anyone who thinks that what we do in this life can be “serious” only insofar as it figures into some sublimely fatuous game of chance, whose final stakes are absolutely all or nothing, suffers from a tragically diminutive moral imagination. It was precisely the absence of the banality of an eternal hell in Origen’s thought that allowed him to believe that all of life and all of creation have a meaning, one immeasurably richer and more ravishing than some tawdry final division between the winners and losers of the game of history: the fullness of reality that will be achieved when all being is
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