The Early Church

The Gnostic heretics had appealed to the principles of Platonism to provide a philosophical justification for their doctrine that the elect soul must be liberated from the evil inherent in the material realm to escape to its true home and to enjoy the beatific vision. Their deep pessimism about this created order was not quite fairly deduced from the text of Plato, but there was a sufficient plausibility about the argument to make it look impressive. The Gnostic appeal to pagan philosophy did not tend to encourage the study of philosophy among those who feared Gnosticism as a corrupter of the truth. Philosophy came to seem like the mother of heresy. To Irenaeus of Lyons Gnosticism was a ragbag of heathen speculations with bits taken from different philosophers to dress out a bogus, anti-rational mythology. His successor as an anti-heretical writer, Hippolytus, whose mind was a curious mixture of scholarship and foolishness, wrote a lengthy refutation of the sects based on the presupposition that each sect had corrupted the authentic gospel by principles drawn from a pagan philosopher; he incidentally preserved thereby many fragments of classical philosophers like Heraclitus which would otherwise have been lost. Tertullian scornfully mocked those who 'advocate a Stoic or a Platonic or an Aristotelian Christianity'. It was a Gnostic thesis that faith needs supplementation by philosophical inquiries. 'What has Athens in common with Jerusalem?'

But in the middle of the second century the atmosphere was very different. Justin Martyr was born early in the second century in Samaritan territory of Greek parentage, and as a young man went to Ephesus to study philosophy. He described his quest, in a form which owes something to literary embellishment but may well have a substratum of truth, in his Dialogue with Trypho. He began with a Stoic tutor-still at this period the most popular philosophy - but passed on to an Aristotelian teacher, who disillusioned him by an unphilosophical anxiety about his fee; he then went to a Pythagorean, and finally to a Platonist with whom he was well content, principally because of the religious and mystical side of Platonic aspirations. Plato had written in ecstatic language of the soul’s vision of God. But while meditating in solitude on the seashore Justin met an old man who refuted the Platonic doctrine of the soul, and proceeded to tell him about the prophets of the Old Testament who foretold the coming of Christ. Justin was converted, but did not understand this to mean the abandonment of his philosophical inquiries, nor even the renunciation of all that he had learnt from Platonism. He regarded Christianity as 'the true philosophy', and accordingly began to wear the recognized costume of a teacher of philosophy (which in this age had something of both the authority and the power to repel which in the modern West has come to be associated with the clerical collar).^[1] Justin moved from Ephesus to Rome where soon after the year 151 he addressed an Apology for Christianity to the emperor Antoninus Pius. Some years later he reissued this work together with a supplement, commonly called his Second Apology, at a critical moment in the fortunes of the Church in Rome when it had been harried by the city prefect, Lollius Urbicus. The Dialogue with Trypho the Jew was written after the first Apology, probably about 160, but is presented as an account of a discussion which Justin had with Trypho about 135.

Justin vigorously rejected pagan myth and cult as gross superstition infected by evil, but gave the most positive welcome possible to the classical philosophical tradition. The transcendent God of Plato, beyond mortal comprehension, is the God of the Bible. Socrates rightly perceived how corrupt the old religion was, and in consequence was hounded to death by the Athenians - a model of integrity for Christian martyrs. Much else in the Platonic tradition is warmly accepted by Justin: Plato rightly taught that the soul has a special kinship to God, that man is responsible for his actions, and that in the world to come there is judgement and justice, Justin thinks Plato made some mistakes, e.g. in holding that the soul possesses a natural and inherent immortality in its own right rather than independence on the Creator’s will, and in accepting the deterministic myth of transmigration. But in Justin’s eyes it is remarkable how much Plato got right: he at least knew that it is very hard to find God without special help, and probably had to exercise reserve in declaring all that he had perceived, on account of the deep prejudices of the polytheistic society in which he lived. How Plato had achieved these profound insights Justin explains on two hypotheses. The first hypothesis was already a conventional apologetic theme in the Greek synagogue, namely, that Plato and the Greek sages had had before them the mysterious allegories of the Pentateuch, which provided them with obscure hints of the truth. The second hypothesis was a development of a Pauline theme, namely, the value and validity of the universal moral conscience, quite independent of any special revelation. (cf. Rom. i-ii.) Where St Paul had argued that all men are responsible and ultimately inexcusable, Justin argues that the light that all men have is implanted by the divine Reason, the Logos of God who was incarnate in Jesus and who is universally active and present in the highest goodness and intelligence wherever they may be found. Justin strikingly interprets in this sense the parable of the Sower. The divine Sower sowed his good seed throughout his creation. Justin does not make rigid and exclusive claims for divine revelation to the Hebrews so as to invalidate the value of other sources of wisdom. Abraham and Socrates are alike 'Christians before Christ'. But just as the aspirations of the Old Testament prophets found their fulfilment in Christ, so also the correct insights achieved by the Greek philosophers reached their completion in the gospel of Christ who embodies the highest moral ideal. Christ is for Justin the principle of unity and the criterion by which we may judge the truth, scattered like divided seeds among the different schools of philosophy in so far as they have dealt with religion and morals,

Justin’s debt to Platonic philosophy is important for his theology in one respect of far-reaching importance. He uses the concept of the divine Logos or Reason both to explain how the transcendent Father of all deals with the inferior, created order of things, and to justify his faith in the revelation made by God through the prophets and in Christ. The divine Logos inspired the prophets, he says, and was present entire in Jesus Christ. This inspiring activity and its culmination in the actual incarnation are special cases of divine immanence. It is implicit in Justin’s thesis that the distinction between 'Father' and 'Son corresponds to the distinction between God transcendent and God immanent. The Son-Logos is necessary to mediate between the supreme Father and the material world. Justin therefore insists that the Logos is 'other than' the Father, derived from the Father in a process which in no way diminishes or divides the being of the Father, but in the manner in which one torch may be lit from another. He is Light of Light.

Justin was well aware of the existence of Gnostic heresies, and wrote a (lost) treatise refuting them. He believed in the free will of man, and was therefore critical of the Gnostic doctrine that salvation depends on a predestination which is in different to moral virtue; and his confidence in the power of the argument from fulfilled prophecy set him in radical opposition to Marcion’s disparagement of the Old Testament. In criticizing the Gnostic devaluation of the natural and material order Justin stressed that the creation in the work of the supreme God, acting through the Logos as mediator; that in the incarnation the Logos assumed a complete manhood, body, soul, and mind, and Christ truly suffered in his passion; above all, that the destiny of man hereafter is not a deliverance of an immortal soul from the bondage of the physical frame, but is 'resurrection", which Justin interpreted in the most literal way. Accepting the Apocalypse of John as authoritative and inspired, Justin understood the Christian hope to mean the expectation that Christ would return to a rebuilt Jerusalem to reign saints for a thousand years. ^[2]

St Paul’s pregnant phrase that Christ came in the fullness of time' has come to bear a theological interpretation of history. Justin was the first writer to think of the annals of humanity as a twofold story of sacred and profane history, with a nodal point in the coming of Christ. The principle, basic to Justin’s attitude, that the Creator has implanted seeds of truth in many places, not only in the inspired prophetic writings, was taken further by later Christian writers. Justin himself mentioned prophecies of the end of the world to be found in the Sibylline Oracles and in an Apocalypte composed by hellenized Zoroastrians in the name of King Hystaspes of the Avesta. Likewise Lactantius early in the fourth century had the same Hystaspes Apocalypse before him, and found valuable testimonies to Christian truth in the Sibylline Oracles, large collections of which had been composed by Jewish versifiers and then adapted to Christian use. The thirteenth-century author of the DiesIrae, to whom King David and the Sibyl were alike prophets of the final cosmic catastrophe, was taking up a theme of great antiquity in Christian history. In the Latin world Dante and the medieval church were following a lead given by Constantine the Great himself when they interpreted as a prophecy of Christ the Sibylline oracle contained in the fourth Edlog of Virgil. The theorists of inspiration might disagree among themselves whether these 'profane' prophets were inspired against their will, like Balaam, or without knowing what they were doing, like Caiaphas. But it was enough for the purposes of argument to find in these oracles a valuable testimony to divine truth. Soon similar witnesses to the majesty of Christ were found in writings claiming to be revelations of 'Thrice greatest Hermes', or in oracles of Apollo himself. The manufacture of such oracular testimonies went on among both opponents and defenders of Christianity. In the third century pagan opponents of Christianity circulated an oracle in which Hecate vouched for the holiness of Christ while deploring the folly of those who worshipped him. Eusebius of Caesarea was glad to find in Plutarch the story that some travellers making a voyage in the time of the emperor Tiberius (and therefore contemporaneous with the time of Christ’s birth) had heard a great voice crying 'Great Pan is dead'. By his coming Christ rid the world of evil spirits. But it was long before simple Christians ceased to look for oracles as a source of predictions of the mysterious future. Even Augustine did not deny that the demons had some power to foresee the future, though this predictive power was not (he thought) more supernatural in principle than a physician’s prognosis or a weather forecast.

Justin Martyr occupies a central position in the history of Christian thought of the second century. His generous and optimistic approach to the Greek philosophical tradition was taken up by others. His pupil Tatian from Mesopotamia admittedly gave Justin’s theses a violently anti-hellenic and polemical edge that would have distressed Justin. But Justin’s liberal and eirenic spirit reappeared in a Plea for the Christians by one Athenagoras of Athens who addressed his work to Marcus Aurelius and Commodus about 177, and especially in Clement of Alexandria. Justin’s more strict theological achievements exercised an influence upon Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, who wrote a rambling defence of Christianity addressed to a certain Autolycus about 180. Justin also moulded the thinking of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons.

With Irenaeus the shape of Christian theology became stable and coherent. Apart from fragments two complete works from his pen have been preserved, though neither survives a manual of doctrinal lesson in his original Greek: a short Presentation of the apostolic preaching, written to providetials for a friend, and five books of Refutation and ever throw of the knowledge falsely so called which, the numerous recent discoveries of Gnostic documents, re even after main an essential and remarkably fair-minded source for the history of the second century sects. Irenaeus directed his polemic principally against Marcion and Valentinus. His anti-Marcionite argument followed the lines laid down by Justin and by other unnamed writers in Asia Minor of the middle years of the second century from whose works Irenaeus gives important quotations. He rested his case on the manifest unity of Old and New Testaments apparent in the fulfilment of ancient prophecy, and especially stressed the parallelism between Adam and Christ which he found in St Paul. The divine plan for the new covenant was a 'recapitulation' of the original creation. In Christ the divine Word assumed a humanity such as Adam possessed before he fell. Adam was made in the image and likeness of God. By sin the likeness became lost, though the image has remained untouched. By faith in Christ man may recover the lost likeness. Because Irenaeus regarded salvation as a restoration of the condition prevailing in paradise before the Fall, it was easy for him to accept Justin’s terrestrial hopes for the millennium. Because he believed that in the Fall only the moral likeness to God was lost, not the basic image, he was able to regard the Fall in a way very different from the deep pessimism of the Gnostics. Error came in, he thought, because mankind is growing to maturity, and in the infancy of the race it was natural that mistakes were made by the frail and immature children who were Adam and Eve. God allowed man to fall to quench his pride and to teach him by discipline and experience. So the history of salvation is a education, in which God has gradually step by step in a long process culminating in the incarnation of the divine Word with a universal gospel diffused through out the world by the church. Irenaeus' scheme does not begin with the Gnostic question: how a world which is the perfect work of a perfect creator can have gone wrong as the present world obviously has. He grants from the start that there is imperfection in the world, but it is like the blunders made by a growing child, and the purpose of our existence is the making of character by the mastery of difficulties and temptations.

By the manner in which he presents revelation as a gradual process Irenaeus was able to turn the edge of the Marcionite arguments against the moral difficulties of the Old Testament. But the followers of Valentinus raised other difficulties for him. Irenaeus' treatment of the Valentinian theology was the most original and independent part of his work. He had taken the trouble to make himself acquainted with the actual tenets of the sect, and saw clearly that the basic question was that of authority. The Valentinians claimed to be able to supplement the writings of the apostles with secret written traditions and with several additional gospels beside the familiar four of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Irenaeus realized that Marcion was right in one thing - that it was necessary to have a canon or fixed list of authoritative writings of the New Testament. Hitherto the dividing line between books accorded the status of being read in the church lectionary and books that were of approved orthodoxy had not been decisively drawn. Irenaeus drew the line, and is the first writer whose New Testament virtually corresponds to the canon that became accepted as traditional.^[3] What was original in Irenaeus was not the acceptance of four gospels or of the Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse, but rather the pro vision of reasoned statements for accepting these books and not others. The Valentinian appeal to unwritten tradition Irenaeus answered by appealing to the churches of apostolic foundation. If the apostles really had taught the strange fan tasies of the Valentinian myths, would they not have told the authoritative teachers to whom they entrusted the churches they founded? Would not these teachers have passed on these doctrines to their successors in the episcopal chairs at these to quote as an especially places? Irenaeus explains that he could vindicate orthodoxy by appealing to the succession of teachers in any church of apostolic foundation. He proceeds good example the list for Rome which could look back to the glorious martyrs Peter and Paul. Since the authentic faith is identical throughout the world, no church disagrees with any other, and diversity of doctrine is inconceivable; nevertheless, because of its great name the Roman succession provides a striking example, and we are assured that the faithful throughout the world will necessarily be in agreement with what is taught there. Accordingly, Irenaeus feels himself justified in citing the list of only one apostolic foundation, and in omitting Ephesus, Corinth, and the rest, though they would prove his point equally well.

Irenaeus perceived that the coherence of Christian doctrine depended upon the tradition of faithful instruction, and that the Gnostic heresies could only be successfully opposed if the scattered statements of scripture were drawn together within a system. But originality was the last thing to be expected of a theologian, he urged. It was essential to keep to the path laid down by authority in scripture and in the clear tradition of the apostolic churches which was the best guarantee of resistance to innovation and dangerous speculation. Heresy was born of the itch for something new. It came of 'curiosity', which meant prying into matters which the human mind had neither capacity to know nor authority even to think about. Irenaeus loved to contrast the unchanging monolithic Church of orthodoxy, semper eadem, standing on the rock of apostolic foundation, with the fissiparous sects, continually changing their systems, at loggerheads with one another, and possessing a clearly traceable history and development back to the first heretic of all, Simon Magus whom St Peter had resisted both at Samaria (Acts viii, 9-24) and, s traditions recorded, at Rome also. Irenaeus' work set out to provide a history of the variations of Gnostic heresy, and to compare them with the one true Church, immutable in time and space, guaranteed in its authenticity by its ability to trace its succession of authoritative teachers to its founding apostles, and by the unanimous consent of believers through out the world.

Irenaeus exercised wide influence on the immediately following generation. Both Hippolytus, the learned presbyter of Rome, and Tertullian of Carthage freely drew on his writings; and the interest he aroused may be deduced both from the fragments preserved on papyrus and from the fact that his work was translated into Latin early in the fifth century and then into Armenian in the sixth. But his too literal hope of an earthly millennium made him uncongenial reading in the Greek East (except to Epiphanius of Salamis who transcribed parts of Irenaeus for his vast refutation of the heresies in 374-5), and it is only in the Latin translation that his work as a whole has been preserved. Even there one line of the manuscript tradition lacks the final chapters of the fifth book, in which Irenaeus attacked those who wanted to interpret the millennial hope as symbolic of heaven rather than as an earthly reality.

North Africa was a province of great importance to the empire as one of its principal sources of grain and, in the West, Carthage had come to rank second only to Rome itself. The old Punic and Berber population was still strong in the countryside, but the cities together with the landowners and administrative classes were Roman. A substantial proportion of the population spoke Greek (as late as the last quarter of the fourth century A.D. there was a Greek bishop of the important city of Hippo who spoke Latin with difficulty and embarrassment; below p. 218). They came of immigrant stock either from the East or from South Italy and Sicily. How Christianity reached this region is not clear, but it is probable that there was a vigorous movement of missionary activity about the middle of the second century. In 180, twelve Christians of Scillium suffered martyrdom at Carthage. There was more trouble in 202 when under the emperor Septimius Severus sharp persecution broke out at Carthage. In the amphitheatre at Carthage there died Perpetua and Felicitas, the extant account of whose martyrdom incorporates a priceless document, viz. Perpetua’s diary of her imprisonment. But Tertullian’s numerous writings reveal little of the public and external history of the North African church. They compensate for that by disclosing much of its internal discussion and above all by their revelation of Tertullian himself: brilliant, exasperating, sarcastic, and intolerant, yet intensely vigorous and incisive in argument, delighting in logical tricks and with an advocate’s love of a clever sophistry if it will make the adversary look foolish, but a powerful writer of splendid, torrential prose. In his Apology of about 197 he makes not a merely defensive reply to popular or philosophical objections but a militant and trenchant attack on the corruption, irrationality, and political injustice of polytheistic society. Every page is written with the joy of inflicting discomfort on his adversaries for their error and unreasonableness, but in such a manner as to embarrass his own friends and supporters.

Some of Tertullian’s most interesting writing is concerned with the proper behaviour for a Christian in a society pervaded by pagan customs. Tertullian demanded that Christians should keep themselves wholly unspotted from the world’s idolatrous corruption. They must keep away from the cruel public shows; but that would be self-evident. Ter tullian’s most stringent demands for purity forbid his fellow Christians to serve in the army, or in the civil service, or even in schools. A Christian may not even earn his living in an occupation producing anything that might indirectly minister to idolatry. Tertullian’s conception of the Christian Easter, the Monarchian Controversy, and Tertullian life is first and foremost as a battle with the devil. This led him to oppose the least compromise with 'idolatry, even in what might seem the most innocuous forms of merely conventional habit, and also to conceive of the intellectual task of the Christian thinker as a conflict with diabolical forces. Because he understood his intellectual role in this way he had no hesitation about using arguments that were fallacious if only they would gain him the victory over his immediate adversary. If he could outmanoeuvre the devil by dialectical subtlety, so much the better. Moreover, he was indifferent to public approval. He was never happier than when advocating the cause of a tiny rigorist minority, and his friends might have predicted that he would take up the Montanist prophecy with its fiercely puritan ethic. For a considerable time his advocacy of Montanism was conducted from within the catholic Church, but as it became clear that the Church was not going to grant recognition to the New Prophecy Tertullian passed outside the Church, condemning it as unspiritual, institutionalized and compromised by worldliness. Tertullian was appalled when an authority in the catholic Church, whom he does not name but describes as 'bishop of bishops' and a veritable 'pontifex maximus', issued an edict declaring that the Church had power to grant remission even in the gravest sins after baptism such as adultery or apostasy. It is possible that he was alluding to Callistus of Rome; but perhaps the authority was the bishop of Carthage.

In spite of the fact that he ended his days outside the Church, Tertullian continued to exercise strong influence on later Western theology. Jerome relates an anecdote that Cyprian called him simply 'the master' and used to study his writings every day. Many turns of phrase and terminology from the tract against Praxeas came to form a permanent part of the Western vocabulary for discussing the doctrines of the Trinity and of the person of Christ, and were to be echoed in documents like the fifth-century Tome of Pope Leo the Great which came

impaling of opponents. In some passages, usually in anti Gnostic contexts, he writes scornfully of the power of philosophers to instruct anyone in truth and cries in tones of defiance 'I believe because it is absurd'. But in fact Tertullian was a well educated man with a considerable amateur knowledge of philosophical debate, and his estimate of the natural man’apart from grace was not pessimistic. He believed that, although humanity had inherited a flawed nature, the image of God had only been obscured, not annihilated, and that many traces of original righteousness and goodness were to be discerned. He saw an intuitive feeling after the truth in the unthinking interjections of ordinary people ("Good God') which perhaps betrayed an unconscious recognition of divine truth. The gospel he saw as a stripping away of the prejudices of pagan custom, setting the soul free to attain a natural fulfilment corresponding to the Creator’s intention. He did not always write with a Kierkegaardian delight in paradox.

These more conciliatory aspects of Tertullian’s mind were shared by another African writer, Minucius Felix. Between 200 and 245 he composed a subtle and charming dialogue in which a Christian named Octavius defends monotheism and belief in the resurrection against the criticisms of a polytheist named Caecilius as they walk along the seashore at Ostia. Minucius was no independent thinker, but a refined stylist and an intelligent compiler. He drew freely on Plato, Virgil, Seneca, Cicero, Fronto (tutor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), and especially Tertullian. Modern argument whether Minucius used Tertullian or if the debt was the other way round must be decided in favour of Tertullian’s priority. Minucius presented Tertullian’s arguments in a less militant manner, more suited to the taste of a fastidious literary public. He dropped the trenchant, uncompromising paradoxes and the coarse vehemence of his master. He preferred to ease his cultured friends into the kingdom rather than to dangle them over the pit. He even took tact and restraint so far as to say hardly a word about Christ and nothing whatever about the Bible and the sacraments. Minucius is more attractive and sensitive than Tertullian; but undeniably less exciting to read.

The history of the church in Egypt is veiled in mit be the sudden emergence of Clement of Alexandria in the last decade of the second century. His biography is almost unknown except as it may be deduced from his writings, which (apart from fragmentary quotations in later writers of an exposition of the gospel story of the rich young nie, some occasional notes on Valentinian Gnosticism and biblical exegesis, and the substantial trilogy-the Ex to Conversion (Protrepticus), the Tudor (Pardagogu), and the Miscellanies (Stromateis) which he never completed. The Protrepticus stands in the tradition of apologetic writing an attacking note criticizing the superstition, crudin, and eroticism of pagan cults and myths, and observing that the great philosophers, despite their realization of the comptin of paganism, had failed to break with it. The Pand guide to ethics and etiquette for a Christian moving in cultivated society. Clement intended that the third volume of his trilogy should be entitled the 'Teacher, and that should contain a systematic exposition of Christian d Clement never wrote the intended study. He felt that high matters of theology should be treated with reverence being concerned with divine mysteries, and it would be dangerous to put into writing a full and extended stain for all to read. Instead, therefore, he decided to write work of a very different character. Several pagan weibes of de age published miscellaneous collections of antiquarian and philosophical interest, the form being deliberately matic so that the subject would entirely change after a l pages. An extant Latin example of the second century is the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, and similar works were produced by Plutarch, Aelian, and Athenacus. Clement decided to use this form partly no doubt because of contemporary literary fashion, but mainly because the style particularly suited his purpose, which was to suggest rather than to prescribe, to throw out exploratory hints for the reader to investigate and consider at leisure rather than to tell all that was in his heart and so cast his pearls promiscuously before unworthy and swinish readers. The content of the Stromateis may certainly be taken to consist of as much dogmatic statement as Clement felt it safe to make, but the matter is wrapped in a deliberately misty and allusive style that prefers to put things in the form of a poetic reminiscence rather than in plain and straightforward prose. The style, however, was more than a mere literary form adopted for tactical reasons; it corresponded in some degree to Clement’s view of the very nature of theology that he should seek to express it in terms which suggested a reality transcending the verbal symbol. Religious language, he felt, is akin to poetry. A certain diffidence is proper to it. Clement was not born at Alexandria. He had come there after various travels in the course of which he had learnt from a number of different Christian teachers. The main attraction at Alexandria was a certain Pantaenus, a convert to Christianity from Stoicism who is reported (credibly) to have visited India. Clement says that Pantaenus had the outstanding merit of combining high intelligence with fidelity to the apostolic tradition - not a common phenomenon in second-century Alexandria where the influence of Valentinian Gnosticism was certainly very powerful. As Christianity penetrated the well-educated society of Alexandria, the choice for the convert seemed too often to be between clever, eloquently defended heresy on the one side and a dim, obscurantist orthodoxy on the other. It was one of Clement’s principal achievements to render this dilemma unreal and irrelevant, and Pantaenus seems to have helped him to discover the right way. At Alexandria Clement found a church afraid and on the defensive against Greek philosophy and pagan literature. Gnosticism had made philosophy suspect; and pagan religion so permeated classical literature that it was not easy to disentangle a literary education from an acceptance of pagan values and polytheistic myth. The method of the Stromateis, written with very positive convictions about the truth contained in Greek philosophy and the value of classical poetry, enabled Clement to present his position to the fearful Christian reader in such a way as to diminish any anxieties. He saw that philosophy, so far from giving support to Gnosticism, provided a rational method for its destruction; the Gnostics talked much of a higher reason, but did not in fact exercise it. So the Stromateis move from statements pressing the need for the study of philosophy to statements attacking the Gnostic heretics, and at the same time provide an acute and well constructed interpretation of Biblical themes in language and categories familiar to the educated Greek world. Apologetic motifs addressed to the pagan outsider mingle with a defence of the true faith against Gnostic perversions of it. At one moment Clement will be explaining that Plato plagiarized Moses and the prophets without making proper acknowledgements; at the next that Greek philosophy, like the Law of Moses according to St Paul, was given as a tutor to bring the Greeks to Christ and as a restraint on sin; and at the next that Gnostic doctrines of love and freedom ignore the fact that no serious ethic can dispense with giving a place to rules, or that Gnosticism places far too wide a gulf between God and the world and far too narrow a gulf between God and the soul. Moreover, Clement was sensitive to the difficulty that educated Greeks felt when confronted by the simple and popular style of the scriptures. In one passage, by a tour de force, he a summary of the moral teaching of the Sermon on the Mount translated into the language of Neopythagorean gnomic wisdom. Yet he felt it necessary to reassure any anxious Christian readers that, although the form of expression was not scriptural and there was no invocation of Biblical texts, yet the content of teaching would be found on examination

to correspond with the New Testament. Clement found it hard to use the word 'orthodox' without a half-ironic apology. He was not sure that he was perfectly happy to be associated with those commonly so entitled. Yet he knew himself to be a committed defender of the apostolic tradition, which he believed to include a 'true knowledge' quite opposed to the false 'knowledge' offered by the sects. The 'true gnostic' was not afraid of philosophy; he could use it for his purposes, to understand what he had come to believe within the church, and to refute any adulteration. The higher life of the spirit is for Clement a moral and spiritual ascent. It was characteristic of the Gnostic heretics that they were little interested in virtue or in training of character. Clement’s true gnostic knows that spiritual insight is given to the pure in heart, to those humble enough to walk with God as a child with his father, to those whose motive for ethical action passes beyond fear of punishment or hope of reward to a love of the good for its own sake. It is an ascent from faith through knowledge to the beatific vision beyond this life, when the redeemed are one with God in a 'deification' symbolized by the holy of holies in the Mosaic tabernacle, or by Moses' entrance into the darkness on Sinai. The ground of this possibility of mystical union is the image of God implanted by creation.

The central principle of Clement’s thinking is the doctrine of Creation. This is the ground of Redemption. Moreover, because God had implanted the good seeds of truth in all his rational creatures, Clement was confident that there is much to be learnt from Platonic metaphysics, and from Stoic ethics, and from Aristotelian logic. All truth and goodness, wherever found, come from the Creator. On the same ground Clement opposed the Gnostics who disparaged the created order by making matter wholly alien from the supreme God, with ethical consequences leading either to rabid asceticism or to antinomian eroticism. In a long review of the Christian sex ethic Clement vigorously opposed the Gnostic thesis that sex is either irrelevant to or incompatible with the higher spiritual life. While affirming all respect for individual vocations to celibacy, he dismisses any suggestion that marriage is an inherently inferior spiritual status. On the same principles he rejected demands that all Christians ought to be teetotallers or vegetarians; it was for him a matter of individual conscience, not of universal prohibition. But Clement was very far from a naturalistic hedonism when writing of delight in the goodness of the created world. The good things of the material order were, he directed, to be used with gratitude but also with detachment, on the conditions given by the Creator and with restraint.

Clement wrote a special discourse to help Christians puzzled about the right use of their money and troubled especially by the absolute command of the Lord to the rich young ruler, 'If you would be perfect, sell all you have…​ On a rapid reading it might seem as if Clement were merely a compromiser trying to wriggle out of the plain meaning of a commandment. But a fairer reading of his tract shows that he did not see the gospel ethic as imposing legalistic obligations but rather as a statement of God’s highest purpose for those who follow him to the utmost. What really matters is the use rather than the accident of possession. Accordingly Clement laid down a guide for the wealthy converts of the Alexandrian church, which imposed a most strenuous standard of frugality and self-discipline. Clement passionately opposed any luxury or ostentation, and much that he pro tested to be lawful he regarded as highly inexpedient.

The exposition of the saying to the rich young ruler and several passages in the Paedagogus and Stromateis show Clement acting as a spiritual director. It lay in the nature of his view of the Christian life as a progress towards the likeness of God in Christ that he saw it both as a dynamic advance in the comprehension of the nature of Christian doctrine and also as a process of education in which the aspirant would make mistakes calling for penitence. The church he described as a 'school', with many grades and differing abilities among its pupils, where all the elect were equal, but some were more elect' than others. Accordingly Clement could take a view of the church which allowed room for the restoration of the lapsed and at the same time held the highest demands before all Christians. The seventh book of the Stromateis (the last that he lived to complete, since the so-called eighth book consists of scattered notes on logic probably found among his papers after his death) portrays the true gnostic in terms which blend the high aspirations of St Paul (Philippians iii) with Platonic language about the soul’s assimilation to God and Stoic ideals of passionlessness. It seems to have been from St Paul rather than from the Platonists that he had learnt to regard the knowledge of God as a dynamic advance rather than a static possession. He once declared that if the true gnostic were required to choose between eternal salvation and the knowledge of God, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter.

Because Clement understood the spiritual life as a never ending progress, he did not think that the process of divine education came to an end with death. His sense of indebtedness to Justin and Irenaeus was not so strong as to make him look kindly on their all too literal belief in a physical resurrection to participate in Christ’s reign for a thousand years on earth. For the sinner there is burning fire, destructive not of the image of God but of the wood, hay and stubble of sins. None in this life can achieve such holiness that he will not need to be purified by the wise fire so that he may be fitted for the presence of God.

Clement’s personal reticence allowed him to reveal little of himself, but his personal ideals are clear to see. In cultural background and in temperament he could hardly be further removed from the militant zeal of Tertullian. Yet in between the lines of urbane dinner-party conversation reflected in his pages there is to be discerned a moral passion in no way cooler than Tertullian’s. Clement is equally reticent about the external life of the church to which he belongs. He never mentions the contemporary bishop of Alexandria, Demetrius, and relatively little can be deduced from his text which helps to explain the institutional development of the community. Like Justin Martyr, he did his chief work as a layman, working as an independent teacher of 'the Christian philosophy', instructing pupils in grammar, rhetoric and etiquette as well as in specifically religious matters. An uncertain scrap of evidence suggests that he may have been ordained presbyter before his death soon after 215. If he was ordained, the fact of his ordination may reasonably be interpreted as the expression of a desire on the part of the bishop of Alexandria to bring lay teachers like Clement under rather closer control.

Origen stands out as a giant among the early Christian thinkers. Although he never names Clement in his writings, he had certainly read him with attention and in many respects continued Clement’s work. One of his own early works was entitled Stromateis; the few surviving fragments suggest that it resembled Clement’s Miscellanies, trying to interpret Christian concepts in language familiar to the Platonic tradition, and mingling philosophical discussion with expositions of biblical cruxes (like the dissension between St Peter and St Paul at Antioch which Origen interpreted as edifying play acting). But the temper of Origen’s mind was very different from Clement’s. Throughout Clement’s works there is a note of cheerfulness and open-eyed enjoyment of the Creator’s mercies. In Origen there is a sterner austerity, a steely determination of the will to renounce not merely all that is evil but also natural goods if they are an obstacle to the attainment of higher ends. Origen knew his way about the classics of Greek poetry, but was little disposed to display the fact. Perhaps he was a little afraid of beauty of form and expression as a dangerous snare that might entrap or distract him. Perhaps it was only that he had no time for such trifles. He worked to a rigorous programme, studying the great philosophers, but above all the scriptures, of which his memory could recall almost any text at will. The excellence of his memory was a source of some natural pride to him, and in consequence he occasionally did not trouble to verify his references and made trivial mistakes.

Pagan literature was for Origen an indissoluble part of the tradition of pagan society, to which as a member of the persecuted church he felt himself to be implacably opposed. Family memory may have played some part in imparting this feeling to him. When he was eighteen years old, in 202 during the persecution of Septimius Severus, his father Leonides died a martyr’s death. Origen always writes as a member of a martyr church, and his attitude towards pagan philosophy and culture is less sympathetic than Clem ent’s, passing at times into an ice-cold disparagement. For Clement Plato enjoyed high authority. In Origen’s eyes he enjoyed none whatever. Origen recognized, of course, that Plato had said many wise things, and that his dialogues contain much that is true. But with Origen one feels that he believed it to be true almost despite Plato, not because of him. He differs from Clement in that he has not the least desire to claim the protection of a great philosophical name for some principle that is important to Christians. Yet, quite unconsciously, Origen is inwardly less critical of Platonism than Clement, and proposes a system that incorporates a larger proportion of Platonic assumptions than is apparent in Clement’s writings. He was completely at home in the arguments of the Greek philosophical schools, and could move with the familiarity of a master among the different positions of Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist, and Aristotelian, using whatever he needed to make his point, but never identifying himself with any one school. Like Justin and Clement before him, he ungrudgingly welcomes the help of Stoic arguments about ethical questions and about providence, and is very sympathetic to the Platonic doctrine of the soul as being 'akin' to God, but obliged to live in a material world which is not its true home. Only there could be no question of Plato being actually inspired to discover divine truth. For Origen the only source of revelation was the Bible, and he devoted many hours of each day to prayer and study, strenuously forcing himself to almost unending toil, and living with little sleep and food. He desired with all his heart to be a man of the Church, defending its doctrines against

all adversaries, Jewish, heretical, or pagan. Early in his career Origen discovered from disputations with Jews that it was essential for Christians to argue with synagogue representatives on the basis of a Biblical text recognized by both sides. The Church used the Septuagint translation. The Greek synagogues were now using more literal versions by Symmachus, Theodotion, and especially Aquila, a Gentile who, after becoming a Christian for a time, became a proselyte to Judaism and about 140 produced a version which took literalism to fanatical lengths. Moreover, in Christian usage there was a tendency, especially in collections of excerpts of Messianic prophecies, for some texts to suffer slight alteration to make them better adapted for their purpose. Justin Martyr believed that the words 'The Lord reigned from the tree' were part of the true text of Psalm 96 and explained their absence from Jewish copies of the Septuagint on the hypothesis that Jewish controversialists had omitted them. In this situation Origen saw how imperative it was to discover the accurate text of the Old Testament, if Christians were not to be faulted on their facts by Rabbinic disputants. He therefore compiled a vast synopsis of the Old Testament versions entitled the Hexapla. He placed in parallel columns the Hebrew, a transliteration of the Hebrew text in Greek characters (perhaps to help with the vocalization of the consonantal text, perhaps derived from churches that may have followed the old synagogue custom of reading the Hebrew text before expounding it in Greek), and the four main Greek versions. For the Psalms two more translations were added; one of them Origen found in a jar in the Jordan valley, perhaps in some find analogous to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The central purpose of the Hexapla was to ensure the accuracy of the Septuagint, which was the accepted version used in all the Greek churches. Origen added supplements to the Septuagint text mainly from Theodotion’s version, and marked with an obelus (to indicate hesitation about their authority) passages in the Septuagint diverging from the Hebrew text. These divergences could be considerable. For example, the Greek book of Daniel included the History of Susanna, for which the Hebrew had nothing to correspond. Origen did not doubt that Susanna was a true part of the book of Daniel, since it was contained in both the Septuagint and Theodotion. Moreover, the story showed up the Jewish elders in an unhappy light, so that the synagogue had an obvious motive for suppressing it.

Origen’s view, however, was correctly challenged on the point in a dramatic correspondence with an older of considerable interest. A native of Jerusalem (Aelia) he had travelled widely. He once visited the court of King Abgar IX the Great at Edessa, where he met Bardesanes (above, p. 61) and went out hunting with him and the crown prince. He visited Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. He had seen the Dead Sea and Jacob’s terebinth in Palestine. About 220 he settled at Emmaus (renamed Nicopolis) in Palestine, whence in 222 he travelled to Rome on an embassy for his city. At Rome he so impressed the emperor Alexander Severus (222-35) by his erudition that the emperor entrusted him with the building of his library at the Pantheon in Rome. His learning was that of a typical antiquarian. He compiled a chronicle of world history, placing the incarnation in the 5500th year after the creation. He also wrote a voluminous miscellany, similar in content to Pliny’s Natural History; the extant fragments include curious lore about veterinary medicine, military tactics, rhetoric, the textual criticism of Homer, and magic. Africanus was the first Christian whose writings were not all concerned with his faith. Africanus' attitude to the Bible was likewise antiquarian in character. He harmonized the gospel genealogies, and noticed that the History of Susanna contains an atrocious Greek pun. He once attended a theological disputation during which Origen appealed to the History of Susanna, and afterwards wrote to Origen a fatherly rebuke for failing to notice that the pun, being only possible in Greek, proves the History of Susanna to be an addition to the original book of Daniel. Origen testily replied that the pun could have been introduced by the translators, but that did not prove that there was no Hebrew original. One could not suppose that the Lord, who had given all to redeem his church, would allow it to err in such a weighty matter. Here at least Origen’s attitude to the Septuagint was strongly conservative. He felt bound by the fact that its canon was accepted by the churches. But Origen conceded that since the synagogue, together with a number of churches, did not accept the authority and canonicity of those books or parts of books which were to be found only in the Septuagint and not in the Hebrew, it was impossible to use these books in a controversy about doctrine. The defence of orthodoxy against heresy occupied much of Origen’s attention. He saw that an answer to Gnosticism could not be made piecemeal by taking particular points in isolation, but only by providing a coherent and all-embracing view of the nature of Christian doctrine, within which the central Gnostic questions (the problem of evil, the place of matter in the divine purpose, free will, divine justice) could find an answer by being seen in a wider and deeper perspective. It was to provide this broad interpretation of Christian theology that Origen wrote his controversial work On First Principles. It was translated into Latin at the end of the fourth century by Rufinus of Aquileia, who frankly explained that he had altered some passages to bring them into conformity with more orthodox opinions expressed in Origen’s other writings. Jerome, however, published an exact version of the principal passages which Rufinus had thus mitigated and qualified, so that it is still possible to discover the original meaning of the work.

According to Origen’s speculative system, God created not this material world in the first instance, but a realm of spiritual beings endowed with reason and free will and dependent upon the Creator. To explain the Fall Origen took an idea from Philo of Alexandria; he suggested that the spiritual beings became 'sated' with the adoration of God, and fell by neglect, gradually cooling in their love and turning away from God to what is inferior. The material world was brought into being as a consequence of this Fall, not, as the heretics said, as the result of an accident, but as an expression of the direct purpose of the Creator himself, whose goodness is manifest in its beauty and order. So the material world is not a disastrous mistake in which man finds himself involved by a cruel chance, but a realm created under the will of the supreme God and expressing his goodness, justice, and redemptive purpose, which is not to make man comfortable but to educate him, to train him, and to remake him so that he turns back towards his Maker, without whom he is less than himself. Origen saw that the 'problem' of evil lies in its apparent purposelessness. For a solution he looked both to Irenaeus' idea that the world is intended to make strenuous demands on man who is called to overcome the difficulties confronting him, and also to the Platonic tradition that evil is a privation of goodness and that responsibility for the disorder lies in the misuse of free will. The material world is for Origen temporary and provisional, and life in it is a short period in a much longer life of the soul, which exists before being united to the body and will continue hereafter. The process of redemption is therefore gradual; the atonement is going on all the time and, since it is God’s way not to use force but to respect freedom, the work of restoration to a correspondence with the divine intention is a slow and painful ascent.

One soul had never turned away from God when the rest fell. This soul was chosen to be united to the divine Logos in a union as close as that of body and soul in man, united like white-hot iron in the fire; even the body derived from Mary was also caught up into the union that constituted the one incarnate Lord. But to discern the presence of God in the Son of Man is a grace. Christ means different things to different people in accordance with their spiritual progress. We may begin with him as Son of Man but learn, as we go on, to understand him more deeply. Christ is 'all things to all men', answering to individual need and aspiration which change as faith matures into knowledge and as moral in sight becomes more sensitive.

It is axiomatic for Origen that all revelation is conditioned by the capacity of the recipient. The incarnation is of necessity a divine incognito: sinful man could not bear the direct splendour. The Church preaches a gospel which, though absolute within the possibilities of this life, is relative in comparison with the truth that shall be revealed hereafter. We see through a glass, darkly. In the life to come our under standing will transcend what we know now by at least as much as the New Testament transcends the Old. And the soul’s ascent in comprehension will continue after the death of this physical frame. Because at death none is sinless and fit for the presence of the divine holiness and love, there will be a purging 'fire', purifying the soul of all dross. All language about heaven and hell is expressed in figurative symbols: Be Origen there is no measuring of hell’s temperature, The truth within the symbolic language is that there is divine punishment. But the crucial question is the purpose of this punishment. Origen will never allow that a remedial purpose is not present in the wrath of God" (which, as he never tires of explaining, is not an emotional reaction in God).

Origen was convinced that the symbols of early Christian eschatology-heaven, hell, resurrection, the Second Coming of Christ-were not to be rejected merely because literalistic believers understood them in a crude and prosaic way. It was, he thought, the opposite error of Gnosticism to reinterpret all these symbols to refer exclusively to inward psychological experience here and now. Origen himself had much inner sympathy with this view, and could explain hell, for example, as meaning a complete disintegration of the soul in utter unrelatedness. But he wanted to find a way of interpreting the symbols in a sense 'worthy of the divine greatness' which maintained the essential meaning of the church’s tradition. His quest for a ria media may often have ended in a rather confused use of language, and in the eyes of the orthodox his reinterpretations sounded alarmingly heretical. But he felt himself justified by St Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians xv, where the apostle implicitly rejected the notion that 'resurrection' is a purely inward psychological or mystical experience, but also criticizes the notion that the resurrection of the body means a literal resuscitation of this present physical frame. Origen’s language about the last things became a stimulus to some fanciful speculations in the sixth century. Some enthusiastic monks in Palestine then claimed his authority for the view that the resurrection body will be spherical. (Plato had explained that the sphere is the perfect shape.) There is no clear evidence that Origen himself ever said this.

Origen believed that the devil was a fallen angel, and that the demonic powers were not created evil by God. They fell by neglect of God and by pride which prevented immediate repentance. But evil powers have retained freedom and reason. No being is totally depraved, or it would cease to be in any sense responsible and rational, and one could feel only pity for its unfortunate condition. Therefore even Satan himself retains some vestige of power to acknowledge the truth; even he can repent at the very last. The atonement is incomplete until all are brought to redemption, and God is all in all. But this universalist hope is not a comfortable belief in a naturalistic process that will come to pass whatever happens. Freedom is an inalienable possession of rational beings, and the divine love treats each individual with sovereign respect. Indeed, because freedom is inalienable, Origen has to allow that the redeemed may once again neglect to love God, so that there is a speculative possibility of an unending cycle of fall and redemption repeated again and again. Origen ends with a question. He cannot know, because he cannot believe either that freedom is lost or that love can fail.

Controversy with Gnosticism also forced Origen to an extended examination of the right principles for interpreting the Bible. Against literalists, such as Marcion, he vindicated the claims of allegory to a place in Christian exegesis. Parts of the Bible might look like merely ceremonial laws or ancient tribal traditions, but beneath the veil of law, history, and even geography Origen could discern timeless truth. Philo had pointed the way for him here, and Origen took over many of his basic principles of interpretation. But for Origen the key to the unity of the Bible, linking Old and New Testaments, is the person of Christ. Difficulties, to which the Marcionites liked to point, were understood by Origen as providential signposts to the necessity of a spiritual interpretation. That the four evangelists did not intend simply to give a dry and factual record of events was demonstrated by their differing accounts of Christ cleansing the Temple; the differences cannot be reconciled at the literal and historical level, but are entirely explicable when the spiritual purposes of the evangelists are taken into account. Accordingly, Origen concludes that the prime purpose of scripture is to convey spiritual truth, and that the narrative of historical events is secondary to this. Most passages of scripture have two, or three, or very occasionally even four levels of meaning. Besides the literal meaning the text may also contain teaching about the Church as a society, or about the individual soul’s relation to God. In this respect Origen’s doctrine of various levels of meaning became profoundly influential in both East and West. His homilies on the Pentateuch and Joshua were long read in Rufinus' Latin translation and deeply influenced Gregory the Great. He also exercised great influence through the medium of Jerome, who made much of Origen’s biblical exegesis his own.

Origen’s attitude to the literal sense of scripture was criticized by his contemporaries and by unfriendly readers in the fourth century. He believed that only very few passages in the Bible have no literal sense but only a spiritual meaning. But it was not clear that he seriously regarded the literal sense as being important in itself. It was almost accidental, theologically peripheral, that the Bible contained much true history. The soul within the body of scripture was the important thing. For Origen it was in line with the entire principle of revelation and redemption that man had to be educated to rise from the letter to the spirit, from the world of sense to the immaterial realm, from the Son of Man to the Son of God. But the theologian to whom the unity of divine and human elements in scripture is analogous to the union of divine and human in Christ cannot have been a thinker to whom the literal and historical sense was completely irrelevant. In fact Origen’s doctrine of prayer and his personal 'mysticism' are always rooted in an attachment to scripture. He once remarks that 'even at the very highest climax of contemplation we do not for a moment forget the incarnation'. So also in prayer the spiritual ascent of the soul finds its foothold in the ladder of biblical meditation. 'Daily we read the scriptures and experience dryness of soul until God grants food to satisfy the soul’s hunger.' So by grace the soul is lifted above earthly concerns and rejoices in God alone, looking into the inward mirror which reflects the glory of the Lord and is transformed as the light of the glory of God makes its mark. In such prayer, Origen adds, there is no need for spoken petitions; for the soul is brought into a sense of union with Christ, the immanent 'world-soul', and is enabled to accept with thankfulness whatever burdens and difficulties it has to bear. Origen regarded the exposition of scripture as his primary task, and the majority of his voluminous works consists of biblical commentaries and sermons on particular books; the commentaries were conceived on so vast a scale that none has been transmitted in complete form. When Rufinus of Aquileia came to translate Origen’s Commentary on Romans he found it necessary to remould the work and to make a drastically abbreviating paraphrase; as early as Rufinus' time, some individual books of this Commentary were already lost, and he was forced to fill some gaps on his own account. 'Who', asked Jerome (in his pro-Origenist period), 'could ever read all that Origen wrote?' Because of his ceaseless toil he was nicknamed 'Adamantius'. His exacting and ascetic standards did not always endear him to other Christians, and he confessed that he often found himself the object of envy, malice, and even hatred. The story, told by Eusebius of Caesarea on hearsay evidence, that in the enthusiasm of youth Origen castrated himself to ensure chastity, could be true, since a few cases of such extreme acts of asceticism certainly occurred in the early Church. But when Origen himself expounded Matt. xix, 12 ('there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake') he strongly deplored any literal interpretation of the words. Perhaps Eusebius was uncritically reporting malicious gossip retailed by Origen’s enemies, of whom there were many.

Origen found it difficult to be on good terms with Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria. He thought Demetrius a worldly, power-hungry prelate consumed with pride in his own self importance, enjoying the honour of presiding over a wealthy community in a great city. Demetrius was anxious to bring order and episcopal control to the church in Egypt which in the second century seems to have enjoyed a rare degree of anarchy. It would be easy for assertions of episcopal authority to appear autocratic. Origen’s friends felt that in Demetrius' attitude to Origen there was an element of envy. Origen was frequently being invited to visit other churches to take part in some public disputation or to help in unravelling some knotty problem of theology. A recent papyrus find has recovered the transcript, taken down by two shorthand writers, of a discussion probably in Transjordan where Origen was invited by a synod of bishops to confute the Monarchian opinions of a certain bishop Heraclides. His fame became so great that he once had the honour of being summoned to Antioch to converse with Mamaea,¹ mother of the emperor Alexander Severus, who had many Christians in his household and is reported (unhappily by an unreliable historical source) to have included statues of Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, Orpheus, and Christ in his private chapel.

About 229 Origen was invited to Athens to help the church there to answer a troublesome Valentinian heretic named Candidus. On his way to Greece he passed through Palestine where he had many admirers, and at Caesarea he accepted ordination to the presbyterate. At Athens Candidus argued that the orthodox could not object to the Valentinian doctrine of predestination to salvation or reprobation when they themselves held that the devil lay beyond hope of redemption. Origen replied that even the devil could be saved. When reports of the ordination at Caesarea and of the disputation at Athens reached Alexandria, there was an explosion of wrath against Origen. Demetrius complained to the bishop of Rome, and together with a synod of Egyptian bishops condemned Origen. Origen defended himself, regretting that deep truths had been disclosed to those unworthy to comprehend them, and adding that he would not wish to speak evil of the devil any more than of the bishops who condemned him. Thereafter he had to make his home at Caesarea in Palestine, until his death about 254 at Tyre (where his tomb was still to be seen by the Crusaders in the twelfth century). In 235 Alexander Severus was succeeded by the emperor

Maximin, who disliked the favour shown to Christians in the imperial household, and for a short period there was

1\. Hippolytus addressed to Mamaca a discourse on the resurrection, lost except for nine quotations preserved in later writers. 2. The Augustan History, a group of historical novels written c. 400.

Origen

III

unpleasant persecution which, unlike most of the earlier persecutions where the decisive factor was the attitude of an the local governor, seems to have been inspired by the emperor’s personal decision. Origen left Caesarea for a time in company with a friend and wealthy patron, named Ambrose, who paid for the stenographers that recorded Origen’s sermons. It was to Ambrose that he addressed his Exhortation to Martyrdom- a plea that Christians like Ambrose with a position in society should resist every temptation to com promise. To Ambrose he likewise dedicated his treatise On Prayer, which sought to answer the deterministic philosophy of those who believed that prayer made no difference. In 248 Ambrose persuaded Origen to compose his one major essay in the vindication of Christianity against pagan criticism, the contra Celsum. The reply to Celsus is a loosely constructed work in which the arguments are presented in association with successive quotations from Celsus' attack. In consequence it is possible to hear both sides of the debate, and for the modern reader the work remains one of the most fascinating among early Christian writings. The conflict between Celsus and Origen was the more intense because Origen himself was, like Celsus, a Platonist, so that both parties to the dispute shared the same philosophical presuppositions. Origen saw clearly that the issue at stake went far deeper than the arguments of popular apologetic from miracles, fulfilled prophecies and the miraculous growth of the church, towards which Origen himself was in part re served. The crucial question in Origen’s eyes was whether, within a Platonic metaphysic, it is possible to speak of free dom in God or whether 'God' is only another name for the impersonal process of the cosmos rolling on its everlasting way. Because Celsus thought in the latter way, he was a religious conservative, shocked and alarmed by the new and potentially revolutionary forces released by Christianity. Origen regarded the idea of freedom as an emphasis that was especially characteristic of Christian philosophy: it meant the possibility of change, of moral conversion, of spontaneity and creativity, and of critical detachment to wards accepted conventions and traditions.

How far Origen won a fair hearing for Christianity among the pagan intelligentsia is very unclear. Porphyry, the pupil and biographer of the philosopher Plotinus, had certainly read some of Origen’s work, and could not forgive Origen’s disrespectful attitude to Plato and to the classics of Greek literature, which for Porphyry were inspired authorities. Probably Origen lost some of his potential influence by his cold and critical comments on the philosophers. But there were others to whom his words were golden. He attracted many pupils, and the most distinguished of them, a young nobleman named Gregory, published an extant panegyric hailing him, according to the convention of the age, as a master of religious and philosophical education. Gregory had been a student at the law school at Berytus (Beirut) and was converted to Christianity by hearing Origen. He left Origen’s lecture room to undertake pioneer missionary work in Pontus in Asia Minor, where a century later the peasants told wonderful tales of his exorcisms - he became known as the 'wonder-worker', Thaumaturgus, and achieved great popularity as a saint. Origen’s influence was also profound among the churches of Palestine and Asia Minor in the century after his death. Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian, looked back on Origen as the supreme saint and highest intelligence in the catalogue of heroes in his history; and no Greek commentator on scripture could escape his influence. Even Epiphanius of Salamis in Cyprus (below, p. 184), who regarded Origen as a heretic who had corrupted Christianity with the poison of Greek culture, admitted that there was excellent stuff in his Bible commentaries. As the monastic movement developed in the fourth century, there were many ascetics who found in Origen’s spirituality a theological basis for their personal aspirations. Yet he had many critics. About 300 a Lycian bishop, Methodius, attacked his spiritualizing doctrine of the resurrection. His most extreme enemies (Epiphanius, Jerome in his later period, and the emperor Justinian) explained the mixture of orthodoxy and heresy in his writings by the hypothesis that his real intentions were heretical, but that he had introduced orthodox ideas to confuse the simple.

Dionysius of Alexandria and Paul of Samosata knew that he desired nothing so much as to be a loyal member of the church.