Origen: The Heretic Who Believed God Would Win
Around the year 202, in Alexandria, a boy of about sixteen tried to walk out the door to be executed.
His father, Leonides, had been arrested in the persecution under Septimius Severus. The son wanted to go and stand with him. His mother, out of arguments, hid his clothes. So he wrote his father a letter instead: do not change your mind on our account. Leonides was beheaded. The family’s property was seized. The boy, the eldest of seven, went to work teaching grammar to keep the rest of them fed.
His name was Origen. He would become the most learned Christian of his century, and very possibly of the first five. He would be tortured for the faith himself, as an old man, and die of it. And three hundred years after his death, the church he had served would strike his name into the roll of heretics beside Arius and Nestorius, where it has stayed, in East and West alike, ever since.
This is an essay about why.
The Man
Origen was born around 185 to Christian parents, which was unusual. Most of the great early Christians were converts, people who came to the faith with a philosophy already in hand. Origen grew up inside it. He was raised on Scripture, and he never in his life met an idea he thought Scripture could not hold.
When Clement fled Alexandria during the persecution, the bishop, Demetrius, put the catechetical school in the hands of this eighteen-year-old. He ran it for nearly thirty years. He slept on the floor, owned one cloak, fasted, and sold his library of pagan literature for a pension of four obols a day so that he would not have to be paid to teach. Eusebius reports that he read there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake and took it literally, with a knife. His enemies enjoyed that story for centuries. Whether it is true, it tells you the kind of man people believed him to be: one who did not think the words were decoration.
He studied philosophy under Ammonius Saccas, the same teacher who, by one account, taught Plotinus. A wealthy convert named Ambrose gave him seven stenographers working in shifts, and Origen dictated. Epiphanius, who hated him, counted six thousand works. Jerome, more soberly, listed about eight hundred. Among them: the Hexapla, six columns of the Old Testament laid side by side so the text could be checked against itself; Against Celsus, the first full defense of Christianity against a serious pagan critic; commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible; and On First Principles, the first attempt in Christian history to say, systematically, what the whole faith means.
Around 231, passing through Palestine, he was ordained a presbyter by the bishops of Caesarea and Jerusalem. Demetrius, his own bishop, had not been asked. Demetrius called two synods. The first banished Origen from Alexandria. The second declared his ordination void. Eusebius, who admired Origen and wrote carefully, lets you read between the lines: the teacher was famous, the bishop was the bishop, and the arrangement had stopped suiting him.
Notice that the first sanction ever brought against Origen had nothing to do with doctrine. Remember that. It is a pattern.
He went to Caesarea, founded a school there, and never went back. In 250 the emperor Decius ordered every citizen to sacrifice to the gods. Origen refused. He was imprisoned, put in an iron collar, stretched on the rack, and, Eusebius says, deliberately kept alive so that he might still recant. He did not. When Decius died he was released, broken, and he died a few years later in Tyre at about sixty-nine. By the measure of his own age he died a confessor: one who had suffered for Christ and lived to tell it. He was buried with honor. For more than a century afterward, to be a serious Christian thinker was to be one of Origen’s readers.
The Image That Cannot Be Erased
Origen’s theology starts with a question a child would ask. Why is the world unequal?
Why is one person born into a Christian household in Alexandria, another a slave in Thrace, another an angel, another a demon? If God is just, and God made everything, where did the ranking come from?
The Gnostics of his day had an answer, and it was the answer Origen spent his life fighting. There are three kinds of people, they said, made that way from the start: the spiritual, who are saved by nature; the soulish, who might be; and the material, who cannot be. Salvation by manufacture. Origen found this monstrous, and not only because it was cruel. It made God the author of the inequality, and it made the gospel a rescue for people who had never needed rescuing.
So he gave a different answer, and it is the root of everything else he taught.
In the beginning, God made rational beings. Not bodies yet. Minds, made equal, made free, made to contemplate God. Every one of them was made in the image of God, and for Origen that image was not a metaphor. It was a kinship. Every created mind participates in the Logos, the Word of John’s first chapter, the Reason by which anything is able to reason at all. There is nothing in creation that thinks that does not think by that light.
Then came the cooling. Origen played on the Greek: psyche, the word for soul, from psychesthai, to cool. The minds, being free, let their attention drift from the fire. Some barely. Some far. And the distance each one fell was the distance each one chose. The world as we find it, with its ranks of angels and humans and demons, is the map of those choices. God then made the material world not as a prison but as a school: the place where fallen minds could be taught their way back. The body is not the punishment. The body is the classroom.
Two things follow, and Origen never let go of either.
First: you did not begin here. You began in the light, and whatever has happened since, whatever you have covered it with, the image is not gone. Origen preached this from the story of Isaac’s wells. Abraham had dug wells, and after his death the Philistines had stopped them with earth, and Isaac’s work was to dig the same wells out again. The wells, Origen told his congregation, are the image of God in you. The earth is what has been shoveled on top. And the whole of the spiritual life is digging.
Origen never used the phrase divine spark. That language belongs to the Stoics before him and to the German mystics long after. But the thing the phrase points to is his: an original kinship with God in every rational creature, obscured, buried, never destroyed, and recoverable by turning.
Second: because every mind fell by its own choice, every mind can rise by its own choice. Free will is the hinge on which all of Origen turns. God does not save some by nature and abandon the rest. God teaches. All of them. For as long as it takes.
The End Like the Beginning
That last phrase is where Origen became dangerous.
“For the end is always like the beginning,” he wrote in On First Principles. If all things began in God, all things end in God. He took two lines of the New Testament at their word. Peter, in Acts, speaks of the restitution of all things: in Greek, apokatastasis panton, the restoration of everything. And Paul, in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, describes the end of the story: when every enemy has been put under Christ’s feet, the Son hands the kingdom to the Father, that God may be all in all.
All in all. Not all in those who qualified.
What, then, of punishment? Origen did not deny it. He believed in the fire. But he believed the fire was medicine. “Every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire,” he wrote, “and is not plunged into some fire which has been previously kindled by another.” Hell, in other words, is what you built out of your own choices, and God’s fire is what burns the building down so that the person inside can walk out. The surgeon’s knife, not the executioner’s axe. A punishment with no end cannot correct anyone, and a punishment that corrects no one is not justice. It is revenge. And Origen could not fit revenge inside the character of the God he had met in Christ.
He was careful about it. He offered the restoration as inquiry, not decree, and said as much. When his enemies claimed he taught that even the devil would be saved, he wrote back that only a madman would say such a thing. But his enemies were not wrong about where his principles pointed. If the fall was a free turning away, and the image cannot be destroyed, then no one, however far down, is past turning back. Origen followed his own logic to the edge and let his readers see over it.
And then he said the thing an institution finds hardest to forgive.
In Against Celsus he admits, plainly, that the threat of everlasting punishment is useful for the simple, who must be held back from sin by fear, while the deeper truth is for those who have grown into love. He did not say this as a cynic. He said it as a teacher. Fear is a child’s first reason for not touching the stove. One grows past it.
But look at what that admits. It admits that the fear is a tool. And a tool of that kind, once someone has said out loud what it is for, becomes very hard to keep using.
Three Hundred Years Later
Origen died inside the church. No one excommunicated him while he could answer.
The turn came slowly, and it came from people who had reasons of their own.
Around 375, Epiphanius of Salamis, the great heresy-hunter of the age, put Origen in his catalogue of heresies. In the 390s Jerome, who had translated Origen, learned from him, and called him the greatest teacher of the church after the apostles, turned on him under pressure from Epiphanius. He then turned on his own oldest friend, Rufinus, for continuing to translate him. The quarrel was as much about Jerome’s reputation as about Origen’s teaching.
In 400, Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, condemned Origen at a synod and used the charge to expel a community of monks from the Egyptian desert who had crossed him. He then carried the same charge to Constantinople and used it to help depose John Chrysostom. Theophilus had been an admirer of Origen the year before. By now the word Origenist had stopped describing a theology. It had become a weapon, and everyone with an enemy reached for it.
Then came the emperor.
Justinian was a ruler who closed the Academy in Athens, fought a generation of wars to remake the Roman world, and considered doctrine part of the job of governing it. In 543 he sent the patriarch of Constantinople an edict with a list of anathemas: against the pre-existence of souls; against the idea that the punishment of the wicked is temporary; against the restoration of all. A synod ratified it, because the emperor had written it.
In 553 the Second Council of Constantinople met, the fifth of the councils that East and West both call ecumenical. Bishops gathered under Justinian’s eye before the council formally opened and passed fifteen anathemas against “Origenists.” Origen’s own name was written into the council’s list of condemned heretics, in a line with Arius and Nestorius. Pope Vigilius, held in the city under the emperor’s thumb, eventually put his name to the council’s work. Scholars still argue about whether the fifteen anathemas are technically the council’s, and whether Origen’s name was added to the list afterward. It made no difference. For fourteen hundred years, in Rome and in Constantinople alike, Origen has been a condemned heretic.
Look at what was actually condemned in 553. Much of it was the sixth-century elaboration of Palestinian monks: a system in which resurrected bodies are spheres, and every soul at the end becomes identical to Christ. Origen wrote none of that. The man was condemned for the movement that carried his name.
That is also a pattern.
Why
There are three layers to the answer, and honesty requires all three.
The first is doctrinal, and should be stated fairly. By 553 the church had settled that soul and body are created together, and Origen’s pre-existent minds contradicted that. He had taught that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, which the Council of Nicaea adopted, but he had also ranked the Son beneath the Father in ways that, read after Arius, looked Arian. He expected a spiritual resurrection body rather than a fleshly one. And he doubted that hell was forever. Some of these he held as settled and some as open questions. The trouble was that by the sixth century the church no longer had a category for an open question.
The second is political, and it is not subtle. Justinian’s immediate problem was monks fighting in Palestine, Origenists against anti-Origenists, in monasteries an emperor could not afford to have at war. His larger problem was a fracture over the nature of Christ that was splitting Egypt and Syria away from the empire. Condemning an Alexandrian who had been dead for three centuries was a cheap way to buy unity. An emperor wants one faith for the same reason he wants one law. One is easier to rule with.
The third is structural, and it is the reason this essay exists.
Consider what a church becomes if Origen is right.
If every soul carries an image of God that cannot be erased, then the church does not confer a relationship with God. At most it can help uncover one. The well is already there. The institution is, at best, a shovel.
If the Logos is the teacher of every mind, the one instructor of Matthew 23, then the priest is not the source of anything. He is a fellow digger, and on a good day a mirror.
If punishment is medicine that ends when it has healed, then the church holds no key to anyone’s eternal outcome. It cannot lock a soul out forever. And an institution that cannot lock the door forever cannot charge for opening it.
And if fear is, by the teacher’s own admission, a tool for beginners, then an institution built on fear is an institution for keeping people beginners.
Origen set out to say none of this. He was a churchman to the bone: a catechist, a priest, a man obedient enough to leave his city when a bishop told him to. But he was honest, and in the third century honesty was cheap. The church was a persecuted minority with no armies, no courts, and no land. It could afford to let its best mind think out loud.
By 553 the church was the empire’s. Then the same honesty cost something.
You can measure the cost by a comparison. Gregory of Nyssa taught the restoration of all things as plainly as Origen ever did, and he is a saint of both East and West. A later council called him the father of fathers. The doctrine was tolerable in a bishop who died at the right moment and had no faction named after him. It was intolerable as the banner of monks the emperor wanted silenced. The difference was never the doctrine. The difference was what the doctrine threatened, and when.
In the West the matter had already been decided by a different hand. Augustine, in The City of God, describes Christians he calls the tender-hearted, who could not bear the thought of endless punishment and believed in the end all would be saved. He treats them kindly and then argues them down. The West took Augustine. From that point on, fear was load-bearing.
What Survived
Because of the condemnation, most of Origen’s Greek is gone. On First Principles, the first systematic theology in the history of the church, survives almost entirely in Rufinus’s Latin, and Rufinus admitted he had softened it in translation. Jerome made a rival translation to expose what Rufinus had hidden, and that is lost too, except for fragments quoted by Origen’s prosecutors. We read the most important theologian of the early church through the hand of his editor and the quotations of his enemies.
And yet every century has turned him up again. Gregory of Nyssa held the restoration. The Cambridge Platonists held it. George MacDonald preached it, and C. S. Lewis called MacDonald his master. In our own time it is argued again, out loud, by Orthodox and Catholic scholars, and the thing they keep having to explain to their readers is that the man who first argued it was tortured for Christ and died in communion with the church that later cursed him.
Tolstoy saw the shape of this. In The Kingdom of God Is Within You he lists the ones who actually tried to understand the teaching, and puts Origen near the head of the list: “It could not be otherwise.” The people who go looking are, by definition, outside. Two men, seventeen centuries apart, expelled by the same instinct. Tolstoy at least was alive to receive the letter.
The Door
An anathema is a door shutting. That is what the word means in practice: let him be cut off. The church of the empire, in 553, shut a door on a man three hundred years dead and called the shutting eternal.
Origen’s entire theology was the claim that no door shuts forever. That the image cannot be erased. That the fire heals. That the end is like the beginning, and the beginning was God.
One of them was right about the nature of God. That is a question worth a lifetime, and this fellowship does not pretend to have closed it.
But notice which one was afraid.
On First Principles is in the public domain in the 1885 Ante-Nicene Fathers translation. Download the ePub.