The Peculiarly Familiar Doctrines of Origen

We have recently been discussing the early Christian thinker Origen in my “Age of the Fathers” class. While we have been focusing mostly on his thoughts regarding the Trinity, there has been much in my readings that have struck as peculiarly familiar to my beliefs as a Latter-day Saint. I guess this is to be expected, to an extent, since he was fairly early–born ca. 185 AD. Also, he was the student of Clement of Alexandria and followed the intruiging line of Alexandrian thought. However, many of my fellow students (and many Christians in general) do not especially like Origen. One of my fellow students referred to him as a “space cadet.” One of the frequent complaints is that he was obviously out of touch with mainstream Christianity, being too highly influenced by Greek philosophy (isn’t it funny how that argument can go both ways?).

Origen, like the rest of the Alexandrian school, was highly trained in philosophy. However, he didn’t see philosophy as more important than revelation, but did see it as a reliable source of truth¹.

Despite his scholarly training, Origen does not necessarily try to make Christian doctrine fit his understanding of Greek philosophy. He just wants to organize and systematize the various Christian beliefs using Aristotelian methods of presenting knowledge. Origen created the first systematic theology of Christian beliefs. His reason for doing so, in his words:

Since many…of those who profess to believe in Christ differ from each other, not only in small and trifling matters, but also on subjects of the highest importance, as, e.g., regarding God, or the Lord Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit; and not only regarding these, but also regarding others which are created existences, viz., the powers and the holy virtues; it seems on that account necessary first of all to fix a definite limit and to lay down an unmistakable rule regarding each one of these, and then to pass to the investigation of other points.”²

It is important to note that Origen does not look to Greek philosophical theories to understand Christian doctrines. He wishes only to use the format of the scientific treatise as the vehicle for expounding Christian doctrine. If he sometimes is influenced by philosophical theories, such as Plato’s view that souls exist prior to their birth into mortality, he also has scriptural reasons for accepting that view. In particular his view of the Godhead does not draw on Greek models of deity. Origen holds that the Son makes “the willing in himself just what it was in the Father, so that…the will of the Son is inseparable from the will of the Father, so that there are no longer two wills but one. And this unity of will is the reason for the saying of the Son ‘I and my Father are one [John 10:30].’”³

Thus “they are two separate persons, but one in unity and concord of mind and in identity of will.” And Origen expressly resists the Greek tendency to make God impassible or incapable of emotion:

[Jesus] came down to earth in pity for human kind, he endured our passions and sufferings before he suffered the cross, and he deigned to assume our flesh…What is that passion which he suffered for us? It is the passion of love. The Father himself and the God of the whole universe is “long-suffering, full of mercy and pity” [Psalm 86:15]. Must he not then, in some sense, be exposed to suffering?…The Father himself is not impassible. If he is besought he shows pity and compassion;he feels, in some sort, the passion of love. Origen is not trying to make the Father and the Son sound like the ineffable One and the eternal Logos of the Platonists. He is trying to put into the language of philosphy the traits of God he finds in the Bible.⁴

More On Jesus as a Subordinate God:

In his Commentary on John, Origen noted a difference between the godhood of the Father and that of the Son. Commenting on John’s Prologue (the first verses of John 1), he explains the difference (in the Greek text) between ho Theos (God, with the article) and Theos (without the article) refers to the Father and the Son. Ho Theos, or The God, is the proper term for the Father, the source of all being. The Logos is termed simply Theos, God, conveying the derivative nature of the Son’s divinity. Elsewhere, as Norman Russell explains, this distinction helps Origen explain how the Father and the Son are two Gods in one sense and one God in another. They are two in so far as they are distinct from one another: the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father. At the same time they are one God in the same way that Adam and Eve are one flesh and Christ and the righteous man are one in spirit. Flesh, spirit, and god are predicates in ascending order of honour and importance.⁵

On Deification:

Just as Christ derived his godhood from the Father and could thus also be called a God, Origen believed that the term “god” could be applied to angels and righteous human beings. He saw the “gods” as the highest class of rational beings alongside the “thrones, dominions, principalities, and authorities of Col. 1:16. He points out Psalms 50:1 (LXX), 136:2, 82:6, and others and compared them with Matt. 22:32, where God is described as the God not of the dead but of the living. The “gods” are therefore living beings and not the dead, or lifeless idols. For Origen, the angelic orders form a continuum extending from the gods down to men. This enables Origen to interpret the “gods” of Scripture sometimes as angels but more often as human beings who have been promoted to the angelic life. The gods are “those to whom the Word of God came” (John 10:35). they are the saints, the perfect, those who live in beatitude. Through participation in God, they have been transformed from men into angels or gods.⁶

On the Preexistence of Souls:

Origen believed that spirits existed in another world prior to their birth into human bodies. Some have imagined that he believed in reincarnation, but this doesn’t appear to have been the case. In his own words:

When the Scriptures are carefully examined regarding Jacob and Esau, it is not found to be unrighteous of God to have said–before they were born, or had done anything in this life–that “the older will serve the younger.” However, it is not unrighteous…if we feel that Jacob was worthily beloved by God according to the deserts of his previous life…Owing to cause that have previously existed, a different office is prepared by the Creator for each one in proportion to the degree of his merit.

It appears to me that this will be seen more clearly at last if each being–whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal–is said to have the causes of his diversity in himself, prior to his bodily birth….There is no doubt that at the Day of Judgment, the good will be separated from the bad (and the just from the unjust) and all will be distributed according to their deserts, by the sentence of God…Similarly, I am of the opinion that such a state of things was the case in the past (i.e., in the pre-mortal world).

I think it should be inquired into as to the reasons why a human soul is acted on sometimes by good and at other times by bad. I suspect the reason for this is older than the bodily birth of the individual…To all these instances, those who maintain that everything in the world is under the administration of Divine providence can give no other answer (as it appears to me) to show that no sadow of injustice rests upon the divine government than to hold that there were ceratin causes of prior existence. And in consequence of this prior existence, our souls contracted a certain amount of guilt in their sensitive nature, before their birth in the body.

This is the objection which they generally raise: They say, “If the world had its beginning in time, what was God doing before the world began?”…I say that God did not begin to work for the first time when he made this visible world. Just as there will be another world after its destruction, so also I believe that other worlds existed before the present one came into being. And both of these positions will be confirmed by the authority of Holy Scripture…That before this world others also existed is shown by Ecclesiastes, in the words…”Who will speak and say, ‘Look! This is new’? It has already been in the worlds that have been before us” [Eccles. 1:9, 10, LXX].⁷

There is much, much more in Origen’s writings that would seem familiar and interesting to Latter-day Saints. While I obviously can’t put it all in one post, there are other reasons why I can’t provide you with all that he said that would be of interest. Although Origen would become one of the most popular of the early Church writers ever, he was condemned by later popes as a heretic. As Christianity changed, falling further into apostasy, Origen’s ideas were seen as more and more unorthodox. Later church scholars who preserved Origen’s writings and translated them into Latin, etc., conveniently edited, changed, inserted, omitted things from Origen’s writings that they saw as heretical or not matching with their beliefs. Most of what we have from Origen’s original +/- 2000 works come to us throught the Latin historian Rufinus. Consider the following concerning his opinion on translating/editing Origen’s materials.

Rufinus on Origen’s writings:

Wherever, therefore, we have found in his books anything contrary to that which was piously established by him about the Trinity in other places, either we have omitted it as corrupt and  interpolated, or edited it according to that pattern that we often find asserted by himself. If, however, speaking to the trained and learned, he writes obscurely because he desires to briefly pass over something, we, to make the passage plainer, have added those things that we have read on the same subject openly in his other books…All who shall copy or read this…shall neither add anything to this writing, nor remove anything, nor insert anything, nor change anything.⁸

While Rufinus looks unfavorably upon anyone tinkering with his translations, he felt justified in heavily editing the original documents. Now, unfortunately, when we read Origen (at least from the commonly accepted Latin translation), we don’t know if it is Origen speaking or if it is Rufinus inserting his own version of Origen’s words. Even worse, Rufinus claimed that he was just following the lead of other handlers of Origen’s works before him. 

Rufinus on Macarius:

…Who when he translated over seventy works of Origen, which are called homilies and also several of his writings on the apostle into Latin in which are found several offensive passages, therefore he removed or cleaned up all of these when he translated, so that a Latin reader would find nothing in them that disagrees with our belief. This, therefore, we follow even if we are not so eloquent, nevertheless as much as we can, by the same rules, watching to be sure not to reveal those passages in the books of Origen that disagree and contradict with himself.⁹

Perhaps if we had the opportunity to have direct access to more of Origen’s writings, instead of having them filtered through editors who saw no problem in changing what were probably some of his most interesting concepts, we would gain through them a greater insight into what some of the earliest Christians believed.

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1. Noel B. Reynolds, “What Went Wrong for the Early Christians,” Early Christians in Disarray (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 11 [↩]
2. Origen, On First Principles, proemium 2, as cited in Daniel W. Graham and James L. Siebach, “The Introduction of Philosophy into Early Christianity,” Early Christians in Disarray, 216 [↩]
3. Ibid., 218 [↩]
4. Ibid., 218 [↩]
5. See discussion in Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 145 [↩]
6. Russell, 146 [↩]
7. These quotes taken from David W. Bercot, ed., A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1998), 489 [↩]
8. As cited in John Gee, “The Corruption of Scripture in Early Christianity,” in Early Christians in Disarray, 172 [↩]
9. Ibid., 173 [↩]