Origen

Origen’s exegesis of the Song of Songs, despite the praise it generally raised both in antiquity and in modern times, still awaits for deeper investigation as far as the literary project of the Alexandrian and its output are concerned. In this respect, it is difficult not only to exactly define the mutual relations between the Commentary and the Homilies on the Song of Songs, apart from the evident similarity of their themes, but more specifically to catch the particular nature of Origen’s interpretation at the first level of the biblical text against his well-known allegorism. Viewing the «littera» or «historia» of the Song as a theatrical piece, as especially shown in the Commentary, Origen delivers a dramatical interpretation which by its careful description of the successive scenes develops into a proper script for the stage. Though this explanation is meant to guide the reader to a further level of interpretation, the ‘letter’ cannot here be appreciated simply as the provisional step leading to the ‘spirit’, i.e. the spiritual intelligence of the Song which is in principle the only one permitted for Origen in this biblical love poetry. Instead of that, through the discourse engaged by the dramatic interpretation, on the one hand, there is an overlapping of both the ‘historical’ and the ‘spiritual’ explanation and, on the other hand, the dramatic exegesis also delivers a surplus of sense which is not totally subsumed in the spiritual interpretation. At moments the Song as ‘play’ seems therefore to gain in Origen’s perceptive reading a life of its own.

"Indeed the mystery of Christ runs the risk of being disbelieved precisely because it is so incredibly wonderful."-- Cyril, the Pillar of Faith

The concept and doctrine of kenosis as it was expounded in the writings of Origen, Athanasius and Cyril in Alexandria, as with the early Desert Fathers. It was later included in a commentary by Gregory of Nyssa, and Hilary of Poitiers. Maximus the Confessor, a student of Origen calls it "an eternal movement of love." The kenosis of Christ was thus depicted in terms of these Trinitarian theologians.

This kenotic action whereby the gift of God was understood as the operation of love within the Trinity, the abandoning of one to the other; and salvation issued from a participation within this intra-Trinitarian procession made possible through the incarnation of Christ, the revelation of the true image of God the Father, revealed by all. We are deified and redeemed through the economy of love, distinctive nature of which is to give in a continuing act of kenosis.

Origen, De Princip., 1.II.8
But since He is called by the apostle not only the brightness of His glory, but also the express figure of His person or subsistence, it does not seem idle to inquire how there can be said to be another figure of that person besides the person of God Himself, whatever be the meaning of person and subsistence. Consider, then, whether the Son of God, seeing He is His Word and Wisdom, and alone knows the Father, and reveals Him to whom He will (to those who are capable of receiving His word and wisdom), may not, in regard of this very point of making God to be understood and acknowledg- ed, be called the figure of His person and subsistence; that is, when that Wisdom, which desires to make known to others the means by which God is acknowledged and understood by them, describes Himself first of all.

It may by so doing be called the express figure of the person of God. In order, however, to arrive at a fuller understanding of the manner in which the Savior is the figure of the person or subsistence of God, let us take an instance, which, although it does not describe the subject of which we are treating either fully or appropriately, may never-theless be seen to be employed for this purpose only, to show that the Son of God, who was in the form of God, divesting Himself (of His glory), makes it His object, by this very divesting of Himself, to demonstrate to us the fullness of His deity. For instance, suppose that there were a statue of so enormous a size as to fill the whole world, which on that account could be seen by no one; and that another statue were formed altogether resembling it in the shape of the limbs.

And in the features of the countenance, and in form and material, but without the same immensity of size, so that those who were unable to behold the one of enormous proportions, should, on seeing the latter, acknowledge that they had seen the former, because it preserved all the features of its limbs and countenance, and even the very form and material, so closely, as to be altogether not distinguishable from it; by some such similitude, the Son of God, divesting Himself of His equality with the Father. Showing to us the way to the knowledge of Him, is made the express image of His person: so that we, who were unable to look upon the glory of that marvelous light when placed in the greatness of His Godhead.

May, by His being revealed to us in brightness, has the means of beholding the divine light by looking upon the brightness. This comparison, of course, of statues, as belonging to material things, is employed for no other purpose than to show that the Son of God, though placed in the very insignificant form of a human body, in consequence of the resemblance of His works and power to the Father, showed that there was in Him an immense and invisible greatness, inasmuch as He said to His disciples, "He who sees Me, sees the Father also;" and, "I and the Father are one." And to these belong also the similar expression, "The Father is in Me, and I in the Father." 

Athanasius, God became Man
The philosophers of Athanasius’ time viewed God as being a static entity who by His very nature could not change nor experience suffering. Athanasius argues for Christ as the incarnate Logos through tackling of the Platonic notions of God where the attributes of immutability and impassibility are paramount.  In order to argue for the divinity of Christ, he had to have a strong defense against these notions. Athanasius asserts that the incarnation of Christ is a physical indwelling of the divine being of Christ in the body of Jesus and not an individual that only shows up that way.

Athanasius indicates that there is a purposeful lived experience in the Logos coming into humanity since humanity has forgotten who God is, accordingly every work of Jesus during his earthly ministry was acted to bring humanity into a revelation of the providence of God. Human race has made created things into objects of monolateral idolatrous  worship, through enchanted irrationality, that could not recognize God. Christ being the visible icon of the invisible God points the Father in His works. 

Athanasius confirms that although the Word dwells fully in Jesus human body and did have some acquired human limitations, none of which has reduced His divine person. Athanasius uses the notion of hunger to portray this. He declares that although Jesus Christ got hungry during His mundane life, He did not abstain from it because Christ being God would not be defeated by death through hunger. Similarly, theologians portray that Christ would be subdued by sickness as evidently confirmed by His miracles, demonstrating  that Christ divine power over all ills.

It is fair to conclude that His divine nature protected Him from being susceptible to sickness. It is evident that Athanasius attempts to be confirm the nature of any  limitations the Logos allows Himself to experience for the sake of human redemption, “Any physical weakness experienced by Jesus must be voluntarily assumed by the Word himself and not imposed upon Him against his own will." Athanasius asserts that if Christ experienced suffering for whatever reason, it is because He has allowed Himself to do so and not because it occurred for reasons outside of His control.

Those above notions express Athanasius elaboration on Kenosis in  as pouring Himself out, explained to Pagan philosophers. C.S. Lewis wrote, "When I first opened his "De Incarnatione verbi Dei," I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. . . only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as arbitrary and violations of the laws of nature 

Cyril's Theology of the Divine Kenosis, by Paul Gavrilyuk
Having briefly surveyed various inadequate approaches to the Nestorian controversy, the author shows that the protection of the unqualified divine impassibility from being compromised by any involvement in suffering was at the heart of Theodore’s and and Nestorius’ christology. Nestorians charged Cyril with being an advocate of theopatheia. In response, Cyril developed a doctrine of God’s appropriation of human suffering and insisted upon the divine self-emptying in the incarnation.

Kenotic Economy, Balthasar to Barth 
It is this abandonment in love which characterises kenosis that Balthasar's theology, as its economy, both preserve the condition for the possibility of ego emptying theology in its core, that "there is only one way to approach the Trinitarian life in God: manifested in divine perichoresis as God's kenosis in the theology of the covenant — and thence in the theology of the Cross — feeling our way back into the eternal mystery. 

'This primary kenosis makes possible all other kenotic movement of God into the world; being simply its consequences. Here comes Karl Barth's understanding of kenosis, God's freedom to love is a self-giving not a giving up. The doctrine of kenosis outlines, then, the giving of the gift of life; a giving that cannot be given if the giving is not part of an economy that includes reception.

The use of sacrificial language is a given widely certified by the first Christian authors to describe the redeeming death of Christ and of Christian moral behavior. This article aims to highlight the hermeneutical strategies employed in dissociating the sacrifice of Christ and of Christians from the connections with Jewish ritual and pagan superstition. From the Patristic period onwards, it is therefore possible to find some criteria to offer to today’s theological research on the use of the references to the world of sacrifices in the proclamation of the faith and that of Christian morals.

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This article provides an account of Didymus’s subtle attention to theological nuance and invites readers to reconsider his importance for the theological debates of the late fourth century. The polemical shape of Didymus the Blind’s theology of the trinity is underdetermined. This article argues that Didymus responded to Eunomius’s first Apology. The argument takes the shape of a short history of the reception of John 16:14. This verse was used in anti-monarchian tradition to distinguish the Holy Spirit from the Son, but it also led to low pneumatologies that in some cases implied angelomorphic pneumatology. Eunomius’s pneumatology in Apology 25 is a radicalization of this anti-monarchian reading of John 16:14, which Didymus opposed with careful attention to Scripture’s usage of terms for “pouring out.”

Criticism of myth in the Bible is not a modern problem. Its roots go back to the earliest Christian theologians, and before them, to ancient Greek and Jewish thinkers. The dilemma posed by texts that ascribe human characteristics and emotions to the divine is a perennial problem, and we have much to learn from the ancient attempts to address it.

Mark Sheridan provides a theological and historical analysis of the patristic interpretation of Scripture’s anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language for God. Rather than reject the Bible as mere stories, ancient Jewish and Christian theologians read these texts allegorically or theologically in order to discover the truth contained within them. They recognized that an edifying and appropriate interpretation of these stories required that one start from the understanding that "God is not a human being" (Num 23:19). Sheridan brings the patristic tradition into conversation with modern interpreters to show the abiding significance of its theological interpretation for today.

Language for God in Patristic Tradition is a landmark resource for students of ancient Christian theology. Wide-ranging in scope and accessible in its analysis, it demonstrates that those engaged in theological interpretation of Scripture have much to gain from studying their forebears in the faith.

The first point in Celsus’ argument against the biblical truth is the origin of the Jewish people and Christian faith. Celsus presents Jews and Christians as descendants of the rebellion against ancient peoples, who held and practiced an ancient account, the True Doctrine. Secondly, the biblical writers are susceptible according to Celsus. Because they are descendants of the rebels, their doctrine must be wrong. This is because in Celsus’ view the doctrine (logos) and the way of living (nomos) are in a mutual relation – a change in the one affects also the other. Thirdly, Celsus points out that Judaism and Christianity are in conflict with the True Doctrine. This is not because of their particular teaching but of their claim for universality, which, according to Celsus, has no universal basis. As Jews and Christians take only their scriptures and holy men into account, their faith is not universal but particular. Finally, on account of previous arguments, Celsus insists that the unreliability of the Bible concerning the universal truth is now proven and there is no divine inspiration in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Therefore they cannot be interpreted allegorically.

Compare Origen’s understanding of God (On First Principles) to that of Plotinus’ (Enneads) to show the divergent paths they took.  Answer is to include Plato’s metaphysics and Stoicism contribution to the development of their thought, and Justin Martyr and Irenaeus’ influence on Origen.

In 2012 the Bavarian State Library announced that it had found among its Greek manuscripts twenty-nine homilies by Origen that were thought to be lost. These are actual transcripts, the closest we can come to hearing the voice of the third-century teacher. That voice fell silent after he was imprisoned and tortured in 251, when the Emperor Decius made the first concerted attempt to eradicate Christianity. Lorenzo Perrone, the principal editor of the critical edition of the Munich manuscript, published in 2015, demonstrated that these homilies are Origen's last word, written shortly before his arrest. Decius had good reason to want Origen silenced. Origen tells believers how our bodies together become God's body, a dynamic force spreading through the Roman politeia and transforming it. The recovered homilies are on ten Psalms. These ten, an odd group, were selected because they posed problems. Origen took his time, spending the better part of an hour explaining no more than a dozen or so lines in each homily. Only three psalms were short enough to be covered by one homily. Homilia means "discussion." I read and discussed the homilies with an old friend who has spent much of her career studying Origen's most brilliant and faithful legatee, Evagrius of Pontus. Origen was a subtle thinker whose style, always complex and often compressed, can make him hard to figure out. It does not help that, as a teacher, he thought that his hearers would be more likely to listen if he kept them guessing what he was going to say next. His approach to the Bible, though invariably logical, relies on assumptions that we no longer share. We had to think with Origen before he made sense. Solving together one puzzle after another was fun, since the effort was generously repaid. I began writing a translation of the homilies in 2015. The work went slowly since I found myself easily distracted by the presidential campaign. My productivity improved on November 9, 2016. I woke up hoping that what I remembered from the night before was a nightmare, but knowing that it wasn't. The third century was a tough time, too, but a welcome relief from what looked like the death of America as a multiracial democracy. (My translation should appear this winter as Volume 141 in the "Fathers of the Church" series.) As I began to translate, I sought to reflect Origen's care in using words by consistently using one English word that corresponded to one important word in Greek. The hardest word to translate this way is the most important, logos. Logos covers a wide range of meanings. It signifies the divine Logos, the rational order of the cosmos, our

Der Vergleich der Behandlung des Themas des Zorns Gottes zeigt überraschende Übereinstimmungen zwischen Tertullian und Origenes. Zorn ist etwas, das Gott wie andere Eigenschaften in einer dem Menschen vergleichbaren Weise annimmt, um dem Menschen nahe zu kommen. Das Ziel von Gottes Zorn ist für diejenigen, die ihn akzeptieren, die Vereinigung mit Gott in seiner lauteren Gutheit. Philosophische Überlegungen zumal platonischer Herkunft werden dabei aufgegriffen, um die biblische Aussagen zu erläutern, nicht jedoch, um sie zu überfremden.

The status of the Septuagint as the Bible of the early church has obscured the level to which the fathers esteemed the original Hebrew text. Indeed, modern studies of the role of the Greek Bible in the church of the patristic age frequently assert that Christians rejected the Hebrew Bible as scripture, even to the extent of declaring the Septuagint inspired in its deviations from the Hebrew. This paper disputes such judgments. Careful study of the relevant patristic passages on the Septuagint shows that Christians generally took great pains to establish the Septuagint as the surest access to the original Hebrew text. Variants between the Septuagint and the Minor Versions could be explained by textual corruption in the Septuagint manuscript tradition, similar corruption in the Hebrew tradition, or anti-Christian bias on the part of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. Only very rarely did a father propose that the Seventy translators deliberately altered the biblical text. In fact, such a suggestion did not become part of any father’s general textual theory before Augustine, and his views may be explained as a direct reaction to the work of Jerome. It turns out that the Hebrew Bible loomed large in patristic imagination, and even Augustine came to attribute great authority to it.

The growing dissatisfaction of current scholars with the meagre results produced by the use of modern analytic categories to explain early Christian exegesis calls for developing alternate analyses. Recent studies in ancient philosophy indicate how Origen’s practice of biblical interpretation can be understood to be an essential aspect of the mind’s ascetical training. Rather than evaluating Origen’s conclusions, we are better off situating his interpretive efforts within his overall style of inquiry and engaging with him in the intellectually demanding meditational practices he advocated. Amid the mental, physical, and political impediments that constrain the human mind, Origen’s exegetical enterprise was a daring form of reasoning about the nature of things. By using the words and images of scripture as a material path for its travels, Origen contended that the mind, through various practiced mental inquiries, could be led to what would otherwise be beyond its scope of vision. In this way, for Origen, scriptural interpretation is drawn into prayer’s fundamental itinerary from the world’s material surface, to matters of the soul, and eventually to the Spirit itself.

The philosophical concept of apocatastasis denotes a return to the beginning, restoration of the primal order of things, restitution of the ideal unity, which on the basis of the law of necessity or the original sin has been lost. In philosophical thought, it is possible to indicate two basic levels on which the return is considered, the level of macro-scale of cosmos and the level of the creation, especially the level of human beings. Thus, it is possible to define a cosmological and personal aspect of the philosophical concept of apocatastasis. In order for the concept to take place, there have to be met certain conditions, such as e.g. an idea of the perfect nature of the beginning and the degradation of the cosmos in the course of history, the cyclical nature of time, the concept of cosmological justice, the evil taken as a lack of good or the idea of kinship between human and god. The article describes the main modes of the concept of apocatastasis in philosophical thought and analyses major requirements that are and have to be met on the way to the concept of eternal return.

International Journal of Systematic Theology 4:1 (March 2002), 45-66, DOI: 10.1111/1463-1652.00072

Origen and Gregory of Nyssa use allegorical exegesis to derive a unified meaning from the diversity of the scriptural text.  However, they have different answers to the question of where, or in what, scripture’s unity lies, which lead to different styles of interpretation and which reveal their broader theological concerns.  The question of the unity and diversity of scripture is thus not just a textual or hermeneutical one but is related to central theological issues.  Furthermore, allegorical interpretation does not obfuscate the text, but aims to relate the salvation-history recounted in it to the history of its reader.

This article was published in a Christian magazine that focuses on culture. The flood story is a paradigm that allows to consider the relationship between God, creation and men. After describing these relations in late antiquity, the author proposes to think about the meaning it can take in our contemporary world with the help of anthropology and ecology.

I Tractatus in Psalmos furono scoperti e pubblicati da G. Morin tra la fine dell’Ottocento e gli inizi del Novecento. Sulla base di vari riscontri l’editore attribuì i nuovi testi a Girolamo, di cui fino a quel momento era pressoché sconosciuta la produzione omiletica, datandoli al primo decennio del V secolo, quando lo Stridonense si trovava a Betlemme. L’attribuzione fu accettata unanimemente, fino a quando nel 1980 V. Peri non propose di intendere i Tractatus come la traduzione geronimiana delle omelie di Origene. Tale tesi ebbe largo successo in Italia, ma incontrò l’opposizione di alcuni studiosi della scuola francese, che continuarono a sostenere la paternità geronimiana.
Qui si pubblicano il testo latino di Morin, rivisto dal curatore, e la traduzione italiana, corredata da un ampio commento che consente di inquadrare i Tractatus all’interno di una corretta prospettiva esegetica, ampia e articolata, che tenga conto della paternità geronimiana e dell’innegabile influenza origeniana.

In this article, I propose a new way of interpreting athletic metaphors in early Christian literature. I argue that the metaphorical figure of the athlete would have evoked for ancient readers not simply the ideas of competitive struggle, but also the idea of sexual abstinence , a lifestyle choice closely associated with athletes in the Greco-Roman world. The article collects and discusses evidence for the practice of athletic celibacy, drawing together a dispa-rate collection of medical and philosophical literature, with Christian sources, from the second and third centuries CE. It demonstrates that athletic celibacy was a familiar concept in this period , and that many observers were interested in the methods that athletes used to control their sexual urges, including applying lead plates to their loin muscles. The treatment of this evidence suggests that there was greater interest in sexual abstinence among non-Christians than has previously been understood, and that athletes were implicated in controversies about whether or not total abstention from sex was a healthy lifestyle choice. As such, I argue that it is plausible to regard the athletic imagery of early Christians not only as a met-aphorical comparison between two kinds of strident individuals, but also as advocacy for the celibate life as the most healthful lifestyle.

It is a common notion among modern biblical scholars that Origen doubted Paul's authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This article offers an examination of Origen's writings on this question, and shows that the evidence is wildly misrepresented in contemporary discussions. It does this by beginning with Origen's Letter to Africanus, continuing with an overview of his Hebrews citations across his writing career, and concluding with an analysis of his oft-cited comments in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History. This examination shows that while Origen suspects Hebrews’ composition to involve more than Paul alone, his surprisingly consistent testimony is that the epistle is indeed Paul's.

In his monograph The Resurrection of the Son of God N. T. Wright argues that in the New Testament, talk about “resurrection” refers to a) a bodily resurrection and b) metaphorically – as an expansion of the Jewish use of such language for the restoration of Israel – to Christian baptism and behaviour. Wright also traces the understanding of this notion through non-canonical early Christian writings. With regard to Origen, he thinks that he firmly affirms a) but does not see b) in his thought: “What Origen does not have, any more than the other writers we have surveyed, is any metaphorical use of ‘resurrection’ to denote (as sometimes in the New Testament) the new life which believers have in the present in baptism and holiness.” (p. 527) In my paper I want to demonstrate that a close reading of Origen’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans indeed exhibits the kind of resurrection language associated with ethical behaviour. But this does not place Origen more firmly into the pattern Wright sees in the New Testament (by now holding a and b) since for Origen the present “resurrection” of the believer is not just a metaphorical description of his moral lifestyle, but of a more substantial nature. It leads to good deeds (and is thus functionally quite similar to what Wright finds in Paul), but describes a more ontological change of the believer. Re-reading Paul in light of this raises questions about what his “metaphorical” use of resurrection language in his letters really denotes and what this implies for the foundation of Christian ethics.

The figure of Socrates features prominently in the works of earliest Christian authors and their attempts to negotiate a viable relation between pagan intellectual tradition and the exigencies of a newly founded religion. The analysis of all relevant ante-Nicene Greek and Latin texts shows that early Christian writers reconstruct "Socrates" with a striking degree of interpretative freedom. Although it is impossible to establish a unified perspective on Socrates in these texts – let alone a positive one, as many previous commentators thought –, the interpretations of the Athenian sage are not entirely haphazard. I argue that they are heavily constrained by apologetic aims of early Christian authors and closely connected to epistemic justification of faith by means of miracles, superior moral behaviour, divine inspiration and prophecy, and, finally, the emphasis that is placed on the limitations of human, all too human, wisdom.

Courtney J. P. Friesen explores shifting boundaries of ancient religions by way of the reception of a popular tragedy, Euripides’ Bacchae . As a play staging political crises provoked by the arrival of the “foreign” god Dionysus and his ecstatic cult, audiences and readers found resonances with their own cultural moments. This dramatic deity became emblematic of exuberant and liberating spirituality and, at the same time, a symbol of imperial conquest. Thus, readings of the Bacchae frequently foreground conflicts between religious autonomy and political authority, and between ethnic diversity and social cohesion. This cross-disciplinary study traces appropriations and evocations of this drama ranging from the fifth century BCE through Byzantium not only among “pagans” but also Jews and Christians. Writers variously articulated their religious visions over against Dionysus, often while paradoxically adopting the god’s language and symbols. Consequently, imitation and emulation are at times indistinguishable from polemics and subversion.

The author describes the development of the complex character of Herakles just as it is reflected in the myths, the cults and the representa¬ tional arts. La delimitación y definición de un personaje heroico e imaginario de gran empaque en un corpus mítico como el griego, no debe ser realiza¬ da como si se tratase de una persona con carácter y psicología propia, una esencia metafísica, forma sustancial filosófica o un arquetipo huma¬ no, como bien ha señalado J. C. Bermejo1 en un reciente trabajo. Nuestra aportación ha de consistir, efectivamente, en realzar aquellas cuestiones que la figura mítica estudiada plantee en el seno de cualquiera de los rela¬ tos e historias míticas en las que se halle encuadrado. Deberemos desta¬ car sus significaciones generadas a través de sus actuaciones. Y esto es lo que intentaremos hacer «biografiando» a Heracles, el gran héroe griego.

La película Origen (Inception) es una de las películas de ciencia ficción más enigmáticas de los últimos años, y es que su director, Christopher Nolan, no dudó en matizar sutilmente su obra con referencias a la filosofía. Controversial a la par que exitosa, se coloca en el puesto 62 de las películas más taquilleras de la historia. La película causó y aún hoy, casi una década después, sigue causando debate en todos aquellos que se aventuran a su primer visionado. En esta ocasión haré un análisis filosófico de la obra y un sumario de referencias literarias y cinematográficas que considero importante destacar. Para terminar, daré mi opinión personal sobre la película