Origen held fast to the traditional teaching of the Apostles and to the Old Testament which he felt contained the sum of Christian truth,[359] and at the same time he worked freely as a speculative thinker. For the greater part of the period during which he was the head of the Alexandrian School, (c. 203-231) he was undisturbed by persecution and could work in the clear atmosphere of scientific study. His theology was built on the secular theology of his day.[360]
God he regarded as wholly transcendent, but potentially everywhere present, incomprehensible to man save in so far as man could behold the revelation of him in nature and in Christ. He predicated justice, goodness, and omnipotence of God, not simply as potentialities, but as attributes exercised fully and eternally in the universe. Still to leave man a free agent, Origen was obliged to hold that God limited his own omnipotence. The belief in the eternal exercise of God’s attributes required him to regard creation as eternal, so that he held that God and his creatures had eternally existed; God therefore, he said, had never existed apart from his creation, but the two were coëternal. This does not mean that Origen regarded the present world as existing in visible form from eternity, for he taught quite the contrary: this present world did begin and will end in time, but it is only one in an infinite series of worlds, a single expression of the eternal creative activity of God.[361]
The Logos in Origen’s system stands midway between God and the world. In opposition to those who claimed that the Logos had been begotten in time and was therefore a temporal creature, he insisted that the Logos was without beginning, but was eternally generated by God. In attempting to make his view clear he employed familiar figures, saying that the Logos, the eternal Son, was related to the Father, as the gleam to the source of light, or the will to the mind of man. He was the wisdom, the consciousness, and the activity of God; and he likewise was God’s perfect image, a second God. Yet in essence he was not independent, but rather one with the Father by whose will he was eternally created. Being created, however, he was one stage removed from God toward the multiple creation; being the medium of the Divine, he was the Creator of the world.[362]
It will be observed that in this philosophical system there is no necessity for the redeemer, and indeed Origen made somewhat less use of this concept of Christ than most other writers. On Christ’s incarnation he insisted, but the essential work of the human Christ was revelation.[363]
Nor did Origen’s system require the Holy Spirit, but to comply with the Christian belief he gave the Spirit a place with God the Father, and Christ the Son, and made him the inspirer of the prophets and apostles. The functions of the three persons in one, so far as man is concerned, he defined by saying that God gave man existence, the Son supplied reason, and the Spirit holiness. Although he held the Spirit to be of the eternal essence of God, he made him subordinate to the Son, being the first creation through the Logos. Thus Origen in reality established two stages of creation: the Logos and the Holy Spirit.[364]
Below these he placed an infinite number of lesser spirits, endowed with freedom and bound for a time with matter: angels, men, and demons. By the exercise of their freedom certain spirits have fallen from perfect holiness and, entering into bodies, have become the souls of men, aided by those spirits which have held fast to purity and are God’s angels, and hindered by the demons who have fallen lower than men and who prefer evil and find pleasure in it.[365] The chief of the fallen angels is the devil.[366] Yet the world is ruled by divine providence toward ultimate good; evil therefore will not finally conquer: men who now choose the good become the sons of God and rise to the rank of angels. Ultimately, by a process which will go on imperceptibly through countless ages, even the evil spirits will be brought back to God and so all wickedness shall be purged away.[367] Then this course will begin again.
Origen’s human psychology was probably taken from his teacher Clement; but the views of both, like those of the Gnostics, go back ultimately to Plato.[368] Accordingly Origen held that the human body has two souls, the first the animal or the passionate, the second the reasonable soul or the spirit. The latter is man’s divine essence which enters him from above; the former becomes his at the time of his conception.[369] To human spirits, as to all others, God granted freedom, and through their evil choice they fell, so that all men are born in a condition of sin. The duty of man is to endeavor to give his divine soul the mastery in him that he may thereby become like God and attain eternal happiness; his inherent sin must be overcome by his own will and determined aspiration. Not that Origen believed that man could fully accomplish his own salvation; on the contrary he held most firmly that divine grace was needed; but he maintained that the first step, an act of faith, did depend on the individual’s free choice.[370] The historical revelation of the Logos and the redemptive work of Christ, who by his death dealt the first blow in the struggle to overthrow the devil, were both made a part of the plan of salvation by Origen, although, as I have said, redemption is not logically an indispensable element in his system.[371]
There are three stages of Christian progress, according to Origen. In the first and lowest man may advance through faith and by a belief in the redemptive death of the historic Christ to a state of sinlessness and to fellowship with God. Here the Logos incarnate in Jesus acts through revelation and redemption as a physician to cure men of their sins. But beyond is a higher stage in which through love and knowledge the soul may mount from its view of the phenomenal world to the “invisible things of God,” that is, to an understanding of the whole creation; and still further soar from these upward to “the eternal power of God, in short, to God’s own divinity.” In these higher stages the Logos is the teacher of the divine mysteries; they make the contemplative life in which the Christian may obtain perfect knowledge. To such a Gnostic as the Christian becomes who has been granted the vision, the historic Christ is no longer significant; the Logos in his manifold revelations teaches him the supreme truth.[372]
Thus we see that Origen assumed that there were two forms of Christianity, an exoteric for the mass, who were capable only of faith and who could not grasp the deeper truths, and an esoteric, reserved for the few who could understand the mysteries of God and whose souls could rise to the knowledge of God himself. This double view depended in part on his Gnostic tendencies, in part on his interpretation of Scripture, to which we shall presently turn.
We have now followed the development of Christianity from the simple teachings of Jesus into a Greek philosophy, as illustrated by the later writings of the New Testament, the Apologists, the Gnostics, and Origen. The last of these completed the process which began in Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews, for he united successfully and fully, the religious principles of the Christian religion with the content of Hellenic philosophy. It must be evident furthermore that Origen and those who prepared the way for him, were no less debtors to the Greeks than they were to the Hebrews, to Jesus, and to Paul, since the form and in no small degree the very matter of their philosophy had been provided by secular thought. Indeed Porphyry with some reason charged Origen with being more Greek than Christian.[373]