Oldmantook
Well-Known Member
I suggest you dig deeper instead of just accepting an article written by an organization sympathetic to the Roman Catholic church. Did you not know that apokatastasis was never condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council some 10 years later? All is not as it appears. Dogma has a way of changing, especially with regards to the Roman Catholic Church.St. Gregory of Nyssa accepted the idea of apocatastasis from Origen. However, this part of St. Gregory's writings has been unequivocally rejected by the subsequent Church Fathers:
- St. Varsanofios the Great, criticizing the doctrine of apocatastasis, when asked about St. Gregory's opinion, has answered: "do not think that people, though also saints, could completely understand all depths of God... Even if a saint speaks about such opinions, you will not find that he confirmed the words as though had the statement from above, but that they resulted from the doctrine of his former teachers, and he, trusting their knowledge of them, did not inquire of God whether it was true."citation needed
- St. Herman of Constantinople has also expressed a negative opinion of the doctrine, but he supposes that the works of St. Gregory have been damaged by Origenists: "those who liked that absurd idea, as if for demons and for people who will be subjected to eternal punishment, is possible to expect the discontinuance... they have taken his clean and sensible works and have added the dark and disastrous poison of Origen's
- St. Mark of Ephesus, after citing St. Gregory, exclaims: "Are we wrong when we do not believe those words of St. Gregory of Nyssa, considering them forgeries, or, even if they are original, to not accept as contradictory to Scripture and to the general dogma?"
- St. Maximus the Confessor, rejecting an Origenistic interpretation of apocatastasis, considered that St. Gregory used this term "in sense of restoration of cognitive forces of the man in that condition of the correct relation to truth."
- St. Photius the Great has expressed the Church's general interpretation in one phrase: "that in works of St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, where restoration is mentioned, it is not accepted by the Church."
It was through Origen that the Platonist doctrine of the apokatastasis passed to St. Gregory of Nyssa, and simultaneously to St. Jerome, at least during the time that St. Jerome was an Origenist. It is certain, however, that St. Jerome understands it only of the baptized: "In restitutione omnium, quando corpus totius ecclesiæ nunc dispersum atque laceratum, verus medicus Christus Jesus sanaturus advenerit, unusquisque secundum mensuram fidei et cognitionis Filii Dei . . . suum recipiet locum et incipiet id esse quod fuerat" (Comment. in Eph., iv, 16; P.G., XXVI, col. 503). Everywhere else St. Jerome teaches that the punishment of the devils and of the impious, that is of those who have not come to the Faith, shall be eternal. (See Petavius, Theol. dogmat. De Angelis, 111, 112.) The "Ambrosiaster" on the other hand seems to have extended the benefits of redemption to the devils, (In Eph., iii, 10; P.L., XVII, col. 382), yet the interpretation of the "Ambrosiaster" on this point is not devoid of difficulty. [See Petavius, p. 111; also, Turmel, Histoire de la théologie positive, depuis l'origine, etc. (Paris, 1904) 187.]
From the moment, however, that anti-Origenism prevailed, the doctrine of the apokatastasis was definitely abandoned. St. Augustine protests more strongly than any other writer against an error so contrary to the doctrine of the necessity of grace. See, especially, his "De gestis Pelagii", I: "In Origene dignissime detestatur Ecclesia, quod et iam illi quos Dominus dicit æterno supplicio puniendos, et ipse diabolus et angeli eius, post tempus licet prolixum purgati liberabuntur a poenis, et sanctis cum Deo regnantibus societate beatitudinis adhærebunt." Augustine here alludes to the sentence pronounced against Pelagius by the Council of Diospolis, in 415 (P.L., XLIV, col. 325). He moreover recurs to the subject in many passages of his writings, and in City of God XXI sets himself earnestly to prove the eternity of punishment as against the Platonist and Origenist error concerning its intrinsically purgatorial character. We note, further, that the doctrine of the apokatastasis was held in the East, not only by St. Gregory of Nyssa, but also by St. Gregory of Nazianzus as well; "De seipso", 566 (P.G., XXXVII, col. 1010), but the latter, though he asks the question, finally decides neither for nor against it, but rather leaves the answer to God. Köstlin, in the "Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie" (Leipzig, 1896), I, 617, art. "Apokatastasis", names Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia as having also held the doctrine of apokatastasis, but cites no passage in support of his statement. In any case, the doctrine was formally condemned in the first of the famous anathemas pronounced at the Council of Constantinople in 543: Ei tis ten teratode apokatastasis presbeuei anathema esto [See, also, Justinian, Liber adversus Originem, anathemas 7 and 9.] The doctrine was thenceforth looked on as heterodox by the Church.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01599a.htm
http://www.mercyuponall.org/2017/03/23/is-origenism-heresy-on-the-fifth-ecumenical-council-in-553/
https://calvinistinternational.com/2015/09/16/david-bentley-hart-on-the-5th-ecumenical-council/
Upvote
0