Universalism and Justice

From

The Severity of Universal Salvation

by Taylor Ross June 04, 2019

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-severity-of-universal-salvation/

Among the most common objections to the idea of a universal salvation—the restoration of all things, as patristic theologians called it—is the thought that so reckless a doctrine of grace lacks any notion of eschatological judgment adequate to the utter depravity of human sin.[1] Essentially, it is a worry that the wicked among us will get a free pass. And it is a justified anxiety. Surely justice for wrongdoing is as inescapable a deduction of reason as it is a running theme throughout sacred scripture. The mistake, then, is not the commonsensical assumption that sin cannot go unpunished, but rather the presumption that classical Christian arguments in favor of a universal salvation lack a clear concept of judgment.

On the contrary, there is good reason to think that apokatastasis, the term of art for universal salvation in Origen of Alexandria and his heirs, entails a concept of judgment just as exacting, just as rigorous, and every bit as righteous as the sort of purely punitive punishment on offer in any version of the doctrine of eternal damnation. To make this case is both to defend the strong claim that all shall be saved and, just as importantly, to chasten those for whom this restoration is already a foregone conclusion. The ancient Christian teaching of the apokatastasis, in other words, is no romantic reverie; it should, quite literally, scare the hell out of you.

Consider Origen’s gloss on the “eternal fire” of which Jesus warns in Matthew 25:41. The Alexandrian exegete characteristically connects the mention of “fire” here to another place in scripture where the word also appears—in this case, Isaiah 50:11. “Walk in the light of your fire and in the flame which you have kindled for yourself,” says the prophet. Origen takes the intercanonical injunction as a clue to what kind of punishment Jesus promises. The eternal fire cannot be something that precedes the sinner himself, as if lit by someone else. Rather, it must be that “every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire,” with his own sins providing the tinder.[2]

Origen, notice, describes an eschatological judgment fitted to—indeed, furnished by—the specific sins of individual souls. Unlike the indifferent inferno in which the massa damnata supposedly languish, punishment is here figured as a radically personal affair—which is, to my mind, just as terrifying a prospect for those of us who have already stockpiled enough sins to keep a fire burning for many ages to come.

But Origen develops the image further. Our sins are not only like straw fed to a roaring flame but like an excess of nasty germs ingested from eating filth which overrun the body and produce a broiling fever. Hallucinations accompany this fever, and the sickly sinner is forced to relive every wrong he or she has ever done as they bubble to the surface of perception. The mind, says Origen, “will see exposed before its eyes a kind of history of its evil deeds, of every foul and disgraceful act and all unholy conduct.” Thus, he concludes, the soul “becomes an accuser and witness against itself,” made to suffer a sickness of its own making.[3] One need only revisit any great work of tragedy to be reminded that suffering a fate fashioned by one’s own hands is far more painful than enduring the blows of a blind providence.

Nevertheless, the point here—as ever with Origen—is that, in its ownmost afflictions, the soul is actually given the chance to suffer a salvation decidedly not of its own making. Which is why, ultimately, affirmation of apokatastasis is never far from the ascetic impulse in his thought. Salvation, for Origen, is a gratuitous event to be sure, but it only ever happens alongside a willingness to die to oneself. The great irony, of course, is that the self to which one must die is only ever a shadow-self, an elaborate fiction we contrive to avoid recognizing our true identity hidden away in God’s wisdom from eternity. As he puts it later in the same text, riffing on the “cup of fury” mentioned in Jeremiah 25:15-16, it is as though God sets before “all nations” a poisoned cup, that “they may drink it and become mad and vomit,” thereby ridding themselves of the shadows they let masquerade as their souls (De prin. 2.10.6).[4] Salvation is purgation and vice versa....

..Suffice it to say, for now, that, as far as Origen and Gregory [of Nyssa] (and not only them) are concerned, any God whose goodness is finally outstripped by its opposite will turn out to be no God at all....

As the great Herbert McCabe, O.P. says, in a context quite different from Origen’s meditation on first principles, the bewildering process of coming to live rightly we call “morality” must be “a matter of enabling people to make good decisions which will be their own decisions.” Morality is about “learning to be free,” and “doing that in any depth,” warns McCabe, “has to take most of a lifetime.”[8] Origen would surely agree; only, he seems much less sanguine than McCabe (and not only McCabe) about what the soul can actually accomplish in the span of a single life. At any rate, regardless of one’s view on the cascade of ages to come, the point, again, is that it would be gravely mistaken to deduce from Origen’s commitment to universal salvation an overly optimistic view of human nature—quite the opposite, in fact.