Chapter 4: The Focal Points of Origen’s Theology

Chapter 4: The Focal Points of Origen’s Theology

Chapter 4

The Focal Points of Origen’s Theology

Origen’s theological thought revolves around three central actions of God presented in Scripture: creation, incarnation, and consummation. He discusses much more, of course, than these three topics, but these topics are central to his theological thinking and, in my opinion, form the core of his theological work. It is not possible to maintain rigid divisions between the topics for they are often tightly intertwined in his discussions of them.201

Origen’s conception of these three themes is complex, partly because the themes themselves are complex and all lie outside of human experience, and partly because much of what he actually said about them has been lost. His thirteen-book commentary on the first four chapters of Genesis where he discussed creation, for example, is lost;202 his discussion of these topics in his theological work, On First Principles, is, for the most part, lost in the Greek language in which he wrote. A fourth-century Latin translation has preserved this latter work, but the accuracy of the translation is sometimes questionable, especially in the discussions of the creation. In addition, some of the terminology Origen used in discussing these topics seems to have been misunderstood occasionally by both his ancient and modern interpreters resulting in skewed pictures of what he taught.

A number of studies of Origen appearing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have addressed some of these skewed views with considerable success so that a clearer picture of Origen’s thought is beginning to emerge.203 In line with this newer research, this chapter will depart from much of what was considered to be Origen’s thought up through at least the mid-twentieth century in an attempt to understand him more accurately. One of the most significant differences that this chapter will reflect in relation to studies of Origen from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries has to do with the starting point of Origen’s thought. Earlier studies saw him as primarily a philosopher who built his system of thought from philosophical principles drawn largely from Plato to which he attached a thin Scriptural veneer to make it appear Christian.204 It is now widely accepted that Origen was a biblical, not a philosophical, theologian. It is indisputable that he had a wide knowledge of the teachings of the philosophical schools of his day, but this knowledge was not the basis of his system of thought. Origen’s thought began with Scripture. Philosophical ideas were sometimes employed in his interpretation of Scripture, but it was Scripture, not philosophy, that provided the structure of his thought.205

Creation

The creation story in Genesis had been the object of speculation by many Christians before the time of Origen. Daniélou notes that Eusebius refers to several authors who had written on the story of the six days in Genesis 1, that the chapters on creation seem to have held special interest for those Christians labeled gnostics, and that both John (John 1:1–14) and Paul (Ephesians 5:31–32) suggest that the creation narrative was an object of interpretation and speculation in the earliest days of the church.206 He notes that Anastasius Sinaiticus, the seventh-century abbot of the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, says that the second-century Christian “Papias . . . ‘interpreted the entire Hexaemeron [i.e. the six days of creation] as applying to Christ and the Church,’ just as did Pantaenus.’” Eusebius quotes from a letter of Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, who knew Origen, which suggests that Origen may have known Pantaenus.207 If this is true then he may also have known Pantaenus’ views on creation. Theophilus of Antioch in the mid- to late-second century devoted a lengthy section in his apology to a speculative discussion of the creation story.208 Origen thus entered an established tradition of exegesis of the creation story when he wrote his commentary on Genesis 1–4. Unfortunately, most of this prior exegesis on Genesis is lost, as well as Origen’s own commentary. Consequently, we cannot know if or how he may have used this previous exegesis and to what extent his work marked a new departure. The church historian Socrates relates that in book nine of his commentary on Genesis Origen’s interpretation of Adam and Eve as types of Christ and the church was not an innovation but followed the mystical tradition of the church.209

In his first homily on Isaiah210 Origen discusses the prophet’s vision of God in Isaiah 6. He understands there to have been only two seraphim, who are identified as Christ and the Holy Spirit. The two seraphim, he says, cover God’s face and feet with their wings. God’s face, moreover, represents the beginning of the cosmos and his feet its end. The uncovered midsection means, he asserts, that human beings can know only what lies between the beginning and the end of the cosmos.211 There are two important implications in this understanding if we take it as a starting point for our subject. One is that Origen was fully aware that everything he said about either the beginning or the end of the creation was speculation.212 This awareness is confirmed in a statement from the prologue to his commentary on Genesis that Pamphilus has preserved in his Apology, where Origen says, “[W]e are not unaware of our ignorance of the great realities and of those things that are beyond us.”213 The second implication from his understanding of Isaiah’s vision is that eschatology and cosmology are closely related in his thought, so closely in fact, that they are sometimes considered, in the On First Principles at least, to be mirrored images of one another. He says in the On First Principles, “The end is always like the beginning.”214

Origen’s understanding of creation depends of course, on the first four chapters of Genesis, but it also draws heavily on such disparate passages of Scripture as the prologue to John’s Gospel, Proverbs 8:22–25, 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, and Colossians 1:16 among others. Our primary source of knowledge of the content of the lost commentary on Genesis is the few comments he makes about the work in his polemical treatise Contra Celsum 6.49–61 along with some scattered fragments quoted or referred to in other ancient authors.215 He indicates that his commentary extended to the statement, “This is the book of the generation of human beings,” in Genesis 5:1.

The précis Origen gives in Contra Celsum 6.49 of the subjects discussed in the commentary, however, covers only Genesis 1:1–5 and ends with “etc.,” suggesting that this was the pattern followed in the remainder of the commentary.216 What Origen reveals in this passage is that he had asked a series of questions of the Genesis text all structured in the format: What was such and such? For example, the first question he lists is, “What was the heaven and the earth that came into existence in beginning?”217 This is not a question about the time the creation occurred, or the amount of time needed for the creation process, or in what manner it came about. “What is (or was)” introduces a question about the essence or nature of a thing. This indicates that the first subject Origen treated in his commentary on Genesis was the question of the essence or nature of the created heaven and earth in Genesis 1:1–2. Celsus had claimed that “Moses and the prophets . . . had no idea what the nature of the world and of mankind really is.”218 Origen was not, of course, responding to Celsus when he wrote his commentary on Genesis, for he wrote this early in his life, and seems to have learned of Celsus’ attack on Christians only late in his life.219 Celsus’ remark, nevertheless, reflects the kinds of things philosophically inclined non-Christians would have directed at the Mosaic account of creation. When one asks what something is, it is a question about the underlying substance of the thing in question. Celsus’ assertion pointed to the opinion that Christians had no understanding of the underlying substance of either the world or humanity. It seems likely that Origen’s commentary on Genesis offered a response to such a criticism in its discussion of creation.

In Contra Celsum 6.51 Origen makes a remark that suggests how he had approached answering the question, “What was the heaven and the earth that came into existence in beginning?” in his commentary on Genesis. He says, “This is not the time to set out in detail the subject concerning intelligible things and sensible things.” Then he remarks that he had done this many years ago when he wrote on “the Mosaic account of the creation of the world.”220 Earlier in Book 6 of the Contra Celsum, drawing on Paul, Origen explains what he understands the terms “intelligible” and “sensible” to mean. He quotes 2 Corinthians 4:17–18 where Paul says, “[W]e look not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporal; but the things that are not seen are eternal.” Then Origen comments, “To those who can understand,” Paul “obviously means sensible things, though he calls them ‘the things that are seen,’ and intelligible things which are comprehensible by the mind alone, though he calls them ‘the things that are not seen.’ He [i.e. Paul] also knows that sensible things are temporal and visible, while intelligible things are eternal and invisible.”221 In the first book of his Commentary on John, written early in his life, Origen had made a similar statement: “I would . . . say that those who have contemplated the bodiless realities that Paul called ‘invisible’ and ‘not seen,’222 that exist in thought apart from everything perceptible by sense, are ruled by that preeminent nature of the only begotten.”223 He gives a very precise definition of what he means by invisible in a comment on John 1:18, where he says,

Perception is twofold, namely sensual and intellectual; the first apprehends material objects and the second immaterial. For this reason we say that those things that are assumed by the mind and perceived by it are invisible. We do not mean that they are not seen but that they are not such by nature as to be seen. For nothing material is invisible, even if it should be out of sight at some time and not seen. “Invisible” does not mean “not to be seen,” but not to be such by nature that this is possible. Consequently, “not to be seen” and “invisible” are not convertible expressions. The fact that the invisible is not seen follows from its being invisible.224

Celsus had set his argument in the context of Plato’s Phaedrus, accusing Christians of having borrowed from Plato; Origen accuses Plato of having filched his concepts from the Hebrew prophets. He considers himself to be following Paul’s understanding and language who, he asserts, was educated in the prophetic writings. When Origen speaks of “intelligible things” being made by God in the beginning, he means things perceivable only by the intellect or thought, and when he refers to “sensible things” being created in the beginning he means things perceivable by the senses. He then says that he had explained these things in his earlier commentary on Genesis. This means that Origen understood the opening chapter of Genesis to contain an account of an invisible, “intelligible” creation. He was surely encouraged to think in this direction by the Septuagint translation of Genesis 1:2, which reads, “And the earth was invisible and unformed.”225 He refers to the world perceptible to the senses as “an image of the intelligible and invisible one, for the truth,” he adds “will be in the world to come.”226 The latter assertion reflects Origen’s view that the end will be like the beginning. This is made explicit in his comment that “there is . . . another world in which there are things that are not seen, besides the manifest and perceptible world that consists of heaven and earth. . . . [T]his in its entirety is an invisible world, a world which is not seen, and an intelligible world on whose appearance and beauty the pure in heart will look.”227 This initial creation was followed by the forming of the visible, physical universe. We can conceptualize the creation perceptible to the senses, but what did he mean by the invisible, intelligible creation?

The Intelligible Creation

Origen understood Genesis 1:1—5:2 to relate two separate creations marked off by the parallel statements in Genesis 2:4 and 5:2, each of which points back to the words that precede them.228 He appears to have understood the first section, Genesis 1:1—2:4, to be an account of the creation of an intelligible heaven and earth perceivable only by the intellect. There is no explicit statement of this in the extant material we have of his discussions of the early chapters of Genesis, but he clearly is thinking this way in his considerations of Genesis 1:1 and he is also, as we will see later, thinking in this way in what he says about the creation of male and female in Genesis 1:26–27.

We might think of this intelligible creation as an outhne or architectural plan in the Logos or Wisdom of God of the form of things that would then be given substantial existence in the creation of the physical universe. This first creation account ends with the words, “This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when it came into existence on that day that God made the heaven and the earth.”229 The second section, from Genesis 2:5—5:2, would then contain an account of the creation of the physical earth and its inhabitants. This account ends at Genesis 5:1–2 with the words, “This is the book of the generation of humanity, on which day God made Adam, in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them and he blessed them and he gave them the name Adam on the day he made them.”

Origen’s idea of a prior intellectual creation must not be regarded as physical or substantial in any way. It was an invisible, that is, intellectual creation that existed only in the Word (Logos) or Wisdom of God. Origen never conceived of this creation as having any other kind of existence prior to the physical creation, and especially not an independent existence outside the Logos or Wisdom of God. It existed in the realm of thought alone, like a building plan in the mind of an architect. He suggests taking the Johannine phrase, “In the beginning was the Word (Logos)” in connection with the statement of Wisdom in Proverbs, “God created me the beginning of his ways for his works,” to mean that “all things came to be in accordance with the wisdom and plans of the system of thoughts in the Word (Logos). For,” he says, “I think that just as a house and a ship are built or devised according to the plans of the architect, the house and the ship having as their beginning the plans and thoughts in the craftsman, so all things have come to be according to the thoughts of what will be, which were prefigured by God in wisdom, ‘For he made all things in wisdom’” (Ps 103:24).230 When Origen, following the Psalter, says that God made all things “in wisdom” he is not thinking of the prepositional phrase as having the adverbial meaning “wisely”; he understands it as locating, so far as Wisdom can be said to be a location, where “all things” were made, that is, in God’s Wisdom. There is an analogous passage in the opening of his homilies on Genesis, where Origen asks, “What is the beginning of all things except our Lord and ‘Savior of all,’ Jesus Christ ‘the firstborn of every creature’?” He then adds, “In this beginning, therefore, that is, in his Word, ‘God made heaven and earth’ as the evangelist John also says in the beginning of his Gospel. . . . Scripture is not speaking here of any temporal beginning, but it says that heaven and earth and all things which were made were made ‘in the beginning,’ that is, in the Savior.”231 The phrase “in the beginning” in Genesis 1:1, in other words, Origen claims, is not a phrase referencing the time of creation, but refers to the Logos-Christ as the location of the intellectual heaven and earth that was later to receive substantial existence.

Origen never understood this intellectual creation in God’s Logos-Wisdom, or, perhaps, from our inadequate human analogy, in his intellect or mind, to have any kind of separate existence outside the realm of thought (again to use our inadequate human analogy). In On First Principles Origen quotes Psalm 103:24, “‘You made all things in wisdom,’ and says, “if ‘all things have been made in wisdom,’ then since wisdom has always existed, there have always existed in wisdom, by a pre-figuration and pre-formation, those things which afterwards have received substantial existence.”232 Notice that the “all things” that existed in wisdom as pre-figurations and pre-formations did not at this time have substantial existence. They existed only in Wisdom. In a text from the third book of his commentary on Genesis, which has been preserved in the Greek language in which Origen wrote, he says,

When God thinks about the beginning of the creation, since nothing happens without a cause, he goes through in his mind each of the things which will exist, perceiving that when this has occurred, this follows, and if this which comes next occurs, this follows, which, when it exists, is followed by this, and, advancing to the ends of things in this way, he knows what will be, though he is not at all the cause of each thing that occurs.233

He is talking about God in his foreknowledge prior to the material creation, thinking through, in our human analogy, everything that will be and happen in the subsequent physical world of human beings. Since Origen places this activity at “the beginning of the creation” he must be referring to the first chapter of Genesis.234 There is an even clearer statement of the role of God’s foreknowledge in creation in one of the recently discovered Greek homilies of Origen on the Psalms, where he discusses the words, “Remember your congregation which you acquired from the beginning” (Ps 73 [74]:2). He finds the key to understanding this statement in the words of Romans 8:29–30 “Whom he [i.e. God] foreknew he apprehended before, whom he apprehended before he predestined, whom he predestined he called, whom he called he justified, whom he justified he glorified.” Origen comments, God “foreknew in [the] beginning and acquired in his foreknowledge all the things destined to come under him,” which means that God foreknew before the creation all who would be a part of his “congregation” mentioned in the psalm. “I know the beginning from which God acquired each of us” he adds, “I know this beginning which is alive, and living and saying: ‘God created me the beginning of his ways for his works’ (Prov 8:22). The beginning is Christ. He, therefore, acquired [it] from the beginning, from Christ, who is the beginning and who is the end, who is the alpha and who is the omega.”235

The view of an intellectual plan of creation preceding the actual physical creation was present in Jewish circles in Origen’s time. Some rabbis identified Torah with Wisdom, as Wisdom is described in Proverbs 8:22, and believed that Torah was present with God before the creation of the world and that God consulted Torah (i.e., the ideas in Torah) for the details of the creation.236 The first-century A.D. Jewish philosopher Philo, whose works Origen had read and regarded highly, also considered there to have been an immaterial plan of creation that God used in making the world. Philo locates this immaterial plan in the Word (Logos) of God as Origen does.237 Origen had read Philo’s works and was, in all probability, influenced by them in his thinking about creation.

Origen’s adversaries, perhaps because they misunderstood him, or perhaps because they maliciously misrepresented him, presented the picture that has controlled most later scholarship’s description of Origen’s view of an intellectual or spiritual world inhabited by independent rational beings, independent of the being of God and, in some sense at least, outside the control of God, who chose either to turn away from God or to cling to him in varying degrees of intensity.238 Most later scholars, including myself, have presented this as Origen’s view. I now believe we were mistaken and that a continued careful reading of Origen’s texts will provide further confirmation of this.239

The Material Creation

The material or visible creation, the subject matter in Genesis 2:5—5:2 as Origen seems to have understood it, at least, was focused on the origin of human beings.240 He points out that a different verb is used to describe this in the two accounts of creation. The account in Genesis 1:26–27 uses the verb “to make” in the Septuagint translation.241 God says, “Let us make a human being in our image and likeness.” And when it was accomplished, the author of Genesis says, “And God made the human being, according to the image of God he made him, male and female he made them.”242 The account in Genesis 2, however, says that God “formed the human being from dust of the earth.”243 Origen understood this change of verbs to be significant. “We do not understand,” he says in a homily on Genesis, “this person indeed whom Scripture says was made ‘according to the image of God’ to be physical. For the form of the body does not contain the image of God, nor is the physical person said to be ‘made,’ but ‘formed.’ . . . For the text says, ‘And God formed the human being,’ that is, fashioned, from the slime of the earth.’”244 He notes the same distinction in a homily on Jeremiah where he says on the Lord’s words to the prophet, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,”245

When you have read Genesis and have observed what is said about the creation of the world, you will discover that Scripture very articulately did not say before I made you in the womb I knew you. For when the one “according to the image” was created, “God said, Let us make a human being according to our image and likeness.” He did not say, Let us form. But when he took “dust from the earth,” he did not make the human being, but “he formed the human being” and “placed the human being whom he formed in the garden to work it and guard it.” . . . [W]hat is made does not come into existence in the womb; what is formed from the dust of the earth is created in the womb.246

Perhaps Origen’s strongest statement about this distinction, however, occurs in his comments on Matthew 19:4–5, where Jesus responds to the Pharisees using the words of Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. Origen comments,

I do not think that the statements in Genesis were . . . made of the same beings. There were those who were made in the image of God, and there were those who were made from the dust of the earth and from one of Adam’s ribs. For where you have the words, “He made them male and female,” it is about those made in the image (Gen 1:27). But where it says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother,” and the rest, it is not speaking of those made in the image, for at some time or other after those, “The Lord God formed the man, by taking dust from the earth,” and from his rib he formed the helper. Note also that in the case of those made in the image it does not speak of man and woman, but of “male and female.” We have also observed this in the Hebrew language. . . . For it is never said that woman was made in the image, nor man, for that matter, but those who are superior, namely male, and second, female. Furthermore, if a man leaves father and mother, he clings not to the female, but to his wife and, since man and woman are one in flesh, they become one flesh.247

This distinction between the significance of the different verbs used to describe the origin of human beings is basic to Origen’s understanding of creation. References to it occur repeatedly in his writings.248

There is a strong influence from the Jewish philosopher Philo in this aspect of Origen’s understanding of creation. Philo had noticed the distinction between the verbs used in Genesis 1:26–27 and 2:7 and asserted that the person formed in Genesis 2:7 was not the same as the one mentioned in Genesis 1:26. He referred to them as two races, the first made after the divine image and the second formed from earth. The first was immaterial, perceptible only by the intellect, sometimes, referred to as mind, and the second was physical, perceptible by the senses, made from earth, and named Adam, which means earth.249

Origen believed that Moses had been aware that it is not the body of flesh formed from the dust of the earth described in Genesis 2 that bears the image of God, but the immaterial soul of the human being that he believed was described in Genesis 1. He also believed that the Apostle Paul knew this distinction and considered it to be a foundation of Paul’s teaching about human salvation, as he makes clear in a passage in the Dialogue with Heraclides, where he says, “In creation, therefore, the human being first created was the one in the image (Gen. 1.26) in whom is nothing material. For what is made in the image is not made from matter.” This creation of humanity did not involve the use of dust from the earth as the second did. He believed that Paul, as well as Moses knew that being in God’s image meant being “nonmaterial.” Because in Colossians 3:9–11 Paul speaks of putting off “the old human nature” and putting on “the new” which is “being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”250 Origen’s use of Paul’s words from Colossians hints at the close relationship he perceived between the action of God in creation and his action in salvation brought about in the incarnation, which will be discussed later.

Origen noticed not only that there is a difference in the verbs that are used in the account of the creation of human beings in Genesis, but also that a special noun is sometimes used in the New Testament to refer to the creation of the material world. It is the Greek noun katabolē, which literally means a “throwing down.” The word had two normal uses in Greek literature: it could be used for the sowing of seed in which the “throwing down” implication of the word is obvious, or for the laying of a foundation, which highlights its connotation of the “beginning” of something. The word appears eleven times in the New Testament, nine times being used in conjunction with the term “world,” once where “world” is implied, and once in reference to human reproduction.251 When it is used of the world in the New Testament most English translations render it “the foundation of the world.” It appears most frequently in Origen’s writings in quotations of passages from the New Testament—primarily Matthew 13:35 (which quotes Psalm 77:2), Matthew 25:34, and Ephesians 1:4—where he draws no attention to the appearance of the word at all.252 He sometimes equates the word with “beginning” and makes no comment about it. For example, in his first homily on Psalm 77 he quotes the words from verse 2 as they appear in the psalm, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter problems from the beginning,” and then he adds, “or ‘from the foundation of the world’.”253 The latter phrase comes from the way the verse is quoted in Matthew 13:35.

What did Origen understand the phrase the “throwing down of the world” to mean? There is only one reliable passage where he discusses his understanding of this phrase in his preserved works that sheds light on that question.254 It is found in his Commentary on John where he discusses Jesus’ statement in John 8:23, “You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world.” Origen sees the key to this statement to lie in the words “below” and “above.”

He first compares this statement of Jesus with the statement Jesus makes in John 3:31, where he contrasts the one who “comes from above” and the one who is “of the earth” by asking if being “of the earth” is the equivalent of “being from below.” Next he asks if being “from below” and being “of this world” are the same, and whether to be “of the earth” differs from being “of this world.” He brings this segment of his investigation to a close by suggesting that his hearers or readers inquire what the statements, “I am from above,” and “I am not of this world” mean, “[f]or” he adds, “it is worthwhile to see what it is to be ‘from above,’ and what it is to be ‘not of this world.’”255 He next suggests for consideration whether one who originates “from material substance . . . is not of the earth because” of forsaking “the better things.” Such a person, he adds, “is also from below.” Then he distinguishes being from “below” from being “of the earth” by the fact that the term “below” can refer to a way of thinking as well as to a place.256 We should note here that this is not a statement about an original fall of souls from the heavenly realm that occurred before the earth was created. This is a statement about the condition that people experience in life because of choosing to live with their thoughts focused on material realities rather than on immaterial ones. The person who is “from below” is defined as one who is a “citizen of things that are seen, and pass away, and are temporary.”257 The Savior, however, after descending into “the lowest parts of the earth” then “ascended above all the heavens and prepared a way for those . . . who have genuinely become his disciples that leads to the things that are above all the heavens, that is to the things that are incorporeal.”258 Here Origen shows clearly that “above” in his thinking is identified with realities that are immaterial, which means that “below” indicates those realities that are material.259

Origen then switches to contrasting this perceptible world consisting “of heaven and earth” with what he calls “another world in which there are things that are not seen.”260 This may be a reference to the world of Genesis 1, which the Septuagint translation refers to as “invisible.”261 Origen describes it as “in its entirety . . . an invisible world, a world which is not seen, and an intelligible world on whose appearance and beauty the pure in heart will look.”262 This seems to be referring to that “world” that Origen earlier located in God’s Logos/Wisdom.263 His immediately following remarks suggest this strongly, where he raises the question of whether the first-born of creation, identified in Colossians 1:15 with Christ, might be a world. Based on the fact, as he understood it at least, that Christ contains “the principles of absolutely everything according to which all things made by God in Wisdom have come to be,” Christ would then “also be a ‘world.’” This world, Origen continues, surpasses “the world of sense perception,” not being constituted on a material basis but on its participation in the Wisdom or Logos “which set matter in order.”264

It is in this context of his discussion of the concepts “above” and “below” with their identifications with immateriality and materiality that Origen refers to the term “the throwing down of the world.” The invisible, immaterial world “has nothing below,” he asserts, as the visible, material world “has nothing above.” “For how,” he asks, “can this world, whose creation is a throwing down, have anything above? . . . The whole world . . . and the things in it are included in the ‘throwing down.’” He then adds that true disciples of Jesus, however, are “outside the throwing down of the world in its entirety.”265 The implication that Origen draws from the phrase “throwing down of the world” is that this material world belongs to a lower order than the immaterial one. The concept “down” in the term joins it with what is “below” as opposed to what is “above.” There is no suggestion in his discussion that he understood the term to mean that the material world had been created to serve as a place of instructional punishment for souls that had fallen away from the world “above,” as his detractors claimed.266

There is an additional text in Greek in the On Prayer that, while not adding any information about Origen’s understanding of the term “throwing down,” does show that, as we saw above, Origen believed that everything that happened in the whole creative process was foreknown,267 planned, and foreordained by God,268 and that there were no surprises such as independently existing rational beings using their free will to turn away from God and thereby causing the necessity for God to create the physical world.269

God’s foreknowledge is a key concept in Origen’s teaching about creation. He insists that God knew in advance everything that would come about in the process of creation and that he knows everything that will occur into the ages of the ages, and that nothing has happened or will happen outside that foreknowledge.

In summary, Origen’s understanding of creation, in my view, at least, began with the plan for creation in God’s mind. It is this plan that is described in the first chapter of Genesis, as Origen seems to have understood it. He thought of God’s mind as his Logos or Wisdom and, in his own thought at least, he could extrapolate Logos or Wisdom from the person of God and conceive of it as a separate existing entity with a separate function, but always one with and in harmony with God. This plan of creation, however, involved not only the things that would be made in the process of giving substantial existence to the various parts of the plan; it also included God’s foreknowledge of everything that would happen in the created world of humanity from its beginning to its end. The concepts in this plan were then given substantial existence, described, in Origen’s understanding it seems, in the second chapter of Genesis, where the focus is on the creation of and provision for humanity.

Incarnation

In 1953 the German New Testament scholar Hans Conzelmann published a game-changing study of the Gospel of Luke with the striking title Die Mitte der Zeit (The Middle of Time).270 Starting with Jesus’ statement in Luke 4:23, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears,” he argued that Luke saw Christ as “the centre of the story of salvation” and that Christ’s ministry marked the dividing line between the first epoch in that story, that of Israel, and the third, the epoch of the church.271

Long before Hans Conzelmann, Origen had set Christ in the center of the story of salvation, though in a somewhat different way than Conzelmann did. In this section we will look at how Origen presents Christ as the centerpiece of the story of salvation. In his Commentary on the Song of Songs he places Christ between the Hebrew church, stretching from the beginning of the Old Testament up to the rejection of Jesus, and the gentile church reaching from that time till the fullness of the gentiles has entered.272

Origen’s biblical theology is a theology of the incarnation of the Son of God. It is patterned after the prologue to John’s Gospel in John 1:1–18 and the Pauline kenosis (emptying) passage in Philippians 2:6–11. Statements from these two passages are woven into the texture of how he perceived and presented Christ. He begins, as do both the Johannine and Pauline passages, with Christ’s divine nature. When he interprets Jesus’ words in John 8:42, “I have proceeded from God and have come; for I did not come on my own, but he sent me,” he wonders if these words might be equivalent to the prophet Micah’s statement, “The Lord proceeds from his place.” He reasons as follows: “[W]hen the Son is in the Father, ‘being in the form of God’ before he ‘empties himself,’ God is his place, as it were.” He then suggests that if one were to consider Christ “before he has ‘emptied himself,’” he would see him “in the essential form of God” and, in the prophet’s words, as “the Lord who has not yet proceeded from his place.” If one compares this understanding of the nature of Christ, he argues, with the picture of Christ seen after he “had taken up ‘the form of a servant’ and had ‘emptied himself,’” one can “understand how the Son has proceeded from God and has come to us, and has come out, as it were, of the one who sent him.”273 He uses the same Pauline statements in relation to the transfiguration of Jesus when he suggests that Jesus appeared to the three disciples on the mountain “‘in the form of God’ in which he existed long ago” but to those waiting at the foot of the mountain he was seen “‘in the form of a servant’.”274

This divine Son of God, whose place was with God or in God, entered human existence by being born of a virgin. Origen takes note of the pre-existence of the Son by stating that his birth was not the passing from non-existence to existence, as the birth of all other human beings, but, in the Pauline words of Philippians 2, was “a passage from being ‘in the form of God’ to ‘taking up’ the ‘form of a servant.’”275 This humiliation of the divine Son involved the taking on of true human flesh with its weaknesses, limitations, and especially its mortality. He did not have flesh “as an apparition, but in truth,” Origen asserts.276 The humiliation was necessary, among other reasons, he believed, because human beings cannot begin their knowledge of Christ with his divinity; they must begin with his humanity and mortality.277

While Origen is aware that various aspects of Christ’s humanity appear in the Gospels in their presentation of Christ’s ministry, it is in the events of Christ’s final days that he sees the humanity of Christ most manifest.278 He looks at the events of the final days of Christ’s life through the lens provided by Psalm 2, which speaks of the kings of the earth gathered against the Lord’s anointed one. It is especially in the context of Christ praying in Gethsemane just prior to his arrest that Origen stresses the human emotions felt by Christ. In his Commentary on Matthew, he imagines Jesus praying in the presence of invisible spiritual enemies arrayed against him.279 He first quotes Matthew’s words, “And taking Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sad and distressed.”280 Then he adds, “Or as Mark put it, ‘He began to be afraid and distressed.’”281 He ponders “if perhaps Jesus saw something especially mysterious in the time prior to his suffering when he went and wanted to pray.” “Perhaps,” he suggests, “he saw ‘the kings and princes of the earth’ standing gathered ‘together against the Lord and against’ himself, ‘his Christ’.282 And because those multitudes were drawn up, as it were, and were mighty in evil, ‘he began to be sad and distressed’ or even ‘afraid’.”283 In his Commentary on John Origen cites the same verse from Psalm 2 in relation to Jesus praying in Gethsemane, but he adds some words from Psalm 26 and says that this psalm prophesies of the Savior “at the time of his passion, and also of the evil one, with all his forces, when he struggles against him.”284 While Origen attributes human emotions to Jesus in these words, he also is careful to point out that this did not affect his divine nature. It was because of this, he asserts, that Matthew says, “He began to be sad and distressed,” for Jesus experienced only the beginning of these emotions. He began to be sad and distressed because of his human disposition, but he experienced only their beginnings because of his divine nature which was removed from such passions.285 Origen believes that the divine, impassable nature of Christ remains distinct from his human nature. “It is true to say,” he asserts, “that he is human and that he is not human. He is human insofar as he is capable of death, not human insofar as he is more divine than human.”286 Both natures, nevertheless, are real and are, in some mysterious sense, united much as a husband and wife are said to be one flesh, or the person joined to the Lord is said to be one spirit.287 “For this man Jesus,” he says, “becomes one with the Logos more than all of those who become ‘one spirit’ with him because they are joined ‘to the Lord.’”288

The work Christ had come to perform demanded that he be human. “Without the human being,” Origen says, “we would have received no benefit from the Word, if he had remained God as he was in the beginning with the Father, and not taken up the human being who was first of all humans, and more precious than all, and purer than all, being able to receive him.”289 In a striking comment on Revelation 19:11–13, where John sees the triumphant Word of God mounted on a white horse, Origen says the Word is not naked but “is clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood, since the Word who became flesh, and died because he became flesh, is invested with traces of that passion, since his blood also was poured forth upon the earth when the soldier pierced his side. For, perhaps,” he continues, “even if in some way we attain the most sublime and highest contemplation of the Word and of the truth, we shall not forget completely that we were introduced to him by his coming in our body.”290

Christ’s work was to rescue humanity from sin. Like the New Testament with its various ways of stating this, but all involving the death of Christ, Origen used different images to depict how Christ’s death was effectual to rescue humanity. All his images, however, share in the general concept that Christ’s death was a victory over hostile Satanic powers. In one passage he blends the imagery of the sacrifice of a lamb that John the Baptist had used291 with Isaiah 53:7 and says. “[T]he fact that he became a servant was moderate indeed compared to the fact that he became an innocent little lamb . . . . For the Lamb of God became as an innocent little lamb led to be slaughtered that he might take away ‘the sin of the world.’”292 In connection with this imagery Origen refers to the death of Christ as a “drug” that “has made the powers which war against the human race ineffectual.” Using the imagery of conflict drawn from Paul, he speaks of Christ disarming and triumphing over these powers on the cross.293 This leads him to say, “[If] anyone is ashamed of the cross of Christ, he is ashamed of the economy of salvation . . . . And the one who believes and has come to know these things must also ‘boast in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ . . .”294 The crucifixion of Jesus, he asserts, is a necessary part of the Christian preaching about him. “It is a defective message,” he says, “to preach him and be silent about his cross. And it does not seem to me,” he adds, “to be as defective to say that Jesus is the Christ while being silent about some of his other prodigious works as being silent about the fact that he has been crucified.”295 Origen believed that the cross of Jesus with its emphasis on the mortality of Jesus, stood at the center of salvation.

Origen also believed that the saving efficacy of the cross was retrospective as well as present and futuristic. When John the Baptist identified Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,”296 Origen understood “the sin of the world” to mean of the whole world.297 John does not say, Origen points out, basing his comment it seems on the present tense participle in John 1:29, “[H]e who will take it away but is not already also taking it away; and he does not say he who took it away but is not also still taking it away. For the ‘taking away’ affects each one in the world until sin be removed from all the world.”298 “[T]he religion of the ancients,” Origen says, referring it seems to the Hebrew saints such as those listed in Hebrews 11, “was . . . acceptable to God by its . . . faith in, and expectation of Christ.”299 When he is identifying the “scattered children of God” of John 11:52 for whom Jesus would also die, Origen suggests that they might be “those who were already righteous in God when these words were spoken, being either the patriarchs, or the prophets, or some other elect people of God who had previously died.”300

There are two complimentary, but somewhat mysterious passages in the Commentary on Matthew that suggest Origen’s understanding of the all-embracing power of the redemptive effect of the crucifixion of Jesus. The first concerns the place of the crucifixion. Origen says he knows a tradition “that the body of Adam, the first man, was buried there where Christ was crucified.” The significance of this, he believed was that “the father of all humanity” might receive “the remission of sins” and obtain “the benefit of the resurrection.”301 The other passage involves the time that Jesus’ died. Origen identifies the human being made in the image of God on the sixth day of creation—he even suggests that this creation occurred at the sixth hour—with the man crucified at the sixth hour.302 Origen believed that Adam, as the father of humanity, was somehow present in the crucified Christ and consequently all humanity, past as well as future, was beneficiary of the redemptive work accomplished in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

The unity of the divine and human in Christ becomes most important to Origen in the final glorification of Christ, for it was the physical Jesus, he believes, who was “highly exalted” and ascended to heaven as one with the divine Word (Logos). The Logos who, as John says, was “with God” in the beginning and “was God”303 was incapable of being exalted any higher. It was in consequence of his death that Jesus was highly exalted. Origen is not, however, thinking of some kind of gnostic abandonment of the physical Jesus on the cross by the divine nature, because it was the divine Son who emptied himself and took up the form of a servant, becoming the lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. The consequent exaltation involved both the spirit and the body, “and,” he adds, “it was the body that he received from the power of the most high and from the virgin for performing a ministry of this kind.”304

Meditating on Christ’s passion and his subsequent ascension to the Father, Origen states that after the conquest of his enemies by his passion—described by Origen as a military victory—Christ needed to be cleansed from these deeds of valor by the Father. This, he thinks, is why he forbid Mary to touch him at the tomb. It is quite clear that he is thinking of the physical body of Jesus needing cleansing. He describes this ascent to the Father almost lyrically, drawing on phrases and images from the Psalms and the Prophets.

When he goes, however, bearing victory and trophies, with the body which arose from the dead (for how else are we to understand, “I have not yet ascended to my Father”? and, “But I am going to my Father”?) then certain powers say, “Who is this that is coming from Edom, with scarlet garments from Bosra, so beautiful”? And those escorting him say to those stationed at the gates of heaven, ‘“Lift up your gates, and the king of glory will come in.”

And they inquire further, as it were, . . . when they see his blood-stained right hand and his whole body filled with the works of prowess: “Why is your apparel red and your garments like the residue of a full wine-vat which has been trampled down”? To which he answers, “I have crushed them in pieces.”

It is truly for these reasons that he needed to wash “his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape.” For after he took our infirmities and bore our diseases, and after he took away the sin of the whole world, . . . perhaps then he received the baptism which is greater than any which could be imagined by men, concerning which I think he said, “And I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and how distressed I am until it be accomplished.” . . .

But since . . . after he had performed manly deeds against his adversaries he needed to wash “his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of grapes,” he went up to the Father, the husbandman of the true vine, that, having washed there after the ascent to the height when he led captivity captive, he might descend bearing various gifts.305

It is the body of the physical Jesus still stained with the blood of his passion that is the subject of this discussion. Origen believed that the physical body of Jesus ascended into the New Jerusalem after the resurrection. When he treats the passage about Jesus’ jubilant triumphal entry into Jerusalem in his Commentary on Matthew, his description of the entry into Jerusalem morphs into the welcome into the New Jerusalem given to the physical Jesus by the heavenly powers much like his description in the Commentary on John. Again, it is the physical nature of the ascending Christ that is marked as the object of astonishment among the heavenly powers. Jesus “enters the true Jerusalem” Origen says. “And the heavenly powers, referred to as ‘the whole city,’ are astonished, and ask, Who is this? This resembles what is prophesied in the twenty-third Psalm,” he says, “concerning the ascension of the Saviour and the astonishment of the heavenly powers at the new sight of his physical vehicle.”306

By blending Johannine and Pauline understandings of the nature of Christ with passages from Isaiah, the Twelve Prophets, and the Psalms, Origen understood Christ to be the divine Son of God embodied in the flesh of the human Jesus of Nazareth. While there were certainly differences between these two natures, which were most evident in the final events of the story of Jesus involving his death and resurrection, the two natures were nevertheless one. Each experienced aspects of the other which were mutually foreign to their individual natures.

Consummation

In his early Alexandrian work, On First Principles, Origen describes the kind of eschatological thinking that was prevalent among many in the church. He notes that different people have different ideas about what the good life is, even in this life. Some think it consists of physical pleasure, others of public service, and still others of learning. He says that such diversity also exists in the conceptions of Christians about the life to come. Some, following the letter of Scripture or, more precisely, “their own desires and lusts,” think the future holds promise of physical pleasure, and want the post-resurrection body to consist of flesh capable of eating, drinking, and doing everything that the physical body does. They imagine that in the resurrected life there will be marriages, child-birth, and “the rebuilding of the earthly city of Jerusalem” from the “precious stones” listed in Revelation 21, and that they will be served and made wealthy by the peoples listed in Isaiah 60 and 61. They also quote Jesus’ statement in Matthew 26:49, made at the institution of the Lord’s supper, about drinking wine again with the disciples in the “Father’s kingdom,” and the beatitude in Luke 6:21 and Matthew 5:6 about those being filled who now are hungry and thirsty. They think, furthermore, that they will occupy positions of political authority based on Jesus’ statement in Luke 19:19. They anticipate, in other words, a future existence that, in most respects, replicates this present life except that their circumstances will be greatly improved.

Origen responds to this view of the consummation in the On First Principles by presenting what he calls the view held by people who accept “the interpretation of Scriptures in accordance with the sense of the apostles.” Such people, indeed, anticipate an eschatological eating, but of “the bread of life,” not bread made from flour. They will also drink, but of the wine served by Wisdom at her banquet described in Proverbs 9:2–5. Such food will restore the human being to “the image and likeness of God” described in Genesis 1:26. Those who had begun the Christian way but were not yet sufficiently instructed will have their education completed “in that Jerusalem, the city of saints,” where they will be formed into an “elect and precious” “living stone” as indicated in 1 Peter 2:4–5.307

What positive concept of the future life of the redeemed did Origen think Scripture presented? He understands Jesus’ words, “I am not of this world” (John 17:14, 16) to indicate the existence of another world besides this present visible world. He asserts that it is difficult to describe this other world because of the concept among Greek philosophers of a bodiless world of “ideas.” He is adamant that Christians do not mean a world that exists only in the imagination or in thoughts when they speak of another world. This other world is “something more glorious and splendid than this present world.”308

In his earlier Commentary on Genesis Origen had discussed the use of homonyms in Scripture, that is, words that have more than one meaning. He notes there that “world” is one such word in Scripture.309 It is true in current English as well that the term “world” has several possible meanings. We may mean the physical earth when we speak of the world, or we may use it in a political sense to mean nations when we speak of world leaders, or we may use it in such a narrow sense as the personal circumstances of an individual when we ask, for example, “How are things in your world?”

In On First Principles Origen applies this understanding of “world” as a homonym by discussing different meanings of the term “world” in relation to Jesus’ statement that he is not of this “world.”310 He says that “some” use the term world to designate the universe consisting of heaven and earth. Within this realm, “world” refers to the celestial bodies such as the sun or moon, called “wanderers,” that is, planets (planētas), along with the sphere of heavenly bodies called non-wandering (aplanē). This sphere of non-wandering heavenly bodies was considered to encompass that of the wandering bodies. This division and description of the heavenly bodies was the prevailing scientific view of the universe in Origen’s time. It was the view of Ptolemy, the important second-century A.D. Alexandrian astronomer.311 Origen used various scriptural images to identify it with the final destination of the saints. The sphere of non-wandering bodies does not pass away, he thought, because it “has not admitted any causes of corruption.”312 This, he suggests, is the world of the saints described in 2 Corinthians 4:18—5:1. This “eternal house” was “not made with hands” and, therefore, is not seen, in contra-distinction to everything in the visible, material world described in Isaiah 66:2 as made by God’s hand. Origen is careful, however, to emphasize that “not seen” is not the equivalent of “invisible” because the latter refers to what does not have a nature capable of being seen, that is, it lacks a material body.313 The things Paul refers to as “not seen,” Origen asserts, “possess a nature that is able to be seen, but . . . have . . . not yet been seen by those to whom they are promised.”314 This, Origen says, is what “they” consider in Scripture to be called “the good land and the land of the living.” While Origen presents this in On First Principles as the view of “some,” which leaves it ambiguous as to whether he too embraced the view that this was what Jesus meant when he said “I am not of this world” and pointed to another heavenly world elsewhere, his discussions of the subject in his later works suggest that this view, either in whole or in part, was important, at least, to the view that he held of the future world.

In his later works Origen tends to give more attention to the literal sense of the scriptural text, without abandoning the view that the text could, in addition, contain a hidden, spiritual meaning. In his discussion of Matthew 24:9–24, for example, he begins by saying, “This text is clear on its own without any explanation because the disciples of Christ have often been delivered ‘to tribulations’ and killed because of the Word and ‘hated by the nations’ because of Christ.” His close contact with persecutions and martyrdoms since his childhood must inform his understanding of this passage, though he does not mention them. He objects to the idea that this delivery of Christians to tribulations and martyrdom is to occur only after nations and kingdoms have risen up in war against one another and says, “[E]ven before these things happen Christians have been delivered ‘to tribulations’ and, because they give testimony to the truth, they have been killed and ‘hated by all nations’ with whom they have lived.” He brings this discussion around to where he can point out that people who experience catastrophes are prone to search for scapegoats on whom they can hang the blame for the catastrophes. He gives the specific example of an earthquake that had occurred in his time when the general population had fastened the blame on Christians and consequently “churches were persecuted and burned.” He then notes Jesus’ closing statement in the passage, about the gospel being preached to all nations prior to the final consummation, and argues that this has not yet occurred. He follows this with a series of assertions introduced by the interesting phrase, “not yet.” “Not yet have there been many betrayers of the church, and not yet have many ‘false prophets’ appeared. . . . So too, not yet have they been ‘hated’ by ‘all races’ . . . , so also not yet has the ‘Gospel of the kingdom’ been preached ‘in all the world.’” That little phrase implies, of course, the anticipation that what has been said will occur sometime in the future. He then introduces a short moral application of the passage with the words, “We have explained these words in accord with the simple tradition,” and suggests that there may be a “moral sense” in the passage as well, which he then proceeds to set forth.315

In the following paragraphs I will set forth what I consider to be Origen’s later thoughts on the consummation. Origen’s understanding of the consummation, or of eschatology, seems to have developed somewhat, at least, from his earlier Alexandrian works to his later Caesarean works. Vogt argued that there is a perceptible shifting of Origen’s eschatological views in his later works, notably the Commentary on Matthew and the Contra Celsum, from his early works such as the On First Principles, and in an earlier publication I expressed my agreement with Vogt’s views, which I still affirm.316 In his later thought, exemplified especially in the two works mentioned above plus the later books of the Commentary on John, and the twenty-nine Homilies on the Psalms discovered in Munich in 2012, there appears to be a rethinking of certain aspects, at least, of eschatology and the use of biblical concepts and imagery to express it. In this reconception of his eschatological views Origen draws on scriptural images, which he often assimilates to one another: the Sabbath rest following the six days of creation as presented in Hebrews 3–4 joined with inheriting the land in Matthew 5:5; the exodus, including the celebration of the Passover and other festive days, coupled with the entry into the city of God discussed in Hebrews 12:22–23. We will look at how Origen interprets these images eschatologically.

Entering God’s Rest and Inheriting the Land

The author of Hebrews317 has a fascinating exegetical argument in chapters 3–4 of the treatise based on Psalm 95:7–11. There the Psalmist refers to the rebellion of the Israelites against the Lord at Meribah because they had no water. Their lack of faith in the Lord caused the Lord to swear, “They shall not enter my rest.” The author of Hebrews takes the words of the psalm, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. . . ,” to mean that the promise of entering God’s “rest” is still open “today” because the Israelites were not allowed to enter it. He denies that the attainment of this rest was realized when Joshua lead the Israelites into the land of Canaan.318 The author of Hebrews understands the “rest” mentioned to refer to God’s resting on the seventh day when he ceased his work after the six days of creation.319 He concludes his argument with the statement, “Therefore, a Sabbath observance remains for the people of God.”

These two chapters in Hebrews provide some key concepts that Origen applied to eschatology in his later life. He reads the text of these two chapters literally. The two chapters are already, of course, a figurative reading of Numbers 14:20–23 based on the interpretation given to this event in Psalm 95:7–11. The “promised ‘rest’” in Hebrews 3–4, as Attridge points out, “is not the earthly land of Canaan but a heavenly reality, which God entered upon the completion of creation.”320 Origen accepts this idea literally and uses it for some of his understanding of the consummation.

The philosopher Celsus had written an attack on Christianity in the second century in which he alleged that Christians say they will go “to another earth, better than this one,” and that they got this idea from the Greek poet Homer and the Greek philosopher Plato. Origen responds that, to the contrary, the Greeks got their ideas from Moses. Moses, he claimed, was far earlier than the Greeks, and he had “taught that God promised a pure land, which was ‘good and large, flowing with milk and honey,’ to those who lived in accordance with His law.”321 This promised land, Origen goes on to argue, could not refer to the land of Judea into which Joshua had led the Israelites because of the curse God pronounced on the earth as a result of Adam’s sin in Genesis 3. That curse included the entire earth and Judea is a part of the earth that was cursed. Therefore, he reasoned, the promise made by God in Exodus 3:8 about a “land good and large, flowing with milk and honey” cannot be understood to have reference to the land of Judea.

But, if not Judea, to what, then, does the promise in Exodus 3:8 refer? Origen believes that Paul, whom he believed to be the author of Hebrews and to have had apostolic insight into the meaning of the Scriptures, is interpreting this promise about the land in Exodus when he says in Hebrews 12:22, “But you have come to mount Sion and to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, and to an innumerable company of angels.” Origen then appeals to the prophets to confirm that his interpretation of the good land promised by Moses is true. “All the prophets,” he says, “teach that there will be a return to Jerusalem for those who have gone astray and fallen from it, and, in general, that they will be restored to what is called the place and city of God by the one who says ‘His place is in holy peace,’ and who affirms that ‘Great is the Lord, and much to be praised in the city of our God, in his holy mountain, a well-rooted joy of all the earth.’”322

Origen did not believe that the prophets were speaking of a future return to the Jerusalem located in Judea when they spoke in this way, but thought they were referring to a heavenly city not located on this earth.

Origen’s interpretation of Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question about what the disciples would receive as a result of following him points to this same understanding. His interpretation goes well beyond Jesus’ response that the disciples would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus says, in his answer to Peter, that this will occur in “the regeneration” (Matt 19:28). Origen identifies this “regeneration” as “a new coming to be, when a new heaven and a new earth are created for those who have renewed themselves, and a new covenant is delivered along with its cup.”323 He proceeds to discuss the “washing of regeneration” mentioned by Paul as the necessary precursor of the end-time regeneration. The former occurs in water; the latter in fire and Spirit. Those who experience the latter are conformed to the body of Christ’s glory and sit with the glorified Christ on twelve thrones. As he concludes his discussion of this subject Origen refers to Jesus’ response to Peter about receiving fields and houses more numerous than those forsaken. He locates these fields and houses “in that ‘rest’ which lies in the divine paradise and the city of God, of which ‘glorious things were spoken,’ and ‘in’ whose ‘fortifications God is known when he assists it.’ Consequently,” he continues, “one can say to those who inherit houses there, ‘Just as we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God,’ of which it is said, ‘Inspect its fortifications.’ For people such as this, it is blessed to inherit eternal life. They possess as their inheritance large fields and trees cared for by God, plus houses made of living stones in which ‘everyone who has left brothers or sisters’ and the other things mentioned will rest.”324 Origen also considered the “bright cloud” that overshadowed the three disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17 to be “an example of the coming rest.”325

He gives a slight hint of what that future rest might consist when he says in a homily on Psalm 36 (37) that the psalm verse that says, “the meek will inherit the land” “supplements what has been written” in the beatitudes “in the Gospel, for not only will the meek inherit the land, but they will also ‘delight in an abundance of peace.’”326 He then seems to contrast this understanding of the reward of the saints with that he had described as hoped for by many Christians in his early On First Principles, where he referred to expectations of physical pleasures in the heavenly life. He says,

On the one hand, let the people who are bodily, earthly, and fleshly delight in strong drinks and in foods that are abolished in the belly which will be abolished,327 although they never want to abolish it, but on the other hand let the saints take delight, “in an abundance of peace” instead of in these delicacies which they have despised. For peace is a luxury and it is not a small peace but an abundance of peace that the Word promises will exist in the days of Christ.328

Origen did not conceive of this land and city to be a purely intellectual or spiritual idea. While he certainly did not think of them in the physical way that many early Christians did, as described at the beginning of this section, he did believe that there is some kind of perceptible substance to this land and city. Origen passes over giving an explanation of the “good land” and “the city of God” in his argument with Celsus, saying that he was postponing such explanations for his “commentaries on the prophets.” He also notes that he had provided a partial discussion of the city of God in his expositions of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh psalms.329 His works on these two psalms, along with his commentaries on the prophets, however, have perished. He makes a passing reference to five verses about inheriting the land in Psalm 36 (37) in the Contra Celsum.330 These verses are discussed in five homilies on the psalm, four of which are among the new Greek homilies discovered in Munich in 2012, and the other in a Latin translation known for some time.

I referred to his discussion of Psalm 36:11 in the preceding paragraph. In his discussion of Psalm 36:22, “[T]hose who bless him will inherit the land, but those who curse him will be destroyed,” he points out that it will be a land of good things, and describes it as “the good land” and the “land which flows with milk and honey,” connecting the promise with the Mosaic descriptions of the land promised to the Hebrews.331 In the conclusion of this homily he also connects the second part of the verse about those cursing God being destroyed with the parable of Jesus in Matthew 25, which is one of Jesus’ eschatological parables.332

In discussing Psalm 37:9, “Those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land,” Origen introduces the concept of another earth which appears, at least, to be a physical earth, as he describes the land to be inherited.

It is some other land which some call counter-earth. That is what the Scriptures call the good land, flowing with milk and honey, which the Savior promises to the meek, saying, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” This333 is not the earth, but the dry land, just as, again in relation to a certain heaven, this is not heaven, but the “firmament.” For God knows the difference between the firmament and heaven . . . , and the difference between the dry land and earth. We are hastening, therefore to the promise of the true heaven, not what is named heaven, and to the truth of the firmament; not to what is called earth, but the truth of what the dry land is.334

The creation story in Genesis 1 furnishes the framework for this interpretation. There heaven and earth are said to be created in Genesis 1:1, then in Genesis 1:6–7 the firmament, that is a solid body335 to separate the waters, is created and called heaven, and in Genesis 1:9–10 the dry land is said to appear and is called earth. The “true heaven” and “the truth of what the dry land is” are the bodies created in Genesis 1:1. In his comment on Psalm 37:9 Origen removes the Christian hope from this material universe, that is, from the firmament and the dry land. The Christian hope, he says, is located in “some other land,” which some call “counter-earth.”336

The idea of a counter-earth appears to have been something that the Pythagoreans had first suggested.337 Eusebius reports that “Philolaus the Pythagorean,” explaining the structure of the solar system, “says that fire is in the center, for this is the hearth of the universe. Second comes the counter-earth, and third the inhabited earth.” Philolaus then says that the earth that is inhabited “lies opposite to and moves around the counter-earth, which is also why those on this earth do not see those on that one.”338 Origen may mean Clement of Alexandria, his earlier Christian contemporary, when he refers to “some” who call the land to be inherited by the saints counter-earth. Clement also attributes the idea of a counter-earth to the Pythagoreans. He then identifies the concept as the “chosen land” mentioned in Jeremiah 3:19 and says that those who inherit this land will reign over the earth.339 It is not possible from our current texts to say how important the concept of a counter-earth was to Origen’s eschatological views, or whether he himself held this view at all. It is clear, however, that he thinks of the “land” of the saints to lie elsewhere than on this present earth.

Origen also makes some eschatological comments on Psalm 37:34: “And he will lift you up to inherit the land.” He interprets the verse quite literally. He suggests that this verse contains an indication of the location of the land to be inherited by the saints, and he thinks this indication is in the phrase, “[H]e will lift you up.” He quotes Ecclesiastes 5:1, “God is in heaven above, but you are on the earth below,” and concludes from this that the land of promise is above and, consequently the Psalmist says, “[H]e will lift you up to inherit the land.”340 “For,” he adds, “unless one is lifted up and ascends on high and is made heavenly, it is not possible that the inheritance of that land follow.” Assuming the firmament of Genesis 1:6–7 to be a solid body, the land of promise is thought to be located on the topside of the firmament. This is the “good land, a holy land, a spacious land, the land of the living, a land flowing with milk and honey.”341 These comments seem to assume the ancient mythical view of the universe as a tiered solid structure. This stationary view of the universe does not appear to me to be compatible with what is said above about the movement of earth and counter earth in relation to one another in the quotation from the psalm homily that is in Greek. Since the statement about the “good land” sitting on the topside of the firmament that is above the earth comes from a later Latin translation, we must question, I think, how much these remarks owe to the view of the translator.

Origen’s discussion of the saints’ inheritance of “the land” and entering into God’s “rest” shows that he certainly believed that there will be a consummation of the present world order and that there will be a subsequent life in another world order that will be a superior life. These images do not, however, give any clear indication of what he anticipated that life to be, except the negative one that it would not be a life of physical pleasure.

The City of God, the New Jerusalem

The story of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem just before his arrest and crucifixion carries symbolic overtones for Origen. Origen’s remarks are found in his comments on the story in Matthew 21, and John 12.342 I have already referred briefly to the fact that Origen’s description of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem morphs into a description of his entry into the heavenly Jerusalem.343 We shall now look in more detail at connections Origen makes between Jesus’ triumphal entry and his ascension to the heavenly city of God.

Origen gives a subjective interpretation of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the Commentary on John. There Jerusalem is taken to be the human soul which the Logos is entering; the ass on which he rides is the text of the Old Testament interpreted by the two disciples who loose it; and the colt of the ass is the New Testament.344 The association of Jerusalem with the human soul is further confirmed a little later when he is interpreting the prophecy from Zechariah 9:9–10. There the prophesied king is said to “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem” (NRSV). These words are a comfort, Origen argues, to the person who is protected from “the fiery darts of the enemy” because he has “received Jesus into his own temple.”345 This seems to be Origen’s understanding of the story at this time, but he follows it by mentioning an alternate view held by some in which the ass is regarded as Jewish believers and the colt as gentile believers. This in turn elicits a different view of Jerusalem. “Perhaps,” he says, “‘the Jerusalem which is above’ is now meant, into which the Lord will ascend conducting believers from the circumcision and from the gentiles.”346

Origen’s interpretation of the triumphal entry in John’s Gospel definitely preceded that found in the Commentary on Matthew for Origen makes a few comments on Matthew’s account in the Commentary on John and then promises a more complete treatment later when he is able to write on the Gospel according to Matthew. In the Commentary on Matthew he also looks back at the Commentary on John and says that he had examined the subject briefly when he was writing the Commentary on John.347

In the Commentary on Matthew, the Jerusalem that Jesus approaches and to which Zechariah refers in his prophecy is “the heavenly Zion which received the one who had been crucified, rather than the Zion which crucified the Lord.” This heavenly Zion is identified with that described in Hebrews 12:22 where Christians are said to “‘have drawn near to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to a myriad of angels in festal assembly,’ and again in the Epistle to the Galatians, ‘But the Jerusalem above, which is our mother, is free.’” Here the ass and the colt are referred to as believers from the Jews and the gentiles both of whom had been bound by sins and were released from this binding by Jesus’ disciples to whom he had given the power to forgive sins. What Jesus needs the ass and colt for, Origen says, is to “give them rest when he sits on them.”348 It will be noticed that in this interpretation of the triumphal entry in the Commentary on Matthew no mention is made of the subjective meaning of Jerusalem as the human soul. It is rather the eschatological heavenly Jerusalem of Hebrews 12 that Jesus approaches and he wants to give those released “rest,” another important eschatological image for Origen also drawn from the Epistle to the Hebrews (3:7—4:11). It should also be noted that the interpretation of the triumphal entry presented here is a fuller development of the view that Origen reports in the Commentary on John was held by “some.” Origen’s thought appears to have taken a more eschatological turn between his writing the Commentary on John and the Commentary on Matthew. In the later commentary there is nothing said about Jesus entering the soul; rather Jesus “enters the true Jerusalem.”

The literal entering of the earthly Jerusalem and the events that transpired concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection are important to Origen’s figurative interpretation of the heavenly city of God. Jesus had, “‘to go to Jerusalem,’” Origen says, “so that when he had suffered many things and been killed in that Jerusalem, he might produce the first fruits from the dead in the Jerusalem ‘above.’” He then interprets what he means by saying, “For so long as ‘Christ’ ‘had’ not ‘been raised from the dead . . . , and those being conformed to his death and resurrection were not raised with him, the city of God, the temple, the purifications, and the other things were being sought below.” It was necessary that Christ go to the literal Jerusalem and suffer in order to establish the things above,

so that he might be glorified by the heavenly elders who comprehend his acts of kindness, . . . and be glorified by scribes of the people who engage in Scriptures not written “with ink but” which are explained by “the Spirit of the living God,” and be killed in the Jerusalem below but, after he arose, rule on “mount Zion and in the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”349

His description of this triumphal entry leaves no question that it is the heavenly realm that Jesus enters. “And the heavenly powers,” he says, “referred to as ‘the whole city,’ are astonished, and ask, ‘Who is this? This resembles what is prophesied in the twenty-third [fourth] Psalm concerning the ascension of the Saviour and the astonishment of the heavenly powers at the new sight of his physical vehicle. . . . There are similar prophecies in Isaiah,” he adds, “about the ascent of the Saviour after the dispensation, for it is written, ‘Who is this coming from Edom, from Bosra with scarlet garments, this one who is beautiful in his robe?’ If you read through the whole passage you will be able to understand what the astonished powers say at the ascent of the Saviour’s body and the answer they are given.”350

This text suggests something more than an intellectual substance for the heavenly Jerusalem, for it is the approach of the Savior’s “physical vehicle,” that is, the physical body of Jesus, that causes the surprise of the heavenly powers. Origen expresses the same view in his Commentary on John when he discusses Jesus’ words at Judas’ departure to betray Jesus, “Now is the Son of Man glorified.”351 He argues that this statement has to be about the human Jesus, for the divine Logos could not be glorified more than he already was as the one who was in the beginning with God and was divine. It is the man Jesus, Origen insists, that is highly exalted through the passion and resurrection. By glorifying God in his death, the human Jesus “was no longer different from the Word, but was the same with him.”352

Origen’s discussions of these Scriptural images again leave his exact understanding of the nature of the eschaton frustratingly vague. They do suggest, however, that he was beginning, at least, to think in terms of some kind of substantial existence for the saints after the consummation of this present physical world.

The Celebration of Festive Days in Heaven

In John 2:13 it says, “The Passover of the Jews was near.” Origen asks why John has added the phrase “of the Jews” to identify the Passover, since no other people celebrated such a feast.

He suggests that when the Passover is not celebrated “according to the intention of the Scripture,” it is a human Passover, but when it is celebrated “in spirit and truth by those who worship God in spirit and truth” it is a divine Passover. The addition of the phrase, “of the Jews” is added, he suggests, to contrast the imminent Jewish Passover with “the divine one.” He then notes that in Exodus 12:11 the Passover is called “the Passover of the Lord.” This prompts him to ask why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5:7, “For . . . Christ our Passover is sacrificed,” and not, “Christ the Passover of the Lord is sacrificed?” He suggests an eschatological answer to this question. “[E]very feast which is truly the Lord’s,” he says, “. . . will be celebrated, not in this age nor upon the earth, but in the coming age and in heaven, when the kingdom of heaven is present.”

Origen confirms that festal days will be celebrated in the coming age by quoting the question of the Hebrew prophet Hosea, “What will you do in the days of festal assembly, and in the days of the feast of the Lord?” He further confirms the eschatological meaning of the Passover of the Lord by quoting what he considers to be Paul’s words in Hebrews 12:22–23 about the saints coming to “a festal assembly” in “the heavenly Jerusalem,” and concludes with Paul’s statement in Colossians 2:16–17 that the earthly feast days and Sabbaths are “a shadow of things to come.”

It is only the hidden, mysterious wisdom of God however, he asserts, that can show us how we will celebrate the “festival in the heavenly places of which there was a shadow among the corporeal Jews.” “It is also the task of this wisdom,” he adds, “to contemplate the things established by law concerning foods, which are symbols of the things which will maintain and strengthen our souls there.” Furthermore, the shadow-reality contrast applies not only to foods and Sabbaths, “but the feasts too are a shadow of things to come.” He concludes this discussion of the Passover of the Jews by alluding again to a heavenly celebration of the Passover in the eschaton based on Hebrews 12:22, which he considers to refer to a “third” Passover “which will be celebrated with ten thousand angels in a most perfect assembly and a most blessed exodus.”353

Origen expands the concept of the celebration of the Passover in the eschaton to include all the Jewish festal days in a homily on Numbers in which he discusses the Jewish festive days in general. He believes that if the instructions about them are taken literally they appear more as superstitions than religious observances. The Apostle Paul, however, knew, he says, that the Holy Spirit was not speaking about the rite observed literally by the Jews, and consequently said, “Let no one judge you in relation to food, or drink, or a portion of a feast day or new moon, or Sabbath. These are shadows of future things.” Origen has understood Paul’s statement in Colossians 2:16 differently than modern New Testament scholars. The phrase about a feast day in Colossians is en merei eortēs, which translated word for word means “in part of a feast.” English translations of Colossians have some such phrase as “regarding a feast.” Origen, however, sees the word “part or portion” as a more significant term in the phrase, pointing to the eschatological significance of what Paul is saying, namely that the festal days are only partially celebrated in this life. They are, in other words, only “a portion” of a feast day. This leads him to conclude, “If then the Sabbath is a shadow of future things . . . , and the new moon is a shadow of future things, certainly the other festivals are likewise shadows of future things.”354

In order to understand how the festive days are performed in the future, he asserts, one must momentarily disregard this earth with its objects known by sense perception and contemplate “how heaven and earth will pass away . . . , but a new heaven and a new earth will be brought forth. In addition,” he goes on, “remove the light of this sun from your view and give to that coming world the sevenfold light of the sun; no rather, on the authority of Scripture, grant that the Lord himself is the light.”355 He then suggests that we imagine the presence of all the angels and heavenly powers, and in the context of all these glorious beings try to conceive how the feast days can be celebrated there and “what magnitude of exaltation” will be present.356 It is only the blessed who will participate in this heavenly gathering. “Sinners,” Origen says, “are punished by not being there with the others.”357

Origen had earlier argued, as also in other texts,358 that Christians keep the festive days even in this life, but in a spiritual, not literal manner. He is now, however, pressing this forward from a spiritual to an eschatological sense, much as he had also moved the concept of the triumphal entry from a subjective entry into the soul to an eschatological ascension of the physical body of Jesus.359 Even the spiritual keeping of the festivals, he insists, is only a partial observation. This argument is based on the combination of Paul’s words in two different texts.360 He argues as follows:

For as the apostle said, “We know in part and we prophesy in part,” so it is, consequently, that we celebrate the festal day in part. But that you may know that these things are so, let us return to Paul’s own words about feast days and new moons, and see how he spoke observantly: “Let no one, therefore,” he said, “judge you in respect to food or drink or part of a feast day.” Notice carefully how he did not say “a feast day,” but “part of a feast day.” Situated in this world, we celebrate a feast day “in part,” not in its totality. For we are hindered by the burden of flesh. Even if we do not will it, we are battered by the lusts of the flesh and pierced by its cares and anxieties. “For a corruptible body,” as that most wise Wisdom says, “weighs the soul down and oppresses a mind thinking on many things.” The saints, therefore, celebrate the feast day in part in this world because they also know in part and prophesy in part. But when those things that are perfect come those things that are in part are destroyed. For just as what is in part ceases with perfect knowledge, and what is in part ceases with perfect prophecy, so too that festival which is in part ceases with the perfect festival. For a world like ours cannot grasp what is perfect, where, as we said, physical necessity brings to mind now food, now drink, now sleep. It also stirs up all kinds of anxiety over what is necessary for the present life. Without doubt, all these things interrupt the continuity of the festival of God. But when that shall come which is said of those who are restored into the holy places—if we too deserve to be of those who are so restored, who do not hunger, thirst, sleep, or labor, but are ever watchful, as the angels are said to be—when we deserve to be restored to that order, then the festival will be true and incorruptible, and Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord will be the prince, bridegroom, and lord of that festival.361

These passages about the celebration of the festivals in the heavenly realm suggest strongly that Origen did not conceive of the future life as an absorption of intelligent beings into the oneness of God.362 He speaks of being restored to the heavenly places, but not of losing individual identity. His discussion suggests that human existence in this restoration will have some similarity to the angelic powers. In the Commentary on Matthew he argues that if all things are made new in the eschaton363 then “all the truly blessed things of life there must be of a different kind.” This includes familial relationships. He argues that even memory of earthly relationships will be deleted.364 He considers terms of familial relationships used of the future life in Scripture to be homonyms. The post-resurrection life, he asserts, is discussed only figuratively in Scripture.365

In opposition to those Christians who thought, like the Sadducees had fallaciously argued, that there would be marriages in the future life as in the present life and that physical relationships would be continued, he cites Jesus’ response that, “those raised from the dead become ‘like the angels in heaven,’ and just ‘as the angels in heaven neither marry nor are married,’ so . . . also are those raised from the dead.” Origen thinks, however, that this statement of Jesus about likeness to the angels implies something more than the absence of marital relationships in the future life. He suggests that being “like the angels” also suggests a transformation of the earthly body into one that is “heavenly and luminous as are the bodies of the angels.”366

But what does Origen mean by a “heavenly and luminous” body? In his discussion of the transfiguration story in Matthew, he asserts that there is a relationship between Jesus being glorified in the resurrection and “his transformation and his face appearing ‘as the sun’” on the mountain.”367 First, we must ask, what Origen understood the three disciples to have seen on the mountain when they saw Jesus with Moses and Elijah. He makes it clear that not just anyone would have seen the three figures had they been present. He notes that the journey up the mountain took place six days after some preceding teaching of Jesus. He takes the mention of six days to be significant, suggesting that they represent the six days of the material creation related in Genesis and, Origen suggests, indicate that one who makes the trip up the mountain represents one “who transcends the affairs of the world in that he looks no longer to ‘the things that are seen’ (for these are ‘temporary’) but looks already to ‘the things that are not seen’ and only to ‘the things that are not seen’ (because these are ‘eternal’).”368 Anyone, therefore, Origen concludes, who wants Jesus to give him a private viewing of the transformation must meet these prerequisites. Otherwise his soul will be detracted by the things of the world and forced down to their level.369 Origen also suggests in this same discussion, drawing on Paul’s words in Philippians 2:6–7, that what the three disciples on the mountain saw was Jesus “‘in the form of God’ in which he existed long ago, and what those at the foot of the mountain saw was Jesus in “the ‘form of a slave.’”370 It seems clear that what Origen understood the three disciples on the mountain to have seen was not the physical body of Jesus that they had known at the foot of the mountain. The body of Jesus had been changed, and it is also suggested that the perception of the disciples had been changed. Nevertheless, Jesus had a body and the disciples recognized him as their Lord and Master with whom they had been associated below.

In another passage in which Origen discusses a similar subject, but this time by blending Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:4 and Philippians 3:21, he says that

the saints “who are in this tent” groan, “being weighed down” by the body of lowhness and do all things to be worthy of being found in the mystery of the resurrection, when God “will transform” not “the body of lowhness” that all have, but that of those who are genuinely disciples of Christ, that it might be “conformed to the body of the glory” of Christ. Again, he speaks of the transformation of a body, but not the physical body that everyone on earth has. It is the body of those disciples who have already on earth begun the process of being focused on the things of Christ. Such disciples, he anticipates, will be “‘conformed to the body of the glory’ of Christ.371

It has perhaps been noticed how often the term “body” appears in Origen’s discussions in these last few paragraphs, though his use of the word does not always have the connotations that we usually associate with that term. Origen believed that the soul always occupies a body, and that the body is always appropriate for the environment in which the soul finds itself. When the soul is on the physical earth it is enclosed in a physical body. When it is no longer on this physical earth, it will be enclosed in a body appropriate to its new environment. He illustrates this by comparing it to a newborn infant putting off the placenta when it leaves the world of the mother’s womb to enter life on earth.372 The sac in which it had been enclosed is no longer necessary or useful. In the same context he draws on 2 Corinthians 5:1–4, where Paul compares the physical body inhabited in this life to a tent that is exchanged for a house to argue that one exchanges the temporary, perishable physical body for an immortal body.373 The most important Pauline metaphor for Origen’s understanding of the spiritual body, however, is that of the continuity and discontinuity between a seed that is sown and the plant that grows from it.374 Origen does not claim to be able to describe what the spiritual body is. He is content to quote Paul’s statement that “God gives it a body as he has chosen.”375

What do Origen’s interpretation and use of these Scriptural images suggest about his understanding of the consummation in his late life? In an essay on Origen’s exegesis in the Contra Celsum, Vogt argued—on the basis of Origen’s use of Paul’s comments in Galatians 5:17 about the opposition between the flesh and the spirit in all human beings, and his words in Colossians 2:16 about celebrating a “part of a feast”—that Origen believed that the total human being consisting of body and spirit cannot celebrate a festival in body and spirit in this life. Either the body will prevail and the feast will be kept literally by eating of the prescribed foods and performing the prescribed rites, or the body will be suppressed, the literal foods and rites ignored, and a spiritual understanding of the feast will be celebrated. It is clear however, Vogt concludes, “that Origen . . . expects a celebration of the whole person, in both spirit and body, at the eschaton.”376

Vogt further suggested that in the Contra Celsum Origen, somewhat like Augustine in his Retractiones, retracted some of his early views, especially his eschatological views expressed in the Commentary on Genesis. He seems also, in my opinion, to be reconsidering the eschatological view he had expressed in the On First Principles. It seems to me that Origen works much more like an exegete of the Bible in his later life. With the exception of the Contra Celsum, which he says Ambrose coerced him to write, his late works are commentaries on the Bible: commentaries on Matthew and Luke, commentaries on the Hebrew prophets, and homilies on both the Old and New Testaments. In these commentaries he speaks about theological topics as they appear in biblical texts, and he speaks in the language of the biblical texts. He does not try to bring the varying biblical images into a system. He is content, rather, to let the images speak in their suggestive ways. This allows, among other things, for a variety of viewpoints.

The kaleidoscope of scriptural eschatological images that Origen draws on in his late works—inheriting the land, entering God’s sabbath rest, entering the New Jerusalem, and celebrating the festivals with the heavenly hosts—is far removed from the simple, unified proposition that the end will be like the beginning, which he used in his early On First Principles. He was perhaps already reconsidering this proposition in his homilies on Isaiah where he argues that the two seraphim cover God’s face and feet and indicate that the beginning and the end are both unknown to us. Human beings can know only the uncovered midsection meaning the historical time between the beginning and the end.377 This intermediate period between beginning and end is the time of human beings on the physical earth. It is also the period of the incarnation, including its preparation and anticipation in the old Scriptures and its announcement and remembrance in the new.

Questions for Discussion

1.Describe the difference Origen perceived between the creation of humanity related in Genesis 1:26 and in Genesis 2:7. What exegetical basis did he have for his view? How would you evaluate his exegesis and conclusions?

2.How do John 1:1–18 and Philippians 2:6–11 influence Origen’s understanding of Christ?

3.What do you think is the most surprising aspect of Origen’s description of the glorification of Christ after the crucifixion?

4.Which of the metaphors Origen uses to describe the future life do you find most appealing? Why?

201. See, for example, Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, lvi–lxxxviii; Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History, 70–349.

202. See, Heine, “Origen’s Alexandrian Commentary on Genesis,” 63–73; Metzler, Origenes Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung.

203. See for example, Harl, “La préexistence des âmes”; Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History; Edwards, Origen against Plato, esp. 87–122; Behr, Origen On First Principles Vol. 1, xv–lxxxviii; Bruns, Trinität und Kosmos; Ramelli, “‘Preexistence of Souls?’”

204. See for example, the three-volume study by Eugène de Faye, Origène sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée.

205. See the section, “Devote yourself to the reading of Scripture” in chapter 3 above, and Martens, Origen and Scripture.

206. Daniélou, Origen, 108–9.

207. Eusebius, H.E. 6.14.9.

208. Theophilus of Antioch, 2.10–30 (pp. 39–75).

209. See Heine, “The Testimony and Fragments,” 137.

210. HomIs 1.2; cf. 4.1; Cels 6.8.

211. Cf. ComCt 3.13.15–20, where he uses similar language of the beginning, middle, and end in discussing Wisdom 7:17–18.

212. See also Princ 1.6.1.

213. Apology 7. Pamphilus says that this quotation comes from the prologue to Origen’s books on Genesis (PG 17.544 B; St. Pamphilus Apology for Origen, trans. T. P. Scheck, FOTC 120, 42). See also Princ 1.6.1.

214. Princ 1.6.2; 2.1.3; 3.6.8. I have been unable to find this explicit statement in Origen’s works outside the On First Principles. The idea did not originate with him. Philo (On Creation 13.44) saw a conjunction between beginning and end at work in the cycle of nature whereby a plant produces fruit containing seed which is the end product of the plant, and the seed then produces a new beginning from the end. The earliest Christian use of the idea of a connection between end and beginning seems to be in The Epistle of Barnabas 6.13. Cf. also the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 18. For Jewish, and especially apocalyptic, similarities see Russell, Method & Message, 282.

215. See Heine, “The Testimonia and Fragments,” and Origenes Werke: Die Kommentierung des Buches Genesis, where these fragments are collected.

216. Cel 6.49.

217. The definite article “the” is intentionally absent. It is not in Origen’s text in the Cel, nor is it present in the text of Genesis 1:1 in either the Septuagint or the Hebrew Bible, and it is also absent in John 1:1.

218. Cels 6.50, trans Origen: Contra Celsum, 367.

219. See Cels, Preface 1, 3.

220. Cels 6.51 (Origen: Contra Celsum, 367).

221. Cels 6.19–20 (Origen: Contra Celsum, 332–33; translation modified; my emphases), See also Heine, “Testimonia and Fragments,” 127, and Princ 2.9.1 as translated by Behr, who has (correctly in my opinion) relegated the excerpt from Justinian to a footnote in Origen On First Principles, Vol. 2, 237–39.

222. See Col 1:16; Rom 1:20; 2 Cor 4:18.

223. ComJn 1.200, trans Origen: Commentary, FOTC 80, 73 (emphasis mine, translation modified).

224. FragJn 13, Origenes Werke Vierter Band, 494–95.

225. My emphasis. The Septuagint was the default version of Scripture Origen read. See Heine, “Origen and the Eternal Boundaries,” 407–8.

226. Analecta Sacra III, 30, my emphasis. See also ComJn 19.146.

227. ComJn 19.146; trans. Origen: Commentary FOTC 89, 200–201 (translation modified).

228. Modern Old Testament scholars have long noticed the division in the story in Genesis 1–4 into two separate accounts, but they have approached the issue in a very different way than Origen.

229. Gen 2:4, translated from the Septuagint.

230. ComJn 1.113–14; trans. Origen: Commentary FOTC 80, 57 (my emphasis).

231. HomGn 1.1; trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, 47 (translation modified).

232. Princ 1.4.5; trans. Origen on First Principles, Butterworth, 42; see also Princ 1.2.2; 1.4.4; and ComJn 1.244.

233. Philoc 23.8. For a similar argument, also in Greek, see PEuch 6.3, and see also Philoc 25.2, which preserves a Greek text from Book 1 of the ComRom.

234. I presented material similar to portions of the preceding in a paper for the Society of Biblical Literature program unit, “Early Exegesis of Genesis 1” led by Christoph Markschies and Volker Henning Drecoll, in 2016.

235. Hom 1 in Ps 73.4, in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 229–30 (my emphases). See Harl, “La préexistence des âmes,” 251–52, whose discussion is based on the Latin version of Rufinus.

236. See Neusner, Genesis Rabbah, 1–2, 10–11.

237. See Philo, On the Creation, chs. III–V, pp. 13–19.

238. See Origen: On First Principles, Vol. 2, 601–2, where Behr has printed the passage composed from excerpts taken from several later antagonists of Origen, which was included as a Greek text of Origen in the critical edition by Koetschau (Origenes Werke Fünfter Band: De Principiis) and translated in the English translation of Butterworth as the words of Origen (Origen On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth).

239. For others who share at least some of the main lines of the view I have sketched here see Harl, “La préexistence des âmes,” 238–48, Edwards, Origen against Plato, 89–92, Ramelli, “‘Preexistence of Souls’?” 167–81, Tzamalikos, Origen: Cosmology and Ontology of Time, 92–94, and Behr, Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, lvi–lxii.

240. See HomGn 1.12; Cels 4.74.

241. English translations, following the Hebrew text, use the verb “to create” in Gen 1:27.

242. Gen 1:26, 27.

243. Gen 2:7. See also 2:8, 15. The same is said of all animals and birds (2:19). See HomGn 1.13.

244. HomGn 1.13, trans. Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, 63, modified.

245. Jer 1:5.

246. HomJer 1.10.

247. ComMt 14.16, Commentary of Origen on Matthew. Vol. 1, 178. Origen’s comments about the different words in the Hebrew text of Genesis are correct. There is also a different Hebrew verb (meaning to form or fashion) used in Genesis 2:7 in contrast to 1:26 and 27 where verbs meaning to make and to create are used.

248. See SelPs on Ps 149:2 (PG 12.1680B); SelGn on Gen 2:15 (PG 12.97D); Pitra III, 279 on Ps 118 (119):73; HomJob Pitra II, 361–91; SelEz (PG 13.781B); ExpProv (PG 17.200B); Cels 4.37; DialHer 15–16; ComJn 13.328–30; 20.182–83, 235; FragJn 28; PEuch 28.3.

249. Allegorical Interpretation, II.2.4; II.4.9; I.28.88; I.29.90; On Creation 46.134.

250. DialHer 15.28—16.4, trans. Origen Treatise, 69–70; Colossians quotation from NRSV.

251. Philo does not use the phrase “throwing down of the world”; he uses the word primarily in reference to the sowing of seed, whether animal or plant seed.

252. See, for example, Philoc 25.4; PEuch 5.5; 6.3; SerMt 51 (Greek fragment p. 113); ComMt 15.28.

253. Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band: Die neuen Psalmenhomilien, 351. See also ibid. 356 where the term has a similar meaning, but in relation to the Mosaic legislation.

254. This text is reliable because it is preserved in the Greek manuscript tradition of the Commentary on John. In the last quarter of the fourth century Epiphanius inaugurated a malevolent attack on Origen’s teachings. He was soon joined in this by Jerome. At the beginning of the fifth century Origenism was condemned by a council held at Alexandria, and in the mid-sixth century the Second Council of Constantinople condemned Origen’s teachings. All of the translations of Origen’s works into Latin were produced in this milieu of antagonistic conflict, some by Jerome, others by Rufinus, who was not antagonistic toward Origen, but who may sometimes have misrepresented what Origen said, and one, at least, it seems by an unknown translator in the sixth century.

255. ComJn 19.127–29; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 196–97.

256. ComJn 130–33; trans. Origen: Commentary FOTC 89, 197.

257. ComJn 19.134; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 198.

258. ComJn 19.137 (See Eph 4:9–10); trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 198.

259. See ComJn 19.138–39; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 198, 199.

260. ComJn 19.146; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 200.

261. Gen 1:1.

262. ComJn 19.146; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 200–201 (translation modified).

263. See the section above, The Intelligible World.

264. ComJn 19.147; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 201 (with slight modifications). See at note 110 below in relation to Origen’s understanding of the term “world” as a homonym.

265. ComJn 19.149, 150; trans. Origen: Commentary, FOTC 89, 201, 202.

266. This was a part of Epiphanius’ accusations against Origen (See Epiphanius II, 64.4.5–8) and was perpetuated by Origen’s later enemies.

267. PEuch 6.3; trans. Origen On Prayer, 251–52.

268. See at note 33 above.

269. This is suggested in Princ 3.5.4.

270. This was later translated into English with the rather bland title, The Theology of St. Luke.

271. Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke, 170.

272. ComCant 4.1.15–16.

273. ComJn 20.152–55; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 238, modified; Mic 1:2–4: Phil 2:6–7. See also HomJer 10.7.

274. See ComMt 12.37.

275. FragMt 3; see also ComJn 1.233.

276. SerMt 92; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 700.

277. ComJn 1.107.

278. See Princ 2.6.2.

279. Cf. ComMt 13.8, 9; see also ComJn 1.192.

280. Matt 26:37.

281. Mark 14.33.

282. See Ps 2:2.

283. SerMt 90; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 698.

284. ComJn 32.296.

285. SerMt 90.

286. ComJn 10.23; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 260, translation modified.

287. See Cels 6.47; ComJn 32.325–26, and Cels 2.9.

288. ComMt 15.24; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 215.

289. ComJn 10.26; Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 261, translation modified.

290. ComJn 2.61; Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 110.

291. See John 1:29.

292. ComJn 1.233; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 81.

293. See Col 2:14–15; ComMt 12.18.

294. ComMt 12.18; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 107.

295. ComMt 12.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 107.

296. John 1:29.

297. See ComJn 6.301–5.

298 ComJn 1.234–235; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 81.

299. ComJn 2.209; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 151.

300. ComJn 28.179–83; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 329.

301. SerMt 126; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 740.

302. SerMt 134; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 748); cf. ComJn 1.108. A small Greek fragment parallel to part of this text says: “And since man came into existence on the sixth day, it is also likely that he fell on the sixth hour, and perhaps this is why he who suffered for the salvation of mankind was hanged on the sixth hour.” Mark has the fullest chronology of the crucifixion. He says that Jesus was put on the cross the third hour, and that the darkness over the land began at the sixth hour and lasted until the ninth when Jesus expired (Mark 15:23, 33–37). Matthew (27:45–49) and Luke (23:44–46) mention the time only in relation to the duration of the darkness and Jesus final breath.

303. John 1:1.

304. SerMt 50; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 2, 625–26.

305. ComJn 6.287–92; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 246–47, my italics.

306. ComMt 16.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 259, my italics; Ps (23) 24:7–10.

307. Princ 2.11.1–3; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 2, 269–73.

308. Princ 2.3.6; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, 171.

309. This text is preserved in Philoc 14.

310. There are similar discussions of “world” as a homonym in ComMt 13.20 and ComJn 6.301–5.

311 See Ptolemy’s Almagest, 327. A comparison of Origen’s argument in Philoc 23.6 with Ptolemy’s Almagest, 327 (VII.2) shows that he knew and followed Ptolemy’s description of the universe.

312. Princ 2.3.6; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, 175.

313. There is a subtle distinction between Origen’s terminology here and what he says on the texts cited above in the section on creation about things that are invisible. Here he is referring to the Greek term asōmatos, meaning incorporeal and hence lacking the physical requirements necessary to be seen; in the texts on creation he was discussing the term aoratos, which can be used to mean invisible, but which Origen is taking in the sense of “not seen,” but not in the sense of incapable of being seen.

314. Princ 2.3.6; trans. Origen On First Principles, Vol. 1, 175.

315. SerMt 39; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew Vol. 2, 600–603. The Latin translator of the SerMt tended to use the word “moral” to translate most of Origen’s descriptive terms for his exegesis (See the section, Discerning the Details in the Text in chapter 3 above).

316. Vogt, “Exegese,” 143–59; Heine, Origen: Scholarship, 238–41.

317. Origen treats the author as Paul throughout his discussions of the epistle in spite of what Eusebius says he had said about the author (see H.E. 6.25.13–14).

318. See Heb 4:8.

319. See Gen 2:2; Heb 4:4.

320. Attridge, Epistle to the Hebrews, 123.

321. See Exod 3:8.

322. For these paragraphs see Cels 7.28–29; trans. Origen Contra Celsum, 417–18, with slight modification.

323. ComMt 15.22; see Matt 19:28; Rev 21:1; Matt 26:27–29.

324. ComMt 15.25; Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 216–17; see Ps 86 (87):3; 47 (48):1, 4, 9, 14; 1 Pet 2:5.

325. ComMt 12.42; Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. I, 124.

326. This is the reading in the LXX; the NRSV, translating the Hebrew text has “abundant prosperity” instead of “peace.”

327. See 1 Cor 6:13.

328 Hom 2 on Ps 36 in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 135.

329. Cels 7.31.

330. Cels 7.29

331. See Exod 3:8, Lev 20:24, Num 3:27, and Deut 6:3.

332. Hom 3 on Ps 36 in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 155–56.

333. “This” in the present context means this physical earth.

334 Hom 2 on Ps 36 in Origenes Werke Dreizehnter Band, 132–33.

335. See HomGn 1.2.

336. This word is rare in Origen’s works. I am aware of its appearance only here in the psalm homily under discussion, and once in a fragment on Genesis 1:26 (Origenes Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung: Band 1/1, 160), plus a use of it in reference to people in Princ 2.3.6.

337. See Aristotle, De Caelo 293a (Book II.1).

338. Eusebius Werke, 15.57.

339. Clemens Alexandrinus. 5.14.139.

340 The verb “to exalt” means “to lift up.” Origen interprets the words of the verse very literally from this meaning of the verb.

341. Hom 5 on Ps 36 in Origène Homélies sur les Psaumes 36 à 38, 236–38. Cf. Princ 2.3.7.

342. ComMt 16.18ff; ComJn 10. The story is also told in Mark 11 and Luke 19. Origen did not write a commentary on Mark and that on Luke is lost. There are two short homilies on the story in Luke (HomLk 37–38) but they do not make any eschatological connections with the story nor do any of the fragments on Luke.

343. See above at the conclusion of the section on the incarnation (p. 126).

344. ComJn 10.174–79.

345. ComJn 10.204–5; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 301.

346. ComJn 10.180–82; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 296, modified; see Gal 4:26.

347. ComJn 10.191; ComMt 16.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 261; see also ComMt 16.20.

348. ComMt 16.15; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 254.

349. ComMt 12.20; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew, Vol. 1, 108; see 2 Cor 3:3; Heb 12:22.

350. ComMt 16.19; trans. Commentary of Origen on Matthew. Vol. 1, 259–60; cf. the similar description of the ascension, which also attributes the bewilderment of the heavenly powers to the physical body of Jesus ascending at notes 105 and 106 above.

351. John 13:31.

352. ComJn 32.325; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 89, 403.

353. This discussion of the Passover is based on ComJn 10.67–111; trans. Origen Commentary, FOTC 80, 270–79.

354. HomNum 23.5 (PG 12.754B); Col 2:16–17.

355. See Isa 30:26; 60:19; cf. Rev 21:23; 22:5.

356. HomNum 23.11 (PG 12.754C-D).

357. HomJer 12.3.

358. See, for example, ComJn 10.88–110; Cels 8.17.

359. See the discussion above at pages 142–44.

360. See the section, The Pauline Imprint on Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture, in chapter 3 above.

361. HomNum 23.11 (PG 12.755A-C); quoting 1 Cor 3:19; Col 2:16; Wis 9:15.

362. See de Faye, Origène, Vol. 2, 250–55, who argued in the early twentieth century that this was Origen’s view. De Faye based his argument on Jerome’s and Justinian’s comments on Rufinus’ version of Origen’s eschatology in the On First Principles.

363. See Isa 43:18–19; Rev 21:5.

364. ComMt 17.33; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 312–13.

365. See his extensive argument in ComMt 17.33–36.

366. ComMt 17.30; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 306; commenting on Matt 22:30. See Crouzel, Origen, 250–52.

367. ComMt 12.43; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 126.

368. See 2 Cor 4:18.

369. ComMt 12.36; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 119.

370. ComMt 12.37; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 120.

371. ComMt 13.21; The Commentary of Origen on the Gospel of St Matthew. Volume 1, 148.

372. See Cels 7.32.

373. See Cels 7.32.

374. 1 Cor 15:35–53; Cels 5.16–19.

375. 1 Cor 15:38 (NRSV); Cels 5.19, 22.

376. Vogt, “Exegese” 155–58.

377. See the citation of this Isaiah passage above in the section on creation at fn. 10.

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