Christianisme et religions païennes dans le Contre Celse d'Origène (review)

While at times crossing paths with the comparative history and phenomenology of religions, this is really a book about Origen's theological judgment on non-Christian religions as arising from his contention with Celsus over the variety and abundance of religious expressions in the Greco-Roman world. In the first two sections of his study, Fédou comprehensively maps out the "conflict of religions" in the foreground of the Contra Celsum, the clash of "beliefs" (focusing especially on issues of polytheism and monotheism) and "practices" (everything from the veneration of images to divination and prophecy) in Greek, Christian, and "barbarian" religions as seen through the eyes of Celsus and Origen. The third section of the book attempts synthetically and constructively to evaluate the "conflict of interpretations" evidenced in the apology, the struggles of Celsus and Origen to make sense of this panorama of religious diversity according to their respective views on tradition, history, and the role of the Logos.

Some reservations notwithstanding, Fédou proceeds on the trail blazed by Carl Andresen in his classic study Logos und Nomos: Die Polemik des Kelsos wider das Christentum (Berlin, 1955). Fédou's Celsus is a staunch guardian of the diverse religious customs (nomoi) of the nations, a traditionalist and a devout "henotheist" who defends these nomoi, whatever the philosophical snares in their literal observance, as tributary to the "true doctrine" of the Divine, the archaios logos testified from remotest antiquity. For Celsus the logos underlying the Greco-oriental and Greco-Roman cultural heritage is a permanent, immutable order, a timeless rationale for devotion to the true God, however named. Origen in his turn attacks Celsus as a blatant relativist or at best a flawed universalist (how can Jews and Christians be the only aliens to this time-honored logos?). Yet Origen goes further, insisting on the "novelty" and unique perspective of Christianity by redefining the comprehensive Nomos by which religious beliefs and practices are to be judged. "Le débat sur les différentes religions est. . . . ordonné, chez Origène, à une théorie de la Loi" (p. 482). Christians look to the "natural law," the "law of God," the Nomos that appraises all religious beliefs and practices by the three primary criteria of truth, morality, and universality. Such a Nomos could not by itself vindicate the newness of Christianity—much of what Christianity represents, after all, accords fully with the "common notions" (koinai ennoiai) of all peoples!—had this Nomos not reached perfect expression in the historically incarnate Logos, the Christ who is Very Truth (autoaleētheia), the embodiment of moral integrity and virtue, and the bearer of a genuinely universal gospel of salvation.

Fédou's monograph has several merits, not the least being its sheer comprehensiveness. He has rightly sketched the argumentation in the Contra Celsum as a full-scale debate, with inseparable religious and political ramifications, over the hermeneutics of "tradition" and "plus précisement sur le rapport à la tradition" (p. 495). He has also convincingly characterized the debate as a clash of historical perspectives, or better yet of "une interprétation théologique d'histoire" (pp. 515ff). Indeed Fédou's vindication of Origen as a legitimately historical thinker, whose "theology of history" in the Contra Celsum compares positively to that of Irenaeus and may be something of a corrective or supplement to the speculative cosmological and eschatological postulates of the De principiis, is most welcome.

The ultimate success of Fédou's study must nevertheless be judged not on these points, where he is building on earlier scholarship, but in his stated goal of finding in the Contra Celsum, if not a thoroughly nuanced theological approach to the problem of religious pluralism, at least certain "axes de discernement" capable of illuminating or guiding the contemporary Christian debate with non-Christian religions (p. 37). From the outset, Fédou cautiously places on himself the burden of negotiating between ancient and modern conceptions...