As for the problem of the ‘second death’ and the final hell after the Last Day, a solution, existential rather than doctrinal, is to be found in the high Eastern spirituality associated with St Antony. A cobbler in Alexandria, to whom Christ had sent Antony to show him a degree of holiness greater than his own, confessed to the famous hermit that he used to think, as he watched the passers-by, ‘May they all be
It is true, as we have said, that the Church condemned Origenism, the certainty that all people, even the fallen angels, will ultimately be reconciled in a ‘universal restitution’, an apocatastasis of both nature and persons. Such a conviction actually conflicts with the stern warnings uttered by Christ in the first three Gospels, and belittles the irreducible mystery of our freedom; in asserting that evil will eventually die of exhaustion, because God alone is infinite,
It is out of respect for our freedom that God allows evil to exist; it has already been conquered, but secretly, because the Holy Spirit wishes to regenerate us from within, by a free and faithful response, without compulsion. What matters in the history of the Church is her holiness, her awareness, in a world that is utterly free, that Christ has conquered death once and for all, and that his victory is always present
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