In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no satisfactory—­that is, rational—­answer, and it matters not whether the supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even panentheist.

Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis.

Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes Himself, becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness embracing all consciousnesses?  And what is an infinite consciousness?  Since consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude infinitude?  What value has the notion of infinitude applied to consciousness?  What is a consciousness that is all consciousness, without anything outside it that is not consciousness?  In such a case, of what is consciousness the consciousness?  Of its content?  Or may it not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness, in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis or final apotheosis without ever reaching it?

May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach—­some of us with fleeter step than others—­but which we are destined never to reach?  May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were to be realized?  Is it possible to be happy without hope?  And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession.  May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach?  Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?

Follow more questions to which there is no answer.  “He shall be all in all,” says the Apostle.  But will His mode of being in each one be different or will it be the same for all alike?  Will not God be wholly in one of the damned?  Is He not in his soul?  Is He not in what is called hell?  And in what sense is He in hell?

Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness.

May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and Judas and Satan himself, as Origen’s development of the Pauline apocatastasis led him to hope?