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Is He not in what is called hell? And in what sense is He in hell? Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness. May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline apocatastasis led him to hope?
In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no satisfactory that is, rational answer, and it matters not whether the supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even panentheist. Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.
Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully, however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union.
This longing is expressed in the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in order that God may be all in all.
This aspect of the modern spiritualistic epidemic did not escape attention. Dr. Leonard Marsh, of the University of Vermont, published, in 1854, a treatise called The Apocatastasis, or Progress Backwards. He proved that the marvels of the Foxes, of Home, and the other mediums, were the old marvels of Neoplatonism. But he draws no conclusion except that spiritualism is retrogressive.
Or may it not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness, in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?
But we have just seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable, or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies.
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