Apokatastasis and the Purifying Fire

At the close of On the Soul and the Resurrection, St. Gregory of Nyssa voices through his dying sister St. Macrina the Younger — “the Teacher” — his fullest vision of the last things: a fire of judgment that is medicinal rather than retributive, purging the soul as the furnace purges gold; evil as mere privation of the good, possessing no substance to outlast its burning; and a final state in which, all evil consumed, “God shall be all in all.” This is the eschatology of the universal restoration (apokatastasis), and because it is Gregory’s most fully Origenist teaching set in a woman’s mouth, it raises at once a theological question about its dogmatic standing and a source-critical question about whose teaching it really is.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Mother)

The Purifying Fire: Gold in the Furnace

From the nature and destiny of the soul the dialogue turns to its purification after death, and here Macrina gives one of the most influential images in patristic eschatology. The “fire” of which Scripture and the Lord’s own parables speak is, on her teaching, not retributive but purgative: its purpose is not the eternal torment of the damned as an end in itself, but the healing and cleansing of the soul (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). She likens it to the refiner’s fire that purges gold. As the goldsmith melts the ore to separate the precious metal from the dross alloyed with it, so the divine fire of judgment burns away the evil that has grown into human nature, drawing it off as slag until only what is precious remains (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; cf. 1 Cor 3:13–15). The fire is real and the pain of it real; what it is not is vindictive.

The pain of this purgation Macrina compares to a surgical cure — sharp, even severe, but ordered wholly to health. Because it is medicinal it is also proportioned: measured to the evil that must be removed, and therefore finite (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The longer and deeper the soul’s attachment to material and base things, the longer and harder the cleansing it must undergo; the soul that came to death lightly burdened is purged quickly, the soul grown thick with evil only after long and painful separation. But the logic is everywhere the same and everywhere has an end: the fire works to restore, not to destroy, and a remedy that healed forever without ever curing would not be a remedy at all (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). This conception Gregory inherits and transforms from Origen, sharpening its therapeutic character while detaching it from Origen’s more speculative cosmology; in Macrina’s mouth it becomes the seedbed of the universal restoration (cf. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, Brill, 2013). The roots of this teaching lie already in the dialogue’s anthropology: if the passions are accidental accretions and not the soul’s essence, then they are precisely the dross that fire can burn away without consuming the soul itself (see The Christian Phaedo).

Evil as Privation, Without Substance

The doctrine of the fire rests on a prior conviction about the nature of evil, and Macrina states it with great economy. Evil has no substance of its own. It is not a thing God made, nor a power standing over against the good, but the privation of the good — a lack, an absence, a turning-away, which exists only parasitically upon the nature it corrupts and has no being apart from it (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). This is decisive for the whole eschatology, for it means that evil is inherently perishable. What has no substance cannot endure of itself; once the good from which it is a defect is healed and restored, the defect simply ceases to be, having nothing of its own on which to subsist. The fire does not annihilate some positive thing called evil; it removes a privation by restoring the good that was lacking, as light removes darkness not by destroying a rival substance but by filling the place darkness only seemed to occupy (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5).

From this it follows that evil cannot be everlasting. Where evil is privation and not substance, an unending hell of evil would require an unending positive existence for what has, by definition, no positive existence at all — and so, on this account, evil must finally exhaust itself and pass away (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5). The purifying fire is the very process of that exhaustion: the burning-off of a privation until nothing of it is left.

“God All in All”

The dialogue rises at its close to its governing text, 1 Corinthians 15:28: “that God may be all in all” (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; 1 Cor 15:28). This is the horizon toward which the entire work has moved. When the purifying process is complete and evil — the privation of the good — has been wholly burned away and has ceased to be, then nothing will remain outside the good; and God, who is the Good itself, will be present in and to all things without remainder. There will then be no place left for evil, for if God is genuinely all in all, evil has nowhere to exist (On the Soul and the Resurrection, NPNF II/5; 1 Cor 15:28). The immortal soul, purified of its accidental passions, raised in an incorruptible body, and gathered with the whole of human nature restored to its archetypal beauty, is drawn into the unhindered communion of God — the soul’s deification in the God who will be all in all (see Theosis). The deathbed in Pontus thus opens onto the consummation of all things; what the Teacher offers her grieving brother is, in the end, not a consolation merely but the shape of the Christian hope.

A Theologoumenon, Not a Conciliar Dogma

This vision of universal restoration must be received within the discipline the Church applies to such teaching, distinguishing settled dogma from the theological opinion of a Father — a theologoumenon — which the Church may honor without binding the conscience of the faithful to it (see METHODOLOGY, §4). Universal restoration is not a defined dogma of the Orthodox Church. It is Gregory’s theologoumenon: a reverent and influential opinion of a great Father, voiced through Macrina, on a matter the conciliar tradition has not settled in his direction (cf. Ramelli, Apokatastasis, 2013; for the contrary tradition of an everlasting hell, the dialogue stands among the dissenting voices, not the defining ones).

Honesty requires noting the later controversy without overstating it. The Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553) condemned a set of Origenist propositions, and the universal-restoration theme is bound up historically with the Origenism that controversy targeted; this is the principal reason the teaching has not been received as dogma (cf. Ramelli, Apokatastasis, 2013). [Disputed: The dogmatic standing and orthodoxy of Gregory’s universal restoration. Some hold it falls under the censure of Origenism associated with 553 and so cannot be received as the Church’s teaching; others (e.g. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, Brill, 2013) argue that Gregory’s restoration differs in key respects from the propositions condemned and that he was never himself condemned. What is not in dispute: Gregory of Nyssa was never anathematized, remained venerated as a saint and was honored as a “Father of Fathers,” and his eschatology has been treated by the tradition as a theologoumenon to be weighed, not as a settled dogma to be confessed or a heresy to be shunned.] Two facts must be held together: the teaching has not been received as dogma, and its author has never ceased to be venerated as a saint and Father of the Church. The collection therefore presents the apokatastasis as Gregory’s theologoumenon — reported and weighed, neither confessed as dogma nor dismissed as condemned heresy.

Whose Eschatology Is This?

A second question presses as sharply as the first, and it is source-critical rather than dogmatic. This eschatology — the medicinal fire, evil as privation, the final restoration in which God is all in all — is Gregory’s most fully Origenist teaching, and he places it in Macrina’s mouth. The same doctrines that “the Teacher” advances on her deathbed Gregory develops elsewhere under his own name, in his own treatises (cf. On the Soul and the Resurrection, PG 46:11–160; the parallels in Gregory’s own corpus). This raises the ventriloquism question in its acutest form: is the universal restoration Macrina’s own teaching, faithfully attributed, or Gregory’s, assigned to his sister by the literary convention of the dialogue?

The constructionist reading presses the suspicion hard. Because the dialogue is a Phaedo in which the author writes both parts, and because this teaching is so distinctively Gregory’s own, the eschatology can be read as Gregory in conversation with himself, having given the better and bolder part to a sister he never names (cf. Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes,” Church History 67/1 [1998]: 1–31; Virginia Burrus, Begotten Not Made, Stanford, 2000). On this view “Macrina” is the figure through whom Gregory advances his most adventurous theology, and the woman’s deathbed lends to a controversial opinion an authority and pathos that a treatise in the bishop’s own name could not. The recoverable-memory camp answers that this proves too much: Gregory wrote of a sister he had revered for fifty years as his actual teacher, and his attribution of this teaching to her is itself a historical claim made in good faith, not a transparent fiction (Anna M. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God, Brepols, 2008; cf. Pierre Maraval, SC 178, 1971).

[Disputed: Whether the apokatastasis eschatology of the dialogue is Macrina’s own teaching or Gregory’s, attributed to her by literary convention. Clark (“The Lady Vanishes,” 1998) and Burrus (Begotten Not Made, 2000) read it as substantially Gregory’s, “Macrina” serving as the constructed voice for the author’s boldest theology; Silvas (Macrina the Younger, 2008) and Maraval (SC 178, 1971) hold that a remembered teacher stands behind the literary figure and that the attribution is in good faith. This collection reports both and rules on neither.] The honest verdict is modest and firm: the words are Gregory’s, on every side of the debate; what cannot be settled, for lack of any second witness, is whether behind them stands a remembered teacher whose mind is faithfully attributed or only a figure serving the author’s ends. The eschatology is received and weighed by the Church on its own merits, as theology, not as a deposition from Macrina’s lips; that Gregory chose to voice his most daring hope through his sister and to seat himself as her pupil is itself a weighty and deliberate act (see The Question of Her Voice; What Is Voiced Through Macrina).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). PG 46:11–160. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 5 (NPNF II/5), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. New York: Christian Literature, 1893.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Trans. Catharine P. Roth. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, in Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works. Fathers of the Church 58. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967.
Origen. On First Principles (De principiis). Trans. G. W. Butterworth. London: SPCK, 1936. (The source Gregory inherits and transforms.)
Ramelli, Ilaria L. E. The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 120. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Clark, Elizabeth A. “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn.’” Church History 67, no. 1 (1998): 1–31.
Burrus, Virginia. Begotten Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Silvas, Anna M. Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
Maraval, Pierre. Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de sainte Macrine. Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971.