Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 36

Everywhere, while evading no difficulty, his strenuous speculative search is steadied by ethical and religious instinct. As against Valentinian and the Platonists, with both of whom he is in close affinity, he inexorably insists on the self-consciousness and moral nature of God, on human freewill. As against all contemporary non-Christian thought his system is pure monism. Yet the problem of evil, in which he merges the antithesis of matter and spirit, brings with it a necessary dualism, a dualism, however, which belongs but to a moment in the limitless eternity of God's all-in-allness before and after. Is he then a pantheist? No, for to him God is Love (in Ezek. vi. 6), and the rational creature is to be made divine and united to God by the reconciliation of Will and by conscious apprehension of Him. The idea of Will is the pivot of Origen's system, the centripetal force which forbids it to follow the pantheistic line which it yet undoubtedly touches. The 'moral' unity of the Father and the Son (see above, tautotes boulematos and ek tou thelematos) is Unity in that very respect in which the Creator stands over against the self-determining rational creature. Yet the immutability, the Oneness of God, must be reconciled with the plurality, the mutability of the creature; here the Logos mediates; dia ta polla ginetai polla: but this must be from eternity:--accordingly creation is eternal too. Here we see that the cosmological idea has prevailed over the religious, the Logos of Origen is still in important particulars the Logos of the Apologists, of Philo and the philosophers. The difference lies in His co-eternity, upon which Origen insists without wavering. The resemblance lies in the intermediate [20] position ascribed to Him between the agennetos, (ho Theos), and the geneta; He is, as Hypostasis, subordinate to the Father.

[20] The formula ktisma ho hui& 231;s is ascribed to Origen by the anti-Chalcedonists of the sixth century, but is probably a 'consequenz-macherei' from the above; see Caspari Alte u. N. Quellen, p. 60, note. But ktisma was sometimes applied to the Son in a vague sense, on the ground of Prov. viii. 22, a text not used in this way by Origen.

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