On First Principles by Origen (review)

Sometimes, it seems as if there is little left for one to say about Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253); more often, it seems as if no one could possibly say enough.

In one sense, he towers over Christian theological history. After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the church how to read scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later Trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who, simply said, laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought. Had there been no Origen, the Christian intellectual tradition might never have been much more than a squalid hovel located somewhere at the disreputable purlieus of classical culture. Moreover, he was not only a man of extraordinary personal holiness, piety, and charity, but a martyr as well, who died as a delayed result of the brutal torture he suffered during the Decian persecution. He was, in short, among the greatest of the church fathers and the most illustrious of the saints and yet, disgracefully, official church tradition—East and West—commemorates him as neither.

This is because, in another sense, who he was and what he achieved have been hidden for the better part of the Christian era behind a false mythology and an even falser historical record. Though, as I say, he towers over the landscape of Christian thought, he has done so invisibly ever since his putative “condemnation” in 553 at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. His shadow looms over everything, but he has been erased from the historical horizon. (One thinks irresistibly of those Stalin-era photographs from which purged enemies had been airbrushed out.) And yet, as we know from the oldest records of the council—which was convened to deal solely with certain Antiochian theologians— the fifteen anathemas pronounced against what later came to be called “Origenism” were never even discussed by the assembled bishops, let alone ratified, published, or promulgated. And since the late nineteenth century various scholars have convincingly established that neither Origen nor “Origenism” was ever the subject of any condemnation pronounced by the “holy fathers” in 553. The best modern critical edition of the Seven Councils, Norman Tanner’s, simply omits the anathemas as spurious. Only after the council’s close were they added to the record, apparently to appease the emperor Justinian.

Even if the council had pronounced Origen a heretic (and his name does in fact—again probably illegitimately—appear on a list of heretics attached to its canons), it would have been not only an injustice, but a preposterous act of temerity. To have declared any man a heretic three centuries after he had died in the peace of the church, in respect of doctrinal determinations not reached during his life, would have been a gross violation of all proper canonical order. It is a happy circumstance, therefore, that no such abuse of episcopal prerogative ever actually occurred. It is a tragic circumstance, however, that the damage done by the im-posture has yet to be wholly undone. For the better part of Christian history, Origen’s name and reputation have labored under the burden of the picture those anathemas paint (even though none of them actually names him as the author of the teachings condemned). But, for two centuries or so, Christian scholars have been striving to rescue both from their unfortunate posterity, and to recover his thought from the caricatures that long ago displaced it in Christian consciousness. With the great renaissance of patristic studies in both the Orthodox and Catholic theological world in the last century, a new period of critical reappraisal and reconstruction of Origen’s work began in earnest. But there is still a great deal left to do.

It would be difficult to name a more significant contribution to this cause in...