J. A. McGuckin
Christians are retrospectivists par excellence. Our religion is the heir of first-century apocalyptic thought, and our originating philosophy of history calls to us to look back to Christ as the midpoint of time, what that fine historian Hans Conzelmann in his study of the Third Gospel called Die Mitte der Zeit, and what his English translators so lamely rendered as “The Theology of St. Luke”! Conzelmann’s original title, of course, summed up ancient Christian apocalyptic philosophy quite brilliantly—all time running up to its Lord and running away retrospectively from him until it runs to him at the Parousia. And this is not simply a Christology (which it is in profoundest terms, needless to say) but also a single-sentence summation of all Christian biblical hermeneutic and process: all things run from him and to him and find their meaning in him. Patristic biblical interpretation is from start to end Christocentric, soteriological, illuminatory. And Origen, who knows the soul of Scripture better than most, recognizes this as the core impetus of the New Testament, and passes it on as his major heritage to the later Church of the Fathers.
From the foundations of the New Testament, through all the patristic ages until, perhaps, modern times, that orientation has remained the basic premise of Christian biblical interpretation. As a result of the foundational attitudes embedded in our Scriptures, almost all Christian historians and commentators have been unashamedly retrospectivist. This is still visibly witnessed in Orthodox and Catholic theological discourse, for the Great Church was ever conscious of its eschatological heritage and preserves the apocalyptic medium in its biblical view of history as a record of salvation, even at those many times throughout history when its embeddedness in contemporary affairs has made it lose sight a little of its core eschatological reality. As a result, we naturally tend to look back on the formative eras of the church through the lenses of later ages. Receptionism is very important to Christian theologians, and is seen as an integral element of catholicity.
This process has heavily determined our placing and assessment of Origen of Alexandria in our collective memory: that great scholar, whom Jerome called the “whetstone that sharpens us all”; that great confessor whose body was martyred and broken; that great saint whose mystical vision ever reached out ascetically to union with the Word. Yet we often regard him askance—remembering the many controversies and denunciations raised against him in history. In the latter part of the twentieth century, there began a long and steady process of rehabilitation of Origen’s memory, accompanied and perhaps caused by a deep firsthand investment in the study of this immensely important author of the ancient church. The movement began with the eighteenth-century Jesuits, the De La Rue brothers, but continued in the early decades of the twentieth century with the extraordinary work of the modern Jesuits De Faye, Daniélou, De Margerie, De Lubac, and later Henri Crouzel and Lothar Lies. It led to an immense and burgeoning interest in this most seminal of all the writers of Christian antiquity. Critical editions were made, and a prolonged series of studies was undertaken with the quadrennial international Origen conferences producing the Origeniana series that continues to our time.
Yet, for most theologians, the memory of Origen remains marginalized. He was, after all, censured in his own time by Bishop Demetrios of Alexandria and Pope Fabian of Rome. We tend to forget, because of this, that he was honored by the learned bishops Theotecnos and Alexander in Palestine, and called by them to found the first-ever Christian university. We remember how he was fought against as a pernicious influence by the Egyptian monks and censured by Theophilus of Alexandria in the first Origenistic crisis, though we tend to forget how Theophilus reproduced Origen’s exegesis extensively under his own name, even while saying he agreed with the (very literalist) monks who condemned anything associated with Origen. We forget how extensively Origen’s exegesis was adopted also by some of the greatest fathers of the church: Saints Gregory the Theologian, Gregory Nyssen, John Chrysostom, Jerome (another public denouncer and private plagiarizer), Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas, to name a few. But we cannot forget how he was denounced at the Second Council of Constantinople and the chief offending sententiae of his theology held up for public censure. Yet we tend to overlook the telling details that the Origenian denunciations appear to be afterthoughts added to the synodical record tendentiously by the court, and the offending sententiae are lifted from the writings of Evagrios of Pontos, not Origen at all.
What really mattered in all of this was simply how Origen was received in the church; and by far the most important aspect of that long-drawn-out controversy was, in my opinion, the burning (and oft-embittered) memory of how Origen’s works were used, again retrospectively, in the Arian crisis. We remember how his Christological subordinationism seemed to inspire Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Acacius of Caesarea, who delighted in fighting against the great Athanasius at every turn; and who left a more than dubious memory in the church as to what leading intellectual Origenists were up to in the fourth-century Christological debates. But we also tend to forget how Athanasius himself or Gregory the Theologian (as did Dionysios and Alexander of Alexandria before them) also used Origen extensively to articulate the eternity of the divine Logos. Nevertheless, the bitterness of the Nicene debates left an aftertaste in the mouth concerning Origen’s “memory.” His greatest admirers were responsible for the “saving” of Origen for the church by sinking his systematic and retaining his exegetical rules and his ascetical thought. But like all architectural afterthoughts, this left behind a building that was at once majestic and mutilated.
With conservative opinion gathering momentum against him by the late fourth century, Origen’s works were still cherished by some of the greatest minds of Christendom. Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian, seeing the mounting hostility against Origen’s reputation, abstracted his exegesis into the Philocalia Origenis to save the best of the exegetical principles to be a guide for future generations. In doing this, they succeeded in educating almost every Christian preacher and commentator in the basics of exegetical methodology, from the fourth century to the nineteenth, when the rise of so-called critical biblical interpretation birthed a wider conspiracy to banish all prior symbolic methodologies of reading from the seminary classrooms, in what has been one of the most curious narrowings of interpretative reading in the history of literature—all done in the name of wissenschaftliche Ordnung (scientific taxonomy).
That great era of biblical discovery from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries left behind achievements of enduring significance. But today its refusal to admit into consideration the symbolic readings of its own prehistory has been challenged by secular schools of symbolic interpretation, and the stage has been set for a renewal of interest in Origen, considered one of the greatest of all Christian masters in the genres of symbolic spiritual exegesis. Following after the importance that postmodern philosophy gave to multiple and simultaneous levels of meaning, Origen’s exegetical work has attracted a new sympathy. It now looks foolish, rightly so, to apologize for Origen’s “reading in” to the allegedly simple text. Such complaints, and they have been many, now look rather quaint in their own presuppositions about what a “plain text” is or what a theology of revelation ought to look like. The refrain “Trust me, for I am a plain man dealing in common sense,” is now revealed to all (one hopes) as merely a plea to adopt an alternative theory, not a genuine claim that theory has been set aside in favor of unmediated access to truth. With the benefit of hindsight, one is better positioned, perhaps, to see that the plain-man approach of a Eustathius of Antioch or Epiphanius, of a Theodore or Diodore, was not so much the triumph of common sense at all, and that the corona of useful and appealing exegesis arguably belonged much more, across the sweep of history, to the moderate Origenists such as Gregory the Theologian, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Maximos.
It is one thing to try to redraft the record, however, and another thing to shift attitudes and sentiments that have been so deeply embedded. Let it suffice, then, to say that this essay does not so much try to rehabilitate Origen, in the style of the Origen Conference in Innsbruck in the 1980s, which had on its agenda a petition to the pope to lift the condemnations from him posthumously (that got nowhere), as much as it tries to look at Origen in his own time, not from a dominant but anachronistically scholastic retrospective. So, trying to work from his own temporal context and in terms of the philosophical premises prevalent in the schools of his day, this essay seeks to ask what motivated Origen’s approach to the Scriptures. I would like, therefore, to set out very briefly, first of all, the terms of Origen’s exegesis—the system, as it ...
