Edward Moore

Originally posted by Shawn
But from what I have read about the lives of Jerome and Gregory of Nyssa, they were not as pure as Origen, or certainly not as pure as Jesus.

What exactly do you mean by “pure”? Jerome, I’ll admit, was a rather callous, curmudgeonly man, but Gregory of Nyssa was a quiet, retiring scholar who preferred to be wronged rather than to wrong his fellow man. Let us recall that Origen castrated himself … that is not the action of a “pure” individual. Origen knew scripture very well, and was an accomplished allegorist. I am convinced that he castrated himself because he lacked the self-control necessary to commune in a chaste manner with females at his school, not because he took the words of Matthew over-literally. His superiors were quite justified in stripping him of his priestly rank. Sexual hang-ups and neuroses were quite common in early Christianity, as they are today. Origen was not free from the taint of hatred of the body and fear of the feminine.

Originally posted by Shawn
It is worth noting that Jerome was declared a saint by the same power that “scattered the bones” of Origen. In my paper “Origen: Prophet or Heretic” I found all nine charges of heresy against Origen by the Emperor to be questionable, as have others before me.

At no time in history did the Emperor ever possess the authority to brand someone a heretic or to declare someone a saint. This was the sole provenance of the Pope and his synod of bishops (later of the Patriarch of Constanintople in the East for the Orthodox Church). This is a basic fact of Christian history. While it is true that the Emperor had a heavy influence on ecclesiastical decisions, he remained always the steward of the secular state, not of the Church.

Originally posted by Shawn
As I have said before, so far in my search, I have yet to find a teaching of Origen which is in conflict with the findings of the natural sciences. This is not something that we can say about any church, which was exemplified by the inquisition against Galileo.

Shawn, I think you place far too much value on the natural sciences. The natural sciences are responsible for the dehumanization of our world. Read the work of Francis Fukuyama, for example, or Matthew Scully. Factory farming, genetic engineering, the unnatural prolongation of human life, the proliferation of human life beyond the bounds of sustenance, over-population, the drugging of children to maintain ‘social order’ … all of these phenomena are anti-personalist onslaughts carried out by scientists against the life of the spirit. There is nothing honorable about nature, Shawn … it is a vast mechanism of slow, tortuous destruction of all that is good and noble. Plato was correct to say that philosophy is the practice for death. Only the life of the intellect is worth my attention. Let the rabble breed and take pleasure in their mindless pursuits. I want no part of it … and, for that matter, neither did Origen … althought lopping off his walnuts was not the best way to go about it …

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.

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 …

The main challenge in describing Origen’s understanding or conception of the nature of God has to do with his lack of a fully developed doctrine of the Trinity. Origen was, as we all know, a subordinationist, i.e., he believed that Jesus is ontologically inferior to the Father, and that the Spirit is inferior to the Son. Yet Origen insists on the full divinity of these three Persons. I think the best way to approach this issue is to draw upon the work of John D. Zizioulas, whose book Being as Communion contains an excellent account of Trinitarian doctrine that I believe is applicable to Origen’s conception.

Zizioulas insists that the nature or substance of God is not a metaphysical substance in the sense of Aristotle’s prime mover or Plato’s Good beyond Being; rather, the substance of God is COMMUNION, realized atemporally and for all eternity in the perfect UNION of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This perfect union became hypostatized in the Person of Jesus Christ, for the purpose of raising all humanity to deification — i.e., the preservation of our humanity in a divine mode of existence. I think Origen would agree with this whole-heartedly.

For we will recall that Origen believed that God is eternally the Creator, that there never was a time when he was not creating. And since His act of Creation arises out of His infinite love, then we may say that the nature of God is to create with a view to communion. This is precisely how Origen envisages our cosmic existence — in a realm created for fallen souls to lead them back to communion with God, and to exist in perfect love.

We know that Origen believed — at least theoretically — that there would be further falls of souls away from God after the restoration (apokatastasis). However, in his Commentary on Romans, he puts forth the suggestion that God’s love, once re-attained in its fullness by redeemed souls, will be enough to prevent any future falls, for God’s love will at that time be something participated in fully by souls who have succeeded in shaping themselves as persons through their lived history in the cosmos.

In other words, in the eskhaton our relationship to God will approach that of the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity — with the only exception being our participation in God, whereas the Persons of the Trinity ARE God.

Shawn thinks it is perhaps more important, however, to know what God is NOT. We know from Origen that God is not embodied, and that He is not subject to the vicissitudes of time, although He does participate temporally in the lives of souls. Besides that, Origen is not much of an apophatic theologian. Perhaps it would be a good idea to look at the negative theology of Origen’s greatest pupil, St. Gregory of Nyssa …

The key to understanding Origen — and his importance for contemporary philosophy and theology — is to realize that his approach to biblical exegesis is dependent upon his largely Middle Platonic philosophical schema … a schema that he relied upon as a foundation for his allegorical approach to scriptural interpretation. As unique a thinker as Origen is, he was still part of a tradition extending back to the Stoics and Philo of Alexandria. These pagan and Jewish thinkers, respectively, approached the founding texts of their tradition (for the Stoics, the Homeric and Hesiodic texts; for Philo, the Hebrew Scriptures) in a manner that was not investigative but REVISIONIST — even though neither the Stoics nor Philo would have admitted such. They interpreted these texts in a fashion that did not reveal hidden truths but rather served to align these texts with the dominant philosophies of their time. In this sense, we may say that the approach of these ancient thinkers was CREATIVE, rather than descriptive or revelatory or what-have-you. In other words, the approach of the Stoics and Philo — and that of the Middle Platonists, Old Academicians, and even Pre-Socratics — precluded (again, whether they admitted it or not) any essentialism in which truth is understood as something existing for all eternity, independently of humanity, and awaiting discovery. Origen was indeed a systematic thinker; however, he was systematic in the ancient sense of a SYSTEMATICALLY SPECULATIVE thinker — meaning: one who offers a more-or-less cohesive body of OPINION that is to be either accepted, rejected or (more often than not) subtly revised and thereby distorted by his successors.

But enough of that. The importance of Origen resides in his yearning for infinity; his preservation of the historical dimension of our existence (for the first time in the history of Western thought); and, most of all, in his admirable humanism, a modern near-analogue of which is Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return of the Same. Indeed, we know that Nietzsche attended the Origen seminars of Steffenson, in which the replacement of God by the eternal human person was (anachronistically) preached as authentic Origen doctrine.

A more sober approach to Origen’s thought was undertaken by the Russian Existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who adapted Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return to Origen’s concept of multiple ages. While Nietzsche had seen the Eternal Return as the most convulsive and yet most burdensome idea ever to enter into human thought, Berdyaev saw it as an invitation to HOPE in a divinity that seeks not to dominate, but to PERFECT humanity.

Origen, of course, conceived of history as a spiral [an image incorporated by Marilynn Lawrence into a beautiful icon of Origen currently in production] in which the gradual education of human souls results in a totalizing ESKHATON in which humanity and historicity is neither overcome nor rejected, but fulfilled in the eternal possibility of/that is human creativity. Instead of Eternal Return we have a concept of eternal self-realization, with God being but a temporary (though paradoxically transcendent) part of the picture.

Our ETERNAL SELF-REALIZATION is the dynamic end of history, toward which the thought of not only Origen, but Joachim of Fiore, Condorcet, de Maistre, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Berlin, Fukuyama, and others, is pointing.

Origen’s belief that the Church is the World is now challenged by militant Islam, which seeks the destructon of all otherness and, therefore, the demise of all human relationality. In the face of this horror, Origen’s doctrine of human equality based upon the universal possibility of intellectual perfection is perhaps more welcome now than at any other time in our history.

In Christ,

Edward

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Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D.
St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology
http://www.st-elias-edu.us
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You said: “This concept came in from Rome and there is no sign of it in the early church. The fact that surviving writings from Origen contain the subject can only be coincidental.”
Origen is not the only relatively early theologian to develop a trinitarian theology; Tertullian, writing about a decade earlier, attempted to codify a concept of the Trinity. The deeper origins of trinitarian doctrine are found in the ‘Unwritten Doctrines’ of Plato himself [see J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Cornell 1977), and E. Moore, “Middle Platonism” http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/midplato.htm)]. A basic triadic emanationist schema of One-Dyad-Demiurge (or World-Soul) goes back as far as Speusippus and Xenocrates, and is given a central place in the Pythagorean cosmologies of Ocellus Lucanus, (pseudo-) Timaeus Locrus, and others, on into the period of Gnosticism and early Christianity, not to mention ‘esoteric’ Platonists like Numenius (whose works Origen read) and Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, etc., etc. …