As an exeptional thinker and a devoted interpreter of the Word of God, Origen contributed immensely to the progress in investigating the Christian eschatology or the doctrine of the last things. However, his teachings in this field unfortunately cannot be expounded irrefutably and without incertitudes. In several elements that his doctrine consists of, there occur portions that suggest him asserting the contrary of his own stances that he has articulated elsewhere. Therefore, the questions that emerge from his claims and theories cannot be entirely resolved in an unambiguous way. In spite of that, out of his eschatological hypotheses, proposals and insights arises a considerably prominent presumption of the universal salvation of the entire rational creation. This notion is in Origen's thought fully supported by the authority of Scripture according to how he interpreted its texts employing the allegorical method of exegesis. This surely adds a certain value of justifiability and strength to it. Origen's universalistic outlook is apparent in his analyses of many individual themes and concepts regarding the soul's mode of being after death. It is noticeable in his teaching on the ascension towards God that the souls that are just as well as the ones that are involved in sin will engage in after their death on earth. For attaining this goal of ascension the righteous souls will prepare in the »school for souls« and the ones that practiced evil will have to undergo the God's punishment first. This punishment is, of course, well-intentioned and beneficial and in no way vindictive. At the very end of history the apokatastasis will take place as the event that brings salvation to the entirety of the rational creation so that God, as it is written in 1 Cor 15,28, »may be all in all«. As Origen infers, apokatastasis will restore all beings to the state of harmony and peace in the union with God, as it was before the earthly life of the rational creatures had begun. According to the presumption of participation of the entire rational creation in the dynamics of the apokatastasis, Origen undertakes to include the fate of the devil and the daemons in this salvational process. He concludes that their evil intentions will cease to exist, rather than their existence in itself. They will convert and subject to God. After the apokatastasis, there appears the problem of confronting the notion of this eternal state of salvation with the notion of the intact freedom of will, which, theoretically, allows for the beings to fall from God again. In this case, as it seems, Origen is convinced that the state of the ultimate harmony will be eternal.
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