Nielsen’s Nook

[ This is the third of eleven chapters out of John Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. You may also wish to see the post Snapshot of Origen. ]

Origen’s [c.a. 182 - 251 CE] personality and ideas have always been the source of passionate controversies. Condemned in his lifetime by his bishop, supported by numerous disciples, he was attacked again in the fourth century by St. Epiphanius and condemned in 400 by a council presided over by Theophilus of Alexandria. The role played by St. Jerome and Rufinus of Aquileia in the Origenist quarrels of that time are also well known. The same quarrels were used as an excuse for the deposition of St. John Chrysostom. (p 47)

In the vein of this legacy, Justinian (483 to 565 CE), the emperor in the Roman empire’s east, issued his edict against the Originests in 543 due to the wide influence that the problematic doctrines Origenism were having broadly. As Theophilus of Alexandria tells us that for the Origenists the Divine Logos had not assumed a human body nor was the Logos to be identified with the Christ, which was the divine soul that assumed a human body (p 47-8). This distinction between Christ and the Logos smacked of the Nestorian distinction between the Word and the ‘assumed man’.

The question of whether the followers of Origen were representative of what Origen himself taught begins to surface at this point. The question seems to pivot around Origen’s περί ἀρχῶν (On First Principles, De principiis). In this work Meyendorf argues that problems with anthropology, cosmology and eschatology are indigenous to Origen. However, even this evidence is insufficient to explain the fate of Origenism in the Christian Tradition (p 49).

The ideas of Evagrius, one of Origen’s most prominent fourth century interpreters, were passionately debated in the sixth century CE. The seat of Origenism at this time was in the Great Lavra of St. Sabbas in Palestine; however, in nearby Egypt the views had been condemned since 400 CE. These Origenist traditions significantly influenced the essentially popular movement of monasticism, which originally sought to express the eschatological nature of Christianity. It made monasiticsm more intelligible to the Hellenistic world while at the same time modifying monasticism with Platonic dualism. It would seem that different facets of monastic asceticism sought to purify the flesh in preparation for the resurrection of the dead, anticipating the realities of the Kingdom to come. “The linear perspective of biblical spirituality seeking the kingdom to come was thus replaced by a vertical perspective, the search for dematerialization.

While several modern historians (e.g., de Lubac, Daniélou, Bertrand) attempting to redeem Origen, the περί ἀρχῶν and many exegetical passages remain to underscore that Origen was working from a framework of Platonic monism. In the Gnostic Chapters Evagrius makes plain the origin of the doctrines condemned by the fifth council. In other words, in additions to Origen’s problematic anthropology, cosmology and eschatology, Evagrius’ Christology presents itself as the fourth pillar in the controversy that would be condemned.

Justinian describes these sixth century doctrinal problems in two letters: 1) the Letter to Menas and 2) the letter to the council of 553. The Letter to Menas produced ten anathematisms against the Palestinian controversies (Origenism per Evagrius). The letter to the council of 553 contained the essentials of the decisions that the assembly ratified, producing fifteen anathematisms.

Justinians attacks on Origenism began by bringing suspicion to Origen’s Trinitarian subordinationism, which itself stemmed from a presupposition that Creation was co-eternal with God excluding the distinction, established by post Nicene theology, between the generation of the Son and the creation of the world in time (p 52).

Regarding the eternality of creation, Origen articulates in περί ἀρχῶν that God created a succession of worlds in which there was an eternal intellectual unity. The individuation and materialization of minds happens then by virtue of their free will and the “fall”. His notion of what we would today call “Redemption” is that of ἀποκατάστασις (apokatastasis) in which we are finally freed from the prison of our body and subsummed into the intellectual unity. Origen taught that Satan would have a place as a spiritual creature of God in the restored intellectual universe. The council and Justinian would have none of this:

Whoever says that the life of the spirits will be analogous to the life which existed at the beginning, when the spirits were not yet fallen and lost, so that the end and the beginning are similar, and that the end will be the true measure of the beginning, be he anathema (Anathema 15).