ABSTRACT
The idea that I should like to trace, and to illustrate with a few highlights from the beginnings of Christianity to the later Middle Ages, is the idea that heaven, in order to be heaven, must ultimately become complete. Even though there are divine punishments for the wicked in the afterlife, these cannot be everlasting. Everyone must in the end be received into the heaven that is unification with God. The goal of all existence is the final reintegration – what philosophers and theologians called the apocatastasis.1 If it were otherwise – if, as the majority of Christians over the centuries have believed, there remained, at the last, a place of punishment for the wicked, a hell, which lay outside that reintegration – then the whole divine plan for humanity and for the universe would have failed.
