Two weeks ago I ventured to write a short article concerning the Origenist Controversy. However, there was one detail (amongst others) I neglected to mention, which would have perhaps been helpful for any of the five people who read it (I’m being generous): The Origenist controversy was a controversy over the theology of Origen!
And so, in addition to my brief biographical sketch of Origen’s Life (as found in Eusebius), I hope to add this very short, very basic outline of Origen’s theology.
Now, the task of succinctly and directly communicating Origen’s theological matrix is the hardest task in the study of Origenism.
This is because, in order to understand Origen’s theology, one must ask the linchpin question on which the whole of the subsequent Origenist Controversy hinges upon: which Origen is the correct Origen? Which works attributed to Origen are authentic? How can one assume a full understanding of Origen’s theology? And from which sources?
Were his writings, as Rufinus of Aquileia claimed, interpolated by heretics and impious people, so as to justify points of view that were alien to Origen’s thought and result in obvious contradictions?[1] Or rather, was the question of Origen’s system as easy as going back to the Greek version, as Jerome thought?[2] Or could one merely read one work of his On First Principles and think that that was enough of Origen to judge his orthodoxy (as was the case with the bishop Anastius)?[3]
I myself do not have an answer to that question, but rather leave it for the realm of specialists. I only mention it because I feel that the reader is entitled to know about the larger, fundamental issue concerning Origen’s works and understand why I call what follows a “very basic outline.”
For practical purposes, I have not chosen to pursue my own interpretation of Origen’s theology, but rather have made extensive use of Joseph Wilson Trigg’s volume, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-century Church.[4] Therefore, in my brief summary of Origen’s views, I am deeply indebted to his scholarly activity.
As Trigg points out (and for what it’s worth, I wholeheartedly agree), a sympathetic interpretation of Origen’s theology should begin with understanding Origen in light of his contemporary conversation-partners.
A very large topic in the religious conversations of the late second century was the question of theodicy. The pagans (that is, in a large part, the pagan “Celsus”) leveled this charge against Christians: how could God be just and good, and yet allow evil to exist?[5]
On the one hand, the Marcionites tried to resolve this problem by proposing that there were two different gods, one responsible for evil and the other responsible for the good. On the other hand, there were the Valentinians, who maintained that evil came from a substance alien from God, a Demiurge, who appeared out of a larger process of emanations.
These responses, however, were ultimately deemed insufficient by their contemporary Christians. And so, Origen, too, labored to respond to the pagans and the gnostic dualists: and so, he did this by way of his own creative, speculative theological discourse.
The problem of theodicy is probably the best context one can give for an introduction to Origen’s thought, for then one will understand the necessary emphasis Origen lays upon the power of choice. Origen, starting out, explicitly rejected the conclusions of the Marcionites and the Valentinians.
There are not two gods, or god and a demurge, from whence evil comes. Thus, necessarily, there are not two different “substances” or “natures” of good and evil. Rather, everything that the One God created is good.
As would be demanded by God’s justice, in the beginning, all things were equal with each other in a spiritual, higher reality.[6] God created rational souls (nous), endowing them with the same abilities to choose good (that is, God) and to reject what was evil (that is, everything that was not God).[7]
However, some souls rejected God- that is, to some degree or another, all but one soul rejected God-[8] and these souls fell from unity into plurality and the hierarchy of materiality. Some became the Planets. Some became Angels. Some became men. And some, those who had strayed the furthest from God, became the heaviest objects of all- demons.
A brief reflection is necessary here: I cannot emphasize how important it is for us to grasp how the primordial fall is working in Origen’s thought. This primordial fall on the basis of will is Origen’s ingenious response to the pagans, the Marcionites, and the Valentinians.
Origen has transcended the emphasis of nature that is characteristic of the gnostic dualists: he sees that the Gnostics, by locating evil and diversity in “nature,” must trace back evil and diversity to the creator of nature (i.e. God).
This necessitates the acknowledgement of either two gods (Marcion) or a god and a succession of heavenly beings (Valentinus) one of which who must be some way responsible for the creation of this evil substance, or else an admission that God is not truly just.
For how could god be just, if he punishes evil, and yet creates us so that we cannot do otherwise? And how can God be just if he creates some lower, some higher, some to be demons, some to be angels, some to be planets, some to be humans? Doesn’t this give some an unfair advantage regarding spiritual things?
However, if evil is not located in nature, but rather located in the will- if it is our choosing of good or evil that makes us good or evil, angel or demon or planet or human, not necessity- then God can remain just, while evil remains evil and diversity, diversity.
By shifting the conversation of evil out of the realm of “nature” or “essence” and into the arena of “will,” Origen has effectually solved the problem of theodicy.
Now, when Christians are asked “How can God be just and yet allow evil?” the Christian can respond that such diversity and evil is not due to God’s creating powers, but rather to the rational choice of souls while they were still in their incorporeal, primordial state.[9] This will be important when considering the Orthodox criticism of Origenism and the controversy between Pelagius, Jerome, and Augustine.
As a response to the first fall, God created the material world so that these souls could learn to reject created things and love the Creator, and so ascend back to Him at the end of all time.[10]
However, it is not that simple: mankind fell a second time, this time into the desires of the flesh (which we call sin). We desire the wrong things. Through our sense perception, we acquire impressions that ensnare the soul and excite the desires, making us captive to the physical and unable to ascend to the realities of the spiritual realm.
And so, God must have mercy on us, reorienting our will that we may begin to desire good things instead of bad things, by means of his tri-personal hierarchical operation in creation.
This tri-personal action must be understood in terms of strict monotheism; however, this monotheism must be understood to be couched within the concept of “Divine Triad.”[11] God the Father is the source of the other two members. He is rightly known by the attribute of “creator.” God the Son (that is, the Logos) is eternally emanating from the Father. He is “begotten” (created) in eternity by the Father and is the Father’s wisdom and the source and prototype of all images of God.
His office is that of mediator,[12] as his soul (that is, the soul that by rational choice did not fall) is capable of both participation in the Father’s Divinity (by choice) and human nature (likewise by choice).[13] In so far as he participates in the Father, He has achieved the ontological identity of God; however, he is not truth when compared to the truth of the Father.[14] From the seeds of the Logos (The Logoi Spermatikoi), the whole world is given a desire and wisdom to seek God.[15]
Furthermore, this Christ tramples over Satan by his death and resurrection.[16] The Holy Spirit is created as a first of all things by the Father through the Logos,[17] and has the job of enlightening men to a true reading of the Holy Scriptures, inciting them to love God and the spirit, not flesh and the letter.[18]
Ultimately, because of the work of this Triad, and because of the desire of all things to return to The One, the end times will consist of an epistrephon, a return, to immateriality and unity. It appears that Origen believed that, in the age to come, we would receive new, heavenly bodies, perhaps made of ether (the most heavenly substances).
However, heaven would not be enough- what we desire is to surpass heaven and her heavenly bodies and ascend to complete immateriality. And so, we will become like Christ, the one nous that has not fallen.
The logical conclusion, though, is that, if all creatures have the desire to return to God, that this is not put into all things in vain- rather, all things will return to God. By learning to choose right things, not only us men, but the devil himself, can return to the angelic regions of celestial bliss. And so, at the end of all time, truly we shall return to the blessed paradise from which we fell, and be so united in God by Christ.
This theology incurred severe criticism during the Origenist Controversy. And, though some of the criticism from Epiphanius and Theophilus was christological and trinitarian, much of the polemics focused on Origen's anthropology. In the eyes of the orthodox party, it was no longer permissible to speak of a primordial fall, of preexistent souls, of a "cooling off" of souls into bodies, or of an essential return to immateriality. Likewise, Origen's use of allegory in his interpretation of Genesis 2 and 3 (which was used to justify much of his anthropology) came under very heavy attack.
The tragedy in this, of course, is that Origen has thus been transmitted down to us as a mad allegorist, more platonist than christian. His name has become associated with Universalism and he has been decried as the Father of Arius.
But what seems to be lost on many is the fact that Origen lived in a time when the Christian faith was not bound to the particular linguistic expressions cauterized at Nicaea and Constantiople. If he does not seem Nicean, it is because he is not. He had no way of anticipating the language the ecumenical councils would adopt for expressing the faith.
Further complicating things is that Origen's theological matrix is expressed situationally. And because of this, it riddled with the discoursive contradictions common to most of the great philosophers of late antiquity. It is not as simple as comparing 19th and 20th century dogmatic treatises to one another, seeing where they line up and where they don't: we have lost many of his manuscript, and we are still unaware as to what extent the writings we do have have been interpolated.
I say this in defense of him because Origen has accomplished an amazing feat in the writings we have by him: he has provided the Christian tradition with a safeguard for God's justice and his goodness. By his theory of the primordial fall of souls, based on the freedom of choice, Origen ingeniously accounts for the evil in this world and the diversity of ranks among the creation without making the primary cause of all of it to be God.
In this way he sheltered the Christian faith, might I add before it was in the gentle arms of Constantine, against both pagans and gnostic dualists. He likewise coined the trinitarian language that would be used by the Eastern Church for over seventeen hundred years, beginning a conversation which would ultimately be continued by the Cappadocians and Athanasius with Arius, Sabeliius, and the other heresiarchs of the following century, founding what would be the orthodoxy that would one day, perhaps ironically, be used to condemn him.
And so, in a way, all of us who stand up on Sunday Morning, repeating the familiar words of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, are indebted to this man. It is hard to believe the portrait which Epiphanius attempts to sell us in his Panarian, when one attempts to view the great doctor of the church not maliciously, but with understanding and love.
[1] See Clark’s discussion in The Origenist Controversy, pp. 163-164.
[2] Ibid, 137.
[3] Anastasius of Rome, The Letter of Anastasius, 3-4.
[4] Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-century Church, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1983).Building Origen’s theology from the ground-up is most definitely outside of the scope of this paper. Realistically, this task may be impossible- most of the Origen corpus was lost with the regrettable destruction of the Alexandrian Library. In any case, I have attempted to modify Trigg’s analysis with my own reading of Origen’s Peri Archȏn, so that we might attach ourselves to at least some grounding in a text.
[5] This, of course, is not original to Celsus, but rather with Epicurus. I novicely dealt with an examination of theodicy and the problem of evil in one of my first articles, located here.
[6] Trigg, Origen, 103.
[7] Ibid.
[8] That is, the Soul of Christ.
[9] It is worthwhile to note that Origen appropriates this solution to the problem of Theodicy, that of rational choice and human responsibility, from Middle Platonism. See Trigg’s discussion of this aspect of his theology in Ibid, 115-120, where he anachronistically labels Origen’s doctrine “Free Will.”
[10] Ibid, 108-115. This is what Origen calls the apokatastasis, that is, the redemption of all of creation (including, perhaps, the devil himself).
[11] Ibid, 95. Kelly posits that this is the influence of middle Platonism on Origen. Origen’s emphasis on monotheism undoubtedly comes both from the Hebrew Scriptures and Plato’s Timaeus.
[12] Origen, Peri Archȏn, II.vi.1. Trigg: “Within the context of Origen’s system, the Son, as the second divine hypostasis, is the necessary link between the Father and the world” (Trigg, Origen, 97).
[13] See Origen’s comments in his Commentary on John, II.2. See also Origen, Peri Archȏn, II.vi.4.
[14] Trigg, Origen, 99.
[15] Ibid, 98.
[16] Ibid, 101.
[17] Origen, Commentary on John, II.6.
[18] For a fuller examination of Origen’s theology of scripture, see Henri Di Lubac’s History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen, trans. Anne Englund Nash, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).
