Von Origenes und Hieronymus zu Augustinus. Studien zur Antiken Theologiegeschichte by Alfons Fürst (review)

A member of the Catholic faculty of theology at the University of Münster, Alfons Fürst is a professor of patristics and archaeology and an expert in the thought of Origen. His latest monograph aims to trace a trajectory from Origen (d. 254) and St. Jerome (d. 420) to St. Augustine (d. 430). Fürst's overall argument is that Origen laid the foundations of a Catholic culture by constructing a comprehensive exegesis that read all of Sacred Scripture in the light of the Word. The Word has entered human history to bring all persons back to the Father; but the mechanics of precisely how this would occur obviously vary, depending on one's overall theology. What Fürst rightly sees is that Origen enabled other sophisticated readers of the Bible, like Jerome, to advance a hermeneutic in the Latin West that understood the Word's incarnation as a divine ambush against the workings of the devil. Through Jerome, the West thus inherited the best of Hebraic and Hellenic soteriology, but what Jerome could not fathom was how all the pieces of God's saving action in the incarnate Word came together. Questions of human freedom, divine foreknowledge, and the bestowal of sanctifying grace were, of course, left to find full flower in Augustine's eschatology. Lest this grand sketch prove misleading, Fürst's work is not a triptych of these three thinkers, but reads more as an introduction to the massive figure of Origen (pp. 45-236), a bit on Jerome (pp. 239-334), and then a section synoptically overlapping these two figures in the thought of Augustine (pp. 337-500).

The main purpose of putting these three luminous churchmen together is to show that Augustine's understanding of Christian salvation relied on a particular reading of Origen. We now know (Divjak, ep. 27) that Augustine and his colleague, Aurelius, were discussing Origen even before the former's ordination in 391. With an ever-growing sense of humanity's radical and utter reliance on grace, however, Augustine tended to read Origen as one who overstressed humanity's autonomy and thus ability to move oneself closer to God. As such, the bishop of Hippo no doubt saw in Origen a Pelagian precursor, a point made by Fürst with brio and brilliance. Fürst also chronicles the ways Jerome and Augustine saw the possibility of Origen's leading the Church astray regarding Trinitarian doctrine, the nature of the soul and its relation to corporeality, as well as the attendant issue of the resurrection of the dead.

Any professional scholar of Origen will have, at least, to know of this work. It is certainly not intended for the nonspecialist. Given the limitations that both the German as well as the price may bring, this work might land on library shelves but will not make its way into many reading lists. This is unfortunate for the good points sketched above, but understandable. Other students of late antiquity may find this volume helpful in understanding the massive influence exerted by Origen's theology, but much of what Fürst advances here concerning Augustine's estimation of Origen is found more readily for us English speakers in Gyorgy Heidl's Origen's Influence on the Young Augustine: A Chapter of the History of Origenism (Piscataway, NJ, 2003). One of Fürst's unmatchable contributions comes with his analysis of Jerome, a very understudied Father of the Church. For example, Fürst opens his section on Jerome (pp. 238-74) by showing how Jerome's De Seraphim concerning Isaiah's vision in the temple was reacting to Origen's Trinitarian interpretation of this multilayered passage. Connections like this prove to be the gems strewn throughout these pages.

Origen has cast a long shadow on practically every aspect of Christian dogma today; and scholars like...