reader to the last four anathemas of the Second Council of Constantinople to fill in the lacunae.49 According to these anathemas, Origen was supposed to have taught that the devil and the spiritual hosts of wickedness “were as unchangeably united to the Word of God as the Mind itself” (i.e., Christ).50 In other words, despite the tragic choices of the primordial intelligences, the connection between the fallen souls and their Creator was never permanently severed.51 Furthermore, the anathemas accuse Origen of holding the view that “all rational creatures will form one unity” once again when these intelligences abandon their bodies and their names, ostensibly as the result of a purificatory process, making the beginning the same as the end, and the end “the measure of the beginning,” such that “the life of spirits will be the same as it formerly was.”52
This process of restoration is, in fact, how Origen conceives of the afterlife, the resurrection and judgment in On First Principles. In Book 2, Chapter 10, Origen outlines a universal path of salvation for all souls. He does this by turning to the question of the “contents of the Church’s teaching to the effect that at the time of judgment ‘eternal fire’ and ‘outer darkness’ and a ‘prison’ and a ‘furnace’ and other similar things have been prepared for sinners.”53 Using Isaiah 50:11 as the basis for explaining the idea of eternal fire, Origen interprets this fire as purgative and restorative, part of a purifying process commensurate in intensity and duration with both the original fall and subsequent actions of each rational soul. It is interesting that the element Origen associates with divinity is also part of the curative process whereby souls are purified. The verse itself reads, “walk in the light of your own fire, and in the flame which you have kindled for yourselves.” Origen argues that these words mean “that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into a fire which has been previously kindled by someone else or which existed before him.”54 This interpretation, of course, helps to mitigate the problem of theodicy in that it absolves God of any responsibility for tormenting souls. For a mere infliction of pain without remedial effect would be unworthy of God.55 According to Origen, the soul’s sin, “the history of its evil deeds, of every foul and disgraceful act and all unholy conduct,” will be exposed to each soul, and the conscience, “harassed and pricked by its own stings,” will become “an accuser and witness against itself.”56 Origen explains to his reader the way in which these torments already accompany evil deeds almost like shadows: “The soul is burnt up with the flames of love, or tormented by the fires of jealousy or envy, or tossed about with furious anger, or consumed with intense sadness.”57 In other words, the motions and feelings that accompany such deeds already prefigure and indicate the sorts of punishments that will work to purge the soul of the effects of these deeds after death. Their pain signals their harmfulness.
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