal restoration and salvation. Indeed: “God’s providence takes care of all, respecting the choices of each human being’s free will” (CC 5:21). The same is argued in Princ. 2:9:7115 and De orat. 27:15: “The present aeon is the consummation of many past aeons, as though it were a year of aeons, and after this there will come future aeons, whose beginning is the next one, and in these future aeons God will show the richness of his grace in goodness. Even in the case of the worst sinner, who has blasphemed against the Holy Spirit, possessed by sin in the whole of the present aeon and in the future from the beginning to the end, after this, I do not know how, God will take providential care of him.” This providential care mainly takes the form of illumination, instruction, and correction. This is consistent with Origen’s ethical intellectualism: one’s moral choices depend on one’s knowledge; one’s will proceeds from one’s intellect; it is not independent of it. Evil is therefore chosen because it is mistaken for a good, due to insufficient knowledge or a clouding of the intellect (e.g., Hom. 1 in Ps. 37, 4: “sin here is rightly called ignorance”). This is why instruction and illumination are paramount in the process of restoration; these will be imparted by angels and then by Christ.116

  The whole process will also entail suffering proportional to each one’s amount of sins. This means that the otherworldly “punishment” is in fact medical, pedagogical, and purifying.117 Like the NT, and like Clement, Origen uses kolasis in the sense of a punishment that is always corrective. For instance, in the newly discovered Munich homilies, in Homily 2 on Psalm 36.5, fol. 47v, he speaks of the fire that will come after the end of the world (μετὰ τὴν συντέλειαν/meta tēn sunteleian) and observes that this fire will punish sinners (κολάζον πῦρ/kolazon pur), but in such a way that a sinner will no longer be a sinner: ποιήσει μηκέτι εἶναι ἁμαρτωλόν/poiēsei mēketi einai hamartōlon.

  Christ is a physician of souls whose aim is “to heal all rational souls with the therapy that comes from the Logos, to make them friends of God” (CC 3:54). He can have recourse to drastic remedies, such as cauterization with fire, but he does heal sinners.118 In Princ. 2:10:6–7 Origen interprets many scriptural passages to show that “God deals with sinners in the same way as physicians do with the sick to restore them to health.” All will pass through the purifying fire, and the duration of their time in it will be commensurate to each one’s sins (Hom. 3 in Ps. 36, 1). God is said by Scripture to kill and destroy, but only to remake creatures better (Hom. in Ier. 1:15–16); his strategy is always “resurrecting.”119

  That all will be saved, and that this will happen because all will come to believe, is particularly clear from Origen’s reflection on Romans 11:25–26. In Comm. in Rom. 7:13, Paul’s prayer for the salvation of Israel will be fulfilled in the end, when the “totality of the nations” will enter and “all Israel will be saved.” This prophecy is repeated by Origen over and over again in this commentary, and in other works,120 and is to be seen as an expression of universal salvation. The salvation of all Israel and all gentiles will take place through faith: Abraham will inherit “the whole world” because all will be made just by their faith.

  One point that must be stressed is that Origen, like Gregory of Nyssa after him, has universal salvation depend on Christ: on his inhumanation, death, and resurrection, besides his healing work as Physician and instructive activity as Logos. Christ’s sacrifice, although it took place once, has had the power of healing and rectifying all rational creatures in all aeons (Comm. in Rom. 4:10; 2:13:27),121 and at the same time—thanks to Christ’s action of instruction and persuasion—the salvation of all will be voluntary. Christ’s sacrifice reconciled all rational creatures with God (Comm. in Rom. 10:9:12–4), putting sin to death (4:12:55–78); Jesus, as a high priest, offered himself in sacrifice “for all rational creatures” (Comm. in Io. 1:35:255). Christ is the savior and propitiatory offering for all, “not only for our sins, but also for the whole world.”122 Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection produce the restoration of “every creature” (Comm. in Rom. 4:7:41–43), by making them just (100–103). Christ’s incarnation destroyed sin in flesh (5:1:501–5), and “the whole creation was restored through the Lord’s resurrection” (4:7:3). This restoration is “the return of the whole universe to God” (CC 4:99). Christ defeats the devil as the holder of the power of death, which is evil (Comm. in Rom. 5:3:65–70). Christ destroyed sin,123 since evil has no power over him, as divine Wisdom (Wis 7:30); his blood shed saves humans more than faith and good deeds (Comm. in Rom. 6:11:73–75). And we must never lose sight of the power of Christ’s illuminating and healing action (CC 8:72).124 No being is incurable for Christ: “nothing is impossible for the Omnipotent; no being is incurable for the One who created it” (Princ. 3:6:5).

  The final restoration itself will be performed by Christ, to whom all rational creatures will submit, and who will hand all of them to God:

  I think that God’s Goodness, by means of Christ, will call back every creature to one and the same end, after submitting even the enemies. . . . Now, what kind of subjection is that in which all beings must submit to Christ? In my opinion, it is the same subjection in which we too want to be subject to him, the same in which the apostles and all saints are subject to him. . . . For the name of the “subjection” in which we are subject to Christ means the salvation of those who have submitted, that salvation which comes from Christ. As David too said, “Will not my soul be subject to God? For my salvation comes from God.” (Princ. 1:6:1)

  Origen bases himself here especially on Psalm 61:1 and 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, and interprets universal submission to Christ as universal salvation also in Comm. in Matt. Ser. 8 (“subjection means the salvation of those who submit”), in Princ. 3:5:7,125 and in Comm. in Io. 6:57(37):

  If we grasp what it means to be subject to Christ, especially in the light of this passage: “And when all will be submitted to him, he himself, the Son, will submit to him who has subjected everything to him,” then we shall understand God’s lamb, who takes up the sin of the world, in a way worthy of the goodness of the God of the universe.”

  The only interpretation of the subjection to Christ in a way that is worthy of Christ and God is its identification with salvation. Only purifying suffering and instruction, and not eternal retributive punishment, is worthy of God. “Christ reigns in order to save,” not to crush (Hom. in Luc. 30). He will subject all nations to himself, “that they may devote themselves to justice, truth, and all the other virtues. Christ will indeed reign as Justice itself.” Likewise, “‘He must reign until he has put all enemies under his
feet’ means ‘until all wicked have become righteous’” (Sel. in Ps. 21).

  The image of God in every human (Gen 1:26) is blurred by sin, but never cancelled.126 Its restoration also relies on Christ, the image of God.127 Each rational creature’s voluntary adhesion to God entails the acquisition of the likeness to God—a biblical (Gen 1:26) and Platonic (Theaetetus 176B) ideal. The “image” of God is an initial datum that must be recovered; the “likeness” of God is attained thanks to moral improvement in this or the future life; in the end there will be a further passage from likeness to unity, when God will be “all in all” (Princ. 3:6:1).128 The image and likeness of God in each human will be restored thanks to Christ-Logos, as is clear from Princ. 4:4:9–10129 and Hom. in Gen. 1:13:

  Let us contemplate unceasingly this image of God [i.e., Christ], so as to be transformed into its likeness. For if the human being, who was created in God’s image, has become similar to the devil due to sin, assuming the devil’s image, which is against its nature, all the more so will it receive that form that was given to it according to its nature, through the Logos and its power, assuming God’s image.

  The restoration or “palingenesis” will indeed take place at the end of time, “in Christ,” who will make all “pure to the highest degree” (Comm. in Matth. 5:15:23*). Thanks to Christ’s work, “evil will be wiped away from the entire world” and “not even the tiniest sin will remain in the reign of the Father, and the word will be fulfilled that ‘God will be all in all’” (Comm. in Io. 1:32). The Logos, with its inhumanation, went far from the Godhead out of love for its creatures, who themselves had gone far from the Godhead, that these might “return into its hands.” “By following Christ, they will come to find themselves near God” (32:35). This restoration will take place at different times, depending on the different merits of rational creatures, but all will be purified and saved, and evil powers destroyed (37–39). In Comm. in Rom. 9: 41:8, 1 Corinthians 15:28 is cited in support of universal salvation, along with Philippians 2:10: