Even the devil

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Can the Devil be saved? Can even the Devil be saved? Origen the great and incautious theologian thought such a thing was possible, and Jerome attacked him for saying so.

The problem is not merely that this notion upgrades a parasitic virus into the status of an independent entity, a *being*. Because, after all, even a virus might evolve into something else with a definable will of its own. But the problem is deeper and worse.

The problem is that when a truly evil being -- Hitler, let's say, to make it easy -- is thought of as saved, then it follows that the most basic cord has been cut. The cord of things happening. Suddenly the evil was a phase, thus not quite real. And the life that the evil destroyed is now turned into a joke. What happened didn't really happen, after all.

Or say that Hitler, a mere human, after all, might repent and yet somehow remain himself (something I can't imagine but perhaps for God somehow imaginable). Then you must turn and go back to the example of the devil. Because evil is part of the devil's definition. If the devil were saved he would no longer be the devil. Were such an entity saved, would that turn all the evil into a joke? Would it all be a silly reversal out of Aristotle? If the evil were not a joke, then in what sense would the entity saved not be some limp skin of blessedness hanging in a void? In what sense could that saved one still be Hitler or whoever it was? Or Saddam Hussein? What real thing would have been saved? How would history itself not be scandalized and debased?

So, in this case at least, Origen's forgiveness sucks the soul, and its very meaning, out of the world.

The devil cannot be saved.

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