Alexander Schmemann

1. The Beginning of the Church (28 pages)

Page 25

Origen’s contribution to the study and interpretation of Scripture is very great. Although preaching and theology had always been based on the Scriptures, he was the first to formulate a systematically Christocentric conception of the Old Testament, and in his innumerable interpretations he was centuries ahead in the development of an ecclesiastical exegesis. We cannot overlook the danger of his approach to the Bible, however. In his extreme allegorism each word acquired an incalculable number of meanings, some of them extremely fantastic. Allegory was fashionable among pagan scholars of literature in Alexandria, and Origen had been influenced by it. Modern scholars are attempting to differentiate between his typology — that is, the search for true types and spiritual meanings — and his allegory, in which he applied arbitrary meanings to certain events and words.
In all likelihood Origen himself was aware of the distinction. It is difficult, though, to draw a real line between these two approaches, and allegorism was for a long time a dangerous propensity in Christian theology, often substituting rhetorical contrivance for the vitality and common sense of the Word of God.

Still more dangerous for the future was Origen’s attempt to construct a Christian theological system. This was contained in his work Peri Archon (“On First Principles”), which has reached us only in a later, somewhat modified Latin translation, De Principiis. Although he maintained that the only standard for any theology must be the rule of faith — meaning the tradition of the Church — he did not in fact discover a way to combine revelation and Hellenistic philosophy so that the basic idealism of the Greek outlook might be overcome. On the contrary, his system was an abrupt Hellenization of Christianity itself; he rejected the clear doctrine of the creation of the world from nothingness, which is the key to any truly Christian cosmology, and all the unique features of the biblical conception of the world as history — as reality — and not an illusory tragedy of free choice. According to Origen, the world evolves from God and returns to Him, by some incontrovertible law, which makes possible the reality of evil, of freedom, and of salvation.
But since all is eternal in God, this cycle of creation of the world is eternally repeated, ending unalterably with general restoration and salvation.

Origen ended his long and righteous life as a “confessor” — one who bore witness to Christ under torture — dying from injuries suffered during the persecutions of Decius (250). His longing for martyrdom, which had never slackened since his childhood, was satisfied. While his figure is unusually attractive and his example inspiring, his theology was to play in the end a fateful role in the history of Church thought, and only with great difficulty was the Church to overcome its temptations and dangers.

Origen started the gradual process of Christianizing Hellenism and the struggle to overcome it within the Church; this struggle was to be the basic theme of the later Byzantine centuries of Church history. Perhaps without his “creative failure” the eventual triumph of Christian Hellenism would have been impossible.

 

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