God's Marvelous Oikonomia: Reflections on Origen's Understanding of Divine and Human Pedagogy in the Address Ascribed to Gregory Thaumaturgus

A student of Origen at Caesarea composed and presumably delivered the (Address on Origen)¹ at some time no earlier than 238 and no later than 245.² It is, as August Brinkmann has demonstrated, the only surviving example of a classical rhetorical genre, the , a speech given at a departure.³ In the introduction to his edition, Henri Crouzel points out that it also the oldest surviving oration by a Christian that is not a homily and one of only two surviving testimonies by students to their teachers in late antiquity.⁴ (The other, written a few decades later, is Porphyry's Life of Plotinus; since Porphyry himself testifies to having met Origen during his youth,⁵ the two authors may even have known one another.) We can only infer Clement's teaching practice from his writings and we can do scarcely more with Evagrius; in Origen's case we can see how a student perceived him as a participant in the divine oikonomia and check that perception against his own understanding of the role. Its author is traditionally identified as Gregory Thaumaturgus, bishop of Neocaesarea, the metropolis of the Roman province of Pontus. Gregory "the Wonderworker" was venerated as the Apostle to Pontus, his cult promoted by Gregory of Nyssa, whose grandmother, Macrina the Elder, he had converted.⁶ If he was the author, as seems likely, he provides a living link between Origen and the Cappadocians.⁷

The body of the work recounts how the author came to Origen (sections 31–72), how Origen secured him as a student (73–92) and how Origen taught him (93–181). It begins with an exordium (1–30) in which Gregory, as I shall call him, rehearses reasons for not giving and for giving the address. It concludes with a statement of his regrets on leaving Origen (182–202) and a peroration in which he asks Origen for his blessing and prayer (203–7).⁸ The account of Origen's teaching is at the heart of the work. As Gregory presents it, Origen dealt initially with forming his pupil's morals (93–98), but his curriculum proper focused on forming the intellect. This curriculum corresponds to the four disciplines of philosophy that Origen himself recognized: dialectics (99–108); physics, the study of natural phenomena of which geometry and astronomy form a part (109–14); ethics (115–49); and theology (150–81).⁹

Questions of Style

Unfortunately, Gregory presents his testimonial in a style that might have been calculated to make Clement of Alexandria seem clear and concise by contrast. Pierre Nautin describes the Address as having "affected style, long digressions on commonplaces of rhetoric or moralistic literature, comparisons taken from nature and developed with complacency," in sum, "all the technique of a set speech (discours d'apparat)."¹⁰ For seven pages of Greek text in Crouzel's edition Gregory expatiates on how he cannot compose an adequate speech. He apologizes for the interference of Latin with his Greek¹¹ and may have been imitating Ciceronian periods. He never uses one word when fourteen will do and, as Eugenio Marotta has shown, he was astonishingly fertile in finding recondite terms or inventing his own.¹² Neither does he use one simple image when three elaborate ones will make the same point. For example, he compares the danger of an irrational and uncritical adherence to a single philosophical school to being mired in an impassable swamp in an immense plain, to being lost a dense forest where each possible way out turns out to be deceptive, and to being caught in a labyrinth with a thousand passages ingeniously designed—the last one of many allusions to Plato.¹³ In spite of his artfully couched protestations of inadequacy, the author of the Address probably expected his contemporaries to be impressed; creating an effect was at least as important as communicating information.

A further peculiarity of Gregory's style, described in detail by Adolf Knauber,¹⁴ is his avoidance of...