Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 34

What account then does Origen give of the beginning and the end of the great Drama of existence? He starts from the end, which is the more clearly revealed; 'God shall be all in all.' But 'the end must be like the beginning;' One is the end of all, One is the beginning. From 1 Cor. xv. he works back to Romans viii.: the one is his key to the eternity after, the other, to the eternity before (Bigg pp. 193 sq.). Into this scheme he brings creation, evil, the history of Revelation, the Church and its life, the final consummation of all things. The Universe is eternal: God is prior to it in conception, yet He was never other than Creator. But in the history of the Universe the material world which we know is but a small episode. It began, and will end. It began with the estrangement of Will from God, will end with its reconciliation: God, from Whom is the beginning of all, 'will be all in all.' (For Origen's eschatology see Bigg, 228-234.) From this point of view we must approach the two-sided Christology of Origen. To him the two sides were aspects of the same thing: but if the subtle presupposition as to God and the Universe is withdrawn, they become alternative and inconsistent Christologies, as we shall see to have actually happened. As God is eternally Creator, so He is eternally Father (Bigg, 160, note). The Son proceeds from Him not as a part of His Essence, but as the Ray from the Light; it cannot be rightly or piously said that He had a beginning, en hote ouk en (cf. De Princ. i. 2, iv. 28, and infr. p. 168); He is begotten from the Essence of the Father, He is of the same essence (homoousios) (Fragm. 3 in Heb., but see Bigg, p. 179), there is no unlikeness whatever between the Son and the Father (Princ. i. 2, 12). He was begotten ek tou thelematos tou Patros (but to Origen the thelema was inherent in the Divine Nature, cf. Bigg. 161, Harnack, p. 534 against Shedd, p. 301, note) not by probole or emanation (Princ. iv. 28, i. 2. 4), as though the Son's generation were something that took place once for all, instead of existing continuously.

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