BERJAYA

A Meditation: Eternal Ends and Seamless Beginnings

Posted on 15 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

by Daniel Pigeon

Here are some foundational teachings stemming all the way back to the early Church:

That God became human so that humans might become God;
That Christ is all things in everything;¹
That the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Jesus—and that we become what we eat;²
That personhood itself is supreme;³
And that divinity is drawing temporality into perfect identity in every way.⁴

Some might respond, “Yes—however, it is by grace that we become what God already is by nature.” This distinction often functions as the qualifying boundary in discussions of theosis: we become what God eternally was, and thus some degree of separation is presumed to remain.

Yet the Christian tradition, in its most ancient expressions, seems to take a different approach. Origen of Alexandria—often regarded as the first Christian systematic theologian—suggests that if our ultimate end is glorification with God, then this was also our beginning. What is eternal and infinite transcends space and time altogether, rendering beginnings and ends seamless.⁵ Personhood unites both realities, and it is divinity itself that draws temporality “into perfect identity in every way.”

It is fruitful to place Origen in joyful dialogue with St. Maximus the Confessor, particularly in Ambiguum 7. Origen understood the world as a fall from an eternal state into space and time. Maximus rejects this account and offers something else:

The divine is unmoved, since it fills all things.
—Ambiguum 7 (1069B)

The position Maximus advances here is summarized in the introduction to On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (p. 24):

Maximus argues that this view cannot withstand philosophical scrutiny. For it assumes that God, who is supremely beautiful and ultimately desirable, is incapable of satisfying the desire of those who seek God. If rational beings in fact reached ‘the end,’ that is, rest in God, and were moved to turn away from God, what will prevent this from happening again and again? ‘What could be greater reason to despair?’ asks Maximus.⁶

Where Origen describes a movement of rest, fall, and return, Maximus reorders this as creation, movement, and rest. Importantly, this reordering still affirms eternal ends with their seamless beginning—but now the notion of a fall from that place is erased altogether.

Jesus could not sin because “in him there is no sin” (1 John 3:5). Jesus reveals reality as it truly is, and what is true of Him is true of us. In Him, we see that our deepest truth is not marked by even a trace of sin or fallenness—not even by the capacity to sin. Our deepest truth is the fullness of divine love, already whole.

One might ask whether ascension entails becoming Spirit without remainder, or whether it is limited to glorified spiritual bodies, as the latter is often invoked to safeguard the tradition’s affirmation of the resurrection of the body. Here I wonder whether St. Maximus both affirms and further elaborates the tradition. For Maximus, personhood draws humanity into perfect identity with divinity in every way. This certainly includes the glorification of the body—but if we take Maximus at his word, it may also suggest something more.

Consider, for a moment, the implications of an ascension that goes no further than glorified spiritual bodies. The tradition often mapped reality hierarchically:

earth below,
angelic realms above it,
and finally God.

If Christ ascends only to the level of a spiritual body, we risk reducing Him from God to the highest rung of the angelic hierarchy. The difficulty here is that the angelic hierarchy itself remains subject to judgment (cf. 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6).

By contrast, in the full ascension—Christ seated at the right hand of the First Person of the Trinity, and we with Him—the impermanence of incarnation blossoms into Spirit without remainder. In this ascension, all judgment is given to Christ. Personhood is not destroyed; rather, it is the vehicle of ascension itself, with the glorified person-in-Spirit as the final destination.

Personhood as a Living Window

In the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, a “nature”—what something is, whether in the created order or in divinity—was understood to precede personhood. Personhood was seen as a kind of mask (prosōpon – πρόσωπον: “mask”)—a function within nature, not its metaphysical ground.

The person as mask, like those worn in Greek theatre, served as a way to display the different roles or faces a single nature could assume. Personhood was reducible to nature.

Plato and Aristotle are considered foundational by many; it’s often what people mean when they say someone is “classically trained.” That is why I find it so extraordinary that St. Maximus the Confessor, writing in the seventh century, could propose something so groundbreaking within that tradition: that nature is not prior to personhood, but that personhood transcends and unites every nature.

Personhood is not something nature produces, but something that carries, holds, and gives nature its meaning. Personhood exists independently and acts on its own—even, astonishingly, independent of divinity. Personhood is not independent from God, but it is not reducible to divinity as a nature.

Personhood is not derived from any nature; it grounds nature.

Divinity is totally transcendent of creation. This is the only way we can affirm that Christ’s personal (hypostatic) union of God and man is completely without intermingling or confusion.

At first glance, this transcendence can seem like a hopeless divide: how may creation know God? For Maximus, the answer is that which transcends even divinity itself—personhood.

Personhood is a living window:
a passage through which the hidden is made manifest,
and the world is drawn into perfect identity with God.

Indeed, God who is love—person—this is the entire mystery of everything.

Our one person in Christ is true reality both within and beyond time and space—the foundation of every conceivable world, and more. This is the inherent and limitless dignity of each and every person—not only human beings, but all creation—in the significance of creation united to Jesus Christ.

Love is Ultimate

An important asymmetry exists in the incarnation: the personal union of essentially different natures. Yet it is precisely through personhood that “this union draws His humanity into perfect identity, in every way, with His divinity.” As Jordan Wood notes in urging readers to take Maximus “at his word,”⁷ Maximus means exactly what he says—and his words are quite compelling here.

In an interview with John Milbank and David Hart, Milbank says, “the fall remains absolutely incomprehensible” and “the metaphysical incomprehensibility of evil, that it’s just sheer nonsense”.⁸

God is Spirit because love transcends itself beyond all containment—even beyond space and time. Time and space are not evil in themselves, but they function to contain evil.⁹ ¹⁰

Perhaps reality in the truest sense is the absolute oneness of Spirit that fills all things even now—love transcending itself: eternally being and becoming (or Trinity, as Christians would say).

This does not attempt to justify suffering or the constraints of time and space; it simply witnesses love. The question, “Is resurrection the absorption of personal identity?” employs absorption as metaphorical language: divinity, in its essential difference, is not a “thing” that absorbs. As for personal identity, we cannot fully comprehend the absolute oneness of eternal and infinite Spirit, but I believe the resolution ultimately lies in fulfillment through personhood rather than in destruction or absorption.

If eternal ends are seamless with their beginnings, does this negate space and time? Perhaps love, as true reality, enacts a kind of negation—or better, fulfillment. It is similar to saying that forgiveness, in its ultimate reality, reveals a forgiveness in which sin never truly existed, with effects that may extend even into space and time.

To recognize that space and time are not the ultimate reality is not cause for despair in our present experience. Maximus says:

But the one who eternally transcends being is no less overflowing with transcendence, for although He became man He was not yoked under human nature. On the contrary, He raised human nature up to Himself, having made it another mystery. He remained entirely incomprehensible, and showed His own incarnation to be more incomprehensible than every mystery, in that He came forth by means of a birth beyond being. To the degree that He became comprehensible on account of the incarnation, by so much more was He known as more incomprehensible through it.

~ Ambigua 5 (1048D–1049A)

If God is love, then where in love is there any sense of inequality in anything, anywhere?

References

¹ 1 Corinthians 15:28; Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, 14.

² St. Augustine, Sermon 227 (Easter): “If we receive the Eucharist worthily, we become what we receive.”

³ St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 37.8: “Therefore the Word in whom the universe is gathered transcends the truth, and, insofar as He is both man and God, truly transcends all humanity and divinity.”

⁴ St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 60: “This union draws His humanity into perfect identity, in every way, with His divinity, through the principle of person.

⁵ Origen of Alexandria, On First Principles (excerpt), trans. John Behr; posted on Eclectic Orthodoxy.

⁶ St. Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (PDF).

⁷ The phrase “taking Maximus at his word” appears four times in The Whole Mystery of Christ: once in John Behr’s foreword, and three times in Wood’s own analysis (ix; twice on p. 11; and p. 222). Wood further insists that Maximus “means what he says” (p. 55) and critiques “the assumption that Maximus cannot mean what he often says” (p. 10).

⁸ John Milbank and David Hart, Interview, YouTube, 29:23 & 31:07. Link

⁹ Gregory of Nyssa, On the Human Image of God 21.1.2 (abridged).

“But wickedness is not so strong as to prevail over the power of good, nor is the thoughtlessness of our nature stronger and more abiding than the wisdom of God; for it is impossible that that which is mutable and alterable should be stronger and more abiding than that which is always as it is and established in the good…

That which is always in motion, if its progress is towards the good, will never cease, because of the infinity of the course to be traversed, from moving towards what lies ahead; for it will not find any limit of that which it seeks, such that when it has grasped it, it will then bring rest from movement.

But if its tendency is in the opposite direction, whenever it has traversed the course of wickedness and reached the extreme limit of evil, then that which is ever-moving, finding no resting point for its natural impulse, since it has run through the interval in wickedness, by necessity turns its movement towards the good. For as evil does not extend to infinity, but is bounded by necessary limits, the accession of the good consequently succeeds the limit of evil, and thus, as we have said, the ever-moving character of our nature runs its journey once more at last towards the good, chastened by the memory of its former misfortunes so that it will never again be in the same circumstances.”

¹⁰ Athanasius, On the Incarnation 3.17.

“The Word was not hedged in by his body, nor did his presence in the body prevent His being present elsewhere as well. When He moved His body He did not cease also to direct the universe by His Mind and might.

No. The marvelous truth is that, being the Word, so far from being Himself contained by anything, He actually contained all things Himself. In creation He is present everywhere, yet distinct in being from it—ordering, directing, giving life to all, containing all—yet He Himself is the Uncontained, existing solely in His Father.

As with the whole, so also with the part. Existing in a human body, to which He Himself gives life, He is still the Source of life to all the universe, present in every part of it, yet outside the whole; and He is revealed both through the works of His body and through His activity in the world.”

* * *

Daniel Pigeon resides in the beautiful Parkland Region of Manitoba. He is a contemplative of personhood, Mother Mary, the northern lights, and solidarity discovered through friendship. He writes on Substack at Marian Metaphysics.

Posted in Theology | 63 Comments

St Gregory of Nyssa’s Stunning Vision of Humanity and the Divine

Posted on 14 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

Posted in Gregory of Nyssa, John Behr | Leave a comment

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 4)

Posted on 12 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

Apokatastasis, Anathema, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Argumenti causa—let us assume, contrary to the weighty evidence presented, that the Fifth Ecumenical Council did officially promulgate the fifteen anathemas. Even so, the challenge of interpretation and application remains.

I now step away from a largely historical posture and speak more directly as a believing Christian. What follows is not a general theory of conciliar interpretation, but a confessional judgment about how conciliar condemnations are commonly read—and how, in fidelity to the gospel proclaimed and heard in the Church, I believe they must be read.

The issue matters not only to specialists or apologists, but to the Church’s own proclamation. When “dogma” is invoked in an uncritical or mechanistic way—treated as a self-interpreting datum rather than as a judgment rendered within the Church’s living confession—the gospel itself is put at risk, because what is finally at stake is the kind of God we are announcing in Jesus Christ.

Reading Synodical Anathemas

Before turning to particular conciliar texts, I first need to plainly state the hermeneutical principle that governs everything that follows: a conciliar condemnation must be read within the world of its utterance—its history, culture, communal life, politics, and theology. This is an ordinary requirement for understanding any genuine act of communication. It is how we interpret serious speech in every other sphere of life. When we listen carefully to another person, we do not abstract their words from who they are, the situation they are addressing, the conflict they are attempting to resolve, or the pressures under which they are speaking. We instinctively attend to these factors because we know that meaning does not hover above concrete human acts but arises within them. This is why the maxim “Words don’t mean; people mean” rings true. Words matter, but they do not carry their full meaning in isolation. Language is living utterance. As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously observed, “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” Linguists distinguish between the lexical meaning of a sentence and its speaker meaning. The former is determined by the dictionary meanings of the words; the latter is determined by the intentions and meaning of the person who utters the sentence in a specific context. Talleyrand is said to have quipped:

When a diplomat says yes, he means “perhaps”;
When he says perhaps, he means “no”;
When he says no, he is not a diplomat.

It is possible for a person to mean different things using the same words. The same sentence can function as a warning, a joke, a promise, or a threat depending on who speaks it, to whom, and for what end. We grasp this without difficulty in everyday life. The difficulty arises when we forget to apply the same common sense to ecclesial texts that carry enormous historical and theological weight.

Conciliar condemnations belong to this category. They are not timeless doctrinal essays or systematic accounts of the faith. They are ecclesial acts—corporate, juridical, and often defensive—composed at a specific point in history and aimed at addressing particular teachings or figures perceived as threatening the Church’s unity, worship, or witness. Their language is shaped by urgency, controversy, and sometimes fear. To read them as though they were carefully calibrated, universally exhaustive judgments on every theological question they touch is to mistake their genre and exaggerate their reach.

Attention to culture and circumstances, therefore, is not a strategy for neutralizing conciliar authority; on the contrary, it is the only way to take that authority seriously. Historical context allows us to discern what kind of judgment is actually being rendered, what errors are being excluded, and—just as importantly—what is not being decided. Where evidence is sparse, the public and conventional sense of a conciliar text inevitably bears greater interpretive weight, which in turn demands caution. Where such evidence is abundant and coherent, it can and should constrain how far a condemnation is extended. The greater the historical distance between a council and ourselves, the greater the danger of importing later assumptions and anxieties into texts that were never meant to bear them.

There is also a decisive difference between interpreting the words of someone who speaks to us now and interpreting the written acts of a convocation held fifteen centuries ago. A living speaker can be questioned, corrected, and asked to clarify what was meant. The dead cannot. We are left with documents, silences, context, and reception—none of which yields certainty without remainder. Questions inevitably arise. We want to know the intent, qualifications, and limits of the propositions in question. This is not a defect of historical theology; it is simply the human condition under which all tradition is received.

Conciliar anathemas, then, are not divine oracles that descend from heaven already translated into self-interpreting propositions. They are spoken by bishops and theologians—and, in the case before us, by emperors as well—in response to teachings perceived as harmful to the gospel and the Church’s life. Political pressures, pastoral fears, and institutional interests are often intertwined with theological concern. To acknowledge this is not cynicism. It is honesty. And without such honesty, conciliar authority is not honored but distorted—turned into something rigid and legalistic, ultimately rendered unanswerable to the very gospel it was meant to serve.

From Apparent Clarity to Historical Ambiguity

Consider anathema #9 from the 543 Synod of Constantinople, which we examined in Part 2:

If anyone says or holds that the punishment of demons and impious human beings is temporary and that it will have an end at some time, and that there will be a restoration of demons and impious human beings, let him be anathema.

At first glance, the meaning of this sentence seems obvious. Most of us approach it with settled expectations formed within the life of the Church today. Perhaps your parish priest has preached on hell and warned against the “error” of universal salvation. Perhaps you have encountered contemporary debates—through sermons, catechetical manuals, internet apologetics, or books such as Destined for Joy—in which universalism is portrayed as the claim that all will inevitably be saved. Read within that modern frame, the anathema appears to speak directly and decisively: it repudiates the belief that the punishments of hell are temporary and that even demons will ultimately be restored.

But this sense of clarity depends entirely upon the context we quietly import into the text. We assume that the synod is addressing the same conceptual landscape we inhabit, that it has in view the same theological options, the same pastoral anxieties, and the same modern formulations of universal salvation. Once that assumption is questioned, the apparent obviousness of the anathema begins to dissolve.

Would we be so confident of its meaning if we forced ourselves to read it within its own sixth-century setting? What if the sentence does not primarily address the kinds of universalist arguments familiar to modern readers, but instead targets a cluster of highly specific—and now largely extinct—eschatological claims associated with sixth-century Origenism? What if “restoration” here is inseparable from a broader metaphysical narrative: the pre-existence of souls, a primordial fall into materiality, the transience (and ultimately dispensability) of embodied existence, and the final undoing of bodily and personal distinctions? In that case, the anathema would not be rejecting universal hope as such, but a particular and deeply problematic cosmological system in which “universal restoration” functions as one moment within a speculative cycle. And then the question presses itself upon us with real force: Did the imperial theologians who formulated this anathema, or the bishops who endorsed it, intend thereby to exclude the universalist eschatology of St Gregory of Nyssa?

Once questions like this are entertained, matters cease to be straightforward. The anathema no longer reads as a self-evident rejection of every conceivable form of universal salvation. Instead, it demands interrogation. What understanding of punishment is being presupposed? What conception of restoration is in view? What wider theological system gives these claims their sense? And, most importantly, are we justified in assuming that this condemnation reaches beyond its original target to exclude all later—and very different—Christological and Paschal expressions of hope for the final reconciliation of all things?

Those are the questions that must be asked before the anti-Origenist anathemas can be responsibly invoked to exclude the universalist presentation of the gospel.

At this point, I am not assuming any particular Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant account of the dogmatic authority of conciliar decrees, nor am I assuming the hermeneutical principles specific to these traditions. Whatever account one ultimately adopts, the question of what a council has actually said—and what it intended thereby to exclude—cannot be bypassed.

Not All Universalisms Are the Same

Just as the Church has long distinguished between heretical and orthodox construals of the atonement or the Incarnation, so too there are heretical and orthodox construals of the “greater hope.” The apokatastasis advanced by Gregory of Nyssa, for example, differs in decisive ways from the sixth-century constructions against which the anti-Origenist anathemas were directed. The latter belong to an esoteric metaphysical system increasingly cut loose from Scripture and from the concrete economy of salvation. The distance between these two visions is not marginal but immense.

The anti-Origenist canons, suggests Augustine Cassiday, are best understood as rejecting this system as a whole, with each anathema targeting a particular element within it.¹ Met Kallistos Ware offers a closely related—and for present purposes especially illuminating—interpretation. He urges careful attention to the wording and structure of the anathemas themselves, noting that the first canon deliberately binds together Origen’s speculations about the beginning and his teaching about the end:

It does not speak only about apokatastasis but links together two aspects of Origen’s theology: first, his speculations about the beginning, that is to say, about the preexistence of souls and the precosmic fall; second, his teaching about the end, about universal salvation and the ultimate reconciliation of all things. Origen’s eschatology is seen as following directly from his protology, and both are rejected together.²

This linkage, Ware continues, is entirely intelligible once Origen’s system is viewed on its own terms. In Origen’s speculative cosmology, rational beings (logikoi) exist prior to the material world, fall from their original unity with the Logos, and receive bodies corresponding to the gravity of that fall. Salvation history thus unfolds as a process of return: at the end, all rational beings—angels, humans, and demons alike—are restored to their original unity, so that “the end will be as the beginning.”³ In this way, Origen’s vision is circular in structure: protology determines eschatology; destiny is governed by metaphysical necessity.

So far, Ware’s analysis is compelling. Yet at this point an important qualification must be introduced. Contemporary scholarship has increasingly challenged the tendency—found not only in Ware but in earlier polemical sources—to identify Origen’s own views straightforwardly with those of the sixth-century Origenists targeted by the anathemas. As Brian Daley explains, the condemned theses represent a radicalized Evagrian Christology and cosmology that go well beyond anything taught by Origen himself, and still further beyond the biblical and Christological universal hope articulated by Gregory of Nyssa. These doctrines envisage not only an ethereal or spherical resurrection body, but ultimately the abolition of material reality altogether and the absorption of all created spirits into an undifferentiated unity with the divine Logos. In such a vision, even the humanity and kingdom of Christ come to an end.⁴

Returning, then, to Ware—but now with these distinctions firmly in view—we arrive at what is perhaps his most decisive insight for the present dispute. Let us grant that the anathemas are ultimately directed against a philosophical system that begins with pre-existent souls, proceeds through a fall into materiality, and culminates in a necessary return to an incorporeal state. On that system, protology is destiny. But what happens, Ware asks, if we remove the protology?

Suppose we abandon all speculation about a realm of eternal logikoi. Suppose we adhere instead to the standard Christian conviction that each human person comes into being as an integral unity of soul and body, without preexistence or precosmic fall. In that case, Ware argues, it becomes possible to affirm a doctrine of universal salvation—not as a logical or metaphysical necessity (Origen himself never claimed that), but as a visionary hope grounded in the redemptive work of Christ—which no longer falls under the scope of the anti-Origenist anathemas. In this way we could advance a doctrine of universal salvation—affirming this, not as a logical certainty, but as a heartfelt aspiration—which would avoid the circularity of Origen’s view and so would escape the condemnation of the anti-Origenist anathemas.⁵

At this point we find ourselves, indeed, in a very different ballpark playing a very different game. The game is called gospel, and the venue is named Pascha. On this field we are free to proclaim the good news of Christ’s triumph over death and evil, free to declare the joyful consummation of the human story in apokatastasis—not as the result of metaphysical necessity, but as the work of the crucified and risen Lord, whose love is stronger than sin, death, and hell.

With the removal of deterministic protology, Justinian’s anathemas fall silent. They have nothing to say to the Nyssen; they were never formulated to condemn him. Gregory of Nyssa decisively abandoned Origen’s speculations about preexistence and the precosmic fall, while holding fast—indeed, with unflinching confidence—to the hope of universal restoration. He speaks of a final purification in which even the devil is healed, and of a consummation in which all creation joins in a single hymn of thanksgiving, so that God is truly “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

Despite this bold hope, Gregory has never been anathematized—neither in 553 nor at any later point in the Church’s history. He is honored, not censured, as a saint and doctor of the Church. Whatever explanation one proposes, this fact is theologically significant. It strongly suggests that, once dissociated from speculative accounts of preexistence and circular return, a carefully articulated hope for the final restoration of all things may be judged compatible with the bounds of orthodox faith.

Origen, Origenism, and Historical Misattribution

At this point, however, another decisive interpretative difficulty emerges. Origen remains condemned in the eleventh canon of the Fifth Council. Even if the bishops who condemned Origen had the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas in mind when they cast their votes, as some contend, that fact alone cannot establish what doctrines they intended thereby to exclude—unless those anathemas accurately represent Origen’s own teaching.

In her magisterial monograph The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, Ilaria Ramelli argues that the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas do not, in fact, address the authentic teachings of Origen at all. What was condemned in the sixth century, she maintains, was not Origen’s theology, but a later and exaggerated form of Origenism shaped by misunderstandings, polemical caricature, and imperial intervention. As she writes:

The so-called “condemnation of Origen” by “the Church” in the sixth century probably never occurred proper, and even if it occurred it did so only as a result of a long series of misunderstandings, when the anthropological, eschatological, and psychological questions were no longer felt as open to investigation … but dogmatically established. The aforementioned condemnation was in fact a condemnation, not at all of Origen, but rather of a late and exasperated form of Origenism.⁶

Ramelli traces this development to the rise of a radicalized Origenism in sixth-century Palestinian monastic circles, especially among the Isochristoi. The fifteen anathemas, she argues, were formulated before the opening of the Fifth Ecumenical Council and were directed against this movement—not against Origen’s own positions. Indeed, the doctrines condemned—pre-existent souls, embodiment as punishment, denial of the resurrection of the body, and an ultimate dissolution of created distinctions—“have nothing to do with Origen,” as she bluntly states.⁷ Even more strikingly, the official documents of Pope Vigilius, eventually promulgated in connection with the council, do not contain Origen’s name at all.

Ramelli’s conclusion is unequivocal: what was condemned was a doctrine of apokatastasis embedded within a theory of transmigration and preexistence, not the patristic hope of universal reconciliation grounded in Christ’s redemptive work. If Ramelli is correct, then the nondescript condemnation of “Origen” in canon 11 cannot function as a precise doctrinal judgment against universal salvation, since the very anathemas supposedly supplying its content do not accurately represent Origen’s eschatology in the first place.

This reading is confirmed by the emperor Justinian himself. In a letter to the bishops—presumably read at the home synod that preceded the council—Justinian lays out in extraordinary detail the doctrines he seeks to suppress.⁸ They include the existence of pre-existent rational beings, their fall into material bodies, the gradation of angels, humans, and demons according to the gravity of that fall, and their eventual return to an incorporeal unity in which even Christ’s humanity is dissolved. These teachings are explicitly traced to pagan philosophy—Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus—and are denounced as incompatible with the Church’s confession that the soul is created together with the body.

Whatever else one makes of Justinian’s theological competence, his letter leaves no doubt about the target of the anathemas. He is opposing a speculative cosmology in which salvation history is governed by metaphysical necessity and circular return—not a Christological proclamation of redemption through the cross and resurrection.

For this reason, the anti-Origenist anathemas cannot reasonably be interpreted as condemning the universalist eschatology of Origen himself, still less that of Gregory of Nyssa. As Ramelli succinctly states, “It is a doctrine of apokatastasis embedded within that of the transmigration of souls that was condemned … not Origen’s own doctrine of apokatastasis.”⁹ Gregory, Diodore of Tarsus, and Isaac of Nineveh—none of whom taught preexistence or transmigration—stand wholly outside the scope of these condemnations.

The implication is decisive. The fifteen anathemas reject the restoration of pre-existent souls to a primordial unity, but they do not address—and nowhere exclude—the evangelical claims that God will bring purifying judgment to its appointed end, and that all humanity will finally be reconciled in the crucified and risen Christ.

To condemn Origen “generally,” as Constantinople II does in its eleventh canon, is not to condemn every doctrine he ever taught. A condemnation that specifies no doctrines cannot, without further evidence, be used to exclude doctrines—especially when those doctrines were not uniquely or universally associated with the condemned figure even in antiquity. Which teachings were in view? We do not know. The Acts do not tell us. Nor may we construct irreformable dogma on the basis of conjecture about what the bishops must have meant. Even had the fifteen anathemas been formally adopted by the council, they would still fail to condemn the proposition that God, in his mercy and goodness, will bring all sinners to repentance and faith.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council’s treatment of Origen thus proves dogmatically indeterminate for the present question. The anathemas served an imperial purpose in suppressing a volatile monastic movement, but they do not—and were never intended to—settle the Church’s teaching on the final destiny of all rational creatures. No one today teaches what the sixth-century Origenists taught. Not even Origen taught what they taught. Nor, it should be added, did Gregory of Nyssa—whose theology was known, praised, and never censured by the same conciliar tradition.

Synodical anathemas cannot simply be lifted from their historical setting and deployed as weapons against whatever theological position one wishes to exclude. To do so is not fidelity to conciliar authority, but a distortion of it. Anathemas must be interpreted—carefully and responsibly—within the historical, cultural, ecclesial, and theological contexts that gave rise to them. Without such interpretation, appeals to conciliar authority become mechanical and arbitrary.

This point is not confined to any one Christian tradition. Whether in Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant polemics, one regularly encounters the claim that a disputed question has been “settled long ago” by some council or synod, and that further theological reflection is therefore illegitimate. But authority cannot substitute for understanding. Before one may rightly invoke a conciliar judgment, one must first establish what that judgment actually addressed and what it intended to exclude.

This has direct bearing on the doctrine of last things. Across Christian traditions, eschatology has rarely been defined with the precision or finality sometimes claimed on its behalf. Beyond the core affirmations of the Creed—the resurrection of the dead, the coming judgment, and the life of the age to come—many questions concerning the nature, duration, and purpose of post-mortem judgment have remained matters of theological reflection rather than dogmatic definition. Appeals to conciliar authority cannot legitimately foreclose such reflection unless the councils themselves clearly and explicitly addressed the claims in question.

For this reason, the mere existence of anti-Origenist anathemas cannot, by itself, settle the question of universal salvation. What matters is not how these anathemas have been rhetorically employed in later centuries, but what they actually condemned. As we have seen, once their historical scope is properly understood, they do not exclude every scripturally grounded, Christological, and Paschal hope for the final reconciliation of all things.

Reception and the “As If” Theory

One might argue that it ultimately does not matter whether the Fifth Ecumenical Council formally approved the anti-Origenist anathemas. The Church came to speak and act as if it had, and that—so the argument goes—is sufficient. As the Cole Porter song goes, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” Later councils and synods would repeat condemnations of Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius in increasingly generalized terms, often without clear distinction between historical figures, later movements, or specific doctrines. As Parts 2 and 3 have already shown, reception in late antiquity often involved repetition without clarification, citation without re-examination, and symbolic naming in place of doctrinal precision.

But this raises unavoidable questions. Were later bishops actually acquainted with the Acts of the Fifth Council or with the fifteen anathemas formulated in advance of it? How many had read Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius with care?

This phenomenon might be described as an “as if” theory of reception: the anathemas are treated as if they were formally promulgated by an ecumenical council, and as if they condemned every form of universal salvation. Yet reception, however widespread, cannot substitute for interpretation. Before a conciliar judgment can be invoked to exclude a theological position, it must first be shown that the position in question actually falls within the scope of what was condemned.

This is not a denial of conciliar authority, but a refusal to reduce that authority to rote repetition. Dogma is too important to be sustained by historical conflation or unexamined assumption. Where serious theological and moral arguments are at stake—especially concerning the final destiny of human beings—appeals to authority must be accompanied by careful attention to what that authority has in fact judged, and why.

The Evangelical Stakes

The gospel itself must ultimately function as our hermeneutic in evaluating the dogmatic assertions associated with the Edict of Justinian and the Fifth Ecumenical Council. St Augustine, confronted with widespread disagreement over the final destiny of sinners, principally appealed not to conciliar finality but to exegetical and moral argument, seeking to persuade fellow Christians rather than to exclude them—an approach that remains instructive here. I conclude with this eloquent plea from Nutcombe Oxenham:

This question, whether the doctrine of never-ending sin and never-ending torments is true, or false, can not be decided on mere historical grounds. Whatever may have been the prevalent opinion in the Christian Church in early or in later ages; whatever may have been the teaching of this or that illustrious theologian in ancient days, or in our own day; whatever may have been the decrees of ancient councils, local or even general; whatever may be the apparent, literal meaning of any text of Scripture; whatever may have been the interpretation with more or less authority assigned to it; whatever may be the evidence which the most honest, laborious, and impartial historical inquiry may supply on any or all of these points, still there remain one question to be asked of vastly greater importance than all these, namely this, What is the moral aspect of this doctrine, which now claims to be de fide in the Christian Church? Is it in keeping with the general scope and tenor of the teaching of Christ and His apostles, or is it in violent contrast? is it in harmony with the revealed character of God? or is it painfully and shockingly discordant? Is it agreeable with those great and unquestionable “everlasting” principles of justice, or mercy, and of love, which must ever be the discriminating and the final test of the truth or the falsehood of any doctrine which claims to be from God? or is it utterly and defiantly subversive of all those principles?¹⁰

Amen. Amen. Amen.¹¹

Footnotes

[1] Augustine Casiday, private correspondence (24 January 2015).

[2] Kallistos Ware, “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?,” The Inner Kingdom (2000), 199-200.

[3] Ibid, 200. I prescind from the scholarly question whether Ware has accurately described Origen’s theology.

[4] Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church (2003), 190. Elizabeth Harding concurs, observing that Origen was condemned largely as a symbolic figure—a convenient cipher for the sixth-century Isochristoi, whose speculative system drew heavily upon Evagrian themes. E. M. Harding, “Origenist Crises,” in The Westminster Handbook to Origen (2004), 166. Also see Istvan Perczel, “Pseudo-Dionysius and Palestinian Origenism,” in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. Joseph Patrich (2001), 261-265.

[5] Ware, 200-201.

[6] Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013), 724.

[7] Ibid., 737.

[8] Justinian’s letter may be found in Richard Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, vol. II (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), II:282-284. “The representation of Origen at the time of his condemnation is thus nuanced. On the one hand, he is grouped amongst the Greek philosophers by Justinian as declaring beliefs that were, according to Cyril the Scythopolitan, prevalent amongst the Origenist monks in Palestine, despite the fact that only one group actually adhered to them. On the other hand, the beliefs of this group seem to be anachronistically attributed to Origen, and coupled with Justinian’s desire to effectuate stability in the region of Palestine that was inflamed by the strife between the Origenists and the adherents of Theodore of Mopsuestia, all of this suggests that the condemnation of Origen almost three hundred years after his death was a strategic maneuver that would silence both parties, making the representation of Origen in the sixth century a theological means to a political end. But the sacrifice of Origen on the altar of imperial politics had a precedent in Palestine, a precedent that once again had more to do with reasons that were extraneous to his person and writings.” Mario Baghos, “The Conflicting Portrayals of Origen in the Byzantine Tradition,” Phronema, 30 (2015): 76.

[9] Ilaria Ramelli, A Larger Hope? (2019), 171. In his introduction to Origen: On First Principles (2018), John Behr contends that Origen did not teach the preexistence of souls (I:lxiii-lxv, lxxx-lxxxviii).

[10] F. Nutcombe Oxenham, What is the Truth as to Everlasting Punishment? (1882), 119-120.

[11] This series is a substantially revised and much expanded version of an article that was first published under the title “Apokatastasis: The Heresy That Never Was” on 18 May 2015 and revised many times since then. This is my final version.

(Part 3) (Part 1)

Posted in Patristic and Byzantine theology, Universalism and Eschatology | Tagged 543 Synod of Constantinople, Fifth Ecumenical Council, hermeneutics of dogma, Kallistos Ware, Origen, Origenism, universal salvation | 10 Comments

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 3)

Posted on 9 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

The Fifth Council and the Anathema Conundrum

The A.D. 543 imperial edict did not resolve the Origenist crisis in Palestine, and so in 553 Justinian decided to revisit the matter. And that brings us to the famous fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas, discovered in the late 17th century by Peter Lambeck, librarian of Vienna:

If anyone advocates the mythical pre-existence of souls and the monstrous restoration that follows from this, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the origin of all rational beings was incorporeal and material minds without any number or name, with the result that there was a henad of them all through identity of substance, power and operation and through their union with and knowledge of God the Word, but that they reached satiety with divine contemplation and turned to what is worse, according to what the drive to this in each one corresponded to, and that they took more subtle or denser bodies and were allotted names such that the powers above have different names just as they have different bodies, as a result of which they became and were named some cherubim, some seraphim, and others principalities, powers, dominations, thrones, angels, and whatever heavenly orders there are, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the sun, the moon and the stars, belonging themselves to the same henad of rational beings, became what they are through turning to what is worse, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the rational beings who grew cold in divine love were bound to our more dense bodies and were named human beings, while those who had reached the acme of evil were bound to cold and dark bodies and are and are called demons and spirits of wickedness, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that from the state of the angels and archangels originates that of the soul, and from that of the soul that of demons and human beings, and from that of human beings angels and demons originate again, and that each order of the heavenly powers is constituted either entirely from those below or those above or from both those above and those below, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the genus of demons had a double origin, being compounded both from human souls and from more powerful spirits that descend to this, but that from the whole henad of rational beings one mind alone remained constant in divine love and contemplation, and that it became Christ and king of all rational beings and created the whole of corporeal nature, both heaven and earth, and what is intermediate, and that the universe came into being containing real elements that are older than its own existence, that is, the dry, the liquid, heat and cold, and also the form according to which it was fashioned, and that the all-holy and consubstantial Trinity did not fashion the universe as the cause of its creation but that mind, as they assert, existing before the universe as creator, gave being to the universe itself and made it created, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that Christ, described as existing in the form of God, united to God the Word even before all the ages, and as having emptied himself in the last days into what is human, took pity, as they assert, upon the multifarious fall of the beings in the same henad and, wishing to restore them, passed through everything and took on various bodies and received various names, becoming all things to all, among angels an angel, among powers a power, and among the other orders or genera of rational beings took on appropriately the form of each, and then like us partook of flesh and blood and became for human beings a human being, [if anyone says this] and does not profess that God the Word emptied himself and became a human being, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that God the Word, consubstantial with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, who was incarnate and became man, one of the holy Trinity, is not truly Christ but only catachrestically, on account of the mind which, as they assert, emptied itself, because it is united to God the Word and is truly called Christ, while the Word is called Christ because of this mind and this mind is called God because of the Word, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that it was not the Word of God, incarnate in flesh ensouled by a rational and intelligent soul, who descended into hell and the same ascended back to heaven, but rather the mind they mention, whom impiously they assert to have truly been made Christ through knowledge of the monad, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the Lord’s body after the resurrection was ethereal and spherical in form, and that the same will be true of the other bodies after the resurrection, and that, with first the Lord himself shedding his own body and [then] all likewise, the nature of bodies will pass into non-existence, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the coming judgment means the total destruction of bodies and that the end of the story will be an immaterial nature, and that thereafter nothing that is material will exist but only pure mind, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the heavenly powers, all human beings, the devil, and the spirits of wickedness will be united to God the Word in just the same way as the mind they call Christ, which is in the form of God and emptied itself, as they assert, and that the kingdom of Christ will have an end, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that there will not be a single difference at all between Christ and other rational beings, neither in substance nor in knowledge nor in power over everything nor in operation, but that all will be at the right hand of God as Christ beside them will be, as indeed they were also in their mythical pre-existence, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that there will be one henad of all rational beings, when the hypostases and numbers are annihilated together with bodies, and that knowledge about rational beings will be accompanied by the destruction of the universes, the shedding of bodies, and the abolition of names, and there will be identity of knowledge as of hypostases, and that in this mythical restoration there will be only pure spirits, as there were in their nonsensical notion of pre-existence, let him be anathema.
If anyone says that the mode of life of the minds will be identical to that earlier one when they had not yet descended or fallen, with the result that the beginning is identical to the end and the end is the measure of the beginning, let him be anathema.¹

Various hypotheses have been advanced to account for these anathemas. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, many historians—including the Catholic colossi Karl Joseph von Hefele and Ignaz von Döllinger, as well as the eminent Protestant scholar Johann K. L. Gieseler—contended that they should be attached to the 543 Synod of Constantinople. Hefele was insistent that the fifteen anathemas should not be assigned to the Fifth Council, noting that they are absent from the conciliar Acts and not mentioned by Popes Vigilius, Pelagius I, and Gregory the Great, despite their detailed discussions of the council’s decrees. “It is by no means probable,” concludes Hefele, “that this Fifth Ecumenical Council occupied itself with Origen in particular, or pronounced against him the fifteen condemnations of which we are speaking.”²

In 1899 Franz Diekamp proposed an alternative reconstruction of the origin of the anti-Origenist anathemas—one that has since been adopted by most modern scholars and may now be regarded as the standard view.³ In late 552, amid renewed factional conflict among Palestinian monastic communities, an anti-Origenist delegation travelled to Constantinople to petition the emperor for intervention. In response to this embassy, Justinian, together with his theological advisers, composed a set of fifteen anathemas directed against contemporary Origenist speculation. In the early months of 553, prior to the formal opening of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, Justinian instructed Patriarch Eutychius to present these anathemas to the bishops then resident in the capital, most likely in the context of a synodus endemousa. This gathering must have occurred before the council convened on the 5th of May. As Richard Price wryly observes, “The opening of the council was delayed by unavailing negotiations with Pope Vigilius; condemning Origenism was one of the activities that filled the bishops’ time.”⁴ The precise date and attendance of this assembly remain uncertain, though Daniel Hombergen suggests March or April 553 as the most likely window.⁵ Alois Grillmeier summarizes Diekamp’s proposal:

Because the condemnation of the Origenists [i.e., the fifteen anathemas] clearly belongs to the Council of 553, but cannot be placed after the opening of it on 5 May 553, an interim solution has to be sought. It consists in the fact that Emperor Justinian instructed the bishops to deal with the question of the Origenists, which, contrary to his expectation, had not been settled by his decree of 543. These bishops had already arrived months before the opening of the Council which was intended to be devoted to the question of the Three Chapters. This ‘synodal action’ took place on the level of a synodus endemousa and was not considered by the Emperor himself as a session of an ecumenical council.⁶

Grillmeier invites us to imagine the situation: Before the opening of the general council, Emperor Justinian summons the bishops then residing in the capital (the endemountes) to confirm his condemnation of Origenist theology.⁷ The convocation of a patriarchal endemousa to address ecclesial and political concerns was already a long-standing practice. Originally, Grillmeier notes, the endemousa “had little to do with the episcopal throne, but in contrast more to do with the Emperor, who, depending upon the occasion, could for serious reasons summon together the bishops who were residing right there at the court.”⁸ The bishops are presented with the imperial anathemas and “encouraged” to confirm them, for the good of Church and Empire. Though history records neither their deliberations nor actions, we may assume that the gathered bishops dutifully assented to the fifteen repudiations.

Because many of the bishops who attended the home synod later participated in the general council, the subsequent association of the anti‑Origenist anathemas with the latter is understandable. Nevertheless, an endemousa remains only a local synod. Its endorsement of the anathemas should not be hastily identified as an ecclesial action with universal doctrinal implications. Issued at imperial initiative and aimed at stabilising a volatile regional conflict, the anathemas reflect both political and theological concerns. In such a context, the conditions for genuinely free episcopal assent are at least open to question; the shadow of imperial dominance cannot be ignored.

With this preconciliar context in view, it becomes clearer how the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas were later associated with the Fifth Ecumenical Council. The distinction between imperial initiatives undertaken in advance of the council and the council’s own formal proceedings was not always clearly preserved in subsequent historiography; as a result, documents originating in different settings and possessing different levels of authority were sometimes transmitted and remembered together. Once this distinction is recognised, a further question naturally arises: How did this association with the Fifth Council take shape and become established in the historical record? Addressing that question requires a shift in focus—from reconstruction of events to the ways those events were narrated, interpreted, and transmitted by ancient historians and ecclesiastical writers.

Interrogating the Ancient Historians

The historical association of the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas with the Fifth Ecumenical Council rests primarily on the testimony of later sixth-century ecclesiastical historians. These sources are often cited as if they offered straightforward confirmation of conciliar condemnation, yet their accounts differ in emphasis, chronology, and scope, and must be read with care. A critical examination of these witnesses is necessary in order to establish what they genuinely attest—and what they do not—regarding Justinian’s campaign against Origenism and the council convened in 553.

The earliest and most frequently cited witness is Cyril of Scythopolis, whose Lives of the Monks of Palestine, composed within a few years of the council (before his death in 558), reflects the perspective of the Palestinian anti-Origenist movement. Cyril recounts that Abba Conon and other monks travelled from Palestine to Constantinople in September 552 to petition the emperor to intervene in the Origenist controversy, and that Justinian, after hearing their report, gave orders that a council be convened to resolve the contentious disputes:

When the fifth holy ecumenical council had assembled at Constantinople, a common and universal anathema was directed against Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia and against the teaching of Evagrius and Didymus on pre-existence and a universal restoration, in the presence and with the approval of the four patriarchs.⁹

Because of his proximity to the events and the confidence with which he narrates them, Cyril’s testimony has often been treated as decisive. Yet his account also exhibits a marked tendency to compress and conflate distinct ecclesiastical actions—imperial initiatives, local synodal proceedings, and the work of the ecumenical council itself—into a single, providential narrative of Origenist defeat.

Daniel Hombergen cautions that Cyril’s account cannot be accepted at face value. Cyril was himself a committed anti-Origenist partisan, and in the passage cited he represents the council as having been convened for the purpose of condemning Origenism. Yet it is well established that Justinian summoned the bishops to Constantinople in order to secure the condemnation of the Three Chapters, a purpose explicitly reiterated in the imperial letter read at the opening of the council. Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that the imperial summons was dispatched before the Palestinian delegation had even arrived in the capital. On this basis, Hombergen concludes that Cyril’s “representation of the facts . . . seriously contradicts the historical evidence”¹⁰ Whether this distortion reflects misinformation, polemical compression, or deliberate narrative reshaping is a further question; but in any case, it signals the need for caution in treating Cyril’s testimony as a reliable guide to the council’s actual proceedings. Hombergen suggests that this chronological distortion serves a clear narrative purpose within Cyril’s project:

Or did Cyril perhaps need this inaccuracy for his claim that it was due to Conon’s libellus that Justinian convoked the Ecumenical Council? In fact, by shifting the date of the convocation as he did, Cyril could compose his account of a providential Origenist defeat by a “common and universal anathema”, pronounced at an ecumenical council through the agency of Sabas’ heir, without being forced to say too much about the painful (to Cyril and his party) Three Chapters affair. In reality, the Origenist coup in Jerusalem, followed by Conon’s action in Constantinople, was only a matter of minor importance. This local crisis was not the one that led to the Fifth Ecumenical Council.¹¹

In other words, while Cyril is an important secondary witness to events in Constantinople, he is not an impartial one. Both he and the sources on which he relies were deeply invested in the outcome of the Origenist controversy.

The crucial question concerns the precise nature of the condemnation Cyril attributes to the Fifth Ecumenical Council. Cyril states that the synod issued a single anathema—described as common and universal—against Origen and his followers. This would be an unusual, though not impossible, way of referring to the fifteen anathemas. It makes considerably more sense, however, if Cyril is referring instead to the council’s general condemnation of Origen in its eleventh canon.

Cyril further claims that the council denounced Didymus and Evagrius Ponticus on account of their teaching concerning the pre-existence of souls and the universal restoration. Yet the Acts of Constantinople II attest to no such condemnation.¹² Whether intentionally or not, Cyril appears to have conflated several distinct actions: the imperial condemnations ratified by the home synod, possibly even those associated with the synod of 543, and the Fifth Council’s unspecific condemnation of Origen in its eleventh canon. His account thus illustrates how heterogeneous measures, undertaken in different settings and for different purposes, could be retrospectively merged into a single narrative. Secondary witnesses of this kind cannot simply be cited as decisive; they must be critically assessed and weighed against the documentary record.

The sixth-century Byzantine historian Evagrius Scholasticus, writing some four decades after Constantinople II, is the second witness most often cited in support of the traditional association between the Fifth Ecumenical Council and the condemnation of Origenism. Evagrius is often said to provide the strongest testimony for the traditional claim that the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas were promulgated by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. In his Ecclesiastical History, he situates the discussion of Origen and the Origenists within the narrative of the council itself, placing it after the bishops’ deliberations concerning pseudonymous condemnation and the ratification of the fourteen conciliar canons. He writes::

And after other things they expounded fourteen chapters concerning the correct and blameless faith. And thus did these matters proceed. But when depositions against the doctrines of Origen, who is also called Adamantine, and those who follow his impiety and error, were submitted by the monks Eulogius, Conon, Cyriacus and Pancratius, Justinian asked the assembled Synod concerning these matters, after attaching both a copy of the deposition and the missives to Vigilius the correct and blameless faith concerning these things. From all of these one can gather how Origen attempted to fill up the simplicity of apostolic doctrines with Hellenic and Manichaean tares. Accordingly a reply to Justinian was given by the Synod, after it had made acclamations against Origen and his companions in error. . . .

To this they also attached the chapters which revealed what those who hold the doctrines of Origen were taught to profess, both their agreements as well as their disagreements, and their many-sided error. Among these there is a fifth chapter for the blasphemies of individual members of the so-called New Lavra, which ran thus: ‘Theodore Ascidas the Cappadocian said: ”If now the apostles and martyrs accomplish miracles and are held in the same honour, if in the restoration they are not equal to Christ, what sort of restoration is there for them?”’ Many other blasphemies of Didymus, Evagrius and Theodore were also reported by them, since they had collected relevant material with great diligence.¹³

At first glance, this passage appears to confirm that the council formally addressed Origenist doctrines. Yet closer examination raises difficulties. Although Evagrius records a discussion of Origenist teachings and reports episcopal acclamations against Origen and his “companions in error,” he makes no mention of the fifteen anathemas themselves. Moreover, the specific material he cites—most notably the fifth chapter attributed to Theodore Ascidas—is not found among the fifteen.¹⁴ This strongly suggests that Evagrius is referring to a different dossier of accusations, quite possibly the depositions submitted by the Palestinian monastic delegation in 552 and transmitted to the emperor and the bishops.¹⁵

The critical question, then, concerns the setting Evagrius has in view. As Michael Whitby, the translator of Evagrius’s Ecclesiastical History, observes, Evagrius appears to have conflated the proceedings of the home synod with those of the general council: “These proceedings concerning Origen are not included among the incomplete acta of the Fifth Council; they preceded the Council and were not regarded as a formal part of proceedings.”¹⁶ Hombergen identifies several inaccuracies and errors in Evagrius’ account of the council but offers this exculpation: “Evagrius depended not only on the documents he had at his disposal, but also, as it seems, on existing contradictory traditions concerning the issue of the Council.”¹⁷

Significantly, apart from the obscure speculation attributed to Theodore Ascidas, Evagrius provides no substantive account of the doctrines allegedly condemned. He does not mention apokatastasis, nor does he address the question of everlasting punishment. While he asserts that Origen and his associates were condemned by acclamation, he does not specify the errors for which they were condemned. Evagrius thus offers further evidence of how preconciliar actions and imperial initiatives came to be retrospectively absorbed into the narrative of the Fifth Ecumenical Council; but, like Cyril of Scythopolis, he does not supply clear evidence that the council itself promulgated the fifteen anathemas.

Our third witness is Victor (d. ca. 569), bishop of Tunnuna in North Africa and a vigorous opponent of Justinian’s Three Chapters initiative. He was also author of a near-contemporaneous, year-by-year chronicle. For the year 553, Victor records that Justinian convened a synod in Constantinople at which the Three Chapters were condemned. Significantly, he cites neither the condemnation of Origen nor the promulgation of the fifteen anathemas. However, for the year 565 he writes that “Justinian sent into exile Eutychius, Bishop of Constantinople, the condemner of the Three Chapters and of Evagrius, the eremite deacon, and of Didymus, monk and confessor of Alexandria.”¹⁸ Unfortunately, he does not provide the specifics of Eutychius’ condemnation of Evagrius and Didymus. As Nutcombe Oxenham observes:

We are certainly not at liberty to cite this passing allusion as a proof that Victor held Evagrius and Didymus to have been condemned at the same time as “The Three Chapters,” i.e. by the Fifth Council, since in his own record of that council he makes no mention of their condemnation. Of Origen, be it observed, he says nothing at all in either Chronicle.¹⁹

Victor’s testimony thus introduces further complexity. His chronicle suggests that Eutychius later took action against Evagrius and Didymus, but it does not locate that action within the proceedings of the Fifth Council. On this basis, Hefele speculated that Eutychius may have been the source of the later report that the Fifth Council condemned Didymus and Evagrius.²⁰ Whether or not this conjecture is correct, Victor’s account once again illustrates how distinct actions—imperial, patriarchal, and conciliar—could be subsequently blurred in the transmission of ecclesiastical history.

Finally we come to a document written in the late 730s: On the Heresies to Epiphanius by Hieromonk George.²¹ This treatise, discovered by Marcel Richard in 1961, includes in its ninth chapter a discussion of the alleged errors of the sixth-century Origenists. There, George asserts that the Fifth Ecumenical Council condemned Origen, Evagrius, and Didymus. Significantly, however, he makes no reference to the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas. He does remark that those who wish to know more should consult the synodical acta, thereby suggesting—without explicitly claiming—that he himself had done so.

George’s testimony does not undermine Diekamp’s reconstruction. Rather, it raises the same methodological questions encountered with earlier witnesses. The treatise does not establish whether its author possessed direct knowledge of the conciliar acts or was instead dependent upon an inherited narrative that had already assimilated synodical and imperial actions. In any case, George offers no new documentary evidence, nor does he address the two central historical difficulties: the absence of the fifteen anathemas from the conciliar acta, and the well-attested fact that Justinian convened the council for the express purpose of securing condemnation of the Three Chapters, not to resolve the Origenist controversy in Palestine.

The Third Council of Constantinople, convened in 680-681, provides clear evidence that by the end of the 7th century the belief that the Fifth Council had condemned Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius had become firmly established in ecclesial consciousness. In its opening preface, the council fathers describe Constantinople II as having been convened not only against Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Three Chapters, but also against the three Alexandrian theologians.²²

We move forward several centuries to the testimony of Nikephoros of Constantinople. In addition to transmitting a set of nine anti-Origenist anathemas—which he mistakenly attributes to the Fifth Ecumenical Council—Nikephoros also offers a summary of the doctrines he believes were repudiated by that council. His description strongly suggests dependence on material ultimately derived from Justinian’s letter to the bishops and/or the fifteen anathemas themselves:

The soul existed before the body, and it may have committed sins in heaven. And also that the heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the water which are above the heavens are animated, and are, as it were, reasonable powers. Besides that, in the resurrection the bodies of men will be raised in a round and orbicular form, and that the torments of all impious men, and of the devils themselves, will have an end, and that the wicked and devils shall be restored to their former order. Moreover, that it behoves Christ to be crucified also for the devils, and often to suffer in future ages for the spirits of wickedness who are in heavenly places.²³

How is it that ancient scribes and historians could get things both so right and so wrong? Seventeenth century historians William Cave (Anglican) and Jean Garnier (Jesuit) speculated that the documents from the three synods under Menas and the general synod under Eutychius were collected together in one codex identified by the name “Fifth Synod.”²⁴ If materials from the synodus endemousa belonged to this collection, the resulting archive would readily account for the persistent confusion concerning which synods addressed Origenism, which promulgated specific anathemas, and which actions belonged to the formal proceedings of the ecumenical council itself.

The above testimonies explain how the association between the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas and the Fifth Ecumenical Council came to be established in conciliar lore. Yet they do not settle the historical question of what the council itself formally enacted. Narrative accounts, often shaped by theological commitment, retrospective interpretation, or archival confusion, cannot substitute for the council’s own documentary record. If the claim that Constantinople II promulgated the fifteen anathemas is to be sustained, it must ultimately be grounded in the conciliar acta themselves. We turn now from historiographical reception to the surviving records of the council’s proceedings.

The surviving acta of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, preserved principally in the Latin translation and critically edited by Richard Price, present a striking contrast to the later historiographical tradition surveyed above. The Acts record in detail the council’s sessions, deliberations, and formal decisions, all of which are directed toward a single overriding objective: the condemnation of the Three Chapters. Neither the imperial letter read at the opening of the council nor the lengthy summary of its work presented at the beginning of the eighth session makes any reference to Origen, to Origenism, or to the controversies then troubling Palestinian monastic communities. The fourteen conciliar canons that conclude the proceedings likewise address only Christological and Chalcedonian concerns related to Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and the letter attributed to Ibas. As Price notes, the continuous numbering of the sessions and their correspondence with citations at the Sixth Ecumenical Council strongly suggest that the Acts are substantially complete.²⁵

This silence is all the more significant given what the Acts do contain. Origen’s name appears only once—in the eleventh anathema, where he is listed alongside earlier heretics as one already condemned by the Church, without specification of errors or discussion of doctrine. There is no record of debate concerning apokatastasis, the pre-existence of souls, or the restoration of demons, nor is there any indication that the council promulgated a set of anti-Origenist canons. Price concludes unequivocally that “the acts contain no such canons and no discussion of Origenism,” and that the anti-Origenist material traditionally associated with Constantinople II must therefore derive from a different context.²⁶ The documentary record thus confirms what the interrogation of later historians had already suggested: whatever measures were taken against Origenist speculation in the 540s and early 550s, they were not enacted as part of the formal proceedings of the Fifth Ecumenical Council.

Price, however, has more recently revived a conjecture originally proposed by the eighteenth-century historians Pietro Ballerini and Girolamo Ballerini, according to which the anti-Origenist anathemas were in fact promulgated by the Fifth Ecumenical Council but were omitted from the Latin translation of the acta for reasons unknown.²⁷ This hypothesis, however, rests on a series of assumptions for which no independent evidence survives. It presupposes, first, that translators would have exercised discretion in suppressing conciliar material of doctrinal significance, and second, that such a substantial omission could have gone unnoticed across both Eastern and Western traditions for centuries. As Price himself acknowledges, the Latin translation was likely produced soon after the finalization of the Greek text and under circumstances that strongly favored fidelity to the original. The more economical explanation, therefore, remains that the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas were never part of the conciliar proceedings at all. On this reading, the Fifth Council’s brief mention of Origen in its eleventh canon sufficed, and no special condemnation of Origenist doctrine was enacted. Price’s conjecture is ingenious, but Diekamp’s reconstruction continues to offer a simpler and better-supported account of the evidence.

The absence of the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas from the Latin acta also raises a serious question of reception. Within Orthodox ecclesiology, ecumenical authority is inseparable from reception by the whole Church, paradigmatically represented by the historic patriarchates. Within Catholic ecclesiology, by contrast, decisive weight is placed upon reception and confirmation by the Bishop of Rome. Yet under either framework, the evidence from the Lateran Synod of 649 renders reception problematic. When the Roman Church received Constantinople II as an ecumenical council, it did so through the Latin acta.²⁸ In that setting, only the fourteen canons concerning the Three Chapters were read, together with the council’s general condemnation of Origen in the eleventh canon. The fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas were neither read nor received. Whatever their origin or later authority in other contexts, they were not received by the Roman Church as part of the conciliar decree of the Fifth Ecumenical Council. From an Orthodox perspective, the difficulty is even more pronounced. Ecumenical authority in Orthodoxy is not conferred by imperial initiative or later historiographical attribution, but by the reception of a council’s determinations by the whole Church. Yet no such reception can be demonstrated for the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas. They are absent from the conciliar acta, were not promulgated as canons of Constantinople II, and were not received universally as conciliar definitions. Their later association with the Fifth Council reflects a process of conflation rather than catholic reception. On Orthodox ecclesiological principles, therefore, the fifteen anathemas should not be regarded as possessing dogmatic authority, whatever their historical significance in other contexts.

Some defenders of the traditional account have attempted to bridge this gap by appeal to implicit or preparatory approval. Ignatius Green, for example, contends (1) that the fifteen anathemas, “signed beforehand at a preparatory council, . . . apparently won the approval of all five patriarchs at the time,” and (2) that the general council itself accepted the anathemas.²⁹ In support of the first claim, Green appeals to the council’s discussion of posthumous condemnation during the fifth session. At that point, the bishops were being asked by Justinian to condemn the person of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who had died in communion with the Church. In this context, the Acts note several precedents for posthumous condemnation, including Origen:

And we find indeed many others who were anathematized after death, including also Origen: if one goes back to the time of Theophilus of holy memory or even earlier, one will find him anathematized after death. This has been done even now in his regard by your holinesses and by Vigilius the most religious pope of Elder Rome.³⁰

Green, following Price, suggests that the reference to actions taken “even now” alludes to the synodus endemousa. This is a plausible conjecture, but conjecture nonetheless. As they stand, the fifteen anathemas do not explicitly mention Origen and therefore cannot be identified with the posthumous condemnation referenced here. Even if the passage does refer to the home synod, it does not constitute a formal adoption of the anathemas by Constantinople II.

Green’s second claim—that the general council accepted the anathemas—fares no better. The conciliar minutes make no mention of the fifteen anathemas. At most, it may be granted that many of the bishops were aware of them, having attended the home synod. Awareness, or even prior acquiescence, however, does not amount to official promulgation. The insertion of Origen’s name into the council’s heresiological list cannot be shown to imply ratification of a particular dossier of doctrinal errors. The claim that it does so rests on inference rather than evidence. We have no access to the private intentions of the council fathers; only their public acts are historically probative. The decisive fact remains that the Fifth Ecumenical Council did not formally promulgate the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas. That fact must govern any assessment of their dogmatic authority.

The Condemnation of Origen and the Question of Apokatastasis

As argued in Part 2, by the mid-sixth century the Origenist controversy had become a malleable instrument of imperial policy. Justinian’s interventions were not confined to the adjudication of theological disputes as such, but were shaped by broader concerns of ecclesial consolidation, monastic discipline, and imperial stability. In this context, Origen functioned less as a historical theologian whose doctrines were subjected to careful scrutiny than as a symbolic figure through whom the emperor could address contemporary unrest and assert doctrinal authority. Any assessment of the Fifth Ecumenical Council’s treatment of Origen must therefore be read in continuity with this wider imperial strategy. Just as Patriarch Theophilus in the late fourth century traduced Origen and his theological legacy to advance specific political and ecclesial objectives, so Emperor Justinian did the same—but on an exponentially larger scale. The continuing conflict between rival monastic communities in Palestine posed a serious threat not only to ecclesial order but also to civic stability and Justinian’s broader project of forging a unified Christian empire. As Istvan Perczel observes:

In the years between 535 and 553, Justinian adopted a new conception of the orthodox Christian empire—apparently he tried to transform it to a land only inhabited by orthodox Christians and to eliminate all dissenting groups or religious formations from the folds of the empire.³¹

To this end the name of Origen was deliberately weaponized.

Assessment of the Fifth Ecumenical Council must, of course, reckon with the fact that, in the eleventh canon, Origen is listed alongside men condemned as heretics by previous general councils. Several features of the conciliar record are decisive here. First, Origen is named without any specification of error. Unlike the detailed Christological judgments directed against Theodore of Mopsuestia and the other figures implicated in the Three Chapters controversy, the council offers no analysis of Origen’s teachings, no enumeration of doctrines, and no theological argumentation. There is no discussion of universal restoration, the final destiny of rational creatures, or the duration of punishment. The council neither defines eternal damnation nor identifies apokatastasis as a doctrinal error. To identify a person as a heretic is not to assert that everything that he believed and taught was in error. There is an important difference, as Oxenham comments, “between condemning a man in general, and condemning certain opinions in particular.”³² What errors, therefore, did the council fathers have in mind when they approved the inclusion of Origen’s name in canon 11? We do not know.

Second, the wider documentary context confirms the limited and derivative character of Origen’s condemnation. Origen’s name is absent from Justinian’s homonoia, the imperial draft summarizing the council’s purpose, and from Pope Vigilius’s subscribed version of the conciliar condemnations. In other words, condemnation of Origen did not belong to Justinian’s original intent for the Fifth Council. As scholars such as Elizabeth Clark have observed, Origen appears in the conciliar acts in an ahistorical and unstable manner, serving largely as a symbolic proxy for sixth-century Origenist movements—especially those shaped by Evagrian speculation—rather than as the subject of a focused doctrinal adjudication.³³ Justinian’s concern, and therefore the council’s concern, was not Origen’s personal theology, but the perceived theological excesses of contemporary groups for whom he had become an emblematic figure.

Finally, and most importantly, no legitimate inference can be drawn from Origen’s condemnation to a conciliar rejection of apokatastasis as such. Councils routinely condemn persons without thereby condemning every doctrine they taught or were later associated with. To move from Origen’s name in canon 11 to the claim that universal restoration was defined as heresy requires precisely what the council does not provide: a doctrinal specification, a theological argument, or a formal definition. None is present. The condemnation of Origen establishes neither the content nor the limits of orthodox eschatology, and it cannot be invoked as proof that the hope for the ultimate restoration of all has been dogmatically excluded by the Second Council of Constantinople.

This conclusion is reinforced if the argument advanced in Part 2 is sound—namely, that by the mid-sixth century the name Origen no longer denoted a clearly defined historical theology but had become a polemical cipher. If so, this fact must decisively shape how the Fifth Ecumenical Council’s condemnation of Origen is interpreted. A cipher cannot bear precise doctrinal weight. It functions symbolically, not analytically, and its condemnation signals disapproval of a perceived theological tendency rather than the rejection of a carefully specified set of propositions.

This is precisely the form Origen’s condemnation takes at Constantinople II. Origen is named without doctrinal exposition, without identification of specific errors, and without any discussion of eschatology. His appearance in canon 11 occurs in a catalogue of heretics and is detached from the council’s actual agenda, deliberations, and self-description. In this context, Origen functions not as a third-century exegete whose theology is being evaluated, but as a representative figure standing in for a cluster of later controversies—many of them only loosely or inaccurately connected to his own writings. The condemnation thus reflects a sixth-century imperial and ecclesiastical judgment about the dangers of speculative theology associated—rightly or wrongly—with Origen’s legacy, rather than a conciliar definition concerning the final destiny of rational creatures.

Be that as it may, Christendom came to believe that the Fifth Ecumenical Council had condemned Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius and all their “mythical speculations.” Their writings were destroyed; their many contributions to the life and witness of the Church forgotten. But most tragically, the good news of humanity’s eschatological restoration in the Kingdom, sealed in the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son, came to be regarded as dangerous heresy. Now the preaching of the gospel must be accompanied by the threat of everlasting damnation. Hell has descended into the depths of the dogmatic consciousness of the Church. Christ Jesus may have cast down the gates of hades; but in its place bishops and emperors built an even more terrifying fortress, whose infernal gates must be defended at all costs.

Footnotes

[1] Richard Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, vol. II (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), II:284-286.

[2] Quoted by F. Nutcombe Oxenham, What is the Truth as to Everlasting Punishment? (1882), 102. Johann Gieseler too was convinced that the 15 anathemas were to be attributed to the 543 Synod: “and from this σύνοδος ενδημούσα proceeded, without doubt, the fifteen canons against Origen.” A Textbook of Church History, trans. Samuel Davidson (1857), I:478, n. 10.

[3] Franz Diekamp, Die Origenistische Streitigkeiten (1899)—alas, I do not read German. It should be noted that Herbert H. Jeaffreson appears to have anticipated Diekamp’s thesis by a decade. He hypothesizes that the 15 anathemas, which scholars of his time attributed either to the 543 synod or the 553 general council, were in fact promulgated by an undocumented home synod convened by Patriarch Eutychius in 552 or early 553: Appendix to Our Catholic Inheritance in the Larger Hope (1888) by Alfred Gurney, 78.

J. A. McGuckin has recently proposed a more radical solution: the 15 anti-Origenist anathemas were interpolated into the Greek version of the conciliar acta after it was translated into Latin: “In the early part of this great synod, when Pope Vigilius had been summoned to the capital but refused to appear at the sessions, a letter (homonoia) seems to have been issued by the emperor’s personal cabinet to the assembled bishops denouncing the Isochristoi who were being led astray by Origen. Fifteen objectionable items were drawn up, a list of things to be anathematized. Peculiarly, the anathemata are all taken from the works of Evagrius of Pontus. The anathemata did not get themselves attached to the official acts of the council of 553, but to strengthen the legal case against the Origenist ‘disturbers of the peace’ the anathemata were quietly added to the synodal acts at a later date and have consequently been received as conciliar records from the end of the sixth century onward, a sleight of hand made possible by those who held the key to the archives.” John Anthony McGuckin, The Path of Christianity (2017), 615. I confess that I personally find the simplicity of the interpolation hypothesis attractive, as it resolves, in one fell swoop, all the historical problems that will be noted below. Its plausibility increases if we then invoke Occam’s Razor. But what the heck do I know? I’m a blogger, dammit, not a historian.

[4] Price, II:271-272.

[5] Daniel Hombergen, The Second Origenist Controversy (2001), 307.

[6] Alois Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, II/2:403-404. For an eccentric Orthodox reading of the Fifth Council that rejects the central theses presented in the present essay, see Georgi Maximov, “Will the Torments of Hades Have an End?” The Orthodox Word, 56 (January-April 2020): 68-89. For a traditional Orthodox view, see Marius Telea, “Origenism in the Vision of Emperor Justinian I (527-565),” International Journal of Orthodox Theology, 13 (2022). Telea attributes the 15 anathemas attributes to the Fifth Council, principally on the basis of the reports of Cyril of Scythopolis and Evagrius Scholasticus. He does not address the absence of the 15 anathemas in the conciliar acta.

[7] Justinian’s cover letter may be found in Appendix I of Price’s book (II:282-284).

[8] Grillmeier, II/2:5-6, n. 1.

[9] Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine (1991), 208.

[10] Hombergen, 293. Hombergen concludes: “I established beyond doubt that Cyril’s representation of the Second Origenist Controversy is seriously defective. Cyril is not a reliable historian who can be trusted uncritically” (330). John Behr concurs: “Although Cyril of Scythopolis asserts that the condemnation of Origenism, together with Theodore of Mopsuestia, was the central business of the Council of Constantinople, the Acts of the Council have no mention of this. It is generally accepted that Justinian’s letter regarding Origenism and the attached canons were accepted by a meeting of bishops held during the period prior to the opening of the council, which had been delayed by Vigilius stalling for time.” The Case Against Diodore and Theodore (2011): 124. Price also questions Cyril’s reliability as a historian because of his misrepresentation of Leontius of Byzantium’s theological views (II:272-273).

[11] Hombergen, 301. On what the 6th century Origenists may actually have believed and taught, see Hombergen’s discussion in chap. 3. Also see Brian Daley, “What did ‘Origenism’ Mean in the Sixth Century?” in Origeniana Sexta (1995), 627-638.

[12] “All later writers, who assert that Origen was condemned by the Fifth Council, always relate that Didymus and Evagrius were condemned at the same time and together with Origen; but Origen’s name stands alone in this eleventh Canon, and no mention is made of Didymus or Evagrius.” Oxenham, 38.

[13] Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History, trans. Michael Whitby, 248-259.

[14] Hefele’s comment on Evagrius’ reference to Theodore Askidas is to the point: “This proposition is not to be found among the fifteen anathemas, there is not even anything that recalls it, which proves that this passage of Evagrius has no feature in common with any of the fifteen anathemas; besides, he does not allude in any way to this number fifteen.” (Quoted by Oxenham, 103).

[15] “Evagrius treats the anti-Origenist libellus presented to Justinian by a group of Palestinian monks, a letter of Vigilius on the same subject, and a relatio which the synod made to Justinian, extracts from which are given by Evagrius (188,24–189,16). To these acta, says Evagrius (189,17-20), was appended a list of Origenist errors, suitably refuted. The fifth chapter contained the teaching of Theodore Ascidas. None of these documents appears in the acta of the council of 553; the proceedings belong, as Diekamp has shown, to a preliminary meeting of the oecumenical council.” Pauline Allen, Evagrius Scholasticus, the Church Historian (1981), 204.

[16] Whitby, 248, n. 131. Many 17th-19th century Church historians—e.g., William Cave, Henri Valois, Jean Garnier, and Hefele—suggested that in his study of the manuscripts Scholasticus mistakenly confused documents from the 543 and 553 synods.

[17] Hombergen, 304, n. 236. Cf. Charles Joseph von Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church (1895), IV:221-225.

[18] Quoted by Oxenham, 54.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Hefele, IV:297.

[21] The Greek text of Hieromonk George’s treatise On the Heresies to Epiphanius may be found in Marcel Richard, “Le traité sur les hérésies de Georges hiéromoine,” Revue des études byzantines, tome 28 (1970): 239-269. I wish to thank Fr John Behr for reading through chapter nine of the treatise and summarizing for me its content. In the paraphrased words of Fr John: chapter nine is typical anti-Origen heresiological fare, not reliable historical reportage.

[22] Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner (1990), I:124-125.

[23] Quoted by Oxenham, 80.

[24] See Oxenham, 94-99.

[25] Price, II:270.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Richard Price, “East and West at the Ecumenical Councils” (2017), unpublished lecture. Hefele dismisses the Ballerini hypothesis as arbitrary and lacking evidentiary support. Hefele, IV:296.

[28] See Oxenham, pp. 58-60, 91.

[29] Ignatius Green, “Introduction” to St Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Discourse (2019), 42.

[30] Istvan Perczel, “Clandestine Heresy and Politics in Sixth-Century Constantinople,” in New Themes, New Styles in the Eastern Mediterranean (2017), 140.

[31] Price, I:338.

[32] Oxenham, 46.

[33] Elizabeth Clark, “Origenist Crises,” in The Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. J. A. McGuckin (2004), 166. The difference between canon 11 of the original homonoia and the received text, combined with the fact that Origen is listed out of chronological order, has prompted historians over the past two hundred years to wonder whether the inclusion of Origen’s name might be an interpolation. This minority view continues to find support among contemporary Church historians. See, e.g., Ilaria Ramelli, “The Second Council of Constantinople,” in Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity Online. https://doi.org/10.1163/2589-7993_EECO_COM_040628.

(Part 2) (Part 4)

Posted in Patristic and Byzantine theology, Universalism and Eschatology | Tagged anti-Origenist anathemas, Fifth Ecumenical Council, Justinian, Origen, Second Council of Constantinople, second Origenist crisis | 13 Comments

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 2)

Posted on 6 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

From Debate to Decree:
Justinian and the Origenist Crisis

In A.D. 543, the long-standing accommodation of divergent views concerning final judgment and salvation was decisively disrupted. What changes here is not merely the tone or intensity of theological disagreement, but the mechanism by which doctrinal judgments are enforced. The imperial edict issued by Emperor Justinian I against Origen and “Origenist” doctrines marks a qualitative shift in the Church’s handling of eschatological controversy. Apokatastasis is no longer treated as a speculative or exegetical position to be answered through theological argument, but as a doctrinal threat requiring juridical suppression. The boundary between theological judgment and imperial governance is now deliberately blurred in a new and consequential way.

Several features of Justinian’s intervention deserve emphasis. First, the condemnation is retrospective. Origen had been dead for nearly three centuries, and many of the doctrines then associated with his name had already been developed, systematized, and in some cases distorted within later Origenist movements. Although the edict enumerates a series of distinct propositions, it does not engage them as self-standing claims with independent histories. Instead, these teachings are presented together as a composite dossier: doctrines such as preexistence, cyclical cosmology, the salvation of the devil, and universal restoration appear as elements of a single polemical construction. In this way, the edict functions to exclude a perceived Origenist complex in the service of imperial demands for doctrinal uniformity and ecclesial stability.

Second, and more decisively, 543 reflects a changed configuration of ecclesial and imperial power. Imperial involvement in enforcing conciliar settlements was not new. What is distinctive here is the initiative and the juridical form of exclusion: the condemnation proceeds not from a conciliar clarification emerging from ecclesial deliberation, but from an imperial edict that presupposes closure and requires episcopal compliance. Disputed theology is thereby reframed as a threat to public order as well as to ecclesial unity. The result is not merely the enforcement of consensus, but the consolidation of doctrinal boundaries under imperial expectation and coercive pressure.

Finally, the attempt at doctrinal closure initiated in 543 cannot be read simply as the formal articulation of a belief long established as ecumenically normative within the Church. At least at the level of imperial intent, the edict appears to press toward a comprehensive exclusion of universal restoration as such. Whether the bishops who subscribed to the edict understood it in so sweeping a sense is far less clear. What is certain is that the intervention represents a politically mediated effort to impose closure upon a question that had not been settled by synodical debate and definition. The very necessity of imperial action testifies to the persistence and vitality of restorative hopes within Christian theology, even on the eve of their attempted suppression. What changes in the sixth century, therefore, is not merely what some Christians believe, but the configuration of authority by which the limits of permissible belief are now asserted.

According to the sixth-century historian Liberatus of Carthage, the papal legate Pelagius traveled to Egypt and Palestine in the early 540s. While in Jerusalem, he encountered anti-Origenist monks who described the doctrines they attributed to Origenist monks and the disturbances these were provoking. These monks presented him with a formal indictment (libellus) against the teachings of Origen and urged him to transmit it to the emperor. Upon his return to Constantinople, Pelagius did so.

In A.D. 543, Justinian I issued an imperial edict condemning the writings of Origen and dispatched it to Menas of Constantinople, Patriarch of Constantinople, instructing him to convene the resident synod (synodus endemousa) and to pronounce condemnation. The edict appended excerpts from Origen’s Peri Archon—some of which may be spurious—together with nine anathemas. Justinian also circulated the edict to Pope Vigilius and to the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, all of whom formally signaled their assent.

Nothing further is heard about the nine anathemas until the thirteenth century. At that point, Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos quotes them in his Ecclesiastical History, which he says he copied from a commentary of unknown author and date, and identifies them as the official canons of the Fifth Ecumenical Council.¹ Historians now regard this identification as mistaken. Nevertheless, the fact that Nikephoros’ sources preserve this error testifies to the confusion surrounding the transmission and authority of the anathemas in the manuscript tradition.

The reprobations read as follows:

If anyone says or holds that the souls of human beings pre-exist, as previously minds and holy powers, but that they reached satiety with divine contemplation and turned to what is worse and for this reason grew old in the love of God and are therefore called souls, and were made to descend into bodies as a punishment, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that the Lord’s soul pre-existed and came into being united to God the word before the incarnation and birth from a virgin, let him be anathema.
If anyone holds or says that the body of our Lord Jesus Christ was first formed in the womb of the holy Virgin and that afterwards both God the word and the soul, being pre-existent, were united to it, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that the Word of God became like all the heavenly orders, becoming cherubim for the cherubim, seraphim for the seraphim, and becoming (in a word) like all the powers above, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that at the resurrection the bodies of human beings will be raised spherical and does not profess that we shall be raised upright, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that heaven, sun, moon, stars, and the waters above the heavens are ensouled and rational powers, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that in the age to come Christ the Master will be crucified on behalf of demons as well as on behalf of human beings, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that God’s power is finite and that he created [only] what he could grasp and comprehend, or that creation is coeternal with God, let him be anathema.
If anyone says or holds that the punishment of demons and impious human beings is temporary and that it will have an end at some time, and that there will be a restoration of demons and impious human beings, let him be anathema.²

Disentangling the authentic teachings of Origen from the doctrines attributed to him in the sixth-century Origenist controversies is therefore unavoidable. The Alexandrian theologian did not teach that Christ would be crucified anew on behalf of demons and humanity, that resurrected bodies would assume a spherical form, or that God’s creative power is finite. This is the crucial contextual point. The anathemas cannot plausibly be read as condemnations of the historical Origen’s theology—despite the attempt to anchor the charges in the Peri Archon—but only of a sixth-century construction of “Origenism,” assembled from later speculative developments and polemical extrapolations. By this stage, Origenism had evolved into a religious–metaphysical system the third-century theologian would scarcely have recognized as his own. Nevertheless, the emperor—much like Theophilus before him—proved determined to discredit Origen by name.³

Though often cited by critics of Origen and proponents of eternal damnation as dogmatically authoritative, the nine anathemas cannot straightforwardly be regarded as possessing such authority. Richard Price explains: “As regards the canons of 543, they were issued as an imperial decree, and sent to the patriarchs (including the patriarch of Constantinople) not for their confirmation but for their circulation. Their authority was imperial rather than synodal.”⁴ Nonetheless, imperial decrees exercise decisive force within the Church by prescribing the boundaries of permissible teaching and proclamation—functioning, in effect, as imposed grammatical rules governing how doctrine may be articulated and defended. They do not, however, by themselves constitute irreformable dogmatic definitions.

For our purposes, it is the ninth anathema that requires closest attention: “If anyone says or holds that the punishment of demons and impious human beings is temporary and that it will have an end at some time, and that there will be a restoration of demons and impious human beings, let him be anathema.” Read in isolation and abstracted from its sixth-century context, this anathema might appear to condemn every conceivable form of apokatastasis. Perhaps Justinian I intended so comprehensive an exclusion. Whether the bishops who subscribed to the edict understood it in that sense is far less certain; we possess no record of their deliberations, only evidence of assent.

This uncertainty gives rise to a decisive clarifying question: Did the condemnation intend to exclude the universalist eschatology of St Gregory of Nyssa?

The pressure point in 543, however, is not a single eschatological thesis considered in isolation, but a sixth-century Origenist system taken as a whole—one whose internal coherence depends upon the preexistence of souls, their fall into embodiment, and their eventual restoration to an original disembodied state. Anathema nine, therefore, cannot be read independently of the metaphysical framework presupposed and excluded elsewhere in the anathemas, most notably the doctrine of preexistence condemned in anathema one. Read together, these anathemas function not as free-standing metaphysical pronouncements, but as coordinated grammatical exclusions aimed at a particular doctrinal configuration. Anathemas one and nine must therefore be interpreted in tandem.

Orthodox philosopher Nathan Jacobs cautiously suggests that even Gregory of Nyssa could have subscribed to canon nine without denying his own formulation of universal salvation:

I have in mind here the fact that Gregory consistently points out that when the wicked repent, the wicked are no more. See, e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Lord’s Prayer, homily 1. For the person is no longer wicked but righteous. Hence, one could affirm that the torments of the wicked are unending in the sense that torment and wickedness are co-extensive. But should the person cease to be wicked, we would not say that the torments of the wicked have ceased. For the man is not wicked. In other words, his repentance has eliminated the referent (i.e., “the wicked”). He is not a wicked man free of torment but a righteous man.⁵

I want to concur, but I find Jacobs’ conjecture strained. Justinian could reasonably object that Gregory is just playing with words. More plausible, I think, is to envision Gregory affirming the canon on the basis of his repudiation of the metaphysic that informs sixth-century Origenism. We might imagine him saying—by way of heuristic paraphrase—”I too reject the cyclical understanding of Origenist apokatastasis. I too reject the Origenist understanding of temporary post-mortem punishment, as it is logically tied to the return to an original disembodied state. Regrettably, neither Justinian nor the Origenists appear to have read my writings on apokatastasis. If they had, they would know that the purgatorial sufferings of Gehenna are but preparation for a more glorious eschatological outcome. In Christ all will be raised into a glorified bodily existence. God will be all in all!”

Oxenham reminds us that canon nine is “the only decree purporting to come from any ancient council, general or local, in which the doctrine ‘that the punishment of the wicked will come to an end,’ is even mentioned.”⁶ This fact alone should caution against universalizing its authority, scope, or intended application. A solitary and anomalous prohibition—especially one emerging from an imperially initiated process—cannot bear the weight of a retrospective, ecumenical dogmatic settlement. Historical context, therefore, must govern interpretation.

The doctrinal authority of the ninth canon, moreover, cannot be assessed apart from the role it plays within Justinian I’s broader effort to secure social order, political cohesion, and ecclesial unity within the empire. As Justinian himself makes clear, one of the perceived dangers of apokatastasis was its alleged tendency to encourage moral laxity and civil disorder.⁷ The fear that apokatastasis will encourage immorality and civil disorder enjoys a long history. The threat of everlasting suffering can be a powerful inducement to obedience to moral norms, Church dogmas, and the laws of the imperium. But social utility is not a theological argument.

God’s self-revelation in Christ as absolute Love will always subvert civil religion and challenge the violence and power structures of the State. Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. For this reason above all, emperors should not dictate doctrine. When they succeed in doing so, the Church must remain free to reassess such interventions theologically.

But why blame Origen for teachings he never taught? One might reasonably expect Justinian I and his theological advisers to have distinguished between the authentic doctrines of the third-century Alexandrian and the heterodox speculations circulating among sixth-century Palestinian monks. The evidence suggests that no such discrimination was made. As Panayiotis Tzamalikos observes with characteristic severity:

Justinian had no idea of who Origen was, or what he had taught. His advisors, abbot Gelasius and his band, had only an oblique knowledge of Origen’s doctrine, namely, a no longer extant fifth-century book by Antipatrus of Bostra, which was studied by the anti-Origenists of the Great Laura. All possible and impossible interpolations and extrapolations were laid at the door of Origen, probably based on hearsay by monks of the era, who styled themselves ‘Origenists’.⁸

St Antipatrus (or Antipater) lived in the mid-fifth century and wrote a lengthy refutation of the Apology for Origen by St Pamphilus of Caesarea. His book was highly regarded by the fifth and sixth century opponents of Origen. After Gelasius of Isauria became abbot of the Great Laura of Mar Saba monastery in A.D. 537, he ordered it to be read to the monks. The supporters of Origen were incensed by what they heard and engaged in vigorous, and apparently disruptive, disputation. They were expelled from Great Laura and relocated to New Laura, joining there Nonnus and Leontius of Byzantium. Tzamalikos describes Antipatrus’s monograph as the “black book” upon which the anti-Origenists relied for their attacks upon Origen:

The treatise by Antipatrus of Bostra was the ‘black book’ used by the anti-Origenist band. For all his hostility, Cyril’s testimony allows for the assumption that the Origenist monks were outraged at the reading of that treatise, presumably because this was not only an inimical account, but also an inaccurate and distorting story instilling outrageous interpolations in Origen’s theology. Nevertheless, the book was put to ample use, and in c. 540 it was read in the churches of the East as an antidote to the widespread Origenism.⁹

In the early 540s anti-Origenists read extracts from Antipatrus’s book to Patriarch Ephraem of Antioch. Ephraem promptly convened a synod and anathematized the doctrines of Origen. In response, the Origenist party—including Nonnus, Domitian, and Theodore Ascidas—pressed Patriarch Peter of Jerusalem to remove Ephraem from the diptychs. This intervention, however, succeeded only in convincing Peter to ask Gelasius and Sophronius, abbot of the monastery of Theodosius, to compose a libellus against Origen. The libellus was then given to the papal legate, who passed it on to the appropriate dignitaries in the imperial capital.

“It seems, therefore,” Tzamalikos concludes,

that the source of the hearsay about this legendary ‘Origenism’ was the distortion contrived by Antipatrus of Bostra in the fifth century. This was the guide and companion of the anti-Origenists of the Great Laura in their polemics. Justinian did not mention Antipatrus at all. He was advised by the libellus composed by Gelasius, the head of the Great Laura and Sophronius the Armenian, the head of the monastery of Theodosius the Coenobiarch, at the request of Patriarch Peter, in 542. Whether Antipatrus of Bostra was the sole culprit and source of a caricature of Origenism prevailing during the sixth century is not easy to determine. It is anyway clear that, in the years that followed, this parody produced various fruits: it was all too easy for anyone to style anything ‘teaching of Origen’, drawing on obscure or hardly expected sources.¹⁰

Tzamalikos conjectures that Antipatrus’ jeremiad is the source for the spurious citations attached to Justinian’s letter to Menas. In any case, by this point “Origen” had become a convenient scapegoat for the perceived ills of the empire—a polemical cipher onto which any number of charges could be projected:

The problem of what Origenism meant in the sixth century is a real one. ‘Origen’ was simply a cloudy catchword used in order to either authorise or besmirch active people of the sixth-century dangerous and volatile world of imperial and ecclesiastical politics the world of all those plots, which made up the complex tangle of personal, political, and ecclesiastical relationships of the times. This is a dark period of palace intrigue, of concocting forgeries, of cooking up devious attributions to authors deemed compromising the imperial hegemony, of whisperings in corridors and shadowy deals.¹¹

At all events, it was convenient to attack Origen. In the sixth-century setting hardly anyone was aware of his theology, whereas his name was a symbol used to either praise or stigmatize occasional enemies, rather than a well-perused corpus of writings. Attacking the name of Origen was an alternative for declaring oneself prepared to endorse whatever Justinian set forward as the legitimate Christian doctrine. In other words, an attack on Origen by name was tantamount to declaring one’s allegiance to the imperial orthodoxy.¹²

In the world of Justinian, “Origen” no longer denotes the Church’s first great theologian—whose speculative daring and exegetical genius once illuminated the firmament of Christian thought. The name has been reduced to a cipher of opprobrium, a hollow signifier pressed into the service of polemic and power.

Notes

[1] F. Nutombe Oxenham, What is the Truth as to Everlasting Punishment? (1882), 81. Following the lead of Nikephoros, more than a few pre-20th century historians (including E. B. Pusey) attributed the nine anathemas to Constantinople II, but recent scholarship supports their attribution to Justinian’s 543 Edictum contra Origenem. See Richard Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 (2012), II:271-272.

[2] Price, II:281. Some versions include a tenth anathema: “Anathema to Origen also called Adamantius, who set forth these opinions together with his nefarious and execrable and wicked doctrine and to whomsoever there is who thinks thus, or defends these opinions, or in any way hereafter at any time shall presume to protect them.” Also see Alois Grillmeier’s discussion of Justinian’s 543 Edict Against Origen in Christ in Christian Tradition (1995), II/2:389-402.

[3] On the misrepresentation of Origen in Justinian’s Edict Against Origen, see Tzamalikos, Origen and Hellenism (2022), 101-121. Tzamalikos proposes that Justinian was not the true author of his 543 edict: “It was prepared for him by abbot Gelasius and the leaders of the Great Laura of Sabas, and the emperor just signed it, without even caring to change the distinctive colloquial language of it at some characteristic points” (102).

[4] Richard Price, email message to Alvin Kimel, 9 September 2020. The great Church historian Karl Joseph von Hefele judiciously sidesteps the question of dogmatic authority of imperial pronouncements: “The question of ecclesiastical authority, as to whether the Emperor was entitled or not to issue an edict of this kind, belongs to another department. It seems to me that we have here before us one of those many and great, even if well-meant, Byzantine encroachments, which does not disappear even when we assume that the Emperor acted in agreement with Mennas and Pelagius” (History of the Councils of the Church, IV:240). In any case, Hefele confidently opines that the 543 synod did not formally approve Justinian’s nine anathemas but instead issued the fifteen anti-Origenist canons (IV:221-228).

[5] Nathan Jacobs, “On Apokatastasis and Universal Salvation,” Theological Letters (27 March 2022), n. 16.

[6] Oxenham, 117.

[7] See extract from Justinian’s letter to Menas: “Will render men slothful, and discourage them from keeping the commandments of God. It will encourage them to depart from the narrow way, leading them by deception into ways that are wide and easy.” Regarding Justinian’s understanding of the role of the emperor in promoting an Orthodox empire, see Price, I:8-41. Price comments: “The condemnation of Origen is evidence of an increasing narrowness of outlook, and is an indelible blot on the ecclesiastical policy of Justinian” (II:280).

[8] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Real Cassian Revisited: Monastic Life, Greek Paideia, and Origenism in the Sixth Century (2012), 259. The entirety of chap. 6 is necessary and illuminating reading.

[9] Ibid., 179.

[10] Ibid., 280.

[11] Ibid., 259. “Therefore, there is good reason to sustain that several tenets ascribed to Origen had nothing to do with the Alexandrian’s actual teaching. Whether consciously or not (as the case of Anastasius of Sinai shows), false attributions to Origen were the rule rather than the exception” (283). Tsirpanlis concurs: “The historian Evagrios [6th century] . . . gives an account of the Origenistic doctrines of the monks of New Lavra (pre-existence of the soul, reincarnation, and the restoration of all) with special reference to Theodore Ascidas’ teaching of isochristoi. This last teaching as weIl as that of reincarnation are not Origen’s doctrines. The isochristoi believed that in the future life the souls of men would be equal to the soul of Christ. The opposite group, the protoktistoi, accepted the superiority of Christ’s soul, because it was the first creation. Both of these Origenistic movements in the first half of the sixth century are strong proofs of the extension of the abuses and distortions of Origen’s thought.” Constantine N. Tsirpanlis, “The Origenistic Controversy in the Historians of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries,” Augustinianum, 26 (1986): 182.

[12] Tzamalikos, Cassian, 299.

(Part 1) (Part 3)

Posted in Patristic and Byzantine theology, Universalism and Eschatology | Tagged 543 Synod of Constantinople, apocatastasis, Justinian, Origen, Origenism, universal salvation | 1 Comment

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 1)

Posted on 5 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

I reckon that this expression, where God is said to be “all in all,” also means that he is all in all in each individual person. And he will be all in each individual in such a way that everything which the rational mind, when cleansed from all the dregs of the vices and utterly swept clean of every cloud of wickedness, can sense or understand or think will be all God; it will no longer sense anything else apart from God; it will think God, see God, hold God; God will be the mode and measure of its every movement; and thus God will be all to it; for there will no longer be any distinction between good and evil.¹

Origen of Alexandria

Eschatology before Dogma:
The Early Church and the Question of Final Restoration

Introduction

When first presented with the universalist hope, skeptical Orthodox and Roman Catholics immediately invoke the authority of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (A.D. 553), citing the famous fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas: “Apokatastasis has been dogmatically defined by the Church as heresy—see canon one . . . case closed.” Yet over the past four centuries historians have seriously questioned whether these anathemas were officially promulgated by Constantinople II.

The council was convened by Emperor Justinian I for the express purpose of condemning the Three Chapters. Neither Justinian’s letter announcing the council nor the letter read at its formal opening mentions the Origenist controversy, and the Acts of the council—as preserved in the Latin translation, the original Greek having been lost—do not include the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas. Hence when church historian Norman P. Tanner edited his collection of the Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils in 1990, he did not include the famous fifteen, offering the following explanation: “Our edition does not include the text of the anathemas against Origen since recent studies have shown that these anathemas cannot be attributed to this council.”²

But the Fifth Ecumenical Council did condemn Origen, right? Both no and yes. No, in that it did not directly anathematize him. As St Gregory the Great would later observe, the general synod only anathematized one person—Theodore of Mopsuestia (Ep. 51). Yes, in that Origen is named alongside the heretics denounced in canon eleven:

If anyone does not anathematize Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apollinarius, Nestorius, Eutyches and Origen, as well as their heretical books, and also all other heretics who have already been condemned and anathematized by the holy, catholic and apostolic church and by the four holy synods which have already been mentioned, and also all those who have thought or now think in the same way as the aforesaid heretics and who persist in their error even to death: let him be anathema.

The canon does not specify which of Origen’s teachings are censured, nor do the conciliar Acts record any discussion of them by the council fathers. Origen is simply included in the list of the previously condemned. This is where things get tricky. The others were convicted of heresy by previous ecumenical councils, and their false teachings were well known; but Origen was never condemned by an ecumenical council. Which of his teachings, therefore, did the bishops believe to be contrary to the apostolic faith, and to which synod were they appealing? On the evidence available to us, we do not know. The acta are silent. This point needs to be stressed. We may not assume that because the council fathers deemed Origen a heretic, they specifically intended to proscribe his doctrine of apokatastasis. The establishment of conciliar dogma requires more than guesswork. F. Nutcombe Oxenham, 19th century Roman Catholic theologian and historian, succinctly states the historical problem and interpretive task:

Let me say to any who may consider it an important matter to be assured whether Origen was, or was not condemned, by some ancient Synod, two things—(1) That if it could be ever so conclusively proved that “Origen was condemned” by the Fifth Council, this would afford no evidence whatever that he was condemned on account of his doctrine of restitution, since he held a great many other doctrines much more open to blame than this one. And then (2) Supposing Origen’s doctrine of restitution had been “by itself condemned,” this would be no condemnation of the doctrine of restitution, as now held, e.g. by Mr. Jukes or by Dr Farrar [two 19th century exponents of universal salvation]; since their two doctrines of restitution are in many important points essentially different.³

Beyond the specific question of apokatastasis, the inquiry pursued here bears directly on how the Church understands the authority, scope, and retrospective interpretation of its own dogmatic judgments.

The Synod of Alexandria and the Condemnation of Origen

But were Origen’s teachings condemned by earlier local synods? Yes—the most noteworthy being the Synod of Alexandria (A.D. 399/400). It should not need to be said (a point that, given later ecclesial practice, bears reiteration) that synods occur in history. To be properly understood, their actions and pronouncements must be interpreted within their respective historical, cultural, political, religious, and philosophical contexts. A romantic or insufficiently critical view of Church history tends to overlook the complex dynamics that inform the theological judgments of synods and of the bishops who convened them. It is therefore misleading to imagine a synod as a convocation of scholars gathered to dispassionately share their wisdom and learning. Church councils are convened by bishops for a host of reasons, only one of which is the constructive resolution of doctrinal dispute. As St Gregory of Nazianzus famously remarked: “I have never seen any council come to a good end, nor turn out to be a solution of evils. On the contrary, it usually increases them” (Ep. 130). In the ecclesial–imperial world we will be exploring, the losers suffer censure, excommunication, exile, or sometimes worse. The stakes are high.

We begin our story with Pope Theophilus, the patriarch of the ancient church of Alexandria.⁴ In A.D. 399, Theophilus sent a festal letter to his diocese affirming the incorporeality of God and rejecting the claim that God bears a human form. In most quarters of the empire, this affirmation would have been decidedly uncontroversial. After all, the great Alexandrian theologians Origen and St Athanasius had long taught that divine transcendence overturns pagan anthropomorphism, and Evagrius Ponticus, the renowned ascetic of Scetis, had structured his practice of imageless prayer around the apophatic mystery of God. Yet the letter proved to be deeply contentious. Monks throughout Egypt were outraged.

Three of the four monastic abbots in Nitria refused to allow the letter to be read in their communities. In their fury, desert ascetics travelled to Alexandria to demonstrate against Theophilus, even threatening violence against him. For the “anthropomorphites,” the question of the divine image was not a trivial matter: it touched the core of their worship, prayer and contemplation.⁵ Scripture teaches that human beings are made in the image of God. Surely this must include our embodiment. The fifth century historian Socrates reports that the patriarch came out of his palace and calmly greeted the angry crowd with these words: “In seeing you, I behold the face of God”:

Theophilus becoming aware of his danger, after some consideration had recourse to this expedient to extricate himself from the threatened death. Going to the monks, he in a conciliatory tone thus addressed them: ‘In seeing you, I behold the face of God.’ The utterance of this saying moderated the fury of these men and they replied: ‘If you really admit that God’s countenance is such as ours, anathematize Origen’s book; for some drawing arguments from them oppose themselves to our opinion. If you will not do this, expect to be treated by us as an impious person, and the enemy of God.’ ‘But as far as I am concerned,’ said Theophilus, ‘I will readily do what you require: and be not angry with me, for I myself also disapprove of Origen’s works, and consider those who countenance them deserving of censure.’ (Ecclesiastical History VI.7)

Theophilus’ swift acceptance of the mob’s demand to denounce the writings of Origen raises a number of questions. Did he undergo a sudden conversion of conscience? This seems unlikely, though sheer fear or duplicity cannot be entirely excluded. Did he harbor a longstanding opposition to Origen that only now emerged under threat of violence? This too is improbable, since Theophilus would resume his opposition to anthropomorphism just a few years later. A more plausible explanation is that he seized upon anthropomorphite hostility toward Origen in order to advance his own ecclesial and political objectives.

This moment became the catalyst for Theophilus’ sudden and intense campaign against Origen. Russell notes that the leaders of the pro‑Origen faction—most prominently the Four Tall Brothers, together with the priest and former confidant of Theophilus, Isidore—had emerged as persistent challenges to the patriarch’s authority. By methodically attacking the orthodoxy of Origen, Theophilus sought to strengthen his position in Nitria, effect the departure of the Origenists from Egypt, and establish within the monastic communities a theological orthodoxy free from the influence of Origen and Evagrius Ponticus.

And so the patriarch convened a synod in Nitria and ordered select passages to be read from Origen’s Peri archon, De oratione, and De resurrectione. The bishops were alarmed by what they heard and solemnly execrated Origen and his monastic followers. When attempts to expel the incriminated monks met with resistance, Theophilus returned to Alexandria and appealed to the Roman authorities for intervention. He then returned to Nitria with a military escort. The soldiers burned the books and cells of the Origenists, but the Four Tall Brothers and some of their followers escaped, making their way to Palestine and Constantinople.

Russell lists the controversial statements Theophilus culled from Origen’s writings and presented to the bishops. These propositions are drawn selectively, often without context, and are best understood as rhetorical exhibits rather than neutral summaries of Origen’s theology. In his First Synodal Letter, the patriarch cites the following:

That the soul pre-existed in heaven before the body; and
that the embodied life is a punishment for earlier sin committed in heaven.⁶

In his Second Synodal Letter, he adds further charges. From the Peri Archon:

The Son is truth compared to us, but falsehood in relation to the Father;
the Saviour is less than the Father;
the Kingdom of Christ will come to an end;
the devil will be saved and restored to glory;
the Word of God did not assume a human body;
Christ is a soul that has descended from the celestial regions; and
Christ will suffer for the demons.⁷

From the De oratione:

We should not pray to the Son but only to the Father;
resurrected bodies will dissolve into aether;
resurrected bodies are corruptible and mortal;
the orders of angels are the result of lapses and falls;
angels are nourished by the (spiritual) food of altars.⁸

And from the De resurrectione:

Magic is not harmful.⁹

In his A.D. 402 Festal Letter, Theophilus adds the following teachings:

Souls are reincarnated;
the Holy Spirit is of limited operation and does not work on inanimate matter;
the soul and God are of a single nature;
God made only as many things as he was capable of conceiving and controlling.¹⁰

Finally, in his A.D. 403 Letter from Constantinople, Theophilus attributes three more heterodox beliefs to Origen:

The two Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision (Isa. 6:2) represent the Son and the Holy Spirit;
resurrected bodies are spherical in shape;
Adam’s body came into being when he fell through sin.¹¹

Modern patristic scholars generally agree that Theophilus has misrepresented (at times grossly so) the authentic views of Origen. Plenty of problematic-looking statements can be found in his corpus, but the appearance of his heterodoxy, as a respected Origen scholar recently told me, disappears upon close analysis. Krastu Banev concurs: “In terms of historical accuracy, Origen’s condemnation presents a problem of the first magnitude, as virtually all modern scholars have now reached an agreement that he cannot be considered guilty of the charges raised against him after his death.”¹² Proof-texting is a dangerous business; traducement and calumny even more so. But as Russell observes:

Modern students of Origen judge most of these charges to be unjust. They are probably right to do so, but they are wrong to accuse Theophilus (as Crouzel does) of lack of intelligence. Theophilus had no intention of trying to read Origen sympathetically. He deployed all his formidable dialectical skills to exploit any inconsistency in Origen, any real or apparent incompatibility with fourth-century orthodoxy, that might wrong-foot his opponents. He was so successful that his official letters not only contributed to the Emperor Justinian’s condemnation of Origen in the sixth century, but have continued until recently to colour the way scholars have read Origen. . . . Origen was concerned to present the true Christian faith in the language of contemporary thought. Even though his thinking was speculative at times, his intention was to expound the apostolic tradition faithfully. But by the fourth century, with the new emphasis since the rise of the Arian controversy on the gulf separating created from uncreated, generate from ingenerate, Origen’s approach no longer found general favour.¹³

One wonders why Theophilus would invest so much time and energy into defaming a man who suffered persecution and torture and died in the peace of the Church. Why not focus on living heretics? And this raises yet another question: “If the synodical condemnation was an unjust one, why was it accepted?”¹⁴

For a compelling answer to these two questions, we turn to Banev. We may be inclined to dismiss Theophilus’ abuse of Origen as the work of a heavy-handed bureaucrat; but Banev proposes that the patriarch is in fact acting with judicial, political, and theological purpose. Like a zealous prosecutor, Theophilus’ aim is to win his case. That case, however, was directed not against the historical Origen of the third century, but against contemporary monastic figures who were creatively articulating Origen’s legacy—perhaps too creatively—along Evagrian lines.

Evagrius Ponticus lived in the monastic community of Kellia, some twelve miles away from Nitria. He was revered by his fellow monks, and many sought him out for spiritual guidance. Evagrius was a master theoretician and psychologist of the spiritual life. His theology grows out of his intense ascetical struggle to achieve union with God. He died in A.D. 399, a few months before Theophilus initiated his anti-Origenist campaign.

When compared to the theological reflections of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, Evagrius’ mystical theology reads like it belongs to the esoterica section of the library. Many of the problematic statements imputed to Origen by Theophilus are thought to be of Evagrian provenance. Or as Hans Urs von Balthasar once quipped, “Evagrius is more of an Origenist than Origen himself.”¹⁵ Think of him as the unnamed defendant in the Alexandrian proceedings. “Although Evagrius is never directly named by Theophilus in his extant letters,” writes Elizabeth Clark, “his theology forms a backdrop for Theophilus’s charges against Origenism.”¹⁶

Theophilus, like St Epiphanius and St Jerome, recognized the important differences between the ascetical theology of the desert monks and the developing public theology of the bishops. He saw that the desert way, with its “emphasis on repetitive reading of biblical texts in a context of prayer and attentive listening to the Holy Spirit in order to nurture individual spiritual progress guided by the voice of the Holy Spirit,”¹⁷ represented a challenge to the doctrinal unity of the Church. It relies too heavily on personal experience, apart from and perhaps in conflict with episcopal teaching authority. Samuel Rubenson elaborates:

What Epiphanius, Jerome and Theophilus understood was that this type of monastic tradition threatened the unity of the Church and ran the risk of establishing an institutionalized elite not willing to accept the necessity of a strict theological framework that was agreed upon by the bishops and that could be understood and accepted by Christians at large. The new ecclesiological structures that emerged with emperor Constantine and the emphasis on doctrinal unity manifested in the introduction of the concept of homousios required what was alien to the early monastic tradition. The controversy was an outcome of something already clearly recognized by Origen himself, the tensions in the Church between the interests and needs of individuals who struggle to gain deeper knowledge and spiritual maturity and are willing to accept what it demands, and ordinary inexperienced Christians for whom a more profound reading and teaching constitute a danger.¹⁸

Theophilus was willing to sacrifice the Adamantine’s reputation in order to achieve a consensual repudiation of Evagrian Origenism. Hence his brilliant campaign after the synod to enlist the support of other bishops in the empire. Theophilus knew that a simple synodical judgment would not accomplish his goal, but perhaps the monks might submit to an ecumenical denunciation of Evagrianism, rhetorically embodied as denunciation of Origen:

Based on the high degree of similarity between the views rejected by Theophilus and those endorsed by Evagrius, we can affirm that it is no longer possible to claim that the issues disputed in the Origenist controversy are just the product of the inflamed imagination of a polemical Theophilus. . . . What needs to be said at this point is that the theses condemned by Theophilus are clearly related to a set of ideas current in the Egyptian desert at the time. Chief witness here is Evagrius, who traces the origin of bodies back to the intellects’ primordial fall from grace and claims that in the eschaton these bodies, together with all matter, will reach a final point of transformation and annihilation when the liberated intellects will be drawn to their original point of unity. This final salvific movement will, by its logic, include the devil as well. It is clear that Evagrius himself was aware of the daring nature of some of his pronouncements. This is why he was explicit about the restricted audience which he envisages for his more advanced ideas. Yet the undisputed presence of such ideas obliges us to change our approach to Theophilus’ involvement and more importantly to the acceptance of that condemnation by the majority of his contemporaries.¹⁹

Banev is now prepared to offer an answer to the question he poses at the beginning of his book: Why was Theophilus’ caricature of Origen ultimately accepted as accurate by so many in the Church? Because the distortions condemned by the Synod of Alexandria represent the heterodox views of the Origenist monks:

If it is true that Theophilus condemned the positions of the magister by ‘misrepresenting’ them, then it is fully legitimate to ask why his contemporaries would have accepted such an ‘unjust’ condemnation. The need for this clarification arises from the fact that it was not with Origen himself that the patriarch had to deal, but with those monastic figures who were undoubtedly propagating their own understanding of the magister‘s legacy. What is important here is not the degree to which the accusations resemble the ipsissima verba of the Alexandrian magister but the extent to which the patriarch had succeeded in constructing a picture of ‘Origenism’ that his monastic audience would unhesitatingly reject. Thus it is against the expectations of the patriarch’s audience at the time of and immediately after the Nitrian council that the list of his charges and their rhetorical elaborations should be examined.

The very existence of the anti-Origenist Festal Letters, all of which postdate the synodal condemnation, implies that Theophilus knew very well that an appeal to the authority of a council was not in itself a sufficient means to bring about the acceptance of its decisions. Rather, to consolidate the authority of the council, Theophilus had to secure its reception by the whole of the Christian church, both at home and abroad; and, secondly, the only way to achieve this was by way of communicating, explaining, and arguing, as effectively as possible, its decisions. Hence the importance of rhetoric for the analysis of patriarchal letters. Jerome’s assistance as an excellent translator cannot be overstated here. Through his work, the anti-Origenist cause found support in the Latin West, and thus in the worldwide Christian church.²⁰

Theophilus’ misrepresentations of Origen’s theology, therefore, were not the result of ignorance, defective theological acumen, or historical naivety, but formed a central element of a calculated pastoral campaign to secure Nicene orthodoxy within his patriarchate. Origen thus becomes a posthumous symbol rather than a genuine doctrinal interlocutor; his name functions as a cipher for the contemporary controversies the synod aimed to resolve. A century and a half later, Emperor Justinian would employ a comparable strategy against more extreme forms of monastic Origenism.

Theophilus’ anti-Origen campaign illustrates how far Origen’s opponents were prepared to go in order to tarnish and ultimately eradicate the legacy of the renowned theologian and confessor, pursuing theological, ecclesiastical, and civic objectives they believed justified their propaganda and tactics. The judgments of the Synod of Alexandria were consequently received as truthful and authoritative, exerting a powerful—at times determinative—influence on the subsequent condemnations of Origen by the synods of Cyprus and Jerusalem (399/400), Pope Anastasius I, and Augustine. These same constructions would later resurface in the anathemas of the imperial edict of 543 and in Justinian’s fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas of 553.

At this point, a decisive fact comes into view: Origen’s teaching on the restoration of all human beings to God is named neither by the Synod of Alexandria nor in Theophilus’ subsequent communications. None of his principal fourth-century critics include the doctrine among his heresies. As Thomas Allin remarks: “Jerome, Theophilus, and Epiphanius literally scrape together every possible charge against Origen, but never allude to his teaching of the larger hope as heretical.”²¹ The silence is not incidental. Given the intensity of the campaign against Origen, the failure to name universal restitution among his supposed errors strongly indicates that it had not yet crossed the threshold into doctrinally proscribed teaching.

The implications of this omission are substantial. If the doctrine of eternal perdition had had already achieved consensual status—thereby rendering Origen’s restorationist teaching doctrinally intolerable—it is difficult to explain why it escaped explicit censure precisely at the moment when his opponents were most eager to secure his posthumous condemnation. Theophilus and his allies demonstrated no reluctance to attribute to Origen a wide array of speculative doctrines, many of them distorted or exaggerated beyond recognition. That apokatastasis was not among them suggests not oversight but recognition: whatever later generations would claim, the doctrine had not yet been ecclesially marked as heretical. The campaign against Origen, for all its ferocity, therefore testifies not to an early consensus against universal restoration, but to its continued viability within the bounds of Christian theological discourse at the turn of the fifth century.

Universal Salvation Before and After Theophilus

At the outset, it is essential to clarify the precise historical claim at issue and the sense in which doctrinal normativity is intended. I do not contend that universal salvation ever functioned as the dominant or officially defined doctrine of the early Church, nor do I deny that many Christian teachers spoke in ways that presuppose severe and enduring eschatological punishment. My claim is limited and precise: from the second through the early fifth century, the Church’s eschatological teaching had not yet reached anything like dogmatic closure in the sense required for the exclusion of rival positions as unorthodox. During this period, universalist and near-universalist hopes were not treated as private eccentricities or merely tolerated errors beneath an otherwise settled consensus, but were articulated, debated, and defended by bishops, monks, and theologians as legitimate interpretations within the Church’s shared rule of faith. The question, therefore, is not whether one eschatological view was more frequently expressed than another, but whether any such view had yet achieved the status of an ecumenically normative doctrine whose denial entailed ecclesial censure. The evidence suggests instead a prolonged period of theological fluidity, in which competing eschatological interpretations were addressed through scriptural exegesis, pastoral reasoning, and speculative theology rather than conciliar definition or formal condemnation. Even the anti-Origenist actions associated with Theophilus of Alexandria (A.D. 399–400) chiefly targeted particular Origenist doctrines—preexistence, a primordial fall of intellects, and speculative cosmology—without explicitly naming or isolating “the eschatological reconciliation of all humanity” as a condemned proposition. When universal restoration is attacked in these polemics, it is typically the extension of restoration to the devil and demons, not the hope for the reconciliation of all human beings.

That the eschatological reconciliation of all humanity was never synodically condemned during the early centuries of the Church may initially appear surprising. Yet this surprise dissipates once the actual pattern of fourth- and fifth-century ecclesial life is recalled. St Gregory of Nyssa—Origen’s most influential heir and an unambiguous proponent of universal salvation—was never censured for his eschatological convictions. On the contrary, he was honored as a doctrinal authority and entrusted with the defense of Nicene orthodoxy.

Nor was Gregory an isolated case. Diodore of Tarsus, founder of the Antiochian school of biblical interpretation and a vocal critic of Origen’s allegorical method, likewise affirmed a vision of finite corrective judgment ordered toward restoration. The Antiochene witness thus demonstrates that commitment to final reconciliation was not confined to a single theological lineage or dependent upon Origenist protology. Theodore of Mopsuestia stands within this same tradition, articulating a restorative eschatology grounded in moral pedagogy rather than speculative cosmology.

The ecclesial standing of such figures is decisive. Diodore of Tarsus participated alongside Gregory of Nyssa in the First Council of Constantinople (A.D. 381). Immediately after the council, Diodore and Gregory were appointed by Emperor Theodosius as guardians of the Nicene faith—an appointment that presupposed not merely theological competence but exemplary orthodoxy. Earlier still, at the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), Eusebius of Caesarea and Marcellus of Ancyra—both advocates of universal salvation—played significant roles in the ecumenical repudiation of Arianism. Although Christians disagreed about the duration and severity of eschatological punishment, such disagreements had not yet risen to the level requiring dogmatic definition or severance of eucharistic communion. Universalist bishops participated fully in the Church’s sacramental and conciliar life alongside their infernalist counterparts, and neither side regarded the other as standing outside the bounds of orthodoxy.

Nor should universalist eschatology be treated as a marginal or merely private opinion in the fourth and early fifth centuries. In the Shorter Rules of St Basil of Caesarea, for example, we encounter a passage warning that “many” (hoi polloi tōn anthrōpōn) disregard the Lord’s solemn warnings about judgment precisely because they presume that punishment will not be everlasting (SR 267). We needn’t press Basil into a statistic; it is enough that he takes this expectation seriously enough to address it.

This impression is reinforced by the breadth of theological testimony in both East and West. In Asia Minor, a striking number of prominent figures either affirm or strongly intimate a doctrine of universal restoration, including Gregory Thaumaturgus, Pamphilus of Caesarea, Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, Diodore of Tarsus, Macrina the Younger, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory the Theologian.²² A comparable pattern appears in Alexandria, long associated with Clement, Origen, Theognostus, Pierius, Dionysius, Didymus the Blind, and Anthony the Great. The geographical and theological diversity of these witnesses makes it difficult to regard universalist hope as the possession of a single speculative school or as a tolerated eccentricity on the margins of ecclesial life.

Even in the Latin West, where resistance to universal salvation was becoming more systematic, expectations of non-eternal punishment remained widespread well into the fifth century. As late as c. 420, Augustine of Hippo could still describe those Christians who denied everlasting punishment as “very many”: immo quam plurimi (Enchiridion 29.112). While the wording may be open to varied readings, the larger point is clear. Opposition to eternal perdition was sufficiently prevalent to elicit sustained exegetical and doctrinal argument.

Augustine’s own writings provide further confirmation of this doctrinal indeterminacy. In The City of God, he identifies and critiques a range of universalist and semi-universalist eschatological positions circulating among Christians of his day, whom he memorably calls the misericordes (“the compassionate”).²³ Significantly, with the exception of Origen and those who extended restoration to the devil, Augustine does not treat these views as formally heretical. Instead, he engages them through extended scriptural interpretation and theological reasoning. His aim is not to invoke conciliar authority or ecclesial censure, but to persuade fellow Christians whom he regards—however mistakenly—as reasoning within the Church’s shared commitment to Scripture. Augustine thus serves as a hostile yet invaluable witness: universalist hopes remained a live theological option well into the fifth century, even as opposition to them was becoming increasingly articulated and doctrinally sharpened, particularly in the Latin Church.

In the late 19th century, John Wesley Hanson summarized the early Church’s tolerance—and in some quarters, we would need to say acceptance—of the greater hope. While his judgment may need to be qualified in light of more recent scholarship, it appears to be still largely correct:

Now let the reader recapitulate: (1) Origen during his life-time was never opposed for his Universalism; (2) after his death Methodius, about A. D. 300, attacked his views of the resurrection, creation and pre-existence, but said not a word against his Universalism; (3) ten years later Pamphilus and Eusebius (A. D. 310) defended him against nine charges that had been brought against his views, but his Universalism was not among them; (4) in 330 Marcellus of Ancyra, a Universalist, opposed him for his views of the Trinity, and (5) Eustathius for his teachings concerning the Witch of Endor, but limited their arraignment to those items; (6) in 376 Epiphanius assailed his heresies, but he did not name Universalism as among them, and in 394 he condemned Origen’s doctrine of the salvation of the Devil, but not of all mankind; (7) in 399 and 401, his views of Christ’s death to save the Devil were attacked by Epiphanius, Jerome and Theophilus, and his advocacy of the subordination of Christ to God was condemned, but not his teachings of man’s universal salvation; and (8) it was not till 544 and again in 553 that his enemies formulated attacks on that doctrine.²⁴

The critical point is that from the third through the fifth centuries, the doctrine of the universal salvation of humanity is never condemned by a council of the Church, whether local or ecumenical. At most we can speak of local hostility to speculative Origenism. Taken together, the evidence is best read as showing that, prior to the sixth century, apokatastasis often functioned as a theologoumenon—contested, certainly, but not yet authoritatively excluded as such.

Origen was a controversial figure. His writings were often misunderstood and misrepresented—already during his lifetime he complained of distortions and interpolations—yet even his critics frequently acknowledged his sanctity and faithfulness under persecution. He did not invent apokatastasis; the greater hope preceded him and was shared, in varying forms, by a wide range of early Christian voices. What eventually disappeared was not the hope itself, but the latitude within which such eschatological disagreement could be sustained. In the sixth century, the mechanisms of doctrinal adjudication were transformed. Nearly three hundred years after Origen’s death, a new and far less patient regime of theological judgment emerged. Our story jumps to A.D. 543.

Footnotes

[1] Origen, On First Principles 3.6.1

[2] Norman Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (1990), I:106. Henri Crouzel concurs: “As for the texts of 553, attributed to the 5th Ecumenical Council, the Second of Constantinople, they do not appear in the official minutes of that Council: so they are not canonically the work of an ecumenical council.” Henri Crouzel, Origen (1989), 178.

[3] F. Nutcombe Oxenham, What is the Truth as to Everlasting Punishment? (1882), 35. Though dated, this book is essential reading. The author discusses the principal first millennium sources for our knowledge of the Fifth Ecumenical Council with regards to its condemnation of Origen and its ~~condemnation~~ of apokatastasis. Herbert H. Jeaffreson, a contemporary of Oxenham, offers a similar judgment: “It is very uncertain whether the Fifth General Council condemned Origen at all; if it did, it is still more uncertain whether it condemned him for his doctrine of Restitution; if it condemned his doctrine of Restitution it does not follow that it condemned all hope of a final restoration of all men to obedience” (Appendix to Our Catholic Inheritance in the Larger Hope (1888) by Alfred Gurney, 78. Also see F. W. Farrar’s discussion of the patristic period, Mercy and Judgment (1882), chaps. 9-12.

[4] I have found the following secondary works particularly helpful on the events leading up to and succeeding the Synod of Alexandria: Norman Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria (2007), 3-41; Krastu Banev, Theophilus of Alexandria and the First Origenist Controversy (2015); Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy (1992), chap. 3; Constantine N. Tsirpanlis, “The Origenistic Controversy in the Historians of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries,” Augustinianum, 26 (1986): 178-181. On early fourth century criticism of Origen, see Cyril C. Richardson, “The Condemnation of Origen,” Church History, 6 (1937): 50-64. On Jerome’s anti-Origenism, see Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Place of Jerome’s Commentary on Ephesians in the Origenist Controversy: The Apokatastasis and Ascetic Ideals,” Vigiliae Christianae, 41 (1987): 154-171; but cf. Brian Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 101-104.

[5] See Elizabeth A. Clark, “New Perspectives on the Origenist Controversy,” Church History, 59 (1990):145-162; and Clark, Controversy, chap. 2.

[6] Russell, 24. Russell does not cite the sources for these two statements attributed to Origen.

[7] Ibid., 24-25. Also see Theophilus’ Synodical Letter to the bishops of Palestine and of Cyprus, translated by St Jerome: Letter 92.

[8] Ibid., 25

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Banev, 2.

[13] Russell, 15.

[14] Banev, 3.

[15] Quoted by Augustine Cassidy, Evagrius Ponticus (2006), 25.

[16] Clark, Controversy, 107. See Clark’s long discussion of Theophilus, Origen, and Evagrius in chap. 3. When speaking of “Origenism,” though, it is always salutary to remember Andrew Louth’s wise observation that what we don’t know far outweighs what we do:

“One of the dangers in talking of Origenism is in thinking that we know what we are talking about. This applies from the very beginning, from the third century itself. The vast resource for Christian theology that Origen created meant that there were very few who were immune to his influence, at least at second hand. Furthermore, Origen proved to be an inspiration to many later theologians, who drew on his ideas for very different purposes: scriptural exegesis, dogmatic reflection, cosmological speculation, understanding of the ascetic life. By the sixth century, there were various ways in which Origenism could be understood. The various condemnations of Origen and his ideas only complicate matters: the condemnations of «Origenism» by Theophilus of Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century, and in 543 and 553, are by no means attacks on the same thing. The late fourth-century controversy that culminated in Theophilus’ condemnation of Origen was pursued by people with very different agendas; it seems likely that only Epiphanius was inspired by strictly doctrinal concerns. The condemnations of «Origenism» in Justinian’s two edicts of 543 and 553 have long been recognized as directed against different complexes of doctrine. The situation becomes still more undefined, if one looks at less formaI condemnations.” Andrew Louth, “The Collectio Sabbaitica and Sixth-Century Origenism,” in Origeniana Octava (2003), II:1167-1168.

[17] Samuel Rubenson, “Why Did the Origenist Controversy Begin?,” Modern Theology 28 (2022): 337.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Banev, 27-28.

[20] Ibid., 48-49.

[21] Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant (1905), 178. Epiphanius, Jerome, and Theophilus did condemn Origen for teaching the redemption of Satan. Whether Origen actually asserted this as gospel truth or merely entertained it as a possibility is a matter of dispute.

[22] On each of the patristic universalists named in this article, see Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (2013).

[23] See “St Augustine of Hippo and the Misericordes. In The City of God, Augustine condemns Origen for heretically teaching the salvation of Satan, largely based, we may surmise, on the Theophilus’ letters on the Synod of Alexandria and the writings of Jerome. At the same time Augustine acknowledges that the belief in the final salvation of all human beings has not been condemned by the Church, though he clearly believed that it should be. Augustine also criticizes those who taught that God would save all in response to the prayers of the saints. Intercessory universalism represents an early form of the greater hope and can be dated to the second century Apocalypse of Peter. See Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, “The Origins of Christian Hell,” Numen 56 (2009): 282–297, and my brief discussion in “Dogma, Damnation, and the Eucatastrophe of the Jesus Story.”

[24] John Wesley Hanson, Universalism, the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church During Its First Five Hundred Years (1899), 289-290. As the title suggests, Hanson firmly believes that the greater hope was widely affirmed, and prayed, by Christians during the first five centuries of the Church. It was, as he states, “the prevailing doctrine.” This is a strong claim—undoubtedly too strong. Even so, Universalism merits reading; but be sure to supplement, and correct when necessary, Hanson’s scholarship in light of the published works of Ilaria Ramelli.

(Part 2)

Posted in Patristic and Byzantine theology, Universalism and Eschatology | Tagged apocatastsis, Gregory of Nyssa, Origenism, Origin, Synod of Alexandria, Theodore of Tarsus, Theophilus, universal salvation | 8 Comments

“These three men follow the leading of the light above, and with steadfast gaze obeying the indications of the guiding splendour, are led to the recognition of the Truth by the brilliance of Grace”

Posted on 5 January 2026 by Fr Aidan Kimel

After celebrating but lately the day on which immaculate virginity brought forth the Saviour of mankind, the venerable feast of the Epiphany, dearly beloved, gives us continuance of joy, that the force of our exultation and the fervour of our faith may not grow cool, in the midst of neighbouring and kindred mysteries. For it concerns all men’s salvation, that the infancy of the Mediator between God and men was already manifested to the whole world, while He was still detained in the tiny town. For although He had chosen the Israelitish nation, and one family out of that nation, from whom to assume the nature of all mankind, yet He was unwilling that the early days of His birth should be concealed within the narrow limits of His mother’s home: but desired to be soon recognized by all, seeing that He deigned to be born for all. To three wise men, therefore, appeared a star of new splendour in the region of the East, which, being brighter and fairer than the other stars, might easily attract the eyes and minds of those that looked on it, so that at once that might be observed not to be meaningless, which had so unusual an appearance. He therefore who gave the sign, gave to the beholders understanding of it, and caused inquiry to be made about that, of which He had thus caused understanding, and after inquiry made, offered Himself to be found.

These three men follow the leading of the light above, and with steadfast gaze obeying the indications of the guiding splendour, are led to the recognition of the Truth by the brilliance of Grace, for they supposed that a king’s birth was notified in a human sense, and that it must be sought in a royal city. Yet He who had taken a slave’s form, and had come not to judge, but to be judged, chose Bethlehem for His nativity, Jerusalem for His passion. But Herod, hearing that a prince of the Jews was born, suspected a successor, and was in great terror: and to compass the death of the Author of Salvation, pledged himself to a false homage. How happy had he been, if he had imitated the wise men’s faith, and turned to a pious use what he designed for deceit. What blind wickedness of foolish jealousy, to think you can overthrow the Divine plan by your frenzy. The Lord of the world, who offers an eternal Kingdom, seeks not a temporal. Why do you attempt to change the unchangeable order of things ordained, and to forestall others in their crime? The death of Christ belongs not to your time. The Gospel must be first set on foot, the Kingdom of God first preached, healings first given to the sick, wondrous acts first performed. Why do you wish yourself to have the blame of what will belong to another’s work, and why without being able to effect your wicked design, do you bring on yourself alone the charge of wishing the evil? You gain nothing and carry out nothing by this intriguing. He that was born voluntarily shall die of His own free will. The Wise men, therefore, fulfil their desire, and come to the child, the Lord Jesus Christ, the same star going before them. They adore the Word in flesh, the Wisdom in infancy, the Power in weakness, the Lord of majesty in the reality of man: and by their gifts make open acknowledgment of what they believe in their hearts, that they may show forth the mystery of their faith and understanding. The incense they offer to God, the myrrh to Man, the gold to the King, consciously paying honour to the Divine and human Nature in union: because while each substance had its own properties, there was no difference in the power of either.

St Leo the Great

Posted in Citations | Leave a comment

Necessity, Rationality, and the Good: Hart, Aquinas, and Rooney on Universal Salvation

Posted on 29 December 2025 by Fr Aidan Kimel

by ChatGPT

1. Introduction

Few recent works in philosophical theology have generated as much controversy as David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved. Hart’s defense of universal salvation has often been criticized as a form of theological or metaphysical necessitarianism allegedly incompatible with classical theism. Hart’s central claim—that eternal damnation is not merely theologically implausible but metaphysically impossible—has provoked sharp responses from defenders of traditional doctrines of hell. Among these, James Dominic Rooney’s Not a Hope in Hell stands out for its ambition and rigor. Rooney contends that Hart’s universalism is incompatible with classical theism, particularly because it entails a problematic form of necessitarianism.

The present essay is intentionally limited in scope. It does not seek to adjudicate the truth of universal salvation as a theological doctrine, nor does it appeal to revelation, ecclesial authority, or confessional commitments. Its purpose is instead comparative and methodological: to clarify the structure of Hart’s argument, to situate it in relation to Aquinas’s account of rationality and the Good, and to assess whether Rooney’s philosophical critique successfully defeats Hart’s position on Hart’s own terms. The analysis proceeds on the assumption that classical theism admits of multiple historically situated and internally coherent specifications. The question at issue is therefore not whether universal salvation is true, but whether Hart’s necessitarian argument is inconsistent with classical theism as such, or only with a particular Thomistic construal of it.

The present article has four aims. First, it offers a clear and charitable reconstruction of Hart’s so-called necessitarian argument for universal salvation, with particular attention to its teleological structure. Second, it situates that argument in relation to Thomas Aquinas’s account of rationality, final causality, and the Good, highlighting both points of agreement and the precise locus of disagreement. Third, it reconstructs James Dominic Rooney’s critique of Hart in its strongest form, drawing directly on his account of divine permission and freedom. Finally, it assesses whether Rooney’s critique successfully engages Hart’s argument on its own terms, or whether it presupposes a Thomistic framework that Hart explicitly rejects.

2. Hart’s Necessitarian Argument for Universal Salvation

Hart’s argument is not framed in deliberative terms, as though God weighs competing reasons and selects the best option. Rather, it is ontological and modal. By “modal,” I mean concerned with the logic of possibility, impossibility, and necessity—what can be the case, what cannot be the case, and what must be the case, given certain conditions. A modal argument does not ask what God happens to will or choose, but what is coherent or incoherent given who God is and what God has done. Hart’s claim, therefore, is not that God is causally compelled to save all, but that eternal damnation is impossible once God has freely created rational beings ordered to the Good.

2.1 Divine Goodness and Creation Ex Nihilo

Hart affirms the classical thesis that God is not merely good but is Goodness itself (ipsum bonum). Evil, therefore, has no positive ontological status; it is a privation of the Good. Within this framework, creation ex nihilo carries decisive moral implications. Because God is the sole sufficient cause of a creature’s existence and of the entire order within which that creature exists, no final state of a creature can be morally external to God’s creative act.

It is crucial here to avoid imagining God as creating sequentially, as though God first brings the world into being, then waits to see what creatures will do, and only afterward finds himself reluctantly confronted with outcomes he neither desired nor foresaw. Both Aquinas and Hart reject this picture. God is eternal, not temporal, and therefore does not act in stages. God’s creative act is one single, timeless act by which the entire history of creation—past, present, and future—is brought into being. What unfolds for us as a long temporal process is eternally present to God as a whole.

This means that hell cannot be understood as an unfortunate byproduct that God merely tolerates once history has run its course.

Closely related to this point is what both Aquinas and Hart mean by final causality. In classical theism, God does not merely cause things to exist; God causes them for an end. To create is to order creatures toward a purpose that gives their existence intelligibility. This is what is meant by saying that God is the final cause of creation: God is not only the source from which all things come, but also the end toward which they are ordered.

This is crucial for the present debate. If rational creatures are created for participation in the Good—that is, for knowledge and love of God—then their final destiny cannot be treated as an accidental add-on to creation, separable from God’s creative intention. The end belongs to the act of creation itself. Hart presses this point to argue that an eternally frustrated end would render creation unintelligible, while Aquinas maintains that the ordering to the end remains real even if some creatures finally fail to attain it. The disagreement between them, therefore, is not about whether creation has a final cause, but about whether a true final cause can be eternally unrealized without contradiction. There is no “after the fact” for God. Whatever finally comes to be is included—at least permissively—within the scope of God’s creative willing. God does not wait to discover humanity’s fate; he eternally knows and wills the kind of world that exists, including its end.

Hart makes this point with characteristic bluntness:

If God creates the world ex nihilo, and if the whole of creation is therefore entirely contingent upon God’s will, then God must be morally answerable for the whole of it, down to its final consummation. Nothing that happens within creation can be dismissed as something for which God is not ultimately responsible. (That All Shall Be Saved, First Meditation)

From this Hart draws a crucial inference: if a rational creature were to end in eternal ruin, that ruin would be implicit in God’s creative intention. Appeals to divine ‘permission’ cannot absolve God of responsibility for an eternal outcome under creatio ex nihilo. Eternal damnation, if real, would therefore implicate the divine Goodness itself.

2.2 Rational Nature and Teleological Determination

Hart’s account of rationality is deeply teleological. Rational creatures are ordered to the Good as such and cannot desire evil qua evil. All sin is therefore a form of ignorance, delusion, or bondage. Finite goods may be mistaken for the Good, but such misapprehensions are corrigible in principle.

Hart articulates this claim forcefully in You Are Gods:

The rational will, insofar as it is rational, is always oriented toward the Good as such; it cannot, without contradiction, finally rest in what is known to be evil or deficient. To imagine an eternal refusal of the Good is to imagine either a perpetual ignorance that could be healed or a will no longer functioning as rational at all. (You Are Gods, ch. 1)

On this basis, Hart denies that a rational will could eternally and freely reject the Good with full lucidity. An everlasting hell would therefore require either an ignorance God could heal or a will permanently fixed in delusion, neither of which is compatible with rational freedom. An everlasting hell would require either an ignorance God could heal or a will permanently fixed in delusion, neither of which is compatible with rational freedom.

2.3 Freedom and Fulfillment

Hart rejects libertarian accounts of freedom according to which the power of final self‑destruction is a perfection of the will. Freedom, on his view, is the capacity to flourish in accordance with one’s nature. A will eternally fixed in misery is not free but enslaved (That All Shall Be Saved, Fourth Meditation). Consequently, eternal damnation would represent not God’s respect for freedom, but God’s eternal ratification of unfreedom.

2.4 The Necessity of Universal Salvation

At this point it is crucial to clarify the sense of necessity at work in Hart’s argument, since this is a frequent source of misunderstanding. Hart does not claim that universal salvation is necessary in an absolute or causal sense, as though God were compelled to create or creatures were coerced into salvation. Rather, he is appealing to what classical theology has often called conditional or hypothetical necessity (necessitas ex suppositione).

Hart explicitly denies that God is necessitated to create the world:

God is in no sense compelled to create. Creation is not an emanation from the divine essence, nor is it required for God’s fulfillment. God would be infinitely complete even had he never created anything at all. (That All Shall Be Saved, First Meditation)

The necessity Hart affirms arises only given God’s free creative act:

Once God has freely willed to create rational beings for participation in the Good, it is impossible—without contradiction—that their final end should be eternal privation of that Good. (That All Shall Be Saved, Second Meditation)

The necessity Hart affirms is therefore teleological rather than causal: it concerns the coherence of final causes, not the operation of efficient causes. Universal salvation is necessary not because God is forced to save all, but because, once God has created rational beings ordered to the Good, their ultimate fulfillment cannot finally fail without contradiction. It is in this precise and limited sense that Hart’s universalism is ‘necessitarian.’”

Interlude: Final Causality and the Intelligibility of Creation

In classical philosophy and theology, a final cause is an end, goal, or purpose—the “for the sake of which” something exists or acts. We often explain things by what causes them from behind: forces, choices, events, or conditions. Classical thinkers insisted, however, that such explanations are incomplete unless we also ask where a thing is going. To understand what something is, we must understand what it is for.

This is especially true of living and rational beings. An acorn becomes an oak tree because that is what it is for. Eyes exist for seeing; lungs for breathing; minds for truth. These ends are not optional aspirations that may or may not be realized without consequence. They are constitutive of what these things are. If eyes were never meant to see, or minds never meant to know truth, then “seeing” and “knowing” would cease to explain what eyes and minds are at all.

Both Aquinas and Hart agree that human beings are rational creatures, and that rational creatures are ordered toward the Good as such. In classical terms, this ordering is often described as a natural desire for the Good itself—a desire that defines rational nature and renders its final fulfillment intelligible as an end rather than an external reward. We are not merely oriented toward finite satisfactions—pleasure, power, success—but toward happiness, meaning, and fulfillment in the fullest sense. Even our sins testify to this orientation, since we always pursue what appears to us as good, however distorted our vision may be. Rational desire is restless until it finds the Good.

For this reason, final causality plays a decisive role in the doctrine of creation. To say that God creates rational beings is not merely to say that God brings them into existence as efficient cause. It is to say that God creates them for an end. Creation is intelligible only insofar as it is ordered. God does not create rational beings arbitrarily, nor simply to exist and persist. God creates them for participation in the Good—that is, for knowledge and love of God.

This is where Hart’s argument sharpens. A final cause, if it is truly a final cause, must be capable of explaining the existence of the thing ordered to it. An end that can fail absolutely—fail not merely temporarily or partially, but eternally—ceases to function as an end in any meaningful sense. It becomes a frustrated intention rather than an intelligible purpose.

Hart’s claim can be stated plainly: a final cause that can fail forever is not really a final cause at all.

Temporary failure does not threaten final causality. Hart has no difficulty accounting for sin, suffering, alienation, resistance to God, or even prolonged rebellion within history. These are intelligible precisely because they are provisional. They can be healed, corrected, overcome, or gathered into a larger redemptive narrative. As long as the end remains attainable, the story still makes sense.

Eternal hell, however, is different in kind. It is not simply more suffering or longer resistance. It is final frustration. If a rational creature is eternally damned, then that creature is created for participation in the Good and yet never attains that end—and never can. The ordering to the Good is thus rendered permanently futile for that creature.

At that point, the final cause ceases to explain the act of creation. The creature’s existence is no longer intelligible as being for anything. Either God creates some rational beings for eternal frustration, or God creates them for an end that God eternally knows will never be realized. In either case, creation loses its teleological coherence.

Hart insists that this result is incompatible with divine goodness and wisdom. God does not create rational beings for nothing. A world in which some rational creatures exist forever in a state of complete and irremediable frustration would be a world containing beings whose existence has no coherent “for-the-sake-of-which.” Creation would then be internally divided: ordered to fulfillment in some cases and to futility in others. The final cause would no longer be truly final.

This is also why Hart rejects appeals to divine permission at the eschatological level. Permission can intelligibly account for evils that are temporary, corrigible, or ordered toward a good beyond themselves. It cannot account for an eternal state of privation. An eternally damned creature would exist forever only by God’s sustaining will. To say that God merely “permits” such a condition is, in Hart’s view, to disguise what would in fact be the eternal ratification of a purposeless existence.

Aquinas agrees that creation has a final cause and that rational beings are ordered to God as their ultimate end. Where Aquinas differs is in allowing that this ordering can remain real even if some creatures never attain the end to which they are ordered. Hart denies that this is coherent. For Hart, an end that is eternally unrealized is no longer an end capable of explaining creation.

The disagreement between Hart and his critics, therefore, is not about whether creation has a final cause. Both sides affirm that it does. The disagreement concerns whether a true final cause—rational participation in the Good—can be eternally frustrated without rendering creation itself unintelligible. Hart answers that it cannot.

3. Hart and Aquinas on Rationality and the Good

Despite their disagreements, Hart and Thomas Aquinas share significant common ground. Both affirm that God is the Good itself, that rational nature is ordered to the Good as such, that evil is privation, and that beatitude consists in participation in God. Both reject voluntarist accounts of freedom as sheer indifference. The disagreement between them does not concern these first principles, but their implications.

The decisive divergence concerns final frustration. Aquinas holds that although rational nature is ordered to God as its ultimate end, that end may be finally and eternally failed without contradiction (Summa Theologiae I–II, qq. 1–5). Hart denies this, arguing that a true final cause cannot be eternally unrealized in any instance of a nature defined by that cause.

At this point a methodological clarification is required. Aquinas’s account of rationality is not formulated in a doctrinal vacuum. It is articulated within a theological tradition that already affirms the real possibility of eternal damnation. That commitment exerts a quiet but decisive pressure on how rational teleology, freedom, and divine permission are specified. In order for eternal perdition to remain possible, rational desire must be understood as non-necessitating with respect to its end, freedom must include the capacity for final self-frustration, and divine love must be capable of non-efficacious willing. These specifications are not self-evident deliverances of rationality as such; they function to secure the intelligibility of a prior eschatological commitment.

This observation does not impugn Aquinas’s coherence or philosophical seriousness. It clarifies scope. Aquinas offers one historically situated and theologically conditioned specification of rational teleology within classical theism. Hart’s disagreement with Aquinas therefore does not amount to a rejection of classical rational teleology, but to a rejection of a particular settlement shaped in part by the inherited confession of eternal damnation.

Interlude: Divine Permission and Eternal Damnation

A key point of disagreement between Hart and Rooney concerns the notion of divine permission. In classical theistic discourse, to say that God “permits” something is to say that God does not positively will or intend it as an end, but allows it to occur through created causes—typically through the free actions of creatures—without being its direct author. God remains sovereign, but the permitted event is not part of God’s positive intention.

This distinction between what God wills and what God permits has long been used to account for the presence of evil in a world created by a good God. In classical theism, such permission is not mere passivity: it is a qualified mode of divine willing, in which God wills not to prevent certain evils for the sake of other goods, without willing those evils as ends in themselves. God permits many evils, classical theists argue, because preventing them would require the elimination of created goods such as freedom, finite causality, or the regular order of nature.

Hart, however, denies that this appeal to divine permission can justify eternal damnation. His objection does not concern temporary evils, suffering, or even grave moral disorder within history. Rather, it concerns the final state of a rational creature. Under creatio ex nihilo, Hart argues, God is the sole sufficient cause not only of a creature’s existence but of the entire order within which its destiny unfolds. Because of this, no final or eternal outcome can be morally external to God’s creative act. If a rational creature ends in eternal ruin, that ruin cannot be dismissed as something God merely allows; it is an outcome God knowingly and irrevocably sustains.

For Hart, this makes the appeal to permission incoherent at the eschatological level. Permission can intelligibly account for evils that are provisional, corrigible, or ordered toward a good beyond themselves. It cannot account for an eternal state of privation. An eternally damned creature would exist forever only by God’s sustaining will, in a condition of complete frustration of its final end. To say that God merely “permits” such a state, Hart argues, is to use the language of permission to mask what would in fact be a positive divine ratification of eternal ruin.

Rooney explicitly rejects this conclusion. He argues that classical theism allows a robust and morally adequate distinction between divine willing and divine permission even with respect to final outcomes. On his Thomistic account, God may genuinely will the good of every rational creature—namely, its ultimate fulfillment in God—while nevertheless permitting some creatures to fail eternally through their own free rejection of grace. As Rooney puts it:

God may genuinely will the good of every rational creature while nevertheless permitting some creatures to fail eternally through their own free rejection of grace. Such permission does not imply a defect in divine goodness or omnipotence, since God does not will the evil of damnation as an end, but allows it as a consequence of created freedom. (Not a Hope in Hell, ch. 3)

Rooney further insists that denying the possibility of eternal loss would undermine the goods involved in rational freedom and moral responsibility:

To deny the possibility of final loss would be to deny the real significance of rational freedom and the seriousness of moral choice, thereby collapsing the distinction between willing and permitting that is essential to classical theism. (Not a Hope in Hell, ch. 3)

Such permission, Rooney maintains, does not imply that God intends or endorses eternal damnation, nor does it compromise divine goodness or omnipotence. Eternal loss, on this view, is a tragic but morally permissible consequence of created freedom, not a contradiction of God’s nature.

The disagreement here is not merely semantic. It concerns whether the concept of permission can coherently be extended to eternal outcomes under creatio ex nihilo, or whether doing so empties divine goodness and final causality of their intelligibility.

4. Rooney’s Critique of Hart

A central feature of Rooney’s critique is his interpretation of Hart as advancing a form of absolute necessity rather than the conditional necessity Hart actually affirms. Rooney consistently frames Hart’s argument as though it entailed that God’s action in saving all rational creatures is necessary simpliciter, such that God could not have done otherwise without contradiction.

Rooney expresses the worry in these terms:

If God must save all rational creatures in order to remain good, then God’s action is no longer free in any meaningful sense. Moral considerations have here been illicitly converted into metaphysical constraints on divine agency. (Not a Hope in Hell, ch. 2)

On Rooney’s reading, Hart’s universalism collapses divine freedom, converts moral considerations into metaphysical necessities, and risks a broader modal collapse in which contingency is undermined.

Rooney further defends a Thomistic account of divine permission, according to which God may will the good of a creature without securing its realization:

Classical theism allows that God may genuinely will the good of every rational creature while nevertheless permitting some to fail eternally. Such permission does not imply a defect in divine goodness or power. (Not a Hope in Hell, ch. 3)

This interpretation, however, rests on a crucial mischaracterization. Hart nowhere claims that God was necessitated to create, to create rational creatures, or to create this particular world. His claim is instead that, given God’s free act of creating rational beings ordered to the Good, their final fulfillment follows with conditional or teleological necessity. Rooney’s critique repeatedly treats this conditional necessity as though it were an absolute necessity attaching to God’s will as such, and it is this stronger claim that Rooney successfully rejects.

Once the distinction between absolute and conditional necessity is restored, the force of Rooney’s modal objection is significantly weakened. Hart’s argument does not deny contingency at the level of creation or history; it denies only the coherence of an eternally frustrated final cause. Rooney’s insistence that classical theism permits God to will the good of rational creatures without securing its realization presupposes a Thomistic specification of rational teleology and divine permission that Hart explicitly contests. As a result, Rooney’s critique does not so much refute Hart’s argument as decline to enter the metaphysical framework within which that argument operates.

At this point the crucial question must be faced directly: Does Rooney accurately grasp Hart’s teleological argument against eternal damnation—specifically, Hart’s claim that hell is impossible because God is the final cause of rational creatures? The answer, regrettably, is no. Rooney recognizes that Hart denies the coherence of eternal hell and that he appeals to necessity in doing so, but he consistently reframes Hart’s argument as a claim about divine compulsion or moral constraint rather than as a claim about teleological intelligibility. Hart’s central contention is not that God is forced to save all in order to remain good, but that an eternal frustration of rational creatures would render creation unintelligible as ordered to a final cause. Rooney does not directly engage this claim. He does not ask whether a final cause that is eternally unrealized can still function as a final cause, nor does he confront Hart’s argument that an eternally damned rational creature would be created for nothing. Instead, Rooney presupposes the Thomistic judgment that final causality may remain real even when it is never realized in some instances, and he critiques Hart from within that framework. As a result, Rooney’s critique succeeds only against a Thomistic account Hart explicitly rejects, and it does not address Hart’s teleological argument on its own terms.

5. Does Rooney’s Critique Defeat Hart’s Argument?

Rooney’s critique is powerful within a Thomistic framework. However, it does not engage Hart’s argument on its own terms. Rooney’s objections presuppose a Thomistic anthropology, a permission‑based account of divine action, and a conception of freedom that Hart explicitly rejects. The charge that Hart collapses contingency into necessity depends upon interpreting Hart’s teleological necessity as causal or absolute necessity, a reading Hart consistently denies.

Once Hart’s argument is understood as asserting a necessity ex suppositione—conditional upon God’s free act of creation—Rooney’s modal objections lose their force. What remains is not a refutation of Hart’s universalism, but a disagreement between rival classical‑theist accounts of rationality, freedom, and divine goodness.

6. Conclusion

Hart’s necessitarian argument for universal salvation does not contradict classical theism as such. It contradicts a Thomistically specified version of classical theism that already presupposes the possibility of eternal damnation. Rooney’s critique therefore succeeds only if Thomism is taken as the neutral baseline for classical theism. Once that assumption is questioned, Hart’s universalism emerges as a coherent, historically grounded alternative within the classical tradition rather than a departure from it.

The deeper point of disagreement, therefore, does not concern divine freedom versus necessity, but the status of final causality itself: whether a true final cause—rational participation in the Good—can be eternally frustrated without contradiction, or whether such frustration would undermine the intelligibility of rational nature and divine goodness alike. The persistence of the debate between Hart and his critics understandingly turns on this point, since a failure to engage Hart’s teleological claim at this level will inevitably result in critiques that, however rigorous within their own frameworks, do not meet his argument where it is actually made.

Editorial Postscript

I confess that I really enjoyed working with ChatGPT in composing the previous article on Fr Rooney’s critique of strong universalism in Not a Hope in Hell. After hitting the publish button, I knew that I wanted to continue the conversation. So I uploaded That All Shall Be Saved and You Are Gods and issued my first command: summarize Hart’s necessitarian argument for universal salvation. I was pleased with the initial output. Chat appeared to have a better grasp of Hart’s argument than many of his critics—and, frankly, than some of his supporters as well.

I then asked it to unpack certain aspects of the argument in greater detail. I was particularly intrigued by its sustained focus on final causality and on the claim that eternal hell renders creation itself unintelligible. In my judgment, it appears to have identified a crucial dimension of Hart’s analysis that many readers—including myself—had not fully appreciated.

I next asked Chat to summarize Rooney’s critique of Hart and to elaborate its central claims. Its responses largely conformed to what I expected. Eventually I posed the decisive question: Does Rooney accurately represent Hart’s argument in his book? Chat answered in the negative and identified several points at which it judged Rooney to have misunderstood the structure and intent of Hart’s position. I did not instruct it what conclusion to reach, though I did continue to ask it to clarify and refine its analysis.

I then asked Chat to write an extended blog article on Rooney’s critique, including a comparison of Hart and Aquinas on rationality and humanity’s ordering to the Good. The article underwent several rounds of revision in response to questions and concerns that I raised. In that limited sense, I collaborated in shaping its final form; but the analysis itself is ChatGPT’s, not mine.

As with the previous article, I cannot verify that everything Chat has written is correct. Hart, Rooney, and Aquinas specialists will no doubt wish to offer corrections or refinements. But what is of interest here is Chat’s interpretation of the texts it was given and the judgment it reached on that basis. My hope is that this article will help readers better understand what is really at stake in the debate between Hart and Rooney—and perhaps to see Hart’s argument with fresh eyes.

(Return to first article)

Posted in Book Reviews, David B. Hart, Universalism and Eschatology | 14 Comments

	Grant on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Robin of Lilyfield on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Grant on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Tom on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Tom on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Daniel P. on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Tom on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	owenkelly on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Daniel P. on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…
	Daniel P. on A Meditation: Eternal Ends and…

Eclectic Orthodoxy

A Meditation: Eternal Ends and Seamless Beginnings

St Gregory of Nyssa’s Stunning Vision of Humanity and the Divine

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 4)

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 3)

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 2)

Apokatastasis, Origen, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Part 1)

“These three men follow the leading of the light above, and with steadfast gaze obeying the indications of the guiding splendour, are led to the recognition of the Truth by the brilliance of Grace”

Necessity, Rationality, and the Good: Hart, Aquinas, and Rooney on Universal Salvation

Follow on Facebook

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

Meta

Blog Stats

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

Meta

Blog Stats