Apocatastasis

In theology, apocatastasis is the restoration of creation to a condition of perfection. In Christianity, it is a form of Christian universalism that includes the ultimate salvation of everyone—including the damned in Hell and the Devil. The New Testament (Acts 3:21) refers to the "apocatastasis of all things", although this passage is not usually understood to teach universal salvation.

Quotes

• I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.
  • Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise (1992)

• Apocatastasis. What it means:
  1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation
  2) Return to a previous condition
  3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.
  Think about it.
  • Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise (1992)

• And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But our religion — although its doctors may protest against this — is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind these words which the Theologica Germanica, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have no other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does.
  • Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism

See also

• Forgiveness