The End Like the Beginning

An end, or consummation, seems to point to the perfecting and completing of things. That is a reminder here that anyone who has a desire to read and understand subjects as difficult and as weighty as these ought to bring a mature and trained mind to the work. Otherwise, if he has never handled questions of this kind, they may strike him as empty and pointless; or, if his mind is already full of settled opinions and prejudices about other matters, he may judge these views heretical and contrary to the faith of the church — giving way, in that judgment, not so much to the convictions of reason as to the stubbornness of prejudice. We handle these subjects with great care and caution, treating them as an inquiry and a discussion rather than as fixed and certain conclusions. In the earlier pages we pointed out which questions have to be set out in clear statements of doctrine, and I think I have done that as well as I could when speaking of the Trinity. But here our exercise is to be carried on, as best we can, in the manner of a debate rather than of strict definition. [a]

The end of the world, then, and the final consummation will come when everyone is subjected to punishment for his sins — a time God alone knows, when he will give each one what he deserves. Still, we think that the goodness of God, through his Christ, may call all his creatures back to one end, his enemies included, once they have been conquered and subdued. For holy Scripture says, “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” And if the prophet’s words there are less than clear, we can learn what they mean from the apostle Paul, who speaks more openly: “For Christ must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet.” And if even that plain statement of the apostle does not tell us well enough what “enemies being placed under his feet” means, listen to what he says next: “For all things must be put under him.” What, then, is this “putting under,” by which all things must be made subject to Christ? My own opinion is that it is the very subjection by which we too want to be subject to him, the subjection by which the apostles were subject, and all the holy ones who have followed Christ. For the word “subjection,” by which we are subject to Christ, shows that the salvation which comes from him belongs to those who are subject to him — as David says: “Shall my soul not be subject to God? From him comes my salvation.”

Seeing, then, that this is the end — when all enemies will have been made subject to Christ, when death, the last enemy, will be destroyed, and when the kingdom will be handed over to God the Father by Christ, to whom all things are subject — let us look, I say, from an end like that back to the beginnings of things. For the end is always like the beginning. Therefore, just as there is one end to all things, so we ought to understand that there was one beginning; and as there is one end to many things, so from one beginning there spring many differences and varieties, which again, through the goodness of God, through subjection to Christ, and through the unity of the Holy Spirit, are called back to one end, an end that is like the beginning. This holds for all who bend the knee at the name of Jesus and by that act make their subjection to him known — those in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. Those three classes point out the whole universe of things: all who, from that one beginning, were arranged among the different orders, each according to the differences in his conduct and as he deserved. [e]

For there was no goodness in them by their very being, as there is in God and in his Christ and in the Holy Spirit. In the Trinity alone, which is the author of all things, does goodness belong by very being; everything else holds it as an added quality that can be lost, and enjoys blessedness only while it shares in holiness and wisdom and in divinity itself. But if they neglect and despise that sharing, then each one, by the fault of his own laziness, becomes the cause of his own downfall — one faster, another more slowly, one further, another less far. And since, as we have said, the lapse by which someone falls away from his position takes many different forms, according to the movements of the mind and the will, one man sliding more easily and another with more difficulty into a lower condition, in this we see the just judgment of God’s providence: that it should happen to each one according to the differences in his conduct, in proportion to what his decline and his falling away deserved.

Some of those who stayed in that beginning — the beginning we have described as resembling the end that is to come — were given, in the ordering and arrangement of the world, the rank of angels; others that of mighty powers, others of rulers, others of authorities, so that they might exercise authority over those who need to have an authority over their head. Others received the rank of thrones, with the duty of judging or governing those who require it; others that of dominions, ruling, no doubt, over slaves. All of this is assigned by divine providence in a just and impartial judgment, according to what they deserved and to the progress they had made in sharing in God and imitating him.

But those who were removed from their first state of blessedness were not removed beyond recovery. They were placed under the rule of the holy and blessed orders we have described, and by making use of their help, and by being remade through wholesome principles and discipline, they may recover themselves and be restored to their happy condition. From all of which I am of the opinion, so far as I can see, that this order of the human race has been appointed so that in the world to come, or in the ages to come, when there will be the new heavens and the new earth that Isaiah speaks of, it may be restored to the unity the Lord Jesus promised in his prayer to God the Father on behalf of his disciples: “I do not pray for these alone, but for all who will believe in me through their word: that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us.” And again, when he says: “That they may be one, even as we are one — I in them, and you in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” The words of the apostle Paul confirm this further: “Until we all come, in the unity of the faith, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” And it is in keeping with this when the same apostle urges us — we who even in this present life are placed in the church, in which is the form of that kingdom which is to come — toward this same likeness of unity: “That you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.”

It must be kept in mind, however, that certain beings who fell away from that one beginning we spoke of have sunk to such a depth of unworthiness and wickedness that they are judged wholly undeserving of the training and instruction by which the human race, while in the flesh, is trained and taught with the help of the heavenly powers. Instead they remain hostile and opposed to those who are receiving that instruction and teaching. And this is why the whole of this mortal life is full of struggles and trials, caused by the hostility and opposition of those who fell from a better condition without once looking back — those who are called the devil and his angels, along with the other orders of evil, which the apostle counted among the opposing powers. [k]

But whether any of these orders that act under the devil’s government and obey his wicked commands will in a future world be converted to righteousness, because they possess the faculty of free will; or whether wickedness, persisted in and grown inveterate, is turned by habit into a kind of nature — that, reader, is a result you yourself may approve, if in neither of these present worlds, which are seen and temporary, nor in those which are unseen and eternal, that portion is to stand wholly apart from the final unity and fitness of things. In the meantime, both in the temporary worlds that are seen and in the eternal ones that are invisible, all these beings are arranged on a regular plan, in the order and degree of what they deserve. Some of them in the first times, others in the second, and some even in the last, are improved by that stern method of training, after undergoing heavier and harsher punishments borne over a long stretch — for many ages, so to speak. They are restored first by the instruction of the angels and afterward by the powers of a higher grade, and so, advancing stage by stage toward a better condition, they reach even to what is invisible and eternal, having travelled by a kind of training through every single office of the heavenly powers. From this, I think, it follows as an inference that every rational nature may pass from one order to another, going through each to all and advancing from all to each, while it is made the subject of various degrees of progress and failure according to its own actions and efforts, put forth in the enjoyment of its power of free will.

But since Paul says that some things are visible and temporary, and others besides these invisible and eternal, we go on to ask in what way the things that are seen are temporary. Is it because there will be nothing at all after them in all those periods of the coming world, in which the scattering and separation from the one beginning is undergoing a process of restoration to one and the same end and likeness? Or is it that, while the outward form of the things that are seen passes away, their essential nature suffers no destruction? Paul seems to confirm the second view when he says, “For the outward form of this world is passing away.” David appears to assert the same thing in the words, “The heavens will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment, and you will change them like a cloak, and like a piece of clothing they will be changed.” For if the heavens are to be changed, then surely what is changed does not perish; and if the outward form of the world passes away, that in no way shows an annihilation or destruction of its material substance, but a kind of change in quality and a transformation of appearance. Isaiah too, when he declares prophetically that there will be a new heaven and a new earth, is undoubtedly suggesting the same view. [m]

For this renewal of heaven and earth, this changing of the form of the present world, and this altering of the heavens will certainly be prepared for those who are walking along the way we have pointed out above and are heading toward that goal of happiness to which, it is said, even the enemies themselves are to be made subject, and in which God is said to be “all and in all.” And if anyone imagines that at the end material — that is, bodily — nature will be entirely destroyed, he cannot in any way meet my difficulty: how beings so many and so powerful are able to live and to exist without bodies, since it belongs to the divine nature alone — that is, to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — to exist without any material substance and without sharing in the least in a bodily attachment. Someone else may perhaps say that at the end every bodily substance will be so pure and refined as to be like the ether, of a heavenly purity and clearness. How things will be, however, is known with certainty to God alone, and to those who are his friends through Christ and the Holy Spirit.