The aim of Origen was less to show how the world came to be, than to justify the ways of God to men in the world’s creation and history. The central principle in his teaching is spiritual monotheism. God is an unchanging spirit, the author of all things, and He transcends human knowledge. What distinguishes Him most is the absolute causality of His will. He is essentially creative, and this creative activity is co-eternal with Himself. God can have no dealings with changing individuals directly, since although creative He is unchanging. He has direct connection only with the eternal revelation of His own image, the Logos. The Logos is a person, a special hypostasis, the perfect likeness of God with nothing corporeal about him.He is not the God, but still God, yet a second God, with no sharing of divinity.[47] The Holy Spirit bears the same relation to the Logos as the Logos to the Father. In his relation to the world the Logos is the Idea of Ideas, the norm according to which things are created.
Origen followed Philo in believing that the original creation consists of a world of beings that are pure intelligences, and that the cause of creation is God’sgoodness. He further believed that the Logos or Wisdom of God is God’s Son. Both the creation of the ideal world of intelligences and the existence of the Son is from eternity. The origin of the visible world is to be contrasted with this eternal creation. The visible world had its beginning in time and is only one of a series of worlds. It will finally return to God, and has in God its beginning and end. Thus man lives in a visible world of time with eternities on either side. Creation, viewed as a whole, is everlasting, and consists of an endless number of beings who are destined to become a part of the divine holiness and to participate in the divine blessedness. These beings are endowed with freedom of will, and they fall away from God. The visible world of matter has been created to purify the fallen spirits, and in consequence we find materialized spirits graded into angels, stars, mankind, and evil dæmons.
In his emphasis on the will as the fundamental mental part of man, Origen is distinctly Christian and opposed to Greek intellectualism. The will of God and the will of man form the corner stone in his system. The will of God is the eternal development of His being, but the will of spirits is their temporal free choice. The will of God is reality itself; the will of spirits is phenomenal and changing. Freedom of the will of the spirits is the ground of their sin, and consequently of their materiality. Thus it is by the freedom of the spirits that Origen explains evil and the existence of imperfect matter without impeaching the eternal purity of God. Origen thus reconciled the ethical transcendence of God as creator with his immanence in the material world. God is the creator without being the creator of sin. Through the conception offree-will Origen reconciled the two antithetical principles of Christian metaphysics: faith in divine omnipotence and consciousness of sin.
The function of the church is thus an important one in the divine plan. For the fallen spirits try to rise by their own wills from the matter to which they are condemned for purification. They never lose their divine essence, however low they may fall. They cannot rise alone, nor are they compelled to, but they always have the help of divine grace, which is always active within man and has also been perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. After the manner of the Apologists, Origen makes use of the Stoic and Platonic conceptions, for the eternal Logos takes form in the divine-human unity of Jesus. Through His physical suffering redemption is made possible to all believers, and through His essence illumination has been brought to those especially inspired. There are different grades of redemption: faith, or a religious understanding of the perceptual world; knowledge of the Logos; final absorption in God. All shall finally be saved through the combined forces of freedom and Grace, and then shall all material existence disappear.
The controversies within the church during the succeeding centuries over the theory of Origen are theological rather than philosophical, and so our account of the relation of Greek philosophy to Christianity in the Hellenic-Roman period closes here. Origen’s undertaking was a private one, approved at first in only limited circles and on the whole disapproved by the church. In his scientific dogmatics the particular changes which he planned pertain especially to the conception of salvation and the place of Christ in the universe. In histeaching about Christ he emphasized more the cosmological than the soteriological aspect, but neither was fully developed. The history of the early church shows that Christianity seized the ideas of ancient philosophy and insisted on revising them with its own religious principle before it used them. We shall find that the next period is introduced by a greater than Origen, in whom again the Christian and the ancient worlds will meet in new and richer combination,—St. Augustine.
BOOK II
THE MIDDLE AGES (476–1453)
CHAPTER XV
CHARACTERISTICS AND CONDITIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Comparison of the Hellenic-Roman Period and the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages can be conveniently remembered as approximately the 1000 years between the fall of old Rome, in 476, and the fall of new Rome (Constantinople) in 1453. Together these two periods make a long and a philosophically unproductive stretch of 1800 years. The intellectual materials which the two periods possessed, differ but little, although during the first half of the Middle Ages such materials were very few. There is, however, a decided difference in the way the two periods look at things. The ancient had started with Aristotle’s interest in knowledge for its own sake; the ancient had passed from that to the need of knowledge in ethical conduct; he had finally made use of knowledge only in formulating religion. On the other hand, the history of thought in the Middle Ages was exactly the reverse. The mediæval man starts satisfied with religion as thus formulated by the preceding period, and seeks to regain pure knowledge. The perspective in the two periods is therefore different. Hellenic thought began in freedom and ended in tradition; mediæval thought begins in tradition and, borne by the youthful German, who brings with him few originalideas, pushes forward toward freedom. No doubt one can discover in mediæval times many fresh transformations of ancient thought and a new Latin terminology, but, on the whole, all the problems of the Middle Ages, as well as their solutions, can be found in antiquity. One may find, too, the germs of modern thought in the Middle Ages, but they come from mediæval pupils and not from mediæval masters. In the Middle Ages humanity is again at school; its problems appear in succession, but they always are expressed in the conceptions of the ancients.
The Mediæval Man. Antiquity had brought together three civilizations,—those of Greece, of Rome, and of Christianity. Greek civilization in the form of an intellectual culture, called Hellenism, had been superimposed upon Roman political society. The result was a society with a twofold stratum, and in such a society the Christian church had grown as an organization of controlling cultural and political influence. It was into this society that the German barbarians, by a series of invasions, entered during the first three centuries of the Middle Ages.