Note (return) — Chapter VI

Not only, however, did Origen employ the Greek ethic in its varied types, but the Greek cosmological speculation also formed the complicated substructure of his religious system of morals. The Gnosis is formally a philosophy of revelation, that is a Scripture theology,700 and materially a cosmological speculation. On the basis of a detailed theory of inspiration, which itself, moreover, originates with the philosophers, the Holy Scriptures are so treated that all facts appear as the vehicles of ideas and only attain their highest value in this aspect. Systematic theology, in undertaking its task, always starts, as Clement and Origen also did, with the conscious or unconscious thought of emancipating itself from the outward revelation and community of cultus that are the characteristic marks of positive religion. The place of these is taken by the results of speculative cosmology, which, though themselves practically conditioned, do not seem to be of this character. This also applies to Origen's Christian Gnosis or scientific dogmatic, which is simply the metaphysics of the age. However, as he was the equal of the foremost minds of his time, this dogmatic was no schoolboy imitation on his part, but was to some extent independently developed and was worked out both in opposition to pantheistic Stoicism and to theoretical dualism. That we are not mistaken in this opinion is shown by a document ranking among the most valuable things preserved to us from the third century; we mean the judgment passed on Origen by Porphyry in Euseb., H. E. VI. 19. Every sentence is instructive,701 but the culminating point is the judgment contained in § 7: κατα μεν τον Βιον Χριστιανως ζων και παρανομως, κατα δε τας περι των πραγματων και του θεου δοξας 'Ελληνιζων και τα 'Ελληνων τοις οθνειοις 'υποβαλλομενος μυθοις. ("His outward life was that of a Christian and opposed to the law, but in regard to his views of things and of the Deity, he thought like the Greeks, inasmuch as he introduced their ideas into the myths of other peoples.") We can everywhere verify this observation from Origen's works and particularly from the books written against Celsus, where he is continually obliged to mask his essential agreement in principles and method with the enemy of the Christians.702 The Gnosis is in fact the Hellenic one and results in that wonderful picture of the world which, though apparently a drama, is in reality immovable, and only assumes such a complicated form here from its relation to the Holy Scriptures and the history of Christ.703 The Gnosis neutralises everything connected with empiric history; and if this does not everywhere hold good with regard to the actual occurrence of facts, it is at least invariably the case in respect to their significance. The clearest proof of this is (1) that Origen raised the thought of the unchangeability of God to be the norm of his system and (2) that he denied the historical, incarnate Logos any significance for "Gnostics." To these Christ merely appears as the Logos who has been from eternity with the Father and has always acted from the beginning. He alone is the object of the knowledge of the wise man, who merely requires a perfect or, in other words, a divine teacher.704 The Gospel too only teaches the "shadow of the secrets of Christ;" but the eternal Gospel, which is also the pneumatic one, "clearly places before men's minds all things concerning the Son of God himself, both the mysteries shown by his words, and the things of which his acts were the riddles" (σαφως παριστησι τοις νοουσι τα παντα ενωπιον περι αυτου του 'υιου του Θεου, και τα παρισταμενα μυστηρια 'υπο των λογων αυτου, τα τε πραγματα, ων αινιγματα ησαν 'αι πραξεις αυτου).705 No doubt the true theology based on revelation makes pantheism appear overthrown as well as dualism, and here the influence of the two Testaments cannot be mistaken; but a subtle form of the latter recurs in Origen's system, whilst the manner in which he rejected both made the Greek philosophy of the age feel that there was something akin to it here. In the final utterances of religious metaphysics ecclesiastical Christianity, with the exception of a few compromises, is thrown off as a husk. The objects of religious knowledge have no history or rather, and this is a genuinely Gnostic and Neoplatonic idea, they have only a supramundane one.