← The Great Books
The Great Books
Episode 357: 'On First Principles' by Origen
00:28:27
John J. Miller is joined by Paula Fredriksen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to discuss 'On First Principles' by Origen.
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:00]
Paula Fredrickson
FOREIGN.
- [00:07]
John J. Miller
Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about On First Principles by Origin. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Paula Fredrickson, a professor emerita of scripture at Boston University and of comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She's the author of many books, including When Christians Were Jews, Paul the Pagans Apostle, and the Early History of an Idea. Her latest book, just published by Princeton University Press, is Ancient Christianity's the first 500 years. She joins us by Zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Paula, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
- [00:52]
Paula Fredrickson
Thank you for having me.
- [00:53]
John J. Miller
Why is On First Principles by Origin a great book?
- [00:58]
Paula Fredrickson
Oh, there are so many reasons. First of all, Origen was a genius, and the book is astonishingly creative and clear. And this is a minor miracle because it was basically put through a shredder in the 6th century when he was considered a heretic. Back when he was writing in the late second, early third century, he was considered orthodox and was a great authority. So he wrote this. The it's the first systematic theology in Christian history. And he, he created it. He and it was so important that it ended up blowing up the Mediterranean with controversies after his death. That's why the the text of the book has to be put back together, because it was shattered.
- [01:46]
John J. Miller
We're going to talk about all of that, what this book says, why it was so important, how it became controversially, the author behind it. Also, what was Christianity like back in and I do want to start with that question, Paul, if you could take us back to the time of Origen, whose life spanned the second and third centuries AD during his life, what was the status of Christianity in his world? Was it growing in strength? Was it imperiled? Was it persecuted? All of the above? What was going on?
- [02:20]
Paula Fredrickson
His dates, first of all, are 187 to 254. So that's the zone of time we're talking about. Christianity was incredibly vigorously various, which is the reason why it's in the plural and the title of my book. And he represents one style of being a Christian authority. He's a layman and he is a teacher and he is an author. That's a lot of how he teaches. Jerome says he wrote something like 2000 treatises. We know the titles of about 800 of them. So he was this phenomenally productive intellectual in a period where there are lots of different types of Christianities And Christianity itself is, you know, we think of Christianity as being this underground persecuted movement, but in fact Origen was called to have a conversation with the imperial regent Julia Mamia to talk about divine mysteries. His colleague and contemporary Julius Africanus arranged the Emperor's library in Rome. So Christianity was not a criminal religion or anything like that. It was sporadically persecuted. But those acts in Origen's lifetime are sporadic and extremely local. And Origen himself, in one of his other masterpieces, the Against Celsus, comments that only a few, whose number could easily be counted, have died for the name. So he's saying that as late as the two forties, there aren't many Christian martyrs.
- [03:59]
John J. Miller
You said this work on first principles, which was probably written in the 2000s AD you said it's the first work of systematic theology. What does that term mean, systematic theology? And why did Christians need such a thing at this time? Or why did Origen think they needed it?
- [04:19]
Paula Fredrickson
Systematic theology is a work that coordinates different doctrines so that they are coordinated. And what Origen did is break things down in terms of the first book was on God. The second book was on creation. The third book was on rational being, by which he meant humans and other rational beings. And the fourth book was called Revelation, and it's about how to read the Bible. So everything he stated in that book, his descriptions about God, his descriptions of Christ, his descriptions of material reality, his descriptions of spiritual reality are all coordinated. So it represents a beautiful integrated system. I don't know why he thought Christianity needed it, because there were very few people who had the intelligence or the education to understand what he was up to. He also gave sort of the equivalent of undergraduate introductory courses in the city he lived in, Alexandria. But this is really an intellectual triumph written for other Christian intellectuals.
- [05:27]
John J. Miller
Book one, chapter one, starts off with the subject of the body of God. This is the first subject he raises in his book, the body of God, or maybe the disembodiment of God, body versus Spirit. Why did he start with that question? What does he say?
- [05:43]
Paula Fredrickson
Well, the definition of God is the, if you will, the tail that wags the entire dog. His vision of God is intensely biblical, but also intensely Platonic. So the definition of God, God the Father and also the Son and Holy Spirit, he's trinitarian, of course, or he wouldn't be orthodox. But the definition of God is that God is the only self existent thing and God is the only non embodied thing because God is completely changeless and he's perfect and he's pure, pure spirit. So that he's unembodied. He's an abstraction in that sense, the way a mathematical point is that doesn't have dimension. God is eternally timeless in a sense. I mean, it's almost paradoxical thinking for us. He's trying to square the problem of Platonism, which is the one in the many. Why, given this definition of God, is there anything else? If God is changeless, where did all this changeful historical matter that we live in come from? If God is the ultimate source of everything, that is, why are things as messed up as they are? If he's a good God, why are things so bad and so on. And it's from that definition of God that he draws a plumb line through human circumstance, basically answering the question to the problem of evil and how Christianity speaks to redemption from evil.
- [07:17]
John J. Miller
You mentioned Platonism. Origen wrote in Greek. To what extent did he rely on Greek philosophy and pagans like Plato to create this first work of Christian systematic theology?
- [07:33]
Paula Fredrickson
There was no option to philosophy. I mean, theology is philosophy about God. That's what the word means. Any kind of theology is completely dependent on philosophy. And the only kind of philosophy there was was Greek philosophy, Greek pagan philosophy. You can't do theology without philosophy, just like you can't do physics without math. So he quite naturally drew on it. Every, every theologian we have represented in antiquity drew on philosophy. And by definition, philosophy, being older than Christianity, was pagan.
- [08:07]
John J. Miller
In book two, chapter three of On First Principles, he talks about the beginning of the world, the creation of the world. Was there something before this one? Nothing before this one? Ultimate ends, all of that. What did he say about how God created matter into being?
- [08:23]
Paula Fredrickson
It's a delicate question for him because his God is changeless. So here's where his trinitarianness comes in, because it's the this God creates as a timeless act of will through the Son, his Logos, who will be eventually incarnated as Christ. There are two levels of creation in origin. There is an eternal spiritual creation where there is a universe of rational souls. And each of these rational souls has free will. That's a definition of rationality. And each of these rational beings has a body, but it's a spiritual body. So it's made up purely. He's really an excellent Platonist. It's made up purely of spirit. It's immaterial, but it's still a body. And the reason why he needs to focus on body is because body is a principle of individuation. You can't have individuals with rational choice. If you don't have individuals individuated through bodies. So what happens in the time before time? I mean, all of this stuff is just existing in eternity. And there is no time before there is matter. What happens is, again, given his definition of God, that God is the only changeless being. All these other beings that are contingent upon God, who depend on God for their existence, all these rational souls, they begin to sort of slip away. Their attention wanders away from God. There's a wordplay he adopts from Plato this. The soul cools down and the soul begins looking around and is sort of distracted and is not thinking about God. And that's still not culpable because that's the way they're created. And God is just. And wouldn't punish you if you did something that you couldn't help but do. But what happens is the souls neglect to stop themselves from being distracted. So they fall away from God at different registers. And what God then decides to do, and it's still changelessness, because it's all happening eternally, is he decides to call matter into being from absolutely nothing. And the reason he calls matter into being is so that he can embody these individual rational beings in the perfect learning situation in material reality, so that the soul can learn what it's supposed to learn and realize how to know and love God again and turn and contemplate God and therefore shed the fleshly body. And I should add that it's not just humans that are the focus of redemption. For origin stars and planets are embodied intelligences. Satan and the minions of evil angels. Everybody has to be brought closer to God and will be brought closer to God at the end. So it's this enormous panorama of eternity. And then matter is this one moment of experience that we all get to have and so that we can learn what we need to learn. And God is the ultimate micromanager. He puts us in exactly the right type of body that we need to learn exactly what we have to learn in order to undo the mistake we made when we slipped away from God in the time before time so that we can go back. What this means, of course, is that the body is not a natural home of the soul. The body is something that's a second order of creation and really isn't part of your self. It's a vehicle you operate in for a while, but it's not really part of who you are. It's the soul and the mind who are really who you are.
- [12:22]
John J. Miller
The question of redemption becomes important, even controversial, with Origen. What does he say about salvation, who is saved.
- [12:31]
Paula Fredrickson
This is one of the most beautiful aspects of this book. He is committed to the principle. In as much as his God is Platonic, his God is also biblical, which means the two great characteristics of his God are justice and mercy. Justice means that God is equally committed to the redemption of every soul that is ultimately his creation. Even the soul of Satan, even the souls of planets and stars. God is committed to the redemption of all of them. God is also merciful. He wants all of these beings to be redeemed so that ultimately and as history winds to an end, even Satan is going to wake up, realize the mistake he made. And once he knows what his mistake is, once you know the truth, you love the truth. And even Satan will turn in love for the knowledge of God and at that point material reality will fall away and it's, it's back to the eternal, it's the eternal return back to non material reality. And that's his picture of redemption.
- [13:46]
John J. Miller
I'm going to guess that claim about Satan raised some eyebrows.
- [13:53]
Paula Fredrickson
It turns out that nobody wants Satan to be saved. Augustine is the great counter theologian to Origen and he has. Satan has a permanent job in hell for all of eternity. He's got to be where the souls of the damned go, the souls and the physical bodies of the damned go. So Satan has this long term job in Western theology ultimately, and he's certainly not among the saved. For most later theologians.
- [14:22]
John J. Miller
Origen was a Church Father. This is a term we apply to him and others from this period, of course. What does that mean, to be a church Father?
- [14:32]
Paula Fredrickson
Obviously it's a retrospective designation by later Christians looking back and recognizing certain figures as authoritative for the tradition. Origen is a Church father with a difference because even though he was a bright shining light in his own lifetime, he ultimately, because of the. Well, you can sense how controversial some of his positions would be because of the controversy surrounding his work after his lifetime. He's ultimately condemned as a heretic, which is why his works are largely lost to us and his, his books are destroyed and he's, he's condemned. But so he's, he's. I don't know what you'd call him. An ex church father, A church father monkey. It's, he was a great authority, but he's not, he's not domesticated for the church in the way that somebody like John Chrysostom or Augustine would be.
- [15:37]
John J. Miller
A lot of church fathers are saints. He is not. So exactly what is his legacy and influence? Was he condemned and rejected and nobody's supposed to read him anymore. Or is he a foundational member of Christian theology?
- [15:53]
Paula Fredrickson
I think the problems he set and addressed through his systematic theology end up shaping all subsequent theology in what will become the Orthodox Church. Remember the Church. There is no such thing as really an Orthodox Church until the Emperor decides which church is Orthodox retrospectively. Even though in terms of amount of publication and commitment to the Orthodoxy, he deserves to be a saint. He's definitely not a saint. He isn't. He's retrospectively condemned instead. I think it's one of the great injustices.
- [16:29]
John J. Miller
Couple questions about Origen. The guy he was from Alexandria, which of course is in Egypt, which is in Africa. Does it help to think of him as African in any sort of way? Or is he fundamentally Greek? How should we position this guy in terms of his own culture?
- [16:46]
Paula Fredrickson
Well, Egypt isn't really part of Africa. It's its own culture. It happens to sit on the edge. Alexandria is right on the edge of the Mediterranean in. In Egypt. It's a philosophical powerhouse. It has an amazing library. It attracts international intellectuals. And this is. This is Origen's hometown. He gets a superlative classical education there. He's committed to the Church. I mean, he's a celibate intellectual teacher.
- [17:21]
John J. Miller
You mentioned his celibacy. One of the legends that surrounds Origen is that he made himself a eunuch, that he actually followed a verse from the book of Matthew, took it literally, made himself a eunuch. Is that true? Does it matter in terms of how we read them?
- [17:38]
Paula Fredrickson
The verse in Matthew says, there are those who are born eunuchs, there are those who are made eunuchs by men, and there are those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let him who has ears to hear hear. Metaphorically. I would guess what that would indicate is that some people should be celibate. The scandals around Origen that collect after his lifetime is that he was so famous for his incredible sexual modesty and celibacy that the rumor arose that he interpreted that verse in Matthew literally. Well, if you know Origen, and we both know Origen, taking a text literally is the last thing Origen would do. He was completely committed to reading the text for its, quote, spiritual meaning, which means allegorically, he never would have taken a text literally. There's also a counter rumor from another later church, Father Epiphanius, who says that Origen achieved his remarkable celibacy by using drugs. So between the Munich rumor and the drug rumor, I think what they both indicate is that Origen was surpassingly, calmly celibate.
- [18:56]
John J. Miller
How do we know what we know about this guy? In his biography, you mentioned he wrote a lot, but only a tiny fraction of what he wrote comes down to us. How do we know anything at all about him?
- [19:08]
Paula Fredrickson
Oh, we have Eusebius of Khazaria to thank for this. Eusebius is renowned as one of the first Church historians, and it's thanks to his book, the Ecclesiastical History, that he gives us the information that we have about Origen's life. So it's through Eusebius and also there are other Greek theologians who create something called the Philokalia, which is a work that has excerpts from Origen's work. And that's also how we know a little bit about him. We don't know as much as we would like to know, but we never know as much as we would like to know.
- [19:51]
John J. Miller
If someone today wants to read Origen in English, is there a translation or an edition you recommend? Is there a place to go if you want to learn about what his systematic theology was all about?
- [20:04]
Paula Fredrickson
There's an available paperback of Origen. It's an older translation, but it's by a man named Butterworth. And that's an easily available version of On First Principles. There's an academic translation and edition by a man named Bear B E H R. And that's for those who are not faint of heart, who want to wade into the. Get down into the weeds with the addition, the textuality of the text. Otherwise, there's the introduction to the Against Celsus by Henry Chadwick. That talks a lot about Origen's biography, and that would be one place to look. But I think the place to go is really this book itself, because it's so foreign. Origen represents the path not taken, and it's so creative and so original so that you can really get a sense of how wide open and experimental Christianity was in the late second, early third century. And I think that's exciting, and I think it's a privilege that we get to look back into the past that way.
- [21:16]
John J. Miller
Your new book is called ancient the first 500 years. Give us a quick synopsis of what's in this book. Where does Origen fit in? But then what is the larger project here? What are you conveying to readers?
- [21:31]
Paula Fredrickson
Well, Origen is somebody, even though he's disavowed, he's. He's never completely let go of, because his style of thinking with interpreting the Bible allegorically is something that will have a long future. So Origen shows up from time to time in this five century tour that I give because he's representative also of what will become Orthodoxy as well as representative of one of the types of Christianity that did ultimately did not survive. The question for me when I started to write the book is why, given an empire that had an infinite number of gods, every ethnic group had its own gods. A successful empire has as many gods as possible. And for a long time the Roman Empire preserved a kind of practical pragmatism, a pluralistic attitude toward different gods and different religions. And by the end of the, by the time we get to the fifth century, the government is behind only one single God. So how do you get from the first century where there's this, this comfortable pluralism to the fifth century having, having this commitment to one God, what happens to all the other gods? Well, they become either demoted to demons or promoted to angels. But all that cosmic clutter is cleared away. It's a story about how religious imagination changes under the pressure of historical and political circumstance. And I think it's an incredible story.
- [23:12]
John J. Miller
The title Ancient Christianities is striking because it's plural. There's maybe an assumption that there's one Christianity, there's always been one Christianity and so forth, but there was incredible diversity of thought, origins. Just one part of that.
- [23:27]
Paula Fredrickson
That's right. Origen is a sample of the diversity within Christianity. And the reason my title is in the plural is that we have, and this is how you can tell these people lost the power sweep stakes in the fourth century. We have second century figures, we have Valentinus, we have Marcion, we have the Montanus, we have ultimately anybody who ends up on the wrong side of what will become imperial. Orthodoxy is called by the name of its leader. And the name Christian isn't granted to them. But of course they think of themselves as Christian and they are type of Christian. They just don't have the imperial government sponsoring their type of Christianity. So there's, we talk about the Church and we talk about Christianity in the singular because that conforms to the rhetoric of the winners because they considered only their version of Christianity to be Christianity. And that's where you have the legends of the apostolic tradition. You know, Jesus taught Christianity to his disciples, who in turn taught it to the bishops that they founded. And the bishops are the ones, the bishops are the ones who are writing the story. The bishops are the ones who preserve the original tradition. And that's, that's the self image of Orthodoxy. And that's what, that's what disenfranchises all this other amazing Christian variety.
- [24:55]
John J. Miller
We live in a world today of plural Christianities. There are Catholics, there's the Orthodox Church, there are all kinds of Protestants, there are even Mormons. Could you write a book called Modern Christianities and it'd be basically the same kind of story? Or is this is our world fundamentally different from the ancient Christianity that you're writing about in this book?
- [25:17]
Paula Fredrickson
No, I, I think that modernity is in this sense mirrors antiquity. I mean you have just think of the, all the variety within the Catholic Church, right? That's a big umbrella. And there are all sorts of different Catholics we have in the West, Catholics and Protestants, there are Greek Orthodox, there are Coptic Christians in Egypt, there are, there are many, many different types of, of, of Christianities now. So it, the difference is that there isn't one imperial power saying that everybody has to be one type of Christian.
- [25:52]
John J. Miller
How did you as a scholar become interested in this period and find your way to origin?
- [25:58]
Paula Fredrickson
This period intrigued me because I started out as a medievalist in Western Europe and I kept slipping backwards because I wanted to find out, well, why is this like this? So I would go, you know, a few centuries earlier and a few centuries earlier and finally I bumped into Augustine and who is a foundational figure for Western culture, not just the Church, but for the culture. You know, just war, theory, City of God, all of that, his incredible legacy. And I was intrigued by him. And Augustine wrote commentaries on the letters of Paul. So I got interested in Paul as a historical figure as well and started toggling between Paul, who's a first century figure, obviously, and Augustine, who's a fourth, fifth century figure. And slowly, slowly I filled up the part in the middle. I think that this is a period that of course every historian thinks his or her own period of expertise is the key to the rest of the story. But I really do see a lot. I think we still live with the consequences of a lot of issues that arose and were argued about in this period of the first five centuries of the Church.
- [27:14]
John J. Miller
Origen's right there in that middle period between Paul and Augustine. Let's wrap up with one more question. What is the case for reading Origen's on first principles today? Is it historical curiosities and artifact or does it have something to tell us right now?
- [27:33]
Paula Fredrickson
I think it's an, it's a dazzling piece of committed Christian spirituality and I think for that reason alone it would repay reading. And it's also, I think it's like throwing open a window and getting a breath there, having having a sense of the commodiousness of his vision of redemption is something that I think is very beautiful. And that's another good reason, I think, to read the book.
- [28:01]
John J. Miller
Paula Fredrickson, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about On First Principles by Origin.
- [28:06]
Paula Fredrickson
Thank you for having me.
- [28:08]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through our website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is Eymiller. Last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week. The new episode of the Great Books Podcast.