2 Introduction
sil of Caesarea (c. 329-379) once observed that, in his time, a
large majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-
speaking Eastern Christian world that he knew) believed that
hell was not everlasting, and that all in the end would attain
salvation. This may have been hyperbole on his part, but then
again it may very well not have been; and, even if he was ex-
aggerating, he could not have been exaggerating very much,
as otherwise the remark would have sounded silly to his con -
temporaries, whereas he stated the matter as something almost
banal in its obviousness. Over time, of course, in large part as
a result of certain obvious institutional imperatives, the voices
of the universalists would dwindle away to little more than a
secretive whisper at the margins of the faith, except in a few of
the sunnier quarters of Christendom (such as the East Syrian
church). And it was not, perhaps, until the nineteenth century
that the tide of opinion on this matter began, if only ever so
slightly, to turn back again.
Much of what I shall argue in this book, consequently,
is likely to seem rather exotic to many readers, and perhaps
even a little perverse. But this would not have been the case in,
say, the first four centuries of the church, especially not in the
eastern half of the Roman imperial world and its neighbor-
ing territories, precisely because the believers of those times
and places were closer to the culture, language, cosmology,
and religious expectations of the apostolic age; as yet, their
imaginations had not been corrupted by centuries of theology
written in entirely different spiritual and intellectual environ-
ments, and in alien tongues. My chief ambition in what fol-
lows, therefore, is to try to think through certain questions
about "the last things" in a way that might naturally bring me
nearer to the obscure origins of the Christian conception of
reality, when the earliest texts of Christian scripture were still