2 The Mature Years at Alexandria

2 The Mature Years at Alexandria

DOI: 10.4324/9780203011997-2

Tension with Bishop Demetrius

Origen had the misfortune to mature as a Christian teacher at the very time when Bishop Demetrius, like bishops elsewhere, was exercising increasing authority over the church’s teaching. Such authority left less and less room for a brilliant lay teacher operating with a divinely given charism. Origen, while sincerely submitting to the church’s rule of faith and always open to informed criticism, never accepted a bishop’s authority to tell him what to teach. The tension between conflicting understandings of teaching authority inevitably intensified as Origen’s reputation grew. It ultimately led to a rupture with Demetrius that made Origen’s position in Alexandria untenable. This tension may explain why, around AD 215, Origen made a journey to Rome. If he was seeking in Rome a more congenial place to function as a lay teacher, he went to the wrong city; but he probably did absorb there a more sophisticated perspective on issues of Trinitarian theology. A second wealthy lay patron, Ambrosius, whom Origen’s teaching had won away from Gnosticism, enabled and encouraged him to take a fateful step in his career by furnishing him with copyists and calligraphers so that his lectures could become books. With such support, Origen’s reputation soon spread beyond the Christian community. First the governor of the Roman province of Arabia (roughly equivalent to modern Jordan) requested a visit with him. Then, in AD 231, Julia Mammaea, mother of the young Emperor Alexander Severus, requested him to attend her in Antioch. (The Severan imperial house no longer persecuted Christianity.) Such fame could not have helped relations with Demetrius, and Origen’s journey to Greece via Caesarea in Palestine was, very likely this time, an attempt to scout out a new place to live. In the event, Theoctistus, the Bishop of Caesarea, valuing his preaching, provided him a congenial place to settle. Theoctistus’s ordination of Origen as a presbyter provoked a crisis in Origen’s relationship with Demetrius, who was understandably incensed that another bishop should ordain a person under his jurisdiction. He also argued that Origen’s self-mutilation made him unworthy of ordination and charged that in his Dialogue with Candidus, the transcript of a debate with a Gnostic, he had set forth the blasphemously heretical position that the Devil would be saved. Even after Demetrius was succeeded, at his death in AD 233, by Heraclas, who had once been Origen’s student, he was no longer welcome in the Alexandrian church. In AD 234 he settled permanently in Caesarea, a date which divides his career as a teacher into two roughly equal halves. Origen called these events his deliverance from Egypt.

Early works

Although Origen remained, throughout his life, open to growth and change, his Alexandrian works set forth the approach to the Bible and to theology that would last him the rest of his career. His desire to gain the best possible access to the biblical text led to one of the great projects of his life, the Hexapla, an immense and complex word-for-word comparison of the Septuagint with the Hebrew Bible and other Greek translations. As best we can determine from accounts of the Hexapla and possible fragments, this consisted of a work in six columns: the original Hebrew; a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew; three more or less literal translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion; and, finally, the church’s Septuagint text, provided with critical markings to indicate where it diverged from the Hebrew. For the book of Psalms, Origen added two Greek versions he himself discovered, one at the Greek city of Nicopolis and one near Jericho, where he discovered a number of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts cached, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, in a jar. Origen made use of the Hexapla throughout his life, beginning, as the fragments of his Commentary on Lamentations abundantly show, with his earliest works at Alexandria. Origen took it with him to Caesarea, but its massive size and highly specialized function meant that it was never copied, so that it eventually disappeared.

The first work which Ambrosius solicited from Origen was, most likely, the early Commentary on Psalms 1–25. This work is lost except for the fragment below and another small fragment, both preserved in the Philocalia, a fourth-century anthology of Origen’s work on biblical interpretation and free will that also preserved the Letter to Gregory and our selection from the Commentary on Genesis. After this Origen wrote several now lost treatises: the Dialogue with Candidus already mentioned; On the Resurrection, which may also have been a transcript of a debate; his Stromateis; and On Natures, a refutation of what he understood to be the Valentinian doctrine that the soul’s destiny depends on its nature. Another early work, his second commentary as a mature author, the Commentary on Lamentations, survives more fully. The selected fragments below illustrate, along with Origen’s attention to the text itself, a way of interpreting biblical imagery that he would follow throughout his life. Thus below the interpretation of feet in fragment XXIII reappears decades later in Book 32 (sec. 71) of the Commentary on John. Such interpretation stems from Origen’s belief that an activity like walking or seeing, a part of the body, or an object like a jar of wine, each of which means one thing in the context of physical reality, means something different but similar in the context of spiritual reality. For a grammateus, a word with more than one meaning was a “homonym.” Homonymy applies to narratives as well as words. Thus the history of God’s dealings with his people in the Old Testament takes on new meaning in the context of the church and of the individual soul. In this elevated interpretation, the Babylonian captivity stands for the soul’s captivity by Satan because of its sins. Similarly, the return from that captivity and the rebuilding of the Temple symbolize the restoration of God’s dwelling-place in the human soul.

In Alexandria Origen began commentaries on two major books, Genesis and John. He conceived both on a grand scale – Book 1 of the Commentary on John covers the gospel’s first half verse! – and continued to work on them for much of his life. In the only extensive surviving fragment of his Commentary on Genesis, included below, Origen vindicates human freedom of choice against astral determinism. Book 1 of his Commentary on John, written in Alexandria, is included here in full. Origen begins it with an introduction to the gospel that constitutes one his fullest statements of exegetical principles. He goes on to analyze a homonym, the Greek word archê, the second word in Genesis and John, which can, among other things, mean “beginning” or “principle,” and concludes with a discussion of the various Christological titles in Scripture, relating them as aspects (epinoiai) of the Logos in his divine and human natures.

The scope and character of Peri Archon

The most fascinating of Origen’s works, the one which has received the most attention from his time to ours, also comes from the Alexandrian period. This is the treatise now commonly referred to by its Greek title, Peri Archon, and also known as On First Principles, its title in G. W. Butterworth’s graceful and accurate 1936 English translation. The title can have – and Origen probably intended it to have – two meanings. As he himself explained in Book 1 of his Commentary on John below, archai can either be “fundamental principles of being,” a meaning with a philosophical pedigree back to the Pre-Socratics, or they can be “elementary principles” of the Christian rule of faith. Origen wrote Peri Archon around AD 229, when he was in his early forties. It thus represents his mature theological position. We possess it in its entirety only in a fourth-century Latin translation by Rufinus, a work intended for and reflecting the Latin-speaking Christian culture of the 390s rather than the Alexandrian Christian culture of the 220s. Nicola Pace’s recent study of Rufinus’s text shows how we have lost the subtlety and philosophical sophistication of Origen’s language in the shift to Latin. Pace does not mention an example in the first sentence of Origen’s treatise, which survives in a Greek fragment:

All who believe and are persuaded (pepeismenoi) that grace and truth have come to be through Jesus Christ (see Jn 1:17) and know that Christ is truth, according to what he himself said, “I am the truth” (Jn 14:6), receive the knowledge that incites men to live well and blessedly from no other source than the very words and teachings of Christ.

Here Origen, always careful about words, implicitly distinguished between simply “believing” that Christ is the truth and “being persuaded,” presumably on the basis of rational argument, that this is so. We would be unaware of this from Rufinus’s rendering of the first phrase, “All who believe and are sure (certi).” We have also lost some of Origen’s theological formulations related to the Trinity, which, in the wake of the Arian controversies, sounded heterodox to Rufinus. Nonetheless, we still have, along with the basic shape and content of the book, a faithful picture of Origen’s cosmology and eschatology, which Rufinus wished to promote.

Two extensive sections of Peri Archon survive in Greek in the Philocalia, and many fragments, often tendentious, survive in Greek and Latin. Butterworth, following the best edition of his time, incorporated these fragments into the text, giving them preference over Rufinus.

Origen’s preface provides a key to his intentions. As we have seen, he begins by arguing that those who believe and are persuaded that Christ is God’s word and truth must seek the truth through Christ’s teachings. Since Christ is the Logos, these constitute the entire Bible, not just Christ’s words recorded in the gospels. He then goes on to argue that

because many who profess to believe in Christ disagree, not just in small and trivial matters, but also in ones of great and the greatest importance, that is about God, or about our Lord Jesus Christ himself, or about the Holy Spirit, and not just about these, but also about creatures, dominions and holy powers, for this reason it seems necessary beforehand to establish a firm line and distinct rule about each of these subjects, and then we can also investigate other subjects.

This “firm line and distinct rule” is the church’s proclamation “truly preserved by an order of succession handed down from the apostles, remaining in the churches even to the present.” The doctrines the apostles proclaimed straightforwardly were:

Aside from ranking the existence of a hidden sense of Scripture among the fundamental articles of the faith (as we shall see, for Origen this is a corollary of its divine inspiration), this list faithfully represents the position of Christians like Irenaeus and Tertullian who differentiated themselves from Gnosticism. Nonetheless, such doctrines are only the elementary principles of theology:

But this ought to be understood. When the holy apostles were proclaiming faith in Christ concerning certain things which they considered necessary, they passed them on very straightforwardly to all believers, even to those who appeared somewhat listless in the investigation of divine knowledge, while leaving the reason for their assertions to be inquired by those who merited the more excellent gifts of the Spirit, and especially those who would acquire the grace of speech, wisdom, and knowledge from the same Spirit (see 1 Cor. 12:7–8). About other things they said, indeed, that they were so, but as to the how and the why, they kept silent, assuredly being so that each of those who were more studious among their posterity, those who would be lovers of wisdom (see Wis. 8:2), would have an exercise in which they could show the fruit of their intelligence, those, that is, who would prepare themselves to be worthy and capable of receiving wisdom.

In the course of reciting the rule of faith, therefore, Origen signals areas where the apostles remained silent. These include: whether the Holy Spirit was begotten or not; whether the soul comes into existence at conception or has an earlier beginning; who the devils are and how they came to exist; “what existed before this world, or what will exist after this world”; “how God himself ought to be understood, whether he is corporeal and configured in some shape or is of another nature than corporeal”; and how and when the angels were created, and whether the heavenly bodies are or are not animated. Origen concludes that:

It is therefore necessary for someone who desires to construct a coherent and organic whole according to the commandment that says “Enlighten yourselves with the light of knowledge” (Hos. 10:12 LXX) to use points such as these [i.e. the doctrines handed down in the rule of faith] as elements and first principles, so that with clear and necessary arguments he may investigate what is true in individual matters, so that, as we have said, one organic whole may be constructed from examples and affirmations which he finds in the Holy Scriptures or which he discovers by careful investigation and direct pursuance of their consequences.

Beginning with Basilius Steidle in an article published in 1942, scholars have noticed that the four books of Peri Archon obscure a more fundamental four-part structure. The treatise incorporates two brief and two extended cycles dealing with a series of theological topics, beginning with the doctrine of God and descending down a chain of being to deal with the Son and the Holy Spirit, rational beings, and, finally, the material world. The preface and last chapter constitute the brief first and last of these cycles. The two extended cycles, constituting most of the work, are from the beginning of Book 1 through of Book 2 and from of that book through of Book 4. The first extended cycle deals with each of these topics in turn in a continuous narrative; the second deals in more detail with particular issues in roughly the same order. It ends with the topic of biblical interpretation, not covered in the first main cycle but enumerated in the preface. Gilles Dorival and Marguerite Harl have shown that such a structure conforms to a recognized philosophical genre dealing with “physics,” the discipline dealing with the nature of reality, archai in the first sense above. Nonetheless, as Brian Daley convincingly points out, on the basis of Origen’s conclusion quoted above to his preface, the work is also clearly about archai in the second sense; it derives from the elementary principles of the faith, “the kind of integrated, demonstrative, logically coherent system of knowledge that in the Aristotelian tradition was called a ‘science’ (epistêmê).”

Pierre Hadot cites Origen’s Peri Archon of a procedure characteristic of ancient philosophical schools: building a philosophy on unquestioned basic principles. This, in his view, accounts for those schools’ remarkable stability over centuries. In establishing the church’s rule of faith on a firm, rational basis, Origen effectively refuted the Gnostics, not by pointing out deficiencies in their systems, but by offering a coherent alternative. As he himself wrote, he also accomplished a still more important goal: “to outhne the most conspicuous characteristics of the understanding of the Scriptures” by investigating precisely those doctrines most important for souls “who cannot otherwise attain perfection without the rich and wise truth about God.” These are doctrines which the biblical authors, enlightened by the Logos, placed in Scripture so that those who devote themselves to the deep things of God (see 1 Cor. 2:10) might seek them out and which the Spirit of God deliberately concealed from those unable to bear the toil of such investigation. Although Peri Archon sets out to examine these doctrines, his tentative expression of conclusions leaves in doubt the extent to which he thought that he had achieved a logically coherent system which he referred to as a “coherent and organic whole.”

The divine hypostases in Peri Archon

In his doctrine of God (the Father) Origen argued that incorporeality, utter unity, and simplicity distinguish God from the multiplicity of the material world. Against the Gnostics, he argued that God who is the Creator and Lawgiver of the Old Testament is also the God and Father of Jesus Christ. The Son is God’s Logos (“Word” or “Reason”) and Wisdom, a second divine hypostasis, subordinate to and eternally generated by the Father. Similarly, the Holy Spirit, the third divine hypostasis, shares in the Father’s eternal existence. Origen cites his Hebrew teacher as saying that the two six-winged seraphim in Isaiah’s Temple vision (Isa. 6:2–3) who cry “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts” are the Son and the Holy Spirit. Origen valued this tradition because it provided an Old Testament attestation of two separate divine hypostases in addition to God the Father. These hypostases mediate the knowledge of God the Father to those worthy of it and hide that knowledge from the unworthy, just as, in Origen’s reading of Isaiah, the wings of the seraphim partially reveal and partially hide God. As a result of the Arian controversy, Origen’s formulation of the Son’s relationship to the Father occasioned a serious misunderstanding, not yet dissipated, which obscures his contribution to the history of Christian doctrine. From the fourth century on, Origen has been criticized for, in effect, importing into Christian doctrine a Platonic understanding of the relationship of the divine hypostases, in which the second is clearly inferior and subordinate to the first. This is the alleged foundation for Arius’s heresy. In this spirit, opponents of Origen took the image of the Son and Holy Spirit as seraphim to mean that, like Arius, Origen thought they were created beings, differing from the angels only in dignity. Although the subordination of the Son and Holy Spirit to the Father was consistent with Middle Platonic understandings of the relationship between the divine hypostases, such “subordinationism,” if we chose to call it that, was an unproblematic characteristic of Christian thought in Origen’s time. Origen he did not need Platonism to suggest it to him; all he needed was the New Testament, in which the Son acknowledges the Father’s superiority and acts in obedience to him. Arius’s notion that the Son and, by implication, the Spirit, are subordinate to the Father come not out of Origen’s influence, but from theological conservatism. Where Origen is original and distinctive is in his development of the concept of the eternal generation. This doctrine, distinguishing the Son and Holy Spirit from all other beings, which were created in time and are subject to change, provided the theoretical foundation of Nicene orthodoxy. It allows the Father to be the cause of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s procession, but in such a way that, in distinction from all other created beings, they share in the Father’s eternal and incorporeal existence. Athanasius, the champion of Nicaea, gratefully cited Peri Archon 4.4.1 in this regard:

If he is the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) the image is invisible. And I am so bold as to posit that, because he is also the “likeness” of the Father, there was no time when he did not exist. For when did God, who is called “light” by John when he says,“God is light” (1 Jn 1:5), not have the “radiance of his own glory” (see Heb. 1:3)? Would someone be so bold as to say that the Son began to exist after having not existed previously? When did the image of the unspeakable, unnameable and ineffable substance Father, the “imprint” (see Heb. 1:3) and the Word who knows the Father (see Mt. 11:27), not exist? For let the one who is so bold as to go ahead and say “There was a time when the Son was not” be aware that he is saying as well that Wisdom did not exist, that the Logos did not exist, and that Life did not exist…. But it is not possible nor is it safe, because of our weakness, to deprive God (in so far as we can do so) of having his only-begotten Son always united with him, who is the Wisdom “with whom he rejoices” (Prov. 8:30), since, in that case, he could not be understood always to rejoice.

In a way characteristic of his use of philosophy, Origen found useful the Platonic concept of hypostasis as a way of speaking about the Son and the Holy Spirit as having a separate existence from the Father in the unity of the Trinity. Nonetheless he modified it in the direction of biblical faith by affirming the doctrine of creation out of nothing, so that, in place of a Platonic continuity of being in an eternally existing cosmos, we have the biblical distinction between the Creator and the creation. Arius repudiated Origen when he affirmed that the Son came into being in time and out of non-existence.

In the beginning of his discussion of Christ in Peri Archon, Origen sets forth the fundamental distinction between two natures: Christ’s deity, by virtue of which he is the only Son of God, and his human nature, which he accepted in recent times to fulfill the divine plan (dispensatio in Latin = oikonomia in Greek). This notion of divine plan, beginning with creation and including the election of Israel, in which Christ’s incarnation and resurrection play the key role, has its roots in the New Testament and was fully developed by Irenaeus. For Origen the grammateus, oikonomia would suggest the image of God as the author of the cosmos, planning all its intricacies and events much as Homer planned the Iliad or as God himself, as its ultimate author, planned the Bible. The divine nature, God’s Logos, fully shares, as we have seen, in the Father’s eternity and incorporeality. In a chapter suffused with awe, Origen discusses how the Logos also shares our full human nature. His taking flesh does not simply mean animating a body, but taking a human soul as well. Anticipating devotion to Mary as the Theotokos, Origen insists on the full union of these two natures, so that, in his words,

it is to be believed that the Power of the divine majesty, that very Logos and Wisdom of God, in whom all things visible and invisible were created (see Col. 1:16), existed within the contours of that man who appeared in Judaea, and, in addition, the Wisdom of God entered a woman’s womb, was born a baby, and uttered a cry just like other howhng babies.

This union is so intimate that Scripture habitually applies the properties of either nature to the other, so that the man Jesus Christ is called the Son of God and the Son of God is said to have died. The union of the Logos with his human soul actually precedes and makes possible his assumption of a human body, for, as he put it “it was not possible for God’s nature to combine with a body without some medium.” The rational being which ultimately constituted Christ’s human soul was the one such being that did not, to a greater or lesser extent, fall away from God after its creation (see below) but clung inseparably to him. It still remains a soul but it is no longer capable of separating from the Logos by choosing evil, by virtue of its “firmness of purpose, immensity of affection and unquenchable warmth of love, any notion of change or alteration was removed, and what was once a matter of choice was by a long condition of practice changed into nature.” Except for its presupposition that Christ’s human soul was a rational being preexisting his human conception, this Christology – Christ in two distinct natures which retain their own integrity, the one fully God and the other fully and completely a man, natures so intimately and inseparably united that the properties of either one may be ascribed to the other – anticipates and foreshadows Chalcedonian orthodoxy. As the one Mediator between God and humanity, Christ not only unites the two natures but mediates between the absolute and simple oneness of God and the multiplicity of created beings. In Peri Archon Origen alludes to Christological titles, which he understood as aspects (epinoiai) of the Logos; he develops their significance in the Commentary on John. Book 1 below (XX. 119) shows how

God is … entirely one and simple, but the Savior, on account of the many – since God “designated” him “in advance as a propitiation” (Rom. 3:25) and first-fruits of all creation – has become many and is doubtless all things that every created being capable of liberation has need of from him.

As we shall see, Origen ascribes four of these (Wisdom, Word, Truth and Life) to the divine nature; the rest Christ (Resurrection, Way, Good Shepherd, etc.) he assumed with his human nature for the sake of the divine oikonomia.

The divine oikonomia in Peri Archon

Origen posited a two-stage Creation. In the first stage, God first creates rational beings, united to him by their free choice. All but one of these rational beings, the one which constitutes the human soul of the incarnate Christ, fell at least to some extent from this original unity with God. Some did not fall very far, so that their return is relatively easy. These are the angels and the spirits who animate the heavenly bodies, who serve those below them who have fallen farther. A second group of rational spirits fell so far from God as to be actively antagonistic, subverting the return of other rational beings to God. These constitute the demons or, as Origen calls them, the “adverse powers.” A third class of rational beings occupy a middle ground. These are called “souls” (psuchai) because their once ardent love of God has “cooled” (psuchesthai). By virtue of their creation in the image and likeness of God, as exhibited in their capacity to participate to some extent in God’s virtues – by being merciful, for example, even as their heavenly Father is merciful (see Mt. 5:48) – these souls still retain a kinship to God. The primeval fall of rational spirits brings into play a further step in God’s oikonomia, a second stage of creation, that of our material cosmos. In unequivocal opposition to the Gnostics, Origen affirms this creation as an essential element in God’s beneficent plan to bring fallen rational spirits back to himself.

The inequities of the world, of which Gnostics, especially Marcion, complained, stem from the diverse motions and declensions of rational spirits from their original harmony with God. The creation we know is submitted to futility and awaiting its liberation (Rom. 8:19–22), serving as a place for these fallen rational spirits to recognize their alienation from God. Here God provides them an opportunity to begin a process of moral and intellectual purification that will ultimately restore them to their unity with him. God’s oikonomia entails an exercise of providence that respects the free choice of rational creatures. Hal Koch, in a pioneering study of Origen, recognized that his entire system revolves around these two foci, divine providence and human free will. In this plan God so arranges things that those beings farther along in their progress assist those who have made less progress. Thus, as Origen explains in a key passage, even the struggles of the adverse powers against them serve to make their ultimate victory more secure:

I suppose that God the parent of all things arranges each individual event for the salvation of his whole creation through the unspeakable calculation of his Word and Wisdom, in such a way that each spirit or soul (or whatever else rational beings ought to be called) should not be compelled by force against its freedom of choice into any action except that to which the motion of its own mind leads – for in that case their freedom of choice would be taken away from them, which would certainly change the quality of their nature itself – and at the same time the diverse motions of their wills should fit together in a suitable and useful way for the harmony of one world, so that, when some need help, others can offer help, while others bring about conflicts and struggles for those who are making progress, so that their zeal may be proven and they may hold their restored position more securely after their victory, because they have confirmed it by the difficulties of those who exert themselves.

For Origen the cosmos may be a difficult place with conflicts and struggles, but it is fundamentally beneficent. Furthermore, its marvelous order bespeaks the unimaginable skill of its Creator. Origen suggests that the ultimate purpose of the cosmos lies in the opportunity it provides for rational spirits to become like God voluntarily and through their own efforts. Although Plato sets forth this ideal, it comes ultimately from Moses. In a characteristic exegetical argument, Origen points to a discrepancy between Genesis 1:26, where God says “Let us make man in our own image and likeness,” and the following verse, where God makes man simply “in the image of God.” God makes rational creatures in his image by endowing them with reason and freedom of choice. Nonetheless, “the perfection of God’s likeness was indeed reserved for the consummation” so that they might obtain it by their own earnest efforts to imitate God. Implicit in this understanding of the cosmos is the idea, which Origen inherited from Clement, that God’s oikonomia extends not simply to the cosmos as a whole, but to each individual rational spirit.

Origen always maintains that “it lies with us and with our own actions whether we are to be blessed and holy, or whether through sloth and negligence we are to turn away from blessedness into wickedness and perdition.” Hendrik Benjamins has recently shown how Origen’s understanding of God’s oikonomia underlies his discussions of freedom of choice from a philosophical perspective. The most important of these is Book 3, of Peri Archon, a chapter preserved in Greek. There Origen draws masterfully on the resources of Greek philosophy to develop a concept of oikonomia inconceivable apart from the biblical notion of a benevolent, personal God. From the Stoics he takes the concept of a chain of events in which nothing happens accidentally. From them he also took arguments vindicating a sphere of human freedom. However, this freedom is no longer, as with the Stoics, in the face of an inexorable and impersonal fate, but in the face of the loving, personal God. From the Platonists he takes arguments vindicating a beneficent divine providence that arranges the world for the best. However, this providence is no longer just for the cosmos as a whole but for each individual soul. From the Platonists also Origen takes the concept of the preexistence of souls as a way to explain apparent injustice in the way providence operates. Thus Origen explained the distinction between souls who are vessels of honor and those who are vessels of dishonor in Roman 9, not on the basis of unmerited election, but on the basis of those souls’ behavior before they were conceived in the womb. Origen presents grace and free will not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary. We see this in his interpretation of another problematic text, “So it depends not on man’s will or exertion, but on God’s mercy” (Rom. 9:16). He argues that Paul is not denying human agency but appropriately indicating that God’s share in our salvation far exceeds ours. Paul is like a sailor who, at the conclusion of a safe voyage, ascribes all the credit to God. The sailor does not for a moment suppose that he could have arrived safe at harbor without his own skill at navigation. Even so, he is far more impressed by God’s role in giving favorable winds, hospitable weather, and the stars as a guide.

Eschatology in Peri Archon

Peri Archon made Origen, as Brian Daley describes him, “without a doubt the most controversial figure in the development of early Christian eschatology.” While conceding “a touch of anachronism,” he goes on to describe Origen’s eschatological thought as “an attempt to de-mythologize the accepted apocalyptic tradition of the Scriptures and popular Christian belief in a constructive, reverent and pastorally fruitful way.” Daley points out that, more than other early Christian thinkers, Origen stresses the relevance of eschatology to the ongoing spiritual life of Christians. In Origen eschatology is in continuity with the rest of the divine oikonomia. This process begins now in those cooperating with God’s grace and continues “bit by bit and by stages as boundless and immense ages pass by, seeing that the amendment will occur and the correction is followed through painstakingly in each individual.” Origen writes that “as the eye naturally seeks light and vision and our body by its nature desires food and drink, so our mind harbors a natural and proper desire to know God’s truth and to learn the causes of things.” He goes on to say that God would not have given us this longing to no purpose, but so that it might be satisfied. Origen thus understood the Christian hope as a continuing education. Souls who have departed this life will pass through “a lecture hall or school” where they learn to understand the mysteries of Scripture and the underlying reason for the diversity and variety of the natural world, including animals and trees. Then, ascending through the heavenly spheres, they will come to understand the nature of the stars. This process of education is also a process of moral purification, since its goal is to “see God,” which is “to understand him through purity of heart.” The personal spirituality and pastoral concern that animate this eschatological vision shine through in a passage where Origen explains why the Holy Spirit is known as “Comforter” (Paraklêtos):

Anyone who deserves to participate in the Holy Spirit, when he has learned his unspeakable mysteries, undoubtedly obtains consolation and gladness of heart. Because, by the Spirit’s revelation, he has come to know the reasons for all things that happen, and why and how they happen, his soul can never be disturbed in any way or experience any feeling of sadness.

Two aspects of Origen’s eschatology have been problematical from his day to ours, both of them related to one of its key principles, eschatology, namely that “the end is always like the beginning.” First, if the end is always like the beginning, and all rational creatures were originally at one with God, will not all eventually be restored to that unity? Borrowing a term from Acts 3:21, Origen refers to this eventual restoration of unity as apokatastasis, the return of all things. (Although, as far as we can tell, he did not use apokatastasis in this sense in Peri Archon, he did do so elsewhere, including Commentary on John 1.XVI.91 below.) Second, if the ultimate source of all things is the incorporeal godhead, will not corporeal existence, entailing, as it does, the possibility of a differentiation from God, ultimately cease to exist when God is all in all? These implications of Origen’s eschatology ran counter to two fundamental early Christian beliefs: the belief that God will condemn the wicked to eternal punishment and the belief that the final Christian hope is for the faithful to be restored to their bodies in the resurrection of the dead. For those souls which have not fully achieved the return to God for which the cosmos exists, Origen suggests that there may be

some future healing and correction, certainly quite harsh and full of pain for those who have refused to obey the Word of God, yet a process of instruction and rational training through which those who already in the present life have devoted themselves to such activity and, by having had their minds purified, have attained here and now to a capacity for divine wisdom, may advance to a fuller understanding of truth.

Origen alludes to such a process of purification after death in Homilies on Jeremiah 12.3 below, explaining to sinners that they “must taste something very bitter, being under God’s careful management, so that, having been corrected, [they] may be saved.” In this purification we make our own fire as we burn with remorse for our evil deeds. Such ideas, which he shared with Clement, provide a possible basis for the doctrine of Purgatory. Elsewhere Origen hints that the notion of eternal punishment, while not actually true, serves a useful function, since it encourages simpler Christians, still motivated by fear, not to be complacent. He also raises the possibility that God has created worlds both before and after this one. He carefully distinguishes this possibility of multiple worlds from the Stoic doctrine that, because the same inexorable sequence of causes will remain, each subsequent world will be identical. The logic of his system suggests that all rational beings will return to their original unity with God, and he leaves open the possibility that even devils will be saved.

Second, if the end is like the beginning, and God, simple and changeless by virtue of his incorporeality, is the beginning from which all things come into being, does not the ultimate Christian hope entail the abandonment of corporeality? Such a conclusion ran counter to contemporary Christian understandings of the resurrection of the body. Origen strongly criticized the views simple Christians held, castigating “disciples of the letter alone” for indulging their own desires and lusts and supposing that “that the promises for the future are to be expected in terms of bodily pleasure and luxury,” imagining that they will eat and drink and even order servants around. While accepting and using the Revelation to John, he implicitly rejects any literal understanding of the Millennium promised in Chapter 20 of that book. Appealing to 1 Corinthians 15, he argues that such persons do not follow the Apostle Paul’s thinking about the resurrection of a “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44). Later, Origen would make the same argument in his Contra Celsum. Origen ostensibly leaves the ultimate status of corporeality open, but he apparently cannot conceive of a continuing role for corporeality once all things have returned to their union with God. Again, he derives this position from 1 Corinthians 15, in which the Apostle wrote that “this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:53). In a manner characteristic of a grammateus, he focuses on the verb and argues that “putting on” incorruption and immortality should be interpreted in terms of Paul’s exhortation in Romans 13:14, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Plausibly interpreting Paul, Origen envisages two stages in our souls’ return to God. In the first stage we will be clothed in more pure and subtle bodies, different from the ones we have now, which cannot be conquered by death. In the second stage, “when at last material nature little by little passed away,” death is swallowed up in victory (see 1 Cor. 15:54) so that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Origen argues elsewhere in Peri Archon that the soul’s attainment of likeness to God also entails incorporeality. There is no reason to believe that Origen substantially altered his eschatological vision. As we shall see, the Contra Celsum, one of his last works, is consistent in this regard with Peri Archon and the same is true of another late work, the Commentary on Matthew. In this teaching Origen distinguished his views from those of simpler Christians whose views on the bodily resurrection and on the eternal punishment of the wicked have, in fact, dominated the Christian tradition. Nonetheless, we can overestimate Origen’s departures from traditional eschatology. Henri Crouzel has pointed out how nuanced Origen’s position was, and Charles E. Hill has shown that his rejection of millennialist eschatology had just as good a pedigree as his adversaries’ position.

Biblical interpretation in Peri Archon

The first three chapters of Peri Archon, Book 4 deal with biblical interpretation. They begin with two arguments for the Bible’s divine inspiration. The first is that Scripture must partake of divine power in order to influence for the better the great mass of humanity, not just a few intellectuals. Besides Moses and Jesus no lawgiver has ever had any influence outside his own people, yet people of all nations flock to conform to the standards of the Old and New Testaments, even though doing so exposes them to the hatred of idolaters. The second is that Scriptural prophecies have been fulfilled long after they were made. Because these prophecies pointed to him, it is only with the advent of Jesus that the divine presence in the prophetic discourses and spiritual character of the Mosaic law, previously hidden, came to light, so that anyone who brings care and attention to the Bible will feel a “trace of enthusiasm” from that divine presence. Origen the grammateus readily admits that the style of Holy Scripture is mediocre (compared, presumably, to Homer or Plato) because, as Paul wrote, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Cor. 4:7), but, even so, this is the pattern of the divine oikonomia: just as we must seek a profound cause when people from all over the world commit their lives to an obscure Galilaean, so the Bible’s divine power clothed in a humble style impels us to seek a profound hidden meaning.

Origen asserts that literal interpretation makes Christian orthodoxy untenable. Unless we seek a non-literal meaning in prophecies – for example Isaiah 11 prophesying that when the Messiah comes the wolf will lie down with the lamb – the Jews can make a good argument that Jesus falsely called himself the Christ. (Origen criticizes the Jews for excessive literalism, as we see also in Homilies on Jeremiah 12.13 below, even though, as we have seen, his own esoteric interpretation has roots in Judaism.) Similarly, Gnostics point to the literal meaning of some passages – for example, “A fire has been kindled in my fury” (Deut. 32:22; Jer. 15:14) and “I am a jealous God, visiting the Sins of the Fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation” (Ex. 20:5) – to prove that the Creator-God whom the Jews worship is imperfect and not even good. Unfortunately, “the simpler of those who boast of belonging to the church, even as they take for granted that there is no God greater than the Creator, which is sound on their part, nonetheless they take for granted things about God that they would not believe about the most savage and the most unjust of men.” If the church accepts such naïve biblical interpretation, it leaves itself defenseless before its adversaries.

Origen is famous for propounding in Peri Archon a threefold interpretation, in which Scripture has bodily, soulish, and spiritual meanings. His intent was not to say that each passage has precisely three meanings, but that Scripture meets the needs of rational creatures at different levels of progress. Some passages, indeed, have no bodily sense, even though all have a spiritual sense. This is because God’s Logos has, in fact, so “planned” the Scriptures as to include “snares, obstacles, and” even “impossibilities” to force the intelligent interpreter to get beyond the obvious sense of the text. God’s oikonomia thus accounts for difficult Scriptural texts as part of a divine strategy of revelation and concealment that enables the spiritual to attain “that which is hidden” of 1 Cor. 2:7. Our selections below from Origen’s homilies exhibit him speaking movingly of the anguish involved in failing to understand a passage as he describes Mary and Joseph’s search for Jesus and also undertaking with zest the “struggle” of explaining difficulties in the passage about the Witch of Endor. Scripture’s goal is to conceal God’s truth from those “unable to bear the burden of examining such momentous things” even as it reveals that truth to the spiritually minded.

Origen points out a number of passages where the literal sense presents “obstacles” and “impossibilities” that impel the intelligent reader toward a deeper, spiritual sense. The first mentioned are inconsistent and absurd statements in the early chapters of Genesis, on which Origen was preparing a commentary at the time, but he finds examples from the entire Bible, the New Testament included. He makes it clear that, although most of the Bible’s narrative is factual and most of its laws were meant to be observed, there are nonetheless some passages, albeit few, that have only a spiritual meaning. Origen’s standards for what is literal may strike the modern reader as obtuse, as when he argues that Jesus’ injunction “if someone strikes you on the right cheek” (Mt. 5:39) is incredible because most assailants, leading with their right hand, would actually strike the left cheek first. We should not, however, expect Origen’s categories for what is literal to correspond to ours, especially when, as Northrop Frye has pointed out, what we ourselves mean by “literal” is far from clear. The spiritual interpretation that penetrates to the profounder sense requires two things: (1) obedience to Jesus’ command to “search the scriptures” (Jn 5:39) by devoting prolonged, careful, and exact examination to them; and (2) God’s assistance, which “breaks in pieces the gates of brass” (Isa. 45:2) that hide the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). God’s assistance is particularly vital for understanding the gospels, which demand “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16) for their interpretation. Origen elaborates on these spiritual qualifications in Commentary on John, Book 1 below.

Origen’s discussion of Scriptural interpretation in Peri Archon stands beside Augustine’s On Christian Teaching as a classic of biblical hermeneutics. Nonetheless, it makes sense only in connection with Origen’s actual practice. It is to be hoped that the selections from Origen’s works here will be helpful in that regard. One of today’s foremost Patristic scholars, Manlio Simonetti, identifies three fundamental principles that, in practice, govern Origen’s interpretation of Scripture. These are:

The Epistle to the Hebrews, which speaks of the law as a shadow of good things to come (Heb. 8:5), provides Origen Scriptural precedent for the third principle. Our selections below include numerous examples of each of these principles in action. Thus, for example, we see Origen concerned with usefulness at the beginning of Homilies on 1 Samuel 5, when he asks how the biblical narrative “touches” his hearers, relating liberation from exile to Christ in Commentary on Lamentations, fragment II, moving from the sensible to the intelligible levels of being in his discussion of the spiritual meaning of footwashing in Commentary on John, Book 32. In practice also, as Theresia Heither has recently pointed out, Origen’s discursive style effectively brings the reader into a dialogue with the biblical text by raising hypothetical objections and answering them. Finally, as important as the Bible was to Origen – and practically all of his work is pervaded by biblical language and concerned in one way or another with biblical interpretation – our selection from the Commentary on John, Book 13 makes clear that he saw it not as an end in itself, but as a gateway to deeper knowledge.

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