It is true, as we have said, that the Church condemned Origenism, the certainty that all people, even the fallen angels, will ultimately be reconciled in a ‘universal restitution’, an apocatastasis of both nature and persons. Such a conviction actually conflicts with the stern warnings uttered by Christ in the first three Gospels, and belittles the irreducible mystery of our freedom; in asserting that evil will eventually die of exhaustion, because God alone is infinite, Origen forgets that personal freedom, precisely because it is in the image of God, is by nature absolute.
But at the same time our ‘catholic conscience’, in the proper sense of ‘catholic’, the conscience that takes account of the whole of humanity reintegrated in Christ, cannot accept the existence of an eternal damnation without any possibility of escape.
In the West, at least since patristic times, this scruple has been rare, but it haunted the thoughts and prayers of Peguy, who had been brought by evangelical socialism to an awareness of the ‘consubstantiality’ of all humanity. In the East, right up to the present day, there have been souls consumed with love who have prayed for the damned, even for the devils. This attitude has not been the preserve of the spiritual-minded. Russian Christians, in particular, are much exercised for the damned, believing, for instance, that the Virgin, by her prayers, has obtained relief of their pain, each year, from Holy Thursday till Pentecost, the very liturgical season when universal Restoration is proclaimed and already begins to take effect. Is the contradiction, then, between freedom and love impossible to resolve?
First we should notice that the early Church, all expectant for Christ’s return, scarcely acknowledged the existence of any who had been damned for all eternity, any more than it acknowledged that the saints would enjoy an immediate consummation and bliss. The Fathers were more often concerned with the notion of purification and progressive healing. After death, the soul whose sanctification is incomplete must journey through the ‘lower’ worlds, presenting itself at symbolic ‘customs posts’ where the powers of evil take away what belongs to them, progressively stripping it bare, constraining it to peace and silence. The ‘sleep’ of death is thus portrayed as a contemplative state; death, dismantling the fallen being, offers to the soul, almost forces upon it, the peaceful, ‘not-passionate’ state that prayerful people experience even in this world, the peace which is the gentle visitation of Christ who is always present in hell, who, together with his saints, fills everything. For some of the dead, locked in ignorance or hostility, the early Church knew that peace, or silence, or the glimpse of the divine Doctor would be experienced as torments; but prayer was offered wholeheartedly for all the dead, especially for those making this journey through the underworld, those, in other words, who are in hell. In all the Eastern rites, at vespers for Pentecost, there are ancient ‘kneeling prayers’. The Byzantine version reads: ‘In this feast of fullness and salvation, thou dost graciously hear our prayers of atonement for those who are shut in hell and givest us the great hope of seeing thee grant to the departed the deliverance from the evils which condemn them .. .’ The love of God, multiplied by the prayer of the Church, works from within – for no one is alone – upon the ultimate hell, individual solitude, to open it to the communion of the Kingdom that is coming.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
