2. The Nature of God

Yes, this is the interesting part of studying Origen, his defiance to the Trinitarian view held by the church that declared him a heretic. Knowing that Origen had a much greater depth of understanding of the Old Testament, and the New for that matter, than we do it would be good to pursue his line of thinking further.

Origen recognized in Yahweh, the Word and the Wisdom of God; not God Himself but rather Jesus His Son. Origen saw Yahweh, the Son, personally responsible for the restoration of all fallen souls. This is the heart of his subordination and this posture is exemplified in Luke 9:35. Clearly, God Himself is telling us that He and His Son are two separate beings. Later in the same chapter the disciple are able to glimpse the divinity of Jesus.

We have lost the spiritual view of Origen and must regain it in order to properly understand these passages. I think there are two problems that must be addressed: 1) the acceptance and understanding of a spiritual body, separate and unique to the corporal body; and 2) a proper understanding of the words ‘divine’ and ‘god.’ The first problem area is exemplified by the difference between the corporal body that Jesus used to live His human life and His spiritual body that the disciples saw after His death; after being released from its temporary, corporal residence.

The second problem area is evident in Zwingli’s difficulty with John 1:1 and his need to clarify that “the Word was a divine being and not God.” If we follow Zwingli’s line of thought and define divine as ‘being with God’ or ‘being one with God’ then we see no contradiction in Origin’s subordination principle and his insistence on the divinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit(s). Putting this all together, we would come to the following conclusion:

God is the Creator, the Father Who has always existed. He has a divine spiritual body; from which our image was created.

God is not the Son; Who is the Only Begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ. The Son also has a divine spiritual body that has existed before all other and He is ‘at one with the Father’, meaning that He knows and does the Will of God, but He is not God.

God is not a holy spirit (The Holy Spirit), who were created through Jesus Christ. The holy spirits have divine spiritual bodies and are independent rational beings. They know and do the Will of God, but they too are not God. They would be synonymous with the modern conception of Angels.

I know that many people have troubles with my use of holy spirits instead of “The Holy Spirit”, so I should explain it a little better. The bible has in it other divine beings that reveal themselves to humanity, as Jesus did to His disciples after His resurrection from the dead; notably the Archangels Gabriel and Michael. We know that at least these first-born retained their divinity through the Fall, and no one would argue that they are not holy spirits. It is also easier to understand that it was many holy spirits who were talking through the people at Pentecost, fulfilling Jesus’ promise to send the Teacher.

Origen taught that God, like the sun, cannot be observed directly, but that we can make inference of Him by His creation. It says the same thing in Psalm 19:1. Do we observe anything in nature that would suggest a Trinitarian-nature of its Creator?

Allow me to begin my reply with a pedantic point that is, nonetheless, of extreme importance. You mention Zwingli’s problem with Jn 1:1 and Zwingli’s ‘need to clarify that “the Word was a divine being and not God.”’ The Greek of that passage reads kai Theos e^n ho Logos: “and God was the Logos.” Note the definite article ho which, in Greek grammar, clearly denotes an identity between the two subjects, in this case, God and the Logos (Christ the Son). This simple grammatical fact led the Church Fathers to utilize this passage in their various works defending the doctrine of the Trinity — and let us be honest, these Hellenes knew their own language far better than Zwingli did! The identification by John of God the Father with Christ the Son is beyond doubt — whether or not one agrees with John theologically is another matter; grammatically, the evidence of identification is directly before us. I would also mention the final passages of Jn 8, where Jesus declares, “before Abraham was, I AM.” When we compare the Greek of this passage with that of Ex 3:14 (LXX), we see a conscious linguistic identification by John.

Shawn, you later pose the question: “Do we observe anything in nature that would suggest a Trinitarian-nature of its Creator?” My answer is, quite simply, yes — we observe our own minds at work, and in this there is a clear Trinitarian nature, as philosophers from Plotinus to Hegel to Husserl have recognized. The Trinitarian or triadic nature of our cognition is divided by these philosophers roughly as follows: THOUGHT — THOUGHT-THINKING-ITSELF — SUBJECTIVITY (or the synthesis of the objectified and the subjective Self). In THOUGHT we see the creative or generative aspect of Life, which corresponds to the Father; in self-reflection or THOUGHT-THINKING-ITSELF we find an objectification of our consciousness, corresponding to the willing subjection of the Son to material nature, in becoming a servant (doulos) and emptying Himself (kenoo^ for our salvation (Phil 2:7); in SUBJECTIVITY we arrive at a union of our mind’s ability to know things as well as its ability to know itself — this is the union of two natures, such as we find in the union of God in humanity, a task initiated by the Father, enacted by the Son, and completed by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

My position, then, is that held by the Orthodox Christian Church: that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons (hupostaseis) sharing a single nature (ousia). Origen, of course, writing at a very early period of Christian theological development, simply did not possess the conceptual or linguistic tools that became available only after several centuries of dialogue and debate (not to mention a few Councils). However, along with Valentinus in the Greek tradition and Tertullian in the Latin, Origen is among the first Christian thinkers to have taken a philosophical interest in the doctrine of the Trinity. His decision to adopt, largely uncritically, the categories of Platonism, both helped and hindered him (in the long run) in his desire to establish a philosophically viable solution to the mystery of the Trinitarian God.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Shawn, I certainly agree with you that our mind is the seat of our free will. However, I disagree with your position that the mind (intellect, nous) is not created by God. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, one of the main debates of the patristic era centered around how many minds were present in the Incarnate Christ. Some argued that He possessed two minds, one human and one divine. This was rejected as unorthodox, for it implied that He also had two wills, which would have meant that He did not unite the two natures — human and divine — in a single hypostasis, but rather contained both natures separately within His person. If there is no union of natures, as St. Athanasius pointed out, then there is no salvation. The whole point, of course, is that our created nature had to be united with the uncreated nature of God.

In the context of Origen’s thought it is exceedingly clear that he considered the mind as having been created by God, albeit not in the manner that He created the body, which the minds took on after the fall when they became souls. Origen states clearly that only God is uncreated, with the explanation that the minds were created atemporally, for there never was a time when God was not the creator. This, I think, is a very important — and difficult — point to consider.