3.
I am of opinion that the expression, by which God is said to be "all in all," means that He is "all" in each individual person. Now He will be "all" in each individual in this way: when all which any rational understanding, cleansed from the dregs of every sort of vice, and with every cloud of wickedness completely swept away, can either feel, or understand, or think, will be wholly God; and when it will no longer behold or retain anything else than God, but when God will be the measure and standard of all its movements; and thus God will be "all," for there will no longer be any distinction of good and evil, seeing evil nowhere exists; for God is all things, and to Him no evil is near: nor will there be any longer a desire to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on the part of him who is always in the possession of good, and to whom God is all. So then, when the end has been restored to the beginning, and the termination of things compared with their commencement, that condition of things will be re-established in which rational nature was placed, when it had no need to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so that when all feeling of wickedness has been removed, and the individual has been purified and cleansed, He who alone is the one good God becomes to him "all," and that not in the case of a few individuals, or of a considerable number, but He Himself is "all in all." And when death shall no longer anywhere exist, nor the sting of death, nor any evil at all, then verily God will be "all in all." But some are of opinion that that perfection and blessedness of rational creatures, or natures, can only remain in that same condition of which we have spoken above, i.e., that all things should possess God, and God should be to them all things, if they are in no degree prevented by their union with a bodily nature. Otherwise they think that the glory of the highest blessedness is impeded by the intermixture of any material substance. 1 But this subject we have discussed at greater length, as may be seen in the preceding pages.
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"Here the honesty of Rufinus in his translation seems very suspicious: for Origen's well-known opinion regarding the sins and lapses of blessed spirits he here attributes to others. Nay, even the opinion which he introduces Origen as ascribing to others, he exhibits him as refuting a little further on, sec. 6, in these words: And in this condition (of blessedness) we are to believe that, by the will of the Creator, it will abide for ever without any change,' etc. I suspect, therefore, that all this is due to Rufinus himself, and that he has inserted it, instead of what is found in the beginning of the chapter, sec. 1, and which in Jerome's Epistle to Avitus stands as follows: Nor is there any doubt that, after certain intervals of time, matter will again exist, and bodies be formed, and a diversity be established in the world, on account of the varying wills of rational creatures who, after (enjoying) perfect blessedness down to the end of all things, have gradually fallen away to a lower condition and received into them so much wickedness that they are converted) into an opposite condition, by their unwillingness to retain their original state, and to preserve their blessedness uncorrupted. Nor is this point to be suppressed, that many rational creatures retain their first condition (principium) even to the second and third and fourth worlds, and allow no room for any change within them while others, again, will lose so little of their pristine state, that they will appear to have lost almost nothing, and some are to be precipitated with great destruction into the lowest pit. And God, the disposer of all things, when creating His worlds, knows how to treat each individual agreeably to his merits, and He is acquainted with the occasions and causes by which the government (gubernacula) of the world is sustained and commenced: so that he who surpassed all others in wickedness, and brought himself completely down to the earth, is made in another world, which is afterwards to be formed, a devil, the beginning of the creation of the Lord (Job xl. 19), to be mocked by the angels who have lost the virtue of their original condition' (exordii virtutem)."--Ruaeus. ↩
