Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)
Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2022 1:30 am
Apocatastasis [Eternal Return] [Wheel of Time]
by Robert Turcan
1987
Translated from French by Paul C. Duggan
Revised Bibliography
encyclopedia.com
Accessed: 7/31/22
The oldest known usage of the Greek word apokatastasis (whence the English apocatastasis ) dates from the fourth century bce: it is found in Aristotle (Magna Moralia 2.7.1204b), where it refers to the restoration of a being to its natural state. During the Hellenistic age it developed a cosmological and astrological meaning, variations of which can be detected (but with a very different concept of time) in Gnostic systems and even in Christian theology, whether orthodox or heterodox, especially in the theology of Origen.
Medical, Moral, and Juridical Meaning
Plato employed the verb kathistanai in the sense of to "reestablish" to a normal state following a temporary physical alteration (Philebus 42d). The prefix apo- in apokathistanai seems to reinforce the idea of an integral reestablishment to the original situation. Such is the return of the sick person to health (Hippocrates, 1258f.; Aretaeus, 9.22). The verb has this meaning in the Gospels in the context of the hand made better by Christ (Mt. 12:13; Mk. 3:5, Lk. 6:10). There are Hellenistic references to the apocatastasis, or "resetting," of a joint. In a psychological sense, the same meaning is present (with nuances that are hard to specify) in magical papyri and in the so-called Mithraic Liturgy. Origen (Against Celsus 2.24) uses the verb in his commentary on Job 5:18 ("For he wounds, but he binds up; he smites, but his hands heal") in one of several expositions where he compares the divine instruction on salvation to a method of therapy. The shift to a spiritual acceptation is evident, for example, in Philo Judaeus (Who Is the Heir 293), where "the perfect apocatastasis of the soul" confirms the philosophical healing that follows the two stages of infancy, first unformed and then corrupt. The soul recovers the health of its primitive state after a series of disturbances.
In a sociopolitical context, apocatastasis may signify a reestablishment of civil peace (Polybius, 4.23. l), or of an individual into his family (Polybius, 3.99.6), or the restoration of his rights (readmission of a soldier into an army, restoration of an exiled citizen to his prerogatives, etc.). Thus the verb apokathistanai is applied to the return of the Jews to the Holy Land after the captivity of Babylon (Jer. 15:9) as well as to the expression of messianic and eschatological hopes. Yet the noun form is not found in the Septuagint.
Astral Apocatastasis and the Great Year
The popularity and development of astrology influenced the cosmological systems of Hellenistic philosophy starting at the end of the fourth century bce. Apocatastasis here refers to the periodic return of the stars to their initial position, and the duration of the cycle amounts to a "Great Year." Plato defines the matter without using the word in the Timaeus (39d), where he talks of the eight spheres. Eudemius attributed to the Pythagoreans a theory of eternal return, but the Great Year of Oenopides and Philolaus involves only the sun. That of Aristotle, who calls it the "complete year," takes into account the seven planets: it also includes a "great winter" (with a flood) and a "great summer" (with a conflagration). Yet one could trace back to Heraclitus the principle of universal palingenesis periodically renewing the cosmos by fire, as well as the setting of the length of the Great Year at 10,800 years (this latter point is still in dispute). The astronomic teaching on the apocatastasis was refined by the Stoics, who identified it with the sidereal Great Year concluded either by a kataklusmos (flood) or by an ekpurosis (conflagration). Cicero defined it (with Aristotle) as the restoration of the seven planets to their point of departure, and sometimes as the return of all the stars (including the fixed ones) to their initial position. The estimates of its length varied considerably, ranging from 2,484 years (Aristarchus); to 10,800 years (Heraclitus); 12,954 years (Cicero); 15,000 years (Macrobius); 300,000 years (Firmicus Maternus), and up to 3,600,000 years (Cassandra). Diogenes of Babylon multiplied Heraclitus's Great Year by 365.
The Neoplatonist Proclus attributes the doctrines of apocatastasis to the "Assyrians," in other words to the astrologers or "Chaldeans." However, Hellenistic astrology also drew from Egyptian traditions. The 36,525 books that Manetho (285–247 bce) attributed to Hermes Trismegistos represent the amount of 25 zodiac periods of 1,461 years each, that is, probably one Great Year (Gundel and Gundel, 1966). The texts of Hermes Trismegistos make reference to the apocatastasis (Hermetica 8.17, 11.2; Asklepios 13). In the first century bce, the neo-Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus perhaps conceived the palingenetic cycle as being a great cosmic week crowned by the reign of Apollo. Whence the celebrated verses of Vergil's Fourth Eclogue: "A great order is born out of the fullness of ages … now your Apollo reigns." The return of Apollo corresponds to that of the Golden Age. The noun apocatastasis (as well as the verb from which it derives) always evoked the restoration of the old order. It often implied a "nostalgia for origins." It is no accident that, in the scheme of the Mithraic mysteries, the last of the "doors" is made out of gold and corresponds to the sun, since the order of these planetary doors is that of a week in reverse; there is the presupposition of a backward progression to the beginning of time. In the teaching of the Stoics, this new beginning is seen as having to repeat itself indefinitely, following a constant periodicity that rules out of chance, disorder, and freedom. During the imperial age, the Roman mystique of renovatio rested upon the same basic concept (Turcan, 1981, pp. 22ff.).
Gnostic Apocatastases
In Gnosticism, apocatastasis also corresponds to a restoration of order, but in a spiritual and eschatological way from the perspective of a history of salvation that is fundamentally foreign to the Stoics' "eternal return." The Christ of the Valentinians "restores" the soul to the Pleroma. Heracleon interprets the wages of the reaper (Jn. 4:36) as being the salvation of souls and their "apocatastasis" into eternal life (Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John 13.46.299). The Valentinian Wisdom (Sophia) is reintegrated through apocatastasis to the Pleroma, as Enthumesis will also be. The female aiōn Achamoth awaits the return of the Savior so that he might "restore" her syzygy. For Marcus, the universal restoration coincides with a return to unity. All these systems tell the story of a restoration of an order disturbed by thought.
The concept of the followers of Basilides is difficult indeed to elucidate, since they imagine at the beginning of all things not a Pleroma but nonbeing. Given this premise, there is no talk about a restoration to an initial state, even less to the truly primitive state of nothingness. However, for the Basilidians the salvation that leads men to God amounts to no less than a reestablishment of order (Hippolytus, Philosophuma 7.27.4). Like the Stoics, Basilides linked apocatastasis to astral revolutions: the coming of the Savior was to coincide "with the return of the hours to their point of departure." (ibid., 6.1). Yet this soteriological process is historical: it unfolds within linear rather than cyclical time. The Basilidian apocatastasis is not regressive but rather progressive and definitive. Some other Gnostics integrated astral apocatastasis into their systems: the Manichaeans seem to have conceived of a Great Year of 12,000 years with a final conflagration.
Christian Apocatastasis
In the New Testament, the first evidence of the noun apocatastasis used in an eschatological sense is found in Acts of the Apostles 3:21: Peter states that heaven must keep Jesus "till the universal apocatastasis comes." According to André Méhat (1956, p. 209), this would mean the "definitive achievement" of what God has promised through his prophets and would indicate the notion of accomplishment and fulfillment. In the Gospels, Matthew 17:11 and Mark 9:2 speak of Elijah as the one who will "reestablish" everything, and Malachi 3:23 (of which the evangelists could not help but think) speaks of the day when Yahveh will "restore" hearts and lead them back to him. Apocatastasis thus represents the salvation of creation reconciled with God, that is, a true return to an original state. The verb has this meaning for Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus 2.17). For both Tatian (Address to the Greeks 6.2) and Irenaeus (Against Heresies 5.3.2) apocatastasis is equivalent to resurrection and points without any ambiguity to a restoration of man in God. In Clement of Alexandria, the precise meaning of the word is not always clear, but this much may be said: apocatastasis appears as a return to God that is the result of a recovered purity of heart consequent to absorption in certain "Gnostic" teachings; it is a conception not unlike that found in the Book of Malachi in the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament).
It is in Origen that the doctrine of apocatastasis finds its most remarkable expression. In Against Celsus 7.3, where he mentions the "restoration of true piety toward God," Origen implicitly refers to Malachi. Elsewhere (Commentary on the Gospel of John 10.42.291), the word involves the reestablishment of the Jewish people after the captivity, yet as an anticipatory image of the return to the heavenly fatherland. Origen's originality consisted in his having conceived apocatastasis as being universal (including the redemption even of the devil or the annihilation of all evil) and as a return of souls to their pure spirituality. This final incorporality is rejected by Gregory of Nyssa, who nonetheless insists upon apocatastasis as a restoration to the original state. Didymus the Blind and Evagrios of Pontus were condemned at the same time as Origen by the Council of Constantinople (553) for having professed the doctrine of universal apocatastasis and the restoration of incorporeal souls. Yet there is still discussion concerning this principal aspect of Origen's eschatology. Astronomical theories and Greek cosmology seem also to have inspired the Greek bishop Synesius of Cyrene, a convert from Neoplatonism. Yet Tatian (Address to the Greeks 6. 2) had already emphasized what fundamentally set Christian apocatastasis apart: it depends upon God (and not upon sidereal revolutions) and is completed once and for all at the end of time, without being repeated indefinitely.
See Also
Ages of the World; Golden Age.
Bibliography
Bouché-Leclercq, Auguste. L'astrologie grecque (1899). Brussels, 1963.
Carcopino, J. Virgile et le mystère de la quatrième eglogue. Paris, 1943.
Crouzel, Henri. "Différences entre les ressuscités selon Origène," Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 9, supp., Gedenkschrift für A. Stuiber (1982): 107–116.
Daniélou, Jean. "L'apocatastase chez saint Grégoire de Nysse." Recherches de science religieuse (1940): 328ff.
Daniélou, Jean. Platonisme et théologie mystique. Paris, 1944.
Daniélou, Jean. Origen. Translated by Walter Mitchell. New York, 1955.
Faye, E. de. Origène: Sa vie, son œuvre, sa pensée. Paris, 1923–1928.
Gundel, Wilhelm, and Hans Georg Gundel. Astrologumena. Wiesbaden, 1966.
Hoven, R. Stoïcisme et stoïciens face au problème de l'audelà. Paris, 1971.
Lenz, Chr. "Apokatastasis." Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 1 (1950): 510–516.
Méhat, André. " 'Apocastastase,' Origène, Clément d'Alexandrie, Act. 3, 21." Vigiliae Christianae 10 (November 1956): 196–214.
Méhat, André. "Apokatastasis chez Basilide." In Mélanges d'histoire des religions offerts à Henri-Charles Puech, pp. 365–373. Paris, 1974.
Müller, G. "Origenes und die Apokatastasis." Theologische Zeitschrift 14 (1958): 174–190.
Mussner, Franz, and J. Loosen. "Apokatastasis." In Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 1, pp. 708ff. Berlin, 1957.
Siniscalco, P. "I significati di 'restituere' e 'restitutio' in Tertulliano." Atti della Accademia delle Scienza di Torino 93 (1958–1959): 1–45.
Siniscalco, P. "Apokatastasis nella letteratura cristiana fino a Ireneo." Studia Patristica 3 (1961): 380–396.
Turcan, Robert. Mithras platonicus: Recherches sur l'hellénisation philosophique de Mithra. Leiden, 1975.
Turcan, Robert. "Rome éternelle et les conceptions gréco-romaines de l'éternité: Da Roma alla terza Roma." Seminario internazionale (April 1981): 7–30.
New Sources
Charalambos, Apostolopoulos. Phaedo Christianus. Studien zur Verbindung und Abwägung des Verhältnisses zwischen dem platonischen "Phaidon" und dem Dialog Gregor von Nyssa "Über die Seele und die Auferstehung." Bern, 1986.
Crouzel, Henri. "L'apocatastase chez Origène." In Origeniana Quarta. Die Referate des 4. Internationalen Origeneskongresses (Innsbruck, 2.–6. September 1985), edited by Lothar Lies, pp. 282–290. Innsbruck, 1987.
Kettler, F. H. "Neue Beobachtungen zur Apokatastasislehre des Origenes." In Origeniana secunda. Second colloque international des études origéniennes (Bari, 20–23 septembre 1977), edited by Henri Crouzel and Antonio Quacquarelli, pp. 339–348. Rome, 1980.
Kretzenbacher, Leopold. Versöhnung im Jenseits. Zur Widerspiegelung des Apokatastasis-Denkens in Glaube, Hochdichtung und Legende. Munich, 1971.
Maturi, Giorgio. "Apokatastasis e anastasis in Gregorio di Nissa." Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 24 (2000): 227–240.
Sachs, John R. "Apocatastasis in Patristic Theology." Theological Studies 54 (1993): 617–640.
Salmona, Bruno. "Origene e Gregorio di Nissa sulla resurrezione dei corpi e l'apocatastasi." Augustinianum 18 (1978): 383–388.
van Laak, Werner. Allversöhnung: die Lehre von der Apokatastasis: ihre Grundlegung durch Origenes und ihre Bewertung in der gegenwärtigen Theologie bei Karl Barth und Hans Urs von Balthasar. Sinzig, Germany, 1990.
von Stritzky, Maria Barbara. "Die Bedeutung der Phaidrosinterpretation für die Apokatastasislehre des Origenes." Vigiliae Christianae 31 (1977): 282–297.
Robert Turcan (1987)
Translated from French by Paul C. Duggan
Revised Bibliography
by Robert Turcan
1987
Translated from French by Paul C. Duggan
Revised Bibliography
encyclopedia.com
Accessed: 7/31/22
In the constant transformation from arising to becoming and out beyond this to passing away, to a new arising and a new becoming, in which Wuotan [Wotan] continues in an uninterrupted evolutionary process -- just as the All (macrocosm) and every individual self (microcosm) consistently remains the same ego [Ich] -- this ego was from the beginning of time bound inseparably and unalterably to certain spiritual and physical realities in a biune-bifidic biunity [beideinig-zwiespaltige Zwei-Einheit). Thus Wuotan [Wotan] appears before our eyes as the reflection of the All as an individual self: "He consecrates himself, consecrated to himself," he consecrates himself -- as a self-sacrificer to himself as a self-sacrifice -- to the passing away in order to arise anew. The nearer he feels to the point in time for this passing away toward a new arising -- his death -- the clearer the knowledge grows in him about the secret of life which is an eternal arising and passing away, a constant transformation, an eternal return [ewige Wiederkehr] -- a life of constant cycle of being born and dying. "This knowledge completely arises in him only at that twilight-moment in which he is sinking (dying) into the Ur out of which he will once more arise, and in this twilight-moment (death) he gives his eye as a pledge in exchange for elevated knowledge. However, this eye remains his property -- even if it has been pawned. He will reclaim it upon his rebirth out of the Ur. For this one is is his physical body, while his other eye, which he retains and takes with him into the Ur, is his spiritual body, his soul. The one physical eye, that is, the physical body itself, is only temporarily lost in the transitional phase of death, but it nevertheless remains his own, and is reunified with his other (spiritual) eye at the moment of his return out of the Ur -- upon his rebirth. This latter is his spiritual body (the soul), but the primeval knowledge gained from Mimir's well also remains his property upon his rebirth, i.e. the property of the All. It is the sum of the experience (Gjallar) of thousands upon thousands of ages which is preserved and inherited -- unconsciously through the mind and consciously through language and writing. Thus the knowledge of Wuotan [Wotan], and that of each individual self, is increased by means of the drink from Mimir's well using the Gjallarhorn, he enriches it through his questions to the Wala (Lady of Death, Totenwal, Helja), as well as through his dialog with Mimir's head. It only appears that he is separating himself from the material world, from humanity, to which he also belongs in what appears to be physical nonexistence, for he constitutes a biune-bifidic biunity as something both spiritual and physical. He cannot separate his own physical day-life from his psychosomatic night-life -- a life which only appears to be nonexistence. There he gains primeval knowledge of his eternal life, which guides him in eternal change through the transformations from arising, becoming, transforming, passing away, and arising anew though all eternity. Through this knowledge he became wise and found both the science surrounding the fate of the world by his own life being consecrated to death, and the solution to the riddle of the cosmos, which -- as it says in the "Runatals thattr Odins" -- "he will never ever reveal to a woman or a girl." And since Wuotan [Wotan] is himself in fact also the All at the same time -- as every self is also simultaneously the not-self, i.e. the All-Unified-Self (community = all-one-self) -- each individual self, each person, makes the same transformations through the same levels of knowledge. All individual storehouses of knowledge and solutions to problems (not mere dead memorized data!) are thus evaluated. Such storehouses are not lost upon death, but rather are preserved in death and once more brought back to the world of men upon the next reincarnation. People call these spiritual storehouses that the reborn individuals bring to the earth "natural abilities," "talent" or "innate genius," which has already been established and discussed above. But just as the unrevealed God is only able to reveal himself in matter and become the world-spirit (First Logos), and just as the revealed God has to activate himself in creation generatively (Second Logos), in order to come to a a vision and knowledge of himself, and finally just as the human spirit (Third Logos) had to attain this through an apparent descent from divinity for the sake of awareness of divinity itself, i.e. his own selfhood, so too the human being can only rediscover the divinity within himself (the divine inwardness) after he has lost it, after he has searched for God unsuccessfully outside himself "up there in heaven," in temples and churches finally only to rediscover his God within his own heart on the painful detour through atheism -- and this time he does so in a way that God will never again be lost. And here we recognize in the world-ash, Yggdrasil -- the imagematic tree of knowledge -- the holy tree Zampuh of Tibetan myth, the Assyrian tree of life, and the other similar trees in Indian, Persian and other mythologies. Thus we find our way back to Yggdrasil again.
-- The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric, by Guido von List
When D. P. Walker wrote about "ancient theology" or prisca theologia, he firmly linked it to Christianity and Platonism (Walker 1972). On the first page of his book, Walker defined the term as follows:By the term "Ancient Theology" I mean a certain tradition of Christian apologetic theology which rests on misdated texts. Many of the early Fathers, in particular Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius, in their apologetic works directed against pagan philosophers, made use of supposedly very ancient texts: Hermetica, Orphica, Sibylline Prophecies, Pythagorean Carmina Aurea, etc., most of which in fact date from the first four centuries of our era. [100-400 A.D.] These texts, written by the Ancient Theologians hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, were shown to contain vestiges of the true religion: monotheism, the Trinity, the creation of the world out of nothing through the Word, and so forth. It was from these that Plato [428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC)] took the religious truths to be found in his writings. [???!!!] (Walker 1972:1)
Walker described A revival of such "ancient theology" in the Renaissance and in "platonizing theologians from Ficino to Cudworth" who wanted to "integrate Platonism and Neoplatonism into Christianity, so that their own religious and philosophical beliefs might coincide" [!!!](p. 2). After the debunking of the genuineness and antiquity of the texts favored by these ancient theologians, the movement ought to have died; but Walker detected "a few isolated survivals" such as Athanasius Kircher, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and the Jesuit figurists of the French China mission (p. 194). For Walker the last Mohican of this movement, so to say, is Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686-1743), whose views are described in the final chapter of The Ancient Theology. But seen through the lens of our concerns here, one could easily extend this line to various figures in this book, for example, Jean Calmette, John Zephaniah Holwell, Abbe Vincent Mignot, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Guillaume Sainte-Croix, and also to William Jones (App 2009).
Ur-Traditions
To better understand such phenomena we have to go beyond the narrow confines of the Christian God and Platonism. There are many movements that link themselves to some kind of "original," "pure," "genuine" teaching, claim its authority, use it to criticize "degenerate" accretions, and attempt to legitimize their "reform" on its basis. Such links can take a variety of forms. In Chapter 4 we saw how in the eighth and ninth centuries the Buddhist reform movement known as Zen cooked up a lineage of "mind to mind" transmission with the aim of connecting the teaching of the religion's Indian founder figure, Buddha, with their own views. The tuned-up and misdated Forty-Two Sections Sutra that ended up impressing so many people, including its first European translator de Guignes, was one (of course unanticipated) outcome of this strategy. Such "Ur-tradition" movements, as I propose to call them, invariably create a "transmission" scenario of their "original" teaching or revelation; in the case of Zen this consisted in an elaborate invented genealogy with colorful transmission figures like Bodhidharma and "patriarchs" consisting mostly of pious legends. Such invented genealogies and transmissions are embodied in symbols and legends emphasizing the link between the "original" teaching and the movement's doctrine. "Genuine," "oldest" texts are naturally of central importance for such movements, since they tend to regard the purity of teaching as directly proportional to its closeness to origins.
A common characteristic of such "Ur-tradition" movements is a tripartite scheme of "golden age," "degeneration," and "regeneration." The raison d'etre of such movements is the revival of a purportedly most ancient, genuine, "original" teaching after a long period of degeneration. Hence their need to define an "original" teaching, establish a line of its transmission, identify stages and kinds of degeneration, and present themselves as the agent of "regeneration" of the original "ancient" teaching. Such need often arises in a milieu of doctrinal rivalry or in a crisis, for example, when "new" religions or reform movements want to establish and legitimize themselves or when an established religion is threatened by powerful alternatives.
When young Christianity evolved from a Jewish reform movement and was accused of being a "new religion" and an invention, ancient connections were needed to provide legitimacy and add historical weight to the religion. The adoption of the Hebrew Bible as "Old Testament," grimly opposed by some early Christians, linked the young religion and its "New Testament" effectively to the very creation of the world, to paradise, and to the Ur-religion of the first humans in the golden age. Legends, texts, and symbols were created to illustrate this "Old-to-New" link. For example, the savior's cross on Golgotha had to get a pedigree connecting it to the Hebrew Bible's paradise tree; and the original sinner Adam's skull had to be brought via Noah's ark to Palestine in order to get buried on the very hill near Jerusalem where Adam's original sin eventually got expunged by the New Testament's "second Adam" on the cross (Figure 11). Theologians use the word "typology" for such attempts to discover Christian teachings or forebodings thereof in the Old Testament.
Similar links to an "oldest," "purest," and "original" teaching are abundant not only in the history of religions but also, for example, in freemasonry and various "esoteric" movements. They also tend to invent links to an original "founder," "ancient" teachings and texts, lineages, symbols of the original doctrine and its transmission, eminent transmitter figures ("patriarchs"), and so on; and they usually criticize the degeneration of exactly those original and pure teachings that they claim to resuscitate. In such schemes the most ancient texts, symbols, and objects naturally play important roles, particularly if they seem mysterious: pyramids, hieroglyphs, runic letters, ancient texts buried in caves, and divine revelations stored on golden tablets in heaven or in some American prophet's backyard ...
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
According to Lanz, the earliest recorded ancestors of the present 'arioheroic' race were the Atlanteans, who had lived on a continent situated in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. They were supposedly descended from the original divine Theozoa with electromagnetic sensory organs and superhuman powers. Catastrophic floods eventually submerged their continent in about 8000 BC and the Atlanteans migrated eastwards in two groups. The Northern Atlanteans streamed towards the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Northern Europe, while the Southern Atlanteans migrated across Western Africa to Egypt and Babylonia, where they founded the antique civilizations of the Near East. The ariosophical cult was thus introduced to Asia, where the idolatrous beast-cults of miscegenation had flourished.
Lanz claimed that the racial religion had been actively preached and practised in the ancient world. He asserted that Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Alexander the Great had been its champions. The laws of Moses and Plato's esteem for the aristocratic principle, and his provision for a caste of priest-kings in The Republic, proved them Ariosophists....
The suppression of the Templars in 1308 signalled the end of this era and the ascendancy of the racial inferiors. Henceforth Europe witnessed the slow decline of her racial, cultural, and political achievements. The growth of towns, the expansion of capitalism, and its creation of an industrial labouring class led to the breakdown of the aristocratic principle and the strict maintenance of racial purity. Christianity was perverted into a sentimental altruistic doctrine, which taught that all men were equal, and that man should love his neighbour, irrespective of his race. During the 'cosmic week' from 1210 to 1920 Europe was subject to a process of debasement, culminating in the enormities of Bolshevism and its open proclamation of rule by the masses.
-- The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Arisophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
From the feeling that society, and indeed 'everything', was in flux, arose, I believe, the fundamental impulse of his philosophy as well as of the philosophy of Heraclitus; and Plato summed up his social experience, exactly as his historicist predecessor had done, by proffering a law of historical development. According to this law, which will be more fully discussed in the next chapter, all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration.
This fundamental historical law forms, in Plato's view, part of a cosmic law — of a law which holds for all created or generated things. All things in flux, all generated things, are destined to decay. Plato, like Heraclitus, felt that the forces which are at work in history are cosmic forces.
It is nearly certain, however, that Plato believed that this law of degeneration was not the whole story. We have found, in Heraclitus, a tendency to visualize the laws of development as cyclic laws; they are conceived after the law which determines the cyclic succession of the seasons. Similarly we can find, in some of Plato's works, the suggestion of a Great Year (its length appears to be 36,000 ordinary years), with a period of improvement or generation, presumably corresponding to Spring and Summer, and one of degeneration and decay, corresponding to Autumn and Winter. According to one of Plato's dialogues (the Statesman), a Golden Age, the age of Cronos — an age in which Cronos himself rules the world, and in which men spring from the earth — is followed by our own age, the age of Zeus, an age in which the world is abandoned by the gods and left to its own resources, and which consequently is one of increasing corruption. And in the story of the Statesman there is also a suggestion that, after the lowest point of complete corruption has been reached, the god will again take the helm of the cosmic ship, and things will start to improve.
It is not certain how far Plato believed in the story of the Statesman. He made it quite clear that he did not believe that all of it was literally true. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that he visualized human history in a cosmic setting; that he believed his own age to be one of deep depravity — possibly of the deepest that can be reached — and the whole preceding historical period to be governed by an inherent tendency toward decay, a tendency shared by both the historical and the cosmical development. Whether or not he also believed that this tendency must necessarily come to an end once the point of extreme depravity has been reached seems to me uncertain. But he certainly believed that it is possible for us, by a human, or rather by a superhuman effort, to break through the fatal historical trend, and to put an end to the process of decay.
Great as the similarities are between Plato and Heraclitus, we have struck here an important difference. Plato believed that the law of historical destiny, the law of decay, can be broken by the moral will of man, supported by the power of human reason.
It is not quite clear how Plato reconciled this view with his belief in a law of destiny. But there are some indications which may explain the matter.
Plato believed that the law of degeneration involved moral degeneration. Political degeneration at any rate depends in his view mainly upon moral degeneration (and lack of knowledge); and moral degeneration, in its turn, is due mainly to racial degeneration. This is the way in which the general cosmic law of decay manifests itself in the field of human affairs.
It is therefore understandable that the great cosmic turning-point may coincide with a turning-point in the field of human affairs — the moral and intellectual field — and that it may, therefore, appear to us to be brought about by a moral and intellectual human effort. Plato may well have believed that, just as the general law of decay did manifest itself in moral decay leading to political decay, so the advent of the cosmic turning-point would manifest itself in the coming of a great law-giver whose powers of reasoning and whose moral will are capable of bringing this period of political decay to a close. It seems likely that the prophecy, in the Statesman, of the return of the Golden Age, of a new millennium, is the expression of such a belief in the form of a myth. However this may be, he certainly believed in both — in a general historical tendency towards corruption, and in the possibility that we may stop further corruption in the political field by arresting all political change. This, accordingly, is the aim he strives for. He tries to realize it by the establishment of a state which is free from the evils of all other states because it does not degenerate, because it does not change. The state which is free from the evil of change and corruption is the best, the perfect state. It is the state of the Golden Age which knew no change. It is the arrested state.
-- The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl R. Popper
The oldest known usage of the Greek word apokatastasis (whence the English apocatastasis ) dates from the fourth century bce: it is found in Aristotle (Magna Moralia 2.7.1204b), where it refers to the restoration of a being to its natural state. During the Hellenistic age it developed a cosmological and astrological meaning, variations of which can be detected (but with a very different concept of time) in Gnostic systems and even in Christian theology, whether orthodox or heterodox, especially in the theology of Origen.
Medical, Moral, and Juridical Meaning
Plato employed the verb kathistanai in the sense of to "reestablish" to a normal state following a temporary physical alteration (Philebus 42d). The prefix apo- in apokathistanai seems to reinforce the idea of an integral reestablishment to the original situation. Such is the return of the sick person to health (Hippocrates, 1258f.; Aretaeus, 9.22). The verb has this meaning in the Gospels in the context of the hand made better by Christ (Mt. 12:13; Mk. 3:5, Lk. 6:10). There are Hellenistic references to the apocatastasis, or "resetting," of a joint. In a psychological sense, the same meaning is present (with nuances that are hard to specify) in magical papyri and in the so-called Mithraic Liturgy. Origen (Against Celsus 2.24) uses the verb in his commentary on Job 5:18 ("For he wounds, but he binds up; he smites, but his hands heal") in one of several expositions where he compares the divine instruction on salvation to a method of therapy. The shift to a spiritual acceptation is evident, for example, in Philo Judaeus (Who Is the Heir 293), where "the perfect apocatastasis of the soul" confirms the philosophical healing that follows the two stages of infancy, first unformed and then corrupt. The soul recovers the health of its primitive state after a series of disturbances.
In a sociopolitical context, apocatastasis may signify a reestablishment of civil peace (Polybius, 4.23. l), or of an individual into his family (Polybius, 3.99.6), or the restoration of his rights (readmission of a soldier into an army, restoration of an exiled citizen to his prerogatives, etc.). Thus the verb apokathistanai is applied to the return of the Jews to the Holy Land after the captivity of Babylon (Jer. 15:9) as well as to the expression of messianic and eschatological hopes. Yet the noun form is not found in the Septuagint.
Astral Apocatastasis and the Great Year
The popularity and development of astrology influenced the cosmological systems of Hellenistic philosophy starting at the end of the fourth century bce. Apocatastasis here refers to the periodic return of the stars to their initial position, and the duration of the cycle amounts to a "Great Year." Plato defines the matter without using the word in the Timaeus (39d), where he talks of the eight spheres. Eudemius attributed to the Pythagoreans a theory of eternal return, but the Great Year of Oenopides and Philolaus involves only the sun. That of Aristotle, who calls it the "complete year," takes into account the seven planets: it also includes a "great winter" (with a flood) and a "great summer" (with a conflagration). Yet one could trace back to Heraclitus the principle of universal palingenesis periodically renewing the cosmos by fire, as well as the setting of the length of the Great Year at 10,800 years (this latter point is still in dispute). The astronomic teaching on the apocatastasis was refined by the Stoics, who identified it with the sidereal Great Year concluded either by a kataklusmos (flood) or by an ekpurosis (conflagration). Cicero defined it (with Aristotle) as the restoration of the seven planets to their point of departure, and sometimes as the return of all the stars (including the fixed ones) to their initial position. The estimates of its length varied considerably, ranging from 2,484 years (Aristarchus); to 10,800 years (Heraclitus); 12,954 years (Cicero); 15,000 years (Macrobius); 300,000 years (Firmicus Maternus), and up to 3,600,000 years (Cassandra). Diogenes of Babylon multiplied Heraclitus's Great Year by 365.
The Neoplatonist Proclus attributes the doctrines of apocatastasis to the "Assyrians," in other words to the astrologers or "Chaldeans." However, Hellenistic astrology also drew from Egyptian traditions. The 36,525 books that Manetho (285–247 bce) attributed to Hermes Trismegistos represent the amount of 25 zodiac periods of 1,461 years each, that is, probably one Great Year (Gundel and Gundel, 1966). The texts of Hermes Trismegistos make reference to the apocatastasis (Hermetica 8.17, 11.2; Asklepios 13). In the first century bce, the neo-Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus perhaps conceived the palingenetic cycle as being a great cosmic week crowned by the reign of Apollo. Whence the celebrated verses of Vergil's Fourth Eclogue: "A great order is born out of the fullness of ages … now your Apollo reigns." The return of Apollo corresponds to that of the Golden Age. The noun apocatastasis (as well as the verb from which it derives) always evoked the restoration of the old order. It often implied a "nostalgia for origins." It is no accident that, in the scheme of the Mithraic mysteries, the last of the "doors" is made out of gold and corresponds to the sun, since the order of these planetary doors is that of a week in reverse; there is the presupposition of a backward progression to the beginning of time. In the teaching of the Stoics, this new beginning is seen as having to repeat itself indefinitely, following a constant periodicity that rules out of chance, disorder, and freedom. During the imperial age, the Roman mystique of renovatio rested upon the same basic concept (Turcan, 1981, pp. 22ff.).
Gnostic Apocatastases
In Gnosticism, apocatastasis also corresponds to a restoration of order, but in a spiritual and eschatological way from the perspective of a history of salvation that is fundamentally foreign to the Stoics' "eternal return." The Christ of the Valentinians "restores" the soul to the Pleroma. Heracleon interprets the wages of the reaper (Jn. 4:36) as being the salvation of souls and their "apocatastasis" into eternal life (Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John 13.46.299). The Valentinian Wisdom (Sophia) is reintegrated through apocatastasis to the Pleroma, as Enthumesis will also be. The female aiōn Achamoth awaits the return of the Savior so that he might "restore" her syzygy. For Marcus, the universal restoration coincides with a return to unity. All these systems tell the story of a restoration of an order disturbed by thought.
The concept of the followers of Basilides is difficult indeed to elucidate, since they imagine at the beginning of all things not a Pleroma but nonbeing. Given this premise, there is no talk about a restoration to an initial state, even less to the truly primitive state of nothingness. However, for the Basilidians the salvation that leads men to God amounts to no less than a reestablishment of order (Hippolytus, Philosophuma 7.27.4). Like the Stoics, Basilides linked apocatastasis to astral revolutions: the coming of the Savior was to coincide "with the return of the hours to their point of departure." (ibid., 6.1). Yet this soteriological process is historical: it unfolds within linear rather than cyclical time. The Basilidian apocatastasis is not regressive but rather progressive and definitive. Some other Gnostics integrated astral apocatastasis into their systems: the Manichaeans seem to have conceived of a Great Year of 12,000 years with a final conflagration.
Christian Apocatastasis
In the New Testament, the first evidence of the noun apocatastasis used in an eschatological sense is found in Acts of the Apostles 3:21: Peter states that heaven must keep Jesus "till the universal apocatastasis comes." According to André Méhat (1956, p. 209), this would mean the "definitive achievement" of what God has promised through his prophets and would indicate the notion of accomplishment and fulfillment. In the Gospels, Matthew 17:11 and Mark 9:2 speak of Elijah as the one who will "reestablish" everything, and Malachi 3:23 (of which the evangelists could not help but think) speaks of the day when Yahveh will "restore" hearts and lead them back to him. Apocatastasis thus represents the salvation of creation reconciled with God, that is, a true return to an original state. The verb has this meaning for Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus 2.17). For both Tatian (Address to the Greeks 6.2) and Irenaeus (Against Heresies 5.3.2) apocatastasis is equivalent to resurrection and points without any ambiguity to a restoration of man in God. In Clement of Alexandria, the precise meaning of the word is not always clear, but this much may be said: apocatastasis appears as a return to God that is the result of a recovered purity of heart consequent to absorption in certain "Gnostic" teachings; it is a conception not unlike that found in the Book of Malachi in the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament).
It is in Origen that the doctrine of apocatastasis finds its most remarkable expression. In Against Celsus 7.3, where he mentions the "restoration of true piety toward God," Origen implicitly refers to Malachi. Elsewhere (Commentary on the Gospel of John 10.42.291), the word involves the reestablishment of the Jewish people after the captivity, yet as an anticipatory image of the return to the heavenly fatherland. Origen's originality consisted in his having conceived apocatastasis as being universal (including the redemption even of the devil or the annihilation of all evil) and as a return of souls to their pure spirituality. This final incorporality is rejected by Gregory of Nyssa, who nonetheless insists upon apocatastasis as a restoration to the original state. Didymus the Blind and Evagrios of Pontus were condemned at the same time as Origen by the Council of Constantinople (553) for having professed the doctrine of universal apocatastasis and the restoration of incorporeal souls. Yet there is still discussion concerning this principal aspect of Origen's eschatology. Astronomical theories and Greek cosmology seem also to have inspired the Greek bishop Synesius of Cyrene, a convert from Neoplatonism. Yet Tatian (Address to the Greeks 6. 2) had already emphasized what fundamentally set Christian apocatastasis apart: it depends upon God (and not upon sidereal revolutions) and is completed once and for all at the end of time, without being repeated indefinitely.
See Also
Ages of the World; Golden Age.
Bibliography
Bouché-Leclercq, Auguste. L'astrologie grecque (1899). Brussels, 1963.
Carcopino, J. Virgile et le mystère de la quatrième eglogue. Paris, 1943.
Crouzel, Henri. "Différences entre les ressuscités selon Origène," Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 9, supp., Gedenkschrift für A. Stuiber (1982): 107–116.
Daniélou, Jean. "L'apocatastase chez saint Grégoire de Nysse." Recherches de science religieuse (1940): 328ff.
Daniélou, Jean. Platonisme et théologie mystique. Paris, 1944.
Daniélou, Jean. Origen. Translated by Walter Mitchell. New York, 1955.
Faye, E. de. Origène: Sa vie, son œuvre, sa pensée. Paris, 1923–1928.
Gundel, Wilhelm, and Hans Georg Gundel. Astrologumena. Wiesbaden, 1966.
Hoven, R. Stoïcisme et stoïciens face au problème de l'audelà. Paris, 1971.
Lenz, Chr. "Apokatastasis." Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 1 (1950): 510–516.
Méhat, André. " 'Apocastastase,' Origène, Clément d'Alexandrie, Act. 3, 21." Vigiliae Christianae 10 (November 1956): 196–214.
Méhat, André. "Apokatastasis chez Basilide." In Mélanges d'histoire des religions offerts à Henri-Charles Puech, pp. 365–373. Paris, 1974.
Müller, G. "Origenes und die Apokatastasis." Theologische Zeitschrift 14 (1958): 174–190.
Mussner, Franz, and J. Loosen. "Apokatastasis." In Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 1, pp. 708ff. Berlin, 1957.
Siniscalco, P. "I significati di 'restituere' e 'restitutio' in Tertulliano." Atti della Accademia delle Scienza di Torino 93 (1958–1959): 1–45.
Siniscalco, P. "Apokatastasis nella letteratura cristiana fino a Ireneo." Studia Patristica 3 (1961): 380–396.
Turcan, Robert. Mithras platonicus: Recherches sur l'hellénisation philosophique de Mithra. Leiden, 1975.
Turcan, Robert. "Rome éternelle et les conceptions gréco-romaines de l'éternité: Da Roma alla terza Roma." Seminario internazionale (April 1981): 7–30.
New Sources
Charalambos, Apostolopoulos. Phaedo Christianus. Studien zur Verbindung und Abwägung des Verhältnisses zwischen dem platonischen "Phaidon" und dem Dialog Gregor von Nyssa "Über die Seele und die Auferstehung." Bern, 1986.
Crouzel, Henri. "L'apocatastase chez Origène." In Origeniana Quarta. Die Referate des 4. Internationalen Origeneskongresses (Innsbruck, 2.–6. September 1985), edited by Lothar Lies, pp. 282–290. Innsbruck, 1987.
Kettler, F. H. "Neue Beobachtungen zur Apokatastasislehre des Origenes." In Origeniana secunda. Second colloque international des études origéniennes (Bari, 20–23 septembre 1977), edited by Henri Crouzel and Antonio Quacquarelli, pp. 339–348. Rome, 1980.
Kretzenbacher, Leopold. Versöhnung im Jenseits. Zur Widerspiegelung des Apokatastasis-Denkens in Glaube, Hochdichtung und Legende. Munich, 1971.
Maturi, Giorgio. "Apokatastasis e anastasis in Gregorio di Nissa." Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 24 (2000): 227–240.
Sachs, John R. "Apocatastasis in Patristic Theology." Theological Studies 54 (1993): 617–640.
Salmona, Bruno. "Origene e Gregorio di Nissa sulla resurrezione dei corpi e l'apocatastasi." Augustinianum 18 (1978): 383–388.
van Laak, Werner. Allversöhnung: die Lehre von der Apokatastasis: ihre Grundlegung durch Origenes und ihre Bewertung in der gegenwärtigen Theologie bei Karl Barth und Hans Urs von Balthasar. Sinzig, Germany, 1990.
von Stritzky, Maria Barbara. "Die Bedeutung der Phaidrosinterpretation für die Apokatastasislehre des Origenes." Vigiliae Christianae 31 (1977): 282–297.
Robert Turcan (1987)
Translated from French by Paul C. Duggan
Revised Bibliography