APOCATÄSTASI. – A Greek word (ἀποκατάστασις) which etymologically means “to restore something to its primitive place.” It is used only once in Sacred Scripture, by St. Peter (Act. 3, 21), to signify the restoration of all things (ἀποκατάστασις πάντων) to the order willed by God, an order that has been disturbed by the sin of free creatures. This restoration will take place at the end of time in the parousia. Jesus expresses this a. with the word palingenesia (Mt. 19, 21). St. Paul alludes to it when he speaks of the liberation of creation from the bondage of corruption (Rom. 8, 19-22), and especially of the destruction of the effects of sin and of the last enemy, death, “when God will be all in all” (I Cor. 15, 25-28.54-57). St. Peter (II Petr. 3, 13) and St. John (Apoc. 21, 1) allude to “new heavens and a new earth” in which justice will dwell. The a. will therefore entail a universal renewal embracing the intellectual and material worlds and establishing a firm and definitive order perfectly conforming to the divine plan. Such is the general, mystery-shrouded idea of the revealed a.
Alongside this orthodox a., a heterodox and heretical one was introduced: the Origenist a. Under the influence of Neoplatonism, Origen conceived the restoration of all things as the complete disappearance, from the moral world, of sin and all its consequences, including the punishment and damnation of free creatures, whether angels or human beings. A day will come when all misguided intelligent beings, including Satan and the rebellious angels, will return to God’s friendship and God, according to the Apostle’s expression, “will be all in all.” In other words, according to Origen there is no eternal hell. To punish sin, God inflicts only medicinal punishments, whose duration is proportionate to the guilt; and hellfire itself, metaphorical fire, is nothing but purifying. This grave error was taught, after Origen, by St. Gregory of Nyssa in its full extent and by the Origenists. In the West, certain authors, such as St. Jerome before 394 and Ambrosiaster, limited the a. to the baptized alone. This is the error of the “merciful,” vigorously opposed by St. Augustine. At first a mere error, the Origenist a., both total and partial, became a formal heresy after the Church’s condemnation in the sixth century (the Constantinopolitan Synod of 543, approved by Pope Vigilius and by all the patriarchs, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553). Many Protestant sects—Anabaptists, Moravian Brethren, Universalists, etc.—follow the Origenist thesis. According to the opinion of A. Harnack (Dogmongeschichte, III, 4th ed., Tübingen 1909, p. 661), all the Reformed adhere inwardly to the a.
This heresy has also penetrated in an attenuated form among modern Byzantine and Greek-Russian theologians. Many of them, resolute opponents of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, teach not only the mitigation of the punishments of hell, but also the liberation of certain of the damned through the prayer of the Church (cf. M. Jugie, Theologia Dogmatica Orientalium dissidentium, IV, Paris 1931, pp. 137-58).