Origen [This entry consists of three articles: General History, Origen in the Copto-Arabic Tradition, and Origen’s Writings.] General History Origen (185-255) was one of the greatest Christians who ever lived, and certainly among the greatest of Egyptian Christians. Only athanasius can rival him in stature among the sons of Christian Egypt. He was born of Christian parents at Alexandria and probably died at Tyre. In 202 his father, Leonidas, was martyred in the persecution under Emperor Septimius Severus. Various details and anecdotes of his youth have been recorded by the ecclesiastical historian eusebius of caesarea, not all of which may be authentic; but it is likely that about 204 Origen, in a fit of ascetical self-mortification, castrated himself, and that at a very early age he was put in charge of the catechetical school of alexandria (though the exact nature of that school is uncertain). He must have known the works of clement of alexandria, though he never mentions him.
His early poverty, which was at least in part voluntary, was relieved by a rich official called Ambrosius, whom Origen had persuaded to abandon gnosticism for Catholic Christianity and who subsidized Origen's publications. Origen mentions his patron more than once and wrote one of his works, The Exhortation to Martyrdom, for his benefit.
By 231 Origen had visited Rome, Arabia, and Palestine briefly, and had begun collecting translations of the Old Testament. He had already made a name for himself as a Christian theologian and had produced his first important work. In that year he found himself in conflict with demetrius I (189-231), the bishop of Alexandria, who apparently resented his growing fame as a teacher. He visited Athens and then, probably in 232, went to Antioch, where he was summoned, as a leading Christian philosopher, to an interview with Julia Mamaea, the mother of Emperor Alexander Severus. He probably returned to Alexandria briefly but then left it forever, pursued by the enmity of Demetrius, who succeeded in having Origen condemned by a synod at Rome as well as one at Alexandria. The main charge must have been that during his recent travels he had been ordained presbyter by a bishop in Palestine, without his own bishop being consulted and in spite of his self-mutilation. Demetrius' successor, heraclas (231-247), continued the feud. The Eastern church, however, took no notice of these synods, and for the rest of his life Origen remained a persona grata among the churches of Asia, Palestine, Syria, and Arabia. He settled in Palestinian Caesarea, where he spent most of the rest of his life, making visits to Athens and Arabia and, during the reign of the persecuting emperor Maximinus (235-238), remaining for a considerable time in Cappadocian Caesarea with its bishop, Firmillian.
In 249 he is said to have been imprisoned and tortured as a confessor during the persecution of Emperor decius. He probably moved to Tyre about two years before his death.
Though Origen started writing late in his life, his output was enormous. Much of it survives in the original Greek, and even more in Latin translations made during the two centuries after his death, some by Rufinus and Jerome. Though most of his work took the form of commentary or sermon on biblical texts, the first major work, and the earliest that has come down to us, is one that he called Peri archon (Concerning First Principles), usually known by its Latin title De principiis. It is an attempt to show the common ground possessed by Christianity and certain forms of contemporary Greek philosophy, notably Middle Platonism (the eclectic, developed form of Platonism popular in the third century). It contains some of Origen's most daring thought, and is more concerned to push speculation beyond the limits of the Rule of Faith (though mostly without contravening it) than to interpret Scripture. It exists in a Latin translation and in fragments of the Greek, some quite long. It should be dated about 225. But Origen had already begun an extremely long Commentary on Saint John's Gospel, of which nine books and several fragments survive in Greek. By the thirty-second and last book he had reached only John 13:33.
This work contains a great deal of Origen's thought on the doctrine of the Trinity and on Christology; he wrote it gradually over a number of years. Next in order (between 232 and 234) we should probably place Commentaries on Corinthians and On Ephesians, and his homilies on Saint Luke's Gospel, as well as his remarkable book On Prayer, the first Christian work to contain a commentary on the Lord's Prayer. In 235 his Exhortation to Martyrdom appeared, designed to support Ambrosius, who had been arrested during the persecution of Maximinus (though he was later freed). He then wrote a longer Commentary on the Song of Songs (he had written a shorter one earlier), a Commentary on Romans, a vast Commentary on Saint Matthew's Gospel, Homilies on Leviticus, Homilies on the Psalms, and, his crowning work, Against Celsus, extant in the original eight books.
celsus, a philosopher, had written an attack on the Christian religion about fifty years before. At Ambrosius' request, because it was troubling the mind of many Christians, Origen undertook to refute it, and did so thoroughly, taking it paragraph by paragraph, so as to make his book virtually an apology for Christianity; it can be dated to 248. We also have, in a manuscript discovered in the 1940s at Turah, near Cairo, a fragmentary account by an anonymous person of a conference between Origen and some clergy in a town in Arabia (modern Jordan) on points of controversy or uncertainty in doctrine, known as the Dialogue with Heracleides, in which what might be called the sweet reasonableness of Origen in discussion is very evident.
There also survive a large number of works by Origen that cannot be so accurately dated: Homilies on 1 Samuel 28 (the witch of Endor), and on Judges, Exodus, Genesis, Numbers, Ezekiel, and Joshua, some of them sermons taken down in shorthand as he delivered them, as well as several fragments of other works and a few letters. Origen also, after spending a large part of his life collecting copies of the Old Testament in Greek, about 243 produced a work known as the Hexapla, the Old Testament in parallel—the Hebrew text, its transcription into Greek letters, the Septuagint, and three (and sometimes more) other Greek translations of the text. It was long preserved in the library of the bishop of Palestinian Caesarea; some parts of it are extant.
Educated in Alexandria, which was then the cultural capital of the Roman empire, Origen had absorbed the intellectual heritage of Greek philosophy, which included what we would now call science in most of its branches, history, and theology. Only in imaginative power is he lacking; when he comes to face the literary forms, sometimes poetic and dramatic, of the Bible, he fails to realize their significance; shows no appreciation of poetry or drama; rarely quotes either; and writes a prose that seldom rises above the pedestrian. But his thought represents a grand and sophisticated synthesis of Christian doctrine and Greek philosophy. His pupil Gregory Theodorus, whose Eulogy of Origen is extant, wrote of him that he did not indiscriminately accept all philosophy; that he owed most of all to Middle Platonism; that his ethics and psychology were largely Stoic; and that Aristotle supplied only his cosmology and his logic. But Origen's thought, which can be reconstructed with confidence in its main lines and in most of its details, is the most able, brilliant, and sophisticated production the Christian Church had hitherto seen or was yet to see until another great African, Augustine, made his appearance.
For Origen, God is One and Simple, pure, immutable Spirit, the original source of all existence and all goodness; he is One in contrast with the manifold, but the One to whom the manifold is moving, striving to return. To this superessential Essence (so abstract that we can scarcely predicate being of Him) Origen attributed self-consciousness and will; to Origen, God was always living and personal; here the biblical tradition made its impression on him. God is omniscient and omnipotent, but he is not the predestining God of Old Testament and New Testament. He foreknows and foresees but does not foreordain. In Origen's view God's goodness and His justice are not contrasted or even kept in balance, but are identical. God, of course, punishes those who deserve punishment, but his punishment is never purely retributive; it is always remedial. Origen rejects altogether the notion of God's wrath; God is never angry. At one point he says that the worst thing that God can do to anybody is simply to leave him alone.
In this respect Origen carried the liberal theology of Clement much further. Origen's doctrine of God is firmly trinitarian. God's nature is to communicate and reveal Himself; and because He cannot change, He must always have been communicating Himself, from eternity. In order to communicate Himself, however, the One and Simple must become manifold, and He can do this only by abandoning His absolute immunity to change or experience (impassibility, apatheia) and assuming a form in which He can act and be an organ for acting. This is the Word (Logos) or Son. The Logos is the perfect image of God, really and truly God; in fact, Origen can call him "Second God" (not "a second god"), echoing a Middle Platonist term. The Logos/Son has a distinct existence, an individual reality (Origen uses both hypostasis and ousia for this), from that of the Father, and this, too, is divine: "The Savior," he says, "is God not merely by participation (metousia) but in His own right (kat'ousian)." The Logos/Son has always been with the Father, and has always been distinct from Him. The generation or production of the Son is an act lasting from eternity. "There never was a time when He did not exist," says Origen, and elsewhere, "The Savior is eternally generated by the Father."
In this doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, Origen has broken through the trinitarian scheme that had held in Christian theology before his day and had taught that for purposes of creation, revelation, and redemption, God had at one point unfolded Himself into a Trinity ("economic trinitarianism"). The Logos/Son is a distinctly existing entity, the second reality (hypostasis) within the godhead. He is not absolutely simple, like the Father, but complex; in relation to the world He can be called a creature (demiourgema, ktisma). Above all, the Son is a mediator by constitution, as part of the godhead, in his preexistent eternal state independently of the Incarnation. In spite of parting from economic trinitarianism, then, Origen's doctrine of the Son is necessarily subordinationist. In certain important respects the Son is less than the Father. Origen's speculations did not require a Holy Spirit, but the Rule of Faith insisted upon the Spirit's being included in his trinitarian doctrine. Therefore Origen postulated the Spirit as the third reality (hypostasis) within the godhead and as part of the divine essence. He becomes the Holy Spirit through the Son and is the first creation of the Father through the Son. Origen uses the word trias of the Trinity. All Persons are equal in divinity and dignity, and the substance that they possess is one. The evidence that Origen applied the word homoousios (consubstantial) to the Son is unsatisfactory and cannot be trusted.
As the Son constitutes a stage of transition from the One to the manifold, so the Spirit represents a further stage of this process. Origen's Trinity is therefore (like Karl Barth's) a Trinity of eternal revelation, but it has degrees in it; it is an internally graded Trinity.
Origen's doctrine of salvation (soteriology) is ingenious and unusual. God must always have had recipients of His eternal self-revelation. Therefore free rational spirits (souls) must have existed from eternity. All forms of Platonism always insisted that the soul is eternal and indestructible; being spiritual (noetoi) and rational (logikoi) is what constitutes all souls, whether angelic or human. All souls have from eternity been created to be obedient to God; and, to preserve God's changelessness, they must all in the end return to free obedience, no matter what may have happened in the past.
Consequently, on philosophical, not humanitarian, grounds, Origen is an universalist; that is, he believes that everybody must in the end be saved. His account of how any souls came to fall from obedience to God is not clear, but he apparently believed that all created spirits must develop, and in the course of development sin; thus disobedience to God occurred. It occurred among souls before the world was created; Origen teaches, therefore, a premundane Fall. The story of Adam and Eve is only an allegory or parabolic account of what happened before the world began.
It was in order to cope with the situation brought about by the Fall that God created the world. The physical universe is the machinery for starting all men and women on their journey back to God after the premundane Fall. Every soul is ultimately born into the world either as a human being or (if very evil) as a devil. The world becomes a vast reformatory run by God. Note that Origen does not believe in reincarnation; in his Commentary on Matthew he explicitly rejects this doctrine more than once. Note, too, that Origen's conception of the world is not Gnostic. For him the world is good, a state not of punishment but of purification. Physical matter, once it has served its purpose of enabling fallen souls to pass through this world, will disappear; it lacks ultimate reality. Evil, too, is unreal; it is the absence of good. Origen's anthropology envisages human beings as rational spirits united with physical bodies and possessing "animal" souls (roughly speaking, nervous systems). Whoever conquers the temptations and passions that reach him through his "animal" soul gradually achieves likeness to God (homoiosis). All men already possess, as free immortal souls, the indestructible image (eikon) of God.
Into this ingeniously devised framework Origen fits a no less ingenious account of the Incarnation. The Logos/Son in His preexistent state had always been helping angels and human beings in their struggle toward purification and union with God. For this purpose he chose his people Israel and sent the prophets. But in order to lead people back to God, the Logos Himself had to appear and to become incarnate. His activity when incarnate was complex and varied. For the duller and rougher souls He had to demonstrate a real victory over sin, to make a sacrifice, to offer a ransom to the devil, to bring obvious and easily intelligible salvation. For the more cultured and intelligent souls, he had to impart in addition new depths of knowledge as teacher and hierophant, and thereby to impart divine life and initiate the process of homoiosis and divinization for men.
Origen accepted that everyone must begin by believing in the historical Jesus. But for intellectuals this was only a beginning; they were to transcend this stage as quickly as possible and reach a state of mystical contemplation of the postincarnate Logos (the Logos no longer incarnate after the ascension), and nourish themselves on the eternal Gospel. In fact, though, Origen reproduces all the traditional language of atonement—conquest of demons, expiation of sin, ransom paid to the devil, sacrifice. All these things were, in his view, subsidiary to the main purpose of God, which was to educate men and women into salvation. E. De Faye rightly said that Origen's atonement doctrine was that of "Dieu éducateur."
Origen's account of how the Son of God became incarnate was as carefully worked out as the rest of his doctrine. The preexistent Logos/Son united Himself with a pure, unfallen, created spirit who had always cleaved steadfastly to Him; to this spirit or soul the Logos was united more closely than to any other, because of the soul's unceasing effort of will to cleave to Him; it was a fellowship, a union, but not a fusion. At the Incarnation this spirit/soul took to itself a human body and an "animal" soul. The Logos preserved His impassibility; all the human experiences—hunger, sleep, suffering, emotions—were endured by the spirit. The Logos was able to cause the body to assume all qualities necessary for His activity, varied and different as they were. That is why Jesus was not easy to recognize and why Judas had to identify him with a kiss. Even during the Incarnation the Logos united with all souls everywhere who would open themselves to Him, and acted independently of the human Jesus. At the death on the cross the "animal" soul of Jesus went to the underworld, the body to the tomb, and the spirit to God. After the Ascension the human Jesus was transformed into a spirit and the human nature disappeared, completely absorbed into the godhead. The Incarnation was therefore a closed incident.
As the human spirit of Jesus united itself with the Logos, so the soul of each of us can be united to Him, beginning necessarily with faith, first in the human Jesus of Galilee, then in the Crucified, then in the risen and glorified Christ, and so on up a scale of enlightenment, the Logos assisting at every step, until the "contemplative life" is reached, the pure spirit clinging in love to the deity. Origen was able virtually to dispense with traditional eschatology by allegorizing it. Picturesque imagery is dissolved into morality; hell becomes the gnawing of conscience; the Second Coming can be anticipated in contemplation (theoria). The resurrection of the flesh is rejected: "A certain principle is inherent in the body; this is not corrupted and it is from this that the [nonphysical] body is raised in incorruption." But this is only the beginning of the progress of each soul beyond this life. We must experience a series of different purgative processes in a series of different spiritual or intellectual worlds or existences (but never again as incarnate) before achieving our final destiny in return to God. Even the devil must eventually capitulate and freely obey. Such is a rough sketch of Origen's remarkable fusion of Christianity and Platonism. He was able to distill it from the Bible to his own satisfaction by the use of allegory.
This was a system of biblical interpretation that drew its thought partly from pre-Christian Judaism, reflected occasionally in the New Testament, but more from the exegetical method of philo of alexandria, a Jewish theologian writing in Greek and a contemporary of Saint Paul, who was deeply influenced by Greek philosophy and contributed much to the thought of both Clement and Origen. A flexible and uncritical use of Philo's allegorizing (i.e., reading into the text a second meaning supposed to be latent within or beneath the ordinary surface meaning) enabled Origen to manipulate the text of the Bible so as to yield virtually whatever meaning he needed for his argument. This technique meant that his thought could be, and to some extent undoubtedly was, independent of scriptural control (or as independent as he chose). In consequence, Origen may be regarded as a great theologian, but he can hardly be described as a great biblical scholar, in spite of his immense exegetical labors and his popularizing the commentary form, which in fact he borrowed (as he borrowed the practice of allegorizing eschatology) from the Gnostics.
Origen was a devout churchman all his life; he championed the Christian church in his books, encouraged its martyrs, instructed its prayer, conducted its services, preached to its congregations, and on more than one occasion was called in to reconcile heretics or to convert the misled. In his own day he was regarded by most of his friends and followers as a great Christian teacher and philosopher, and this deserved reputation lasted long after his death. It would be quite wrong to call him a heretic. By the standards of his own day he was not only orthodox but a defender and upholder of orthodoxy. It was only long after his death that serious accusations of heresy were brought against him, culminating in his condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople of (553). But the charges brought there against Origen were caused partly by misunderstanding and misrepresentation, partly by complete lack of historical sense, and partly by the demand of contemporary pressures.
Origen's influence upon the Greek-speaking theologians of the Eastern church extended for well over a century after his death. His contribution to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was a permanent gain and enabled the defenders of the Nicene Creed to overcome the influence of arianism, even though certain other traits in his thought may have tended in the opposite direction. His tradition of interpreting the Bible in the interests of the spiritual development of the individual soul, especially displayed in his work on the Song of Songs and on the book of Numbers, extended its influence well into the Middle Ages in both East and West. Origen has always appealed to individuals of intellect and insight through the ages—for instance, to John Scotus Erigena and to Erasmus—and probably always will. Indeed, international scholarship has seen a great revival in the study of Origen since the end of World War II, and an international Colloquium Origenianum has been founded to further this interest.
Perhaps Origen's greatest and most enduring achievement was to compel the church to recognize the necessity of coming to terms with contemporary non-Christian thought. So thoroughly did he achieve this that the church's attitude to philosophy was permanently altered by his work. Never again could it afford to ignore secular thought. Distant though he is from us in time, and distant in culture owing to his living in a late Greco-Roman civilization, and distant in thought because of his preoccupation with late Platonism, we can salute this great Christian Egyptian and recognize in him a kindred spirit as we in our generation struggle to express the Christian message in the language and thought of our day.