Meeting the real Origen

Origen is the most tragic character of all Christian scholarship, if not of all Christian history after Paul. I mean the epithet ‘tragic’ in its original sense, referring to a noble person engaging in a morally momentous struggle ending in ruin, essentially because of some extreme quality which is both the source of his greatness and the cause of his downfall. 

Perhaps celebrity and adulation came too early in his life; perhaps it was his stormy character and his audacity to furnish theological conjectures, which were received (not always in good faith) as definitive doctrines, although he himself proposed them as tentative exegeses of thorny portions of the veiled Scripture, not as mandatory dicta.

He lived during the third century and died well after 265 AD, probably during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Probus (276-282). The widespread assertion that he died in c. 255 is a fanciful assumption following the contradictory sanctimonious myth of Eusebius, which theologians continue to take as ‘Origen’s biography’.

Origen was converted to Christianity when he was nearly 50, which to Greeks was an intolerable scandal, since he was already a very famous and widely respected Greek philosopher. He followed lessons by Ammonius Saccas for a short time and was co-pupil with Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270). Notwithstanding his conversion to Christianity, he remained in the best of terms with Plotinus and other Greek companions of his, and his personal relationship with them was never shadowed by the fact that he chose to follow a different intellectual path. Actually, a careful comparative study of Plotinus and Origen that leaves aside the fanciful distortive nonsense of Eusebius (an extremely rare commodity nowadays) points to two members of the same lodge, whose numerous common points of thought and critical locution demonstrate a bifurcation of an underlying common education that unfolded in the class of the obscure Ammonius Saccas.

When Origen visited the class of Plotinus in Rome and the latter grew consternated and broke off his lecture abruptly saying that he did not care to teach before those who knew all he was about to say (Life of Plotinus, 14), the authority that had entered the seminar was the Christian Origen.

This is why Porphyry (c. 234 - c. 305) sought to meet Origen personally at Alexandria, at a time when Origen was already a Christian. This is why Porphyry writing against the Christians mourned Origen’s loss to Greek letters, although he himself had converted to Christianity for a while.

In the history of philosophy, Origen’s thought is a chapter of its own, which remained unwritten and unknown for centuries. It was Origen (oftentimes followed by the volatile Porphyry) who revived Anaxagoras’ Theory of Logoi, which has been expounded recently (Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen and Neoplatonism – The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, De Gruyter, Berlin / New York, 1016).

Origen was the founder of a concept of Time, which some Christians (Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine) took up, but they lacked Origen’s stupendous philosophical background and easily lapsed into Platonic ideas and formulations, which had nothing to do with Origen’s original thought. For example, Origen used the term συμπαρεκτείνων (‘stretched out alongside with’) in order to adumbrate time proper, in the context of the Stoic view of time being an ‘extension’ (διάστημα). Galen abundantly used this term, yet only literally, not in any technical sense related to the philosophy of time. It was Alexander of Aphrodisias who introduced its usage in relation to divine life (explaining Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1072b29: ‘and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is’). In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he posited that ‘eternal existence (or, ‘aeon’) is the life which is co-extended along with everyone’. Thus, he used the term συμπαρεκτείνων (‘stretched out alongside with’) not only for divine life, but for the life of every living being, which means that (in reference to those living in the world) he used this for time proper. Origen followed Alexander suit and this is how he described divine life in his Commentary on the gospel of John, I.29.204 (and then, is the literary sense after Galen, in the Commentaries on the gospels of John, and of Matthew, on Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, and on the Proverbs). Then, making the utmost of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ innovation, he posited the definition of time proper as that which is stretched out alongside with the structure of this world’, thus setting forth a conscious distinction between space and time (Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians). By contrast, Gregory of Nyssa, who (unlike the philosophically mediocre Gregory of Nazianzus) was an acute philosophical mind took up not only Origen’s innovative terminology, but also the true tenor of his statements, especially in his rebuttal of Eunomius. As it happened, later writers (John of Damascus, and then Michael Psellus, and others) were satisfied that this terminology about time and divine life was introduced by Gregory of Nazianzus. This is how Christians wrote their history of ideas. (See more on this in Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Origen: Cosmology and Ontology of Time, Brill, Leiden / New York, 2007).

Origen was also the founder of Christian Eschatology, on which it has been impossible to add anything new until today (see a full exposition of this in Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History and Eschatology, Brill, Leiden / New York, 2008, especially chapters 9-11, and Conclusion).

Origen was also the predecessor of the doctrine of Nicaea, and his formulations about the Son / Logos (not only the orthodox use of the term homoousios (see Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen and Neoplatonism, Appendix II, pp. 1559-1604, a critical edition of two unpublished texts from Codex Sabaiticus 232 and Codex Holy Sepulchre, 3) but also philological structures such as ‘there was not a state in which the Son was not’ (οὐκ ἦν ὅτε οὐκ ἦν) about the Son in relation to the Father, which he took up from Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Aristotelian commentator who (along with Galen and Plutarch) exerted a remarkable philological influence upon Origen himself.

Beyond the fact that Eusebius’ distorted ‘biography’ of Origen is appearing convenient to modern religious scholarship, there is one more fundamental point which is persistently either overlooked or ignored or hard to accept: this is about the relations between Pagans and Christians during the Later Antiquity. It is widely believed that those groups were mutually alienated, even hostile to each other. However, the truth is different (and I intend to demonstrate this fully in the near future): While Christians were fiercely hostile to those of their lot that they considered as heretics, men like Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Hippolytus (all of them in the first place philosophers that were converted to Christianity) were in the best of terms with those of their friends and colleagues that chose to remain lifetime Greeks. This state of affairs went on well after those early times, hence it was all too natural for the grammarian Orion of Alexandria (or, of Thebae) to be the teacher of both Proclus and Eudocia, the devout Christian wife of Emperor Theodosius II (see Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Real Cassian Revisited, Brill, Leiden / New York, 2008, pp. 352-3; An Ancient Commentary on the Book of Revelation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York, pp. 308-9). The plain fact that pagans and Christians were not immune to each other’s influence is normally overlooked. But they lived under the same sky; they ran their lives under the same institutions; they experienced the same needs; and they shared common concerns. Sometimes they were friends with each other, certainly they conversed with each other, and we know that it was normal for both Christians and pagans to study under common teachers in the same classes, although it was not always easy for all of them to reason on the same principles. Two different worlds were cohabiting, and for all the mutual spiritual alienation they often experienced, they were bound even to express their ‘otherness’ in terms of the common stock of the language they shared. ‘Togetherness’ and ‘otherness’ at the same time made up the amalgam of that transient world.