Note (return) — Chapter VI

Among the theologians of ecclesiastical antiquity Origen was the most important and influential alongside of Augustine. He proved the father of ecclesiastical science in the widest sense of the word, and at the same time became the founder of that theology which reached its complete development in the fourth and fifth centuries, and which in the sixth definitely denied its author, without, however, losing the form he had impressed on it. Origen created the ecclesiastical dogmatic and made the sources of the Jewish and Christian religion the foundation of that science. The Apologists, in their day, had found everything clear in Christianity; the antignostic Fathers had confused the Church's faith and the science that treats of it. Origen recognised the problem and the problems, and elevated the pursuit of Christian theology to the rank of an independent task by freeing it from its polemical aim. He could not have become what he did, if two generations had not preceded him in paving the way to form a mental conception of Christianity and give it a philosophical foundation. Like all epoch-making personalities, he was also favoured by the conditions in which he lived, though he had to endure violent attacks. Born of a Christian family which was faithfully attached to the Church, he lived at a time when the Christian communities enjoyed almost uninterrupted peace and were being naturalised in the world; he was a member of a Christian Church where the right of scientific study was already recognised and where this had attained a fixed position in an organised school.680 He proclaimed the reconciliation of science with the Christian faith and the compatibility of the highest culture with the Gospel within the bosom of the Church, thus contributing more than any other to convert the ancient world to Christianity. But he made no compromises from shrewd calculation: it was his inmost and holiest conviction that the sacred documents of Christianity contained all the ideals of antiquity, and that the speculative conception of ecclesiastical Christianity was the only true and right one. His character was pure, his life blameless; in his work he was not only unwearied, but also unselfish. There have been few Fathers of the Church whose life-story leaves such an impression of purity behind it as that of Origen. The atmosphere which he breathed as a Christian and as a philosopher was dangerous; but his mind remained sound, and even his feeling for truth scarcely ever forsook him.681 To us his theory of the world, surveyed in its details, presents various changing hues, like that of Philo, and at the present day we can scarcely any longer understand how he was able to unite the different materials; but, considering the solidity of his character and the confidence of his decisions, we cannot doubt that he himself felt the agreement of all essential parts of his system. No doubt he spoke in one way to the perfect and in another to the mass of Christian people. The narrow-minded or the immature will at all times necessarily consider such proceedings hypocrisy, but the outcome of his religious and scientific conception of the world required the twofold language. Orthodox theology of all creeds has never yet advanced beyond the circle first mapped out by his mind. She has suspected and corrected her founder, she has thought she could lop off his heterodox opinions as if they were accidental excrescences, she has incorporated with the simple faith itself the measure of speculation she was obliged to admit, and continued to give the rule of faith a more philosophic form, fragment by fragment, in order that she might thus be able to remove the gap between Faith and Gnosis and to banish free theology through the formula of ecclesiastical dogma. But it may reasonably be questioned whether all this is progress, and it is well worth investigating whether the gap between half theological, clerical Christianity and a lay Christianity held in tutelage is more endurable than that between Gnosis and Pistis, which Origen preserved and bridged over.