{"id":2729,"date":"2016-09-01T17:15:08","date_gmt":"2016-09-01T17:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/?p=2729"},"modified":"2016-10-21T21:07:09","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T21:07:09","slug":"origen-on-adam-part-2-locating-origens-views","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2016\/09\/01\/origen-on-adam-part-2-locating-origens-views\/","title":{"rendered":"Origen on Adam, Part 2: Locating Origen’s Views"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"800px-origen-768x911\"This is the second post in my series about Origen and “Adam.”<\/a><\/p>\n

Today Origen is widely recognized in both the Western and Eastern branches of the Church as one of Christianity\u2019s great early thinkers, even if some of the details of his protology and eschatology remain suspect, or at least subject to historical dispute.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 However, several problems confront anyone who seeks to understand \u201cOrigen\u2019s view\u201d of Adam, sin, and the Fall.<\/p>\n

First, like all of the early Church Fathers, Origen did not produce a definitive \u201csystematic theology\u201d treatise.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Origen is, of course, recognized as one of the first \u201csystematic\u201d Christian thinkers because of his effort to produce a sustained, philosophically and Biblically integrated argument in his treatise On First Principles<\/em>, from which these posts\u00a0will draw heavily.\u00a0 Much of what we know today about Origen\u2019s thought, however, is derived from more occasional, less systematic sources, in particular his extensive Biblical commentaries and homilies.\u00a0 As Peter Bouteneff has argued, Origen\u2019s theology primarily was an exercise in Biblical exegesis in conversation with the Church\u2019s experience with Christ and the Rule of Faith.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

A second problem is that the textual tradition for some of Origen\u2019s key writings sometimes is ambiguous.\u00a0 For some key writings, such as his Commentary on Genesis<\/em>, only isolated fragments survive.\u00a0 For other key writings, such as On First Principles<\/em>, there is a Latin translation by Rufinus<\/a> that might gloss some potentially heterodox passages, and some Greek fragments preserved in the Philocalia<\/em><\/a> that may or may not always be faithful to the lost original Greek text.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

A third problem is a significant reason for the textual issues:\u00a0 some of Origen\u2019s ideas, which were controversial even in his lifetime, were seemingly anathematized by the Second Council of Constantinople<\/a> in 553 C.E. upon the urging of the Emperor Justinian<\/a>, about three hundred years after Origen\u2019s death.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 The circumstances leading up to the anathemas included numerous intellectual and political disputes and intrigues between \u201cOrigenist\u201d and \u201canti-Origenist\u201d schools that developed after Origen\u2019s death.\u00a0 There is considerable question today about whether the concepts condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople could really be fairly traceable unalloyed to Origen himself.[6]<\/a>\u00a0 The result is that Origen\u2019s intellectual legacy is somewhat obscured.<\/p>\n

These three problems suggest that we cannot truly claim to know \u201cwhat Origen thought\u201d about Adam, sin and the Fall.\u00a0 We cannot cite Origen as some sort of counter-authority to Augustine, even if an argument from authority in this context could otherwise be valid.\u00a0 What we can do is peek into the workings of this great early Christian mind for insights that might help us make sense of these questions today. \u00a0We’ll start to do that in the next post.<\/p>\n

________________<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> See, e.g., <\/em>Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origen:\u00a0 Spirit and Fire<\/em>, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Washington D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press 1984), 1 (stating that \u201c[i]t is all but impossible to overestimate Origen and his importance for the history of Christian thought\u201d); Pope Benedict XVI, Great Christian Thinkers:\u00a0 From the Early Church Through the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:\u00a0 Fortress Press 2011), 19-25 (stating that Origen was one of the most \u201cremarkable\u201d and \u201ccrucial\u201d figures in the history of Christian thought).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> For a good discussion of the nature and sources of Origen\u2019s corpus, see von Balthasar, Origen:\u00a0 Spirit and Fire<\/em>, 1-23.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Bouteneff, Beginnings<\/em>, 94-96.\u00a0 For a good discussion on debates in contemporary Origen scholarship about how to read Origen, see Wilson, Origen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> von Balthasar, Spirit and Fire<\/em>, 21-22; Bouteneff, Beginnings<\/em>, 95.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> An English translation of the Acts of the Second Council of Constantinople is available at http:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/3812.htm.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> For a discussion of this history, see Wilson, Origen<\/em>, 64-66.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second post in my series about Origen and “Adam.” Today Origen is widely recognized in both the Western and Eastern branches of the Church as one of Christianity\u2019s great early thinkers, even if some of the details of his protology and eschatology remain suspect, or at least subject to historical dispute.[1]\u00a0 However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[37,78,70,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-early-christianity","category-origen","category-patristics","category-science-and-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-I1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2827,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2729\/revisions\/2827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}