Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea (review)

Beginning with the Pythagoreans, who upheld it, and the Ionians, who denied it, Scott traces to Origen the idea that the stars are rational beings. On the way he deals with the classical philosophical schools, with Philo, with Hellenistic natural science, with gnosticism, and with Clement of Alexandria. As in Jean Pépin's Théologie cosmique et théologie chrétienne, Aristotle turns out to have a bigger role in the story than does Plato. In the process, Scott provides us a distinctive perspective on Christian attitudes to the natural world and awareness of the natural sciences. He also helps us better understand the world-view ultimately apotheosized in Dante's Paradiso. Interestingly, this strand of Origen's thought had a fuller career in the West, where Ambrose and, at least to some extent, Aquinas accepted it, than in the East, where Basil and John Philoponus rejected it.

Origen refers to the rational nature of the stars in several works and devotes to them a chapter (I.7) in On First Principles. There he provides scriptural and philosophical arguments that the stars are rational beings. Scripturally, Origen appeals to passages in the LXX like Isaiah 45.12, "I have given precepts to all the stars" and Psalm 148.3 "Praise him, sun and moon, Praise him all stars and light." Most importantly, he appeals to Job 25.5, "the stars are not clean in his sight." The uncleanness of the stars could not have been their original state, since that would imply imperfection on God's part. If the stars are not clean, therefore, there must have been a moral failure on their part. Origen further argues that the stars have been, in the words of Romans 8.21, "subjected to futility," their present embodiment, on account of their fault. Like the angels, though, they also serve humanity as they await their deliverance. Philosophically, Origen argues that the stars' motion implies animation and that their exact observance of rule and plan further implies rationality.

Scott makes no attempt to distinguish between the Christian and the philosophical elements in Origen's thought on the stars. His work thus witnesses to a consensus among students of Early Christianity that Harnack's hypothesis about the Hellenization of Christianity, with its implicit assumption that we can distinguish the biblical tradition from its Greco-Roman cultural context, does not point us to useful questions. In the case of Origen this led to a false dichotomy between a committed Christian theologian and a Middle Platonist. Scott's extensive discussion of the relation between the corporeal vehicle (okhêma) Origen envisaged for the stars and the resurrection body also witnesses to a consensus on Origen's eschatology. Scholars can now agree that Origen's understanding of the Christian hope did not entail the loss of some sort of embodiment that would remain as an essential distinction between the creature and the creator. Whether understanding this doctrine would have mollified Origen's ancient detractors is another question. They clearly preferred to understand resurrection as the resuscitation of the corpse, as in the story of Lazarus so prominent in early Christian iconography.

Scott shows a solid grasp of classical and Patristic sources and secondary literature. His work testifies to Origen's great interest in and knowledge of the natural sciences. Without a trace of Augustine's suspicion of curiositas, Origen regarded the natural world as, like Holy Scripture, an avenue toward the knowledge of God. The book's main limitations are that it does not put Origen's understanding of the stars within a broader theological context than his eschatology and that, by and large, it does not deal with exegetical issues. Scott does little to relate Origen's understanding of the stars to his theological system as a whole, of which it is an integral part. As a result, he perhaps underestimates the importance of gnosticism in moving Origen toward Greek philosophical understandings of...