Email Exchange with John Anthony McGuckin

February 2019
Q = JC’s Questions; A = McG.’s Answers

Q. Did the Fifth Ecumenical Council condemn universalism as heresy? I have heard conflicting
Orthodox views on this subject. As an Orthodox Christian myself, but also as a university
professor who, though now retired, still finds himself fielding queries from former students and
others, I would like to know, and be able to provide, a definitive answer. 

A. In the textbooks concerning the history of dogma, the modern era—with its wissenschaftliche
theological tradition—has tended to see the Ecumenical Councils as dogmatic mills grinding out
propositions pro and anathemata con. But I do not think this is the right way to assess them
historically. For me they are (a) primarily liturgical defenses of something (e.g., Nicaea I’s
immediate rush to an ancient baptismal creed to address the Christological issue), or (b)
emergency solutions to present crises. In the case of the 5th Council, the two crises were: (i) the
worrying inability since Ephesus 431 to reconcile Egypt’s hierarchy, which was pressing a heavy
Cyrillian Christology and trying to downplay Leo’s Tome, without losing Rome’s allegiance;
and (ii) the  massive, ongoing conflict in the Palestinian church (predominantly composed of
monasteries) between the intellectual monks (dedicated followers of Evagrios, Gregory
Nazianzen, and the Origenian spiritual tradition) and the more simple ascetics, who tended to be
also more fundamentalist in their reading of the Bible and who thought all this intellectual stuff
was a distraction from solid monastic practices, such as Psalter reading and heavy fasting. The
“Anti-Origenism” items are largely the result of a clash at the Great Lavra in the Nitrean Desert
when the intellectuals briefly took over and told the “grand old men” of the desert that asceticism
was no use without understanding the mysteries. These grand old men got their own back by
having the intellectuals ejected. More on that story in Cyril of Scythopolis’ “Lives”, though he
himself is anti-Origenist.

Q. I have read that the pertinent anathemas, assembled by Justinian, were not in fact issued by
the Council, but only later added on. 

A. The court of Justinian sided with the old men of the Lavra, but since the younger monks had
done nothing that was canonically censurable, attention was turned to the dubious, speculative
elements in Evagrios, whom all the monks venerated for his unobjectionable teaching on prayer.
At a local council of the standing synod of Constantinople in 543, Evagrios’s metaphysical
universalist opinions were listed and condemned. Origen, however, was not condemned at this
council. At the larger Ecumenical Council of 553, it is a matter of dispute whether the Palestinian
issue rose again, and, if so, whether the anti-Evagrian chapters were listed in the Acts of the
Council. What several scholars now seem to think is that, when the Acts were subsequently
edited, those theologians who had censured Evagrios in the local Constantinople synod took
advantage of the opportunity to slip the earlier condemnations into the larger, more prestigious
synodal Acts so as to nail their opponents more completely.
Q. There appears to be disagreement as to whether Origen himself was condemned—this, if so, I
must say, has always seemed to me one of the grossest errors in the history of the Church—or
only a later form of “Origenism”, in which a protology including the pre-existence of souls was
supposedly part of a package deal with the idea of apokatastasis.  

A. Origen’s thought appears only skeletally in the condemned chapters. All the quotations are
derived from Evagrios, not Origen. Condemning Origen, or Evagrios for that matter, was by this
time largely a matter of ignorant armies clashing by night, as few seem to have read the primary
sources—not that that mattered much in antiquity!

Q. A related issue is whether universalism is a legitimate theologoumenon, in either its “hopeful”

form (e.g., Metro. Kallistos) or a more “confident”, even assertive, form (e.g. D. B. Hart).
 
A. When Origen deals with universalism (apokatastasis and the eventual salvation of all), he
always does so very tentatively, working out of the two major premises which guide all his
theology: nothing is to be thought that is unworthy of God; eternal punishment without the
possibility of rehabilitation is unworthy of God’s majesty. Origen knows, however, that this
cannot be established on the basis of evangelical tradition (except that “God wills all to be
saved”), and so he leaves it open to speculation, at the level of “what do you think?” Gregory the
Theologian takes the idea and presses it even further, and so does Gregory of Nyssa, both of
whom did so without attracting censure. I think the approach of Metropolitan Kallistos is
widespread in Orthodoxy: blatantly to advocate universal salvation seems to weaken the hard
sayings about Gehenna in the Gospel; but to impute a failure on the part of God’s desire for all to
be saved is to limit the infinite mercy in a rather boorish and ignorant way.