Origen Against Plato

Mark Julian Edwards

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138733916
• eBook ISBN: 9781351738767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

This title was first published in 2002.Origen (AD 185 - 254) is regarded as one of the figures chiefly responsible for the contamination of biblical theology with pagan philosophy in the early church. Edwards argues that Origen set out to construct a Christian philosophy, yet he did so with the intention of preserving theology from the infiltration of pagan thought. Examining the question of philosophical influence on Christian thought, Edwards argues that scholars have often leapt to unjustified conclusions based simply on common vocabulary or parallel development. This book advances new interpretations of the early Christian systems which are generally called 'Gnostic', and the Doctrine of the Trinity in Origen's 'Platonist' teacher Clement of Alexandria. Edwards concludes that Origen's hermeneutics, eschatology, cosmology and Trinitarian theology are all related to his understanding of human nature, which is radically opposed to that of Platonism.

Chapter 1
Origen among Christians, Jews and Gnostics

That Origen was born in Alexandria, the principal city of Egypt, and that most of his education was received there, may be all that is incontestably known about his infancy. His race, his date of birth and the religion of his parents are all matters on which the palpable bias of our ancient witnesses forbids any but the most tentative conclusions. Epiphanius, no friend and for the most part no authority, qualifies the statement that he was born in Alexandria with the words 'by race an Egyptian', Aiguptios genei. Although the adjective, when used alone, may betoken simply that one comes from the hinterland rather than the capital of Egypt, the noun genei in this context will be otiose unless it means that one at least of his parents was a Copt. We may choose to discount this as a wilful slur, the prototype for Theodoret's invidious hurling of the term Aiguptios at Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century; we shall certainly be too prudent to surmise with Norman Williams that Origen's theology inherited an irascible and saturnine tincture from his provincial forebears.¹ However many traces of the indigenous culture scholars may descry in the Christian heresies and the theosophical literature of Egypt in this period, they agree that the mother of Origen's Christianity was the Church catholic. It is, however, less easy to determine whether he was reared as a member of this church or whether, as Porphyry the Neoplatonist seems to allege, he was brought up as a Greek among Greeks and only later exchanged his ancestral culture for that of the new barbarians.² It is Porphyry, more than anyone, who has taught us to regard Origen as a Platonist at heart, who did not so much convert to Christianity as annex parts of that religion to his own way of thinking. The present book, however, is a plea against the promiscuous application of the term 'Platonic' to elements of Origen's thought that he and his contemporaries would have considered part of the Christian heritage. With the passage of time the apostolic deposit had inevitably borne interest in the worshipping community, and, as this chapter will show, it was not always a simple matter to distinguish this spontaneous maturation from the trickle of foreign coin.

Christian and Jew

Circumstantial testimony that Origen was a Christian from birth comes from Eusebius, an apologist for both Origen and Christendom, and the literary adjutant of the Emperor Constantine. Porphyry's strictures on Origen have been preserved for us only because Eusebius feels obliged to contradict them in the sixth book of his Ecclesiastical History. To demonstrate that Origen was never a member of a pagan household, he asserts that his father Leontius went to prison for his faith in the reign of Severus, whereupon his son at the age of seventeen became his tutor in fortitude, urging him in a letter not to put away the God of his salvation for any imagined benefit to himself or to his kin. The date of 185 for the birth of Origen is obtained by reckoning backward seventeen years from the Severan persecution of 202. He himself (Eusebius continues) thirsted only to join the martyrs, and his mother could prevent him only by hiding his clothes so that he would be ashamed to fare abroad. It is clear that the expedient was successful, yet no such fear of custom intervened when Origen read at Matthew 19.12 that 'some have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven'; the story of his castration has rendered him infamous in circles otherwise ignorant of theology, and we may note, as a striking instance of the vagaries of tradition, that Origen's friend Eusebius feels compelled to lend his authority to this anecdote, while his enemy Epiphanius concedes that it may be false.³

The credit of all our witnesses could possibly be saved by the conjecture that Eusebius has mistaken circumcision for castration. The tone of legislation against conversion to Judaism in the third century shows that this was a common error among the Gentiles,⁴ though it was not one to be made by the Palestinian Epiphanius in the fourth century, a time of fierce contention between the synagogue and the Church. No city of the Mediterranean world played host to such a large population of Jews as Alexandria in the time of Origen, and in his earliest works we meet allusions to a 'Hebrew' who instructed him in Biblical criticism. Notwithstanding his ancestry, this man confessed both Christ and the Holy Spirit,⁵ and he must clearly be credited with no mean part in the formation of a pupil who went on to become the first Christian to enjoy a reputation for Hebrew scholarship or to undertake a continuous exposition of the Old Testament. The influence of this teacher will be slighted only by scholars who continue to embrace a crude dichotomy between Hebraism and Hellenism - one that must now be entertained in the teeth of modern findings in philology, archaeology and comparative mythology, all of which conspire to prove that the Greek and the Jew have never been such strangers as we were once taught to imagine.⁶ Even had they become antipodes elsewhere in the empire, it could hardly have been so in Alexandria: the two races had been neighbours in that city from its foundation, and the Jew at least could hardly have maintained a discrete identity in the place where the Hebrew scriptures had been translated into Greek at a king's behest.

Origen's master, then, was a Jewish Christian, but his religion had little in common with the 'Jewish Christianity' that is frequently contrasted with the Gentile varieties.⁷ Its traits, as drawn by modern physiognomists, are scrupulous legalism in dietary and venereal conduct, often amounting to abstinence, a predilection for uncanonical gospels and apocalyptic writings, and hostility to any commutation of monotheism, with the consequence that Christ was honoured as a glorious man, the Messiah of prophecy, but not as God. There is reason to doubt, however, whether any group in the ancient world would have answered this description. The Palestinian Ebionites, who are commonly presented as exemplars of the type, are a skeletal phenomenon at best in heresiology until flesh tints are applied by Epiphanius, and he is no more disposed than his ecclesiastical forebears to admit that Ebion, the putative founder of the sect, is merely an eponym from the Hebrew word for 'poor'.⁸ The doctrine that Christ was merely a man, if anyone ever held it, was more probably the symptom of a Euhemeristic tendency than a relic of Palestinian Christianity: it was rare to accord divine honours in the Roman world to one who had not enjoyed them during life.⁹ As to legal observances, there was even a party of Jews in Alexandria who considered them to be superannuated, and the Judaizing Christians of the early second century (of whom for once we know something) neither practised nor demanded circumcision. Their conspicuous devotion to the Sabbath may have been a Gentile subterfuge to escape a persecution that was directed at Christians but not at Jews.¹⁰ The majority of the extant texts which are known to have been produced by Jewish Christians now form part of our New Testament: while they lack the hallmarks of the 'Jewish Christianity' reconstructed by modern scholars, they bear witness to the prevalence of an error that was natural for Jews and barely possible for pagans - the worshipping of angels, with the concomitant belief that Christ was a being of that kind.¹¹ Here it might seem at first that we have the measure of Origen's 'Hebrew', who is known to have construed Isaiah's vision of the Lord flanked by two angels as an intimation of the Christian Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We must not infer, however, that he took Christ for an angel: many Christian exegetes opined that certain appearances of angels in the Old Testament were in fact discreet theophanies, and the argument that Christ was prophesied at Isaiah 9.6 as the 'angel of good counsel' was advanced by many whose writings leave no doubt that they acknowledged Christ as God.¹²

Christian, even catholic, as it may have been, the comment on Isaiah bespeaks a typically Jewish interest in the angelology of the Old Testament. In modern times a superficial antithesis between Jewish and Hellenistic Christianity, coupled with the assumption that the Ebionite is a representative specimen of the former, has led some to suppose that only Greek thought can furnish a pedigree for the Trinity. But this is to seek an answer without considering the problem: had the Church not been fettered by the rigid monotheism that it inherited from Israel, the divinity of Christ would have been no scandal and the mystery of the three in one - so recondite to the faithful, so intractable to logic - would have given way to a pantheon of three unequal gods. The doctrine of the Trinity resolves the pious dilemma of any reader, Jew or Christian, who discovers that the same events are indifferently described in the oldest scriptures as angelic visitations or as epiphanies of 'the Lord'.¹³ Should Yahweh be degraded to an angel? This, which might be called the Gnostic expedient,¹⁴ was equally abhorrent to the Israelite who retained a hope for his people and to the Christian who knew Yahweh as the Father of Jesus Christ. Or should one follow the opposite course, not diminishing Yahweh but enlarging the class of deities? Such affronts to the unity of God were not inconceivable, for the rabbis of this epoch used strong words against the heretics, or minim, who paid blasphemous devotions to the angel Metatron.¹⁵ Orthodox Jewry and primitive Christianity were at one in the belief that there was only a single God and that the angels were his creatures; but if this God addressed the world through cherubim and seraphim, while maintaining a categorical distinction between his glory and the ministers whom he glorified, some nomenclature must be devised to explain his mediated presence in the lower sphere, without prejudice to the freedom and inscrutability of his eternal nature.

The Old Testament already speaks of the 'name of the Lord' and the 'glory of the Lord' as though they were his intramundane surrogates; Wisdom is personified as his helpmeet in creation, and his Word is almost an intermediary.¹⁶ The New Testament preserves echoes of a time when the abstract terms had come to be used autonomously, as circumlocutions for a name that was now deemed to be too holy for human lips. Keeping pace with rabbinic orthodoxy, which imagined God as engaging in a permanent devolution of his sovereignty through his word and wisdom, apostolic documents bestow these titles on the incarnate Christ. In him, says Paul, 'dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily' (Colossians 2.8), though the essence of God the Father remained unbounded. As the Word or Logos, Christ is stated in the Fourth Gospel to have been theos from the beginning - clearly in a less contingent, but not perhaps in a less symbolic sense than that in which Moses is declared in the Book of Exodus to have been 'made god' to Pharaoh.¹⁷ No devout Jew, of course, could have allowed that the Almighty could have delegated his attributes so unreservedly to a single prophet; on the other hand, no heresy appears to have been detected in the assertion of Jesus Sirach that his wisdom is embodied in the law.¹⁸ At some time - perhaps as early as the third century - it became a rabbinic commonplace that the glory of God, the Shekinah, had been scattered among the nations by the exile and dispersion of the Jews¹⁹ Reading in the infallible word of scripture that the patriarchs had both seen and heard 'the Lord', a number of teachers postulated a 'form of God', an anthropomorphic vision of the invisible, which made his will intelligible to mortals but was not to be confounded with his essence.²⁰ This, it would appear, was a sufficiently ancient notion to find a place in one of the earliest meditations on the pre-existent Christ (Phil 2.5-12).

The first developments of Chnstian doctrine coincide with the age of the Tannaim, the rabbis who took charge of Jewish life under the Roman domination. Their aim was not to make converts but to teach Jews to be Jews, and until the compilation of the Mishnah around 200 their sayings were perpetuated by an oral, and therefore arcane tradition.²¹ Their teachings must therefore have remained unknown to the majority of Gentiles, and once the Temple had been destroyed in 70 and the nation of Israel broken in 135, the synagogues of the Diaspora, the expatriate population, turned gradually into enclaves of the Law. The misanthropy of the Jews became proverbial, and to Christians at least they were never friendly; as a convert, Origen's teacher may have incurred the maledictions of the Egyptian synagogues.²² Whether he himself had been a rabbi we cannot say, nor whether he kept faith with his ancestors by spe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Origen among Christians, Jews and Gnostics
• Chapter 2 The God of Origen and the Gods of Plato
• Chapter 3 The Doctrine of the Soul in Origen
• Chapter 4 The Interpretation of Scripture
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index