Origen Flashcards
Origen Adamantius?
late second and early third century
Biblical texts on a purely allegorical level, and his commentary on ‘The Song of Songs’, reveals that he believes the love song, and the marriage described, to be representative of the relationship and eventual union / marriage of the Church or the soul and Christ, the Word
Heavily influenced by Platonic thought, Origen also outlines the stages through which one must progress in order to attain this union with Christ: moral, physical and ‘enoptike’. It is in the ‘enoptike’ manner of life that one has metaphysical concerns and is able to contemplate things in the divine realm, and therefore surpass what: “it can achieve by its own efforts: it can only pass to this way, characterised by love, by reliance on God’s mercy.”
solomon
little book”, ‘Song of Songs’, which Solomon, “wrote in the form of a drama and sang under the figure of the Bride, about to wed and burning with heavenly love towards her Bridegroom”,
KING
Origen believes the reading of the ‘Song of Songs’ is in itself a way to become closer to God, as the Scripture is divinely inspired, and is Christ’s own epithalamium and therefore is the Logos of God:
“For Origen, the reading of scripture is itself an exercise spiritual transformation,”
Bride?
“individual and collective person—conceived in the light of a continuous, ordered, voluntary progress towards the perfection.” Origen believed that the Church is eternal, and pre-existent, that it has been even since before man was created: ““For you must not please think that she is called the Bride or the Church only from the time when the Saviour came in flesh; she is so called from the very beginning of the human race and from the very foundation of the world.”
O.T
Old Testament that the Church has been prepared, and finally brought to perfection through her union with Christ: “Day by day, in His mystical communion with her, He enlightens her until she achieves perfection in holy nuptials with the Logos.”
history of the church
Origen interprets the imagery from the ‘Song of Songs’ as symbolic of the history of the Church, that at first, the Bride is visited by the “friends of the Bridegroom”, namely prophets and angels, from whom she receives “the kisses of the teachings and exhortations of the Old Testament.”
gifts of the bride
Furthermore, Origen interprets the ‘gifts’ that the Bride receives to be representative of the Law and the prophets, this constitutes her ‘dowry’ and her wedding gifts.
However, these gifts that she received, and the instructions that she has followed, given to her by the mediators of God, did not ultimately fulfil her desires, and she still longed for the visitation of the Word of God himself: “‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth.”
Eventually: “she had been brought so far that she could receive the kisses, that is to say the doctrine and the words of the Logos,” no longer through mediators and prophets.
LEDEGANG
LEDEGANG
All of the other songs and passages of the Old Testament, were revealed to the Bride so that she may mature, and now she is finally prepared and strong enough to receive the ‘Song of Songs’: “She is perfect and has received the words of the perfect doctrine.”
Platonic thought
he believes that the ultimate union with Christ will come when we return from the material realm, to our original place in the spiritual realm, from which we fell. He describes the return to this realm as a threefold process, ultimately culminating in ‘enoptike’, metaphysical contemplation through the understanding and appreciation of Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’
Heine
these souls seemed to turn away from their contemplation of God and resultantly fell into three different states: “holy powers consisting of such beings as archangels and angels, wicked powers consisting of the devil and demons, and a group between these two extremes consisting of humans.”
aim of second creation
second creation: material realm
as a result of turning away from god
Origen believes that the aim of this second creation, these human bodies, is to return to the spiritual realm, through contemplation and understanding of God, and by becoming free of their material bodies, so that they may be in union with Christ: “the end, is always like the beginning,” (Origen).
union through the word
Origen believed that you can come into union with Christ through the incarnation of the Word, which united the material and early realms, “the coming of Christ in the Incarnation as that to which the soul responds in its ascent to God.” LOUTH
Scripture
Yet, the understanding of the scripture itself, also grants you access to Christ, as the scripture is understood to be divinely inspired and therefore, it also bridges the gap between the material and the spiritual realms: “the competent reader enters the text and thus proceeds to mystical matters, advancing to a pure and loving contemplation of God.”
3 stages of understanding scripture
three stages to understanding the Scripture: ethics, physics and enoptike (metaphysics), (later called ‘purificatory, illuminative, and unitive’) and that the ordering of Solomon’s books: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, ‘Song of Songs’ is formulated to draw you through these stages.
ethics
Firstly, ethics is about ‘learning virtue’ whereby one must follow the laws outlined in the scripture and amend ones behaviour so that they live morally, which is outlined in Proverbs through his pithy statements about moral code.
physics
Secondly, physics is about ‘adopting the right attitude to natural things’, Origen’s ascetic philosophy means that for him this stage is about realising the importance of spiritual contemplation in contrast to the inconsequential nature of material pleasures and concerns, and this natural contemplation is a theme referenced in Ecclesiastes.
enoptike
= metaphysics
Finally, once one has freed the soul from the concerns of the body, one can progress into the final stage, ‘enoptike’: “he will follow on from that point to contemplate and to desire ‘the things that are not seen’, and ‘that are eternal’.” As our material longings have been deadened by grace, in the enoptike, one is immersed in contemplation and love of God: “a pure, spiritual longing for that which is invisible,” (the Platonic realm of forms, or the spiritual realm), whereby they may understand the transcendence of the spiritual realm and in doing so become united with God.
LOUTH
perfection of the song
Therefore, the song is perfect not just because of the message that it contains, but because of its function as the epithalamium of Christ to his Bridegroom the Church: “As the perfect Bride of the perfect Husband, then, she has received the words of perfect doctrine.” Origen also argues that the ‘Song of Songs’ is perfect because it contains no corporeal or carnal meaning and so is a ‘bodiless’ text, and therefore it’s meaning cannot be understood through a literal or sensible interpretation.
speaker of the song
herefore, although through reading the song, it appears to be the Bride who speaks, the Song is actually the epithalamium of Christ himself and therefore, is entirely constituted of His own words: “this song is the very one which was at last to be sung—in the guise of an epithalamium—by the Bridegroom himself, when about to take his Bride.” As a result, the song is interpreted by Origen, as the Word of the Bridegroom (Christ), and therefore through reading it, one may have access to teachings about the spiritual realm from which Christ came.
reading scripture
spiritual exercise
new perspective on the nature of and route to union with Christ.
relationship between christ and the church
it seems that the relationship between Christ and the church for Origen, is one where Christ slowly reveals himself through the prophets and the Law, until the Church is mature enough to receive himself in the form of the incarnation.
sharing of divine essence
Thus, he conceives of the human soul as sharing in the divine essence without it being completely subsumed in it. Louth parallels this by saying that Origen’s eschatology would involve the souls in perfect communion with the Son who is himself in perfect communion with the Father,
use of gender
trinity union
a union akin to the trinity, where the soul becomes one in being with Christ, yet they are not the same thing. Just as Jesus in John’s Gospel can say that ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30) without it meaning the Father and the son are the same person, so Origen can say that the soul becomes ‘one with the word of God’ without entering pantheism.
logikoi
creatures
The difference between union with the soul and union with the church
is simply a matter of spatial and temporal perspective rather than a different category of union.
