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)
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
