Monday, October 27, 2008

The Significance Of Origen

Origen was one of the most influential Christians of the patristic age, but also one of the most controversial. Because of the beliefs he held, Origen is both commended and criticized by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants.

Though some of the criticism of Origen is warranted, what I want to do in this post is address the tendency of some to be overly dismissive of him. Because of his mixed doctrinal character and the mixed reaction to him by Christians, Origen is problematic for some of the historical claims of high churchmen. When Evangelicals cite his contradictions of Roman Catholic belief, for example, often the Catholic response is to dismiss Origen as a heretic or as a marginal figure in church history. Much the same occurs among some Evangelicals, such as King James Onlyists. To those who don't know much about Origen, such dismissals may seem reasonable, but they aren't.

Origen was born into a Christian home late in the second century, and he lived until the middle of the third century. Although he eventually became controversial in some Christian circles during his lifetime, partly for some of his theological views, he began his Christian life in the mainstream, he was part of the clergy of the Caesarean church, and many Christians continued to think highly of him in spite of the criticisms of others. Despite opposition to Origen in Alexandria and Rome, for example, other Christians in those cities, such as Hippolytus in Rome and Dionysius in Alexandria, were more supportive (John McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook To Origen [Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004], pp. 8, 22). He became controversial, but he remained in fellowship with the Christian mainstream throughout his life.

Despite Origen's errors, no Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant should deny that he was right on most issues and that he did much good. Regarding one of Origen's most significant works, his treatise Against Celsus, Henry Chadwick wrote:

"In the contra Celsum Origen does not merely vindicate the character of Jesus and the credibility of the Christian tradition; he also shows that Christians can be so far from being irrational and credulous illiterates such as Celsus thinks them to be that they may know more about Greek philosophy than the pagan Celsus himself, and can make intelligent use of it to interpret the doctrines of the Church. In the range of his learning he towers above his pagan adversary, handling the traditional arguments of Academy and Stoa with masterly ease and fluency." (Origen: Contra Celsum [New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003], p. xii)

Anybody who professes to be a Christian should be grateful for much of Origen's life and what he accomplished. Who could read Eusebius' account of Origen's childhood and adolescence or his account of the closing years of Origen's life, for example, without being moved?

Below are some of the comments of the Eastern Orthodox patristic scholar John McGuckin concerning the life and significance of Origen. The work from which I'm quoting has many contributors from a wide variety of theological backgrounds. Comments similar to McGuckin's have been made by many other scholars. I don't agree with all of McGuckin's conclusions, but I'm quoting some of his highest comments about Origen to illustrate the misleading nature of the dismissive approach taken toward Origen by some.

Jerome once described [Origen] as clearly the most important Christian thinker since the generation of the apostles....

He was, after all, the Christian church's first and greatest biblical scholar....

Thomas Merton put his finger on it when he tried to describe Origen's life, character, and impact in his poem "Origen." "His sin was to speak first among mutes," he said, describing Origen's effect on later ages as akin to that of a "mad lighthouse," emitting incessant pulses of illumination, setting a compass point for the whole West.

In his own lifetime Origen had many passionate defenders, students, and patrons (see Disciples of Origen) as well as many hostile critics. No age of the church has seemed to be different in this regard....he always kept a body of Christian admirers who were themselves powerful voices in the formation of Christian theology in their own generations....

More times than one can tell, his reflection on an issue was massively influential on the later course of Christian theology (although in the West, after the sixth century, Augustine's influence came to predominate)....

Origen's father, Leonides, a marked man, was first imprisoned, then beheaded. The impact on his family was devastating financially as well as emotionally, for the whole patrimony of those executed was confiscated to the treasury. As Origen was the eldest of seven sons, the support of the family fell onto his shoulders. His first instinct had been to run to join his father in prison and profess his faith, but he was prevented by his mother. Despite his eagerness for the honor of martyrdom, he was denied it by the very law that put his students of the higher classes to death. Even at the end, the witness of martyrdom would elude him. He would be severely tortured in his old age but would also outlive the persecutor Decius; so he was technically a confessor but not a martyr.

The posthumous lack of the title [of martyr], more than anything else, left his reputation vulnerable to revisionists of later centuries....

When he was eighteen Origen was appointed to the task of giving catechetical direction for the Alexandrian church....

Other visits [of Origen outside of Alexandria], according to Eusebius's chronology of events, took place in this same period and also bear witness to his growing international fame as a teacher. According to Eusebius, the Roman governor of Arabia sent letters to the prefect of Egypt asking him to send on Origen, accompanied by official bodyguards, so that he could hear more of the Christian movement from one of its leading intellectuals....

His eventual transfer to the permanent staff of the church at Caesarea is synonymous with the church of that city establishing its own library archive, with Origen presiding over it as collector-archivist, priest and professor....

As a priest-theologian in Caesarea, Origen's fame and importance rose in an unbroken curve, despite any of Rome's or Alexandria's misgivings as to his orthodoxy. The hierarchs of his province trusted him entirely as an arbiter of orthodoxy....He was also taken with the hierarchs to the local councils of the Palestinian region....

Origen was a marked man. He had evaded previous persecutions by hiding in the houses of the faithful. This time [in the persecution under Decius around the middle of the third century] he was deliberately sought out as the leading Christian intellectual of the age and was arrested. His treatment was specially designed to bring him to a public recantation of the faith. To this end he was tortured with special care, so that he would not die under the stress of his pain. He was chained, set in the infamous iron collar, and stretched on the rack - four spaces, no less, as Eusebius tells his readers, who knew exactly what degree of pain that involved, and how many dislocations of bones and ripping of sinews it brought with it....

The four spaces refers to the ratchet divisions of the Roman torturer's racking machine, and is a near fatal amount that leaves the victim permanently crippled, if not paralyzed....

He was saved time after time, only because the governor of Caesarea had commanded he should not die under the torture before he had publicly denied the faith. This was why he suffered throughout the two years of persecution and was liberated only by the death of the persecutor, Decius, assassinated with his children in 252 after a blessedly short time as emperor. Origen's health had been broken by his ordeals, however. He was by the standards of his age an extremely old man already at sixty-nine, and died from the accumulated sufferings of his imprisonment shortly afterward. That he died as a confessor, not as a martyr under the rack, was one reason for the loss of much of his work in later centuries, when he was censured for unorthodox opinions....

Eusebius gives us to understand that Origen in his last year of life, broken in health, spent his time dictating letters of encouragement to those who had also suffered for the cause of Christ: "After these things Origen left many words of comfort, full of sweetness, to those who needed assistance, as can be seen abundantly and most truly from so many of his epistles."...

Jerome tells us that Origen was buried (and so presumably was also resident at the time of his death) in the Palestinian city of Tyre. This gave rise to an abundance of later medieval tales of his tomb being held in special honor in the Crusader cathedral of Tyre, walled in the back of the high altar. The Crusader stories demonstrate only how his memory remained high in the hearts and minds of Christians of all generations, despite his official censure by subsequent church authorities....[Origen was] one of the greatest, yet most self-effacing, men of his epoch....

So it is that the greatest Christian of his age passes out of our notice quietly and without fuss. Even from his deathbed he was concerned to console those who had been scarred, both psychologically and physically, by the time of torture. His heart's desire, even in this excruciating posttraumatic context, was to offer "sweet words of consolation" to the faithful who were grieving after surviving the latest cruel tyranny against them....

Precisely because his legacy lived on, as undoubtedly the greatest genius the early church ever produced, and because his memory and teachings were revered by generations of later Christian thinkers (especially the monks who loved him as one of the first Christian ascetics and mystics), his reputation became something the church had to control and correct. Thus it was that after several "Origenistic controversies" agitating the church from the fourth through the sixth centuries, the Emperor Justinian moved against him with a decree in 543 to proscribe and burn his books. This damning of his memory in the sixth century is largely responsible for the great damage that has occurred to his received canon of works. The hostile judgment of the Fifth Ecumenical Council - even if the canonical condemnation of him by name is not authentic to the acts of that synod - certainly weighed against him overall, as did the Gelasian Decretal in the West, which put his works on a list of banned authors. That even so there remains so much is an extraordinary testimony to the love the church retained for this irrepressible genius, even after an imperial and synodical verdict of posthumous condemnation. Of course, all of the greatest thinkers of the patristic age were in his debt, and even after his condemnation he was too deeply inserted into the fabric of Christian theologizing ever to be dismissed or forgotten. He had been the founding architect (as far as its international reception was concerned) of biblical commentary as a mode of organizing Christian reflection, and no one who took the Bible seriously in the first millennium of the church was able to avoid his groundbreaking writing....

Jerome says that Eusebius listed just under 2,000 treatises as the sum of Origen's lifework....

[He was] the greatest writer of Christian antiquity...

Origen's elaboration of a hermeneutic using the allegorical method, advanced in these commentaries, both established him as the Christian world's greatest exegete and formed the foundational architecture of Christian interpretation of the scriptures....

Origen in his old age composed a commentary on Matthew in twenty-five volumes. By this monumental work, destined to remain a classic for all later generations (even after he was condemned, the main ideas of his commentary made their way into more or less all other commentators of the Christian tradition), Origen established Matthew as the primary canonical Gospel of the Christian tradition....

Almost all Christian spiritual and ascetic literature, ever since, has been indebted to Origen's foundational architecture of Christian mysticism [in his commentary on Song of Solomon]....

Nothing like it [Origen's treatise First Principles] had ever been seen before in Christianity, and although many of its sketched-out avenues for development caused more alarm than admiration for many later thinkers, it is nevertheless unarguable that behind all the theological arguments of the next three centuries, it was Origen's agenda in this book (in Trinitarian thought, Christology, anthropology, hermeneutics, eschatology, and ecclesiology) that served as the point of departure....

Origen's general premise in this work [the treatise On Prayer]...was of monumental significance in influencing all later ascetical writings on prayer. In his Commentary on Canticles and in his Treatise on Prayer, Origen can rightly be said to have founded the monumental Christian tradition of spiritual literature that would soon follow. For this reason, although not technically a monastic himself (although he was certainly an ascetic Sophist), Origen has also often been seen as a forerunner and theorist of the Christian monastic movement.

(The Westminster Handbook To Origen [Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004], pp. ix-xi, 3-4, 8-9, 21-22, n. 123 on p. 22, 22-23, 25-26, 29-31, 37-38)

3 comments:

  1. By the way, in the "Disciples of Origen" entry referenced by McGuckin above, Lillian Larsen writes the following about how Origen was perceived at the time of the Reformation:

    "Many of the Reformers looked on him aghast for his theology of grace, but for other aspects of his thinking (such as his Eucharistic remarks or his profound biblicism) he seemed a hero to some Reformers, sending the Catholic Counter-Reformation theologians running back to his texts to garner counter-arguments to claim him to their side once more, as an example of early Catholicism. As Erasmus famously said, 'A single page of Origen teaches more Christian philosophy than ten of Augustine.'" (p. 91)

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  2. "Many of the Reformers looked on him aghast for his theology of grace,"

    Jason, Origen was an extremely influential Church Father, but he was rightly condemned as a heretic for being a universalist.

    I remember Steve Hays having a series of posts earlier this year in which he thoroughly refuted a universalist author's book.

    I don't know if universalism is a damnable heresy, but it is a very bad heresy.

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  3. Origen seems to have wavered on universalism, sometimes affirming it and sometimes doubting it. See p. 15 and the "Universalism" entry in McGuckin's book cited above.

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