That God wills universal salvation of each person is scriptural. Isaac the Syrian teaches from his homilies that even in Gehenna people are not experiencing a lack of divine love, but its fullness finally revealed to humanity. Free will is accepted by the Orthodox Church. God does not coerce us into loving Him, but He wants a willing heart. Irenaeus of Lyons teaches that not all angels and people choose to depart from God’s will. Departing from God creates an alternate, artificial reality, which Scripture and the holy fathers have called Hades. It is a spiritual experience that seems to be the natural consequence of self-isolation from God, a willful hiding from the truth just as the first parents did in the garden of Eden. But there will be no hiding place at the restoration of all things, as Scripture teaches. The Holy Trinity does not withhold goodness in any absolute sense just as God even now makes it rain on the just and unjust in this world. There seems to be an enigma between what the Holy Trinity wills and what creatures will against the Creator. It sounds as if creatures are allowed to maintain a co-parallel kingdom of Hades. But there is no paradoxical ending in Orthodox Christianity. Kenosis, meaning self-emptying or making room for the other, is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; it is the eternal sacrifice for mankind. God’s self-emptying does not seem to ever end, according to Holy Scripture. No one has a choice to opt out of this experience of God’s love. There is already a difficulty, then, for our understanding of free will, which is often used to explain the destiny of individuals. The dogma of the universal resurrection too already begins to encroach on traditional understandings of free will as well as Isaac’s Ascetical Homily 18.
Protopresbyter Georges Florovsky teaches that there is only one possibility: all will experience God’s eternal, unchanging love. “Hades is a tear … a revolt and apostasy” writes Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev in this chapter. We might understand that an obstinate refusal of love will feel tormenting to certain individuals. But Orthodoxy does not advocate for the existence of an ongoing, never-ending war between Good and Evil, like some gnostic teachings and pagan philosophies have taught. A choice may be more like a decision to offer sacrifice to the Holy Trinity or to a creaturely being. Sin may be better understood as a wish to “establish another level of being.” But God is not a Being, and He is beyond beings. Metropolitan Hilarion writes that the possibility of people rejecting God’s love does not reverse the teaching that Hades will be destroyed; people will not disappear, but ontological places that once held us hostage do not need to exist any longer when Christ comes into His Kingdom. Christ did open up the scenario that all people in Hades can be saved through our prayers and ascetical struggles.
In the Old Testament, Sheol is translated as Hades in Greek. It was a gloomy prison of forgetfulness, where evil doers are tortured by their self-will and there is no communion with God or others; others seem to have gone to Abraham’s bosom, waiting place of the righteous. Christ reversed all of that by his descent into Hades. Gehenna is called the “unquenchable fire.” Some think Hades is described in more detail in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16. Real fire, real worms are not required to feel or experience the separation of a soul from what it can see as a loss of repentance. Gehenna (Hell) already starts in this life, Metropolitan Hilarion mentions, just as it is seen in the psychological disturbances of well-known characters such as Tolstoy, Nietzsche or Nebuchadnezzar who appear to become mentally ill. Repentance is an inevitable consequence for all people since all have sinned; whether we hide from God or bring our sins to Him in life now. Repentance is a “change of mind” (metanoia); it is an activity of the nous that is turned back toward its Creator, the Holy Trinity. Isaac the Syrian teaches that Gehenna (Hell) is the nous’ attempting to repent for the past in frustration, or “the inability to change one’s mind.” It is the sadness that amends cannot be completed in the old earth that has been burned up. Even in this scenario, however, we already find an admittance of the wicked wishing to escape a never-ending, limitless punishment of Hell. Hades is also described as “excommunication” and “an inability to relate to God.” To know is to have seen, and Christ says in the Scriptures to the goats, “I know you not.” It is the original sin that hides our shame that seems to prevent communion again. Will there be mercy for those in Hell? Mark of Ephesus teaches that it is the seeing or “contemplation” of God that is felt to have been lost by sinners; it is what is unseen that is the suffering of souls. Symeon the New Theologian teaches similarly to Isaac the Syrian that sinners will try to repent in vain.
Unlike the dogma of purgatory (an infernal part of Hell) taught in Roman Catholicism, based on an interpretation of “paying the last penny” in Luke 12 and Matthew 5, Isaac the Syrian does not posit any “intermediary” place between Heaven and Hell. It is Orthodox teaching that we can pray for and change the fate of people now until the Last Judgment. Eastern theologians and fathers have frequently asked the question, can people in Hell be saved ultimately. There is the difficulty of understanding concepts like free will, time, eternity and “ages” while applying them to a new creation outside of created time. On the one hand, people may choose their inner experience in this life and even change through faithful prayers after death. On the other hand, they will not choose the outcome of reality, the resurrection to eternal life of some kind. That is only in the will of the Holy Trinity. Origen investigated this idea of the universal restoration (apokatastasis) of all things. That theme is found in the Book of Acts 3:21. Some have argued that his theology was posthumously anathematized by a council, however, similar thoughts in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor appear too without any condemnation as well as many other patristic saints. In fact, his theology was not the concern of the council. There are several different meanings of restoration. It can mean a “moral rebirth,” “physical rebirth” and the soul and body reborn into their dynamic, original image. Origen may have been playing off two Greek words “age” (aion) and “worldly” often translated as “eternal” (aionios). The word eternal is actually a Latin word (aeterna) that means the same as “eons” “worlds” or “ages.” In the New Testament, Gehenna, punishment and the everlasting torment of sinners are specifically not described with the Greek word “aeidios” (never-ending, forever) but with the word “aionios,” that means “of an age, eon, world” that would include a limit. He inferred from this that the fires of Hell (Gehenna) could be instructive suffering for the salvation of “every rational creature” with the exception of the demons, which the holy fathers have experienced in ascetic struggles, by going through ages that are completions of time. In this way, eternity is not “never-ending” but more of the idea of cyclical ages that are completed. From Acts 3, Origen took the principle of “the end is like the beginning.” That would hint at the idea of non-linear time in passages of Scripture like Psalm 60 and the Book of Revelation that speak of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. There are also possible connections to the Hellenistic “eons” or circles of finished time periods in his writings, On First Principles. But if sacrifice is part of human nature, then it is from the beginning of reality. The question is how can the wicked, if they so will it, offer sacrifice rightly in the end? There were other critics of Origen’s investigation. Georges Florovsky critiques Origen by calling his apokatastasis a “rejection of history.” Emperor Justinian oversaw the Council in 553 AD that supposedly anathematized Origen and his writings, who coerced Pope Vigilius of Rome to attend the council. Justinian thought it unfair to believe in universal restoration when some strived in asceticism and others did not in this life. Isidore of Pelusium also teaches that salvation cannot be coerced but only carried out by “persuasion.” The Church decidedly rejected the “pre-existence of souls” or a pagan conception of apokatastasis. But Origen’s influential and thought-provoking theologoumena still held a persuasiveness for Russian theologians such as Bulgakov, Berdiaev, Lossky and Sourozh. To imagine a world where the Devil will no longer “rule” humans as captives and where the constraints of the laws of this age are gone, Death is bound and defeated, no one really knows what this new kind of life of the ages will fully entail. So, the next chapter discusses this theme of the newness of heaven and earth that is to come soon.