Note (return) — Chapter VI

The idea of createdness was already more closely associated with the Holy Ghost than with the Logos. He is in a still clearer fashion than the Son himself the transition to the series of ideas and spirits that having been created by the Son, are in truth the unfolding of his fulness. They form the next stage after the Holy Spirit. In assuming the existence of such beings as were required by his philosophical system, Origen appealed to the Biblical doctrine of angels, which he says is expressly acknowledged in the Church.755 With Clement even the association of the Son and Holy Ghost with the great angelic spirits is as yet not altogether avoided, at least in his expressions.756 Origen was more cautious in this respect.757 The world of spirits appears to him as a series of well-arranged, graded energies, as the representative of created reason. Its characteristic is growth, that is, progress (προκοπη).758 Growth is conditioned by freedom: "omnis creatura rationabilis laudis et culpæ capax: laudis, si secundum rationem, quam in se habet, ad meliora proficiat, culpæ, si rationem recti declinet"759 ("every rational creature is capable of meriting praise or blame—praise, if it advance to better things according to the reason it possesses in itself, blame, if it avoid the right course"). As unchangeableness and permanence are characteristic of the Deity, so freedom is the mark of the created spirit.760 In this thesis Origen goes beyond the assumption of the heretical Gnostics just as much as he does in his other proposition that the creaturely spirit is in no sense a portion of the divine (because it is changeable761); but in reality freedom, as he understands it, is only the capacity of created spirits to determine their own destiny for a time. In the end, however, they must turn to that which is good, because everything spiritual is indestructible. Sub specie æternitatis, then, the mere communication of the divine element to the created spirit762 is not a mere communication, and freedom is no freedom; but the absolute necessity of the created spirit's developing itself merely appears as freedom. Yet Origen himself did not draw this conclusion, but rather based everything on his conception that the freedom of naturæ rationabiles consisted in the possibilitas utriusque, and sought to understand the cosmos, as it is, from this freedom. To the naturæ rationabiles, which have different species and ordines, human souls also belong. The whole of them were created from all eternity; for God would not be almighty unless he had always produced everything763; in virtue of their origin they are equal, for their original community with the Logos permits of no diversity764; but, on the other hand, they have received different tasks and their development is consequently different. In so far as they are spirits subject to change, they are burdened with a kind of bodily nature,765 for it is only the Deity that is without a body. The element of materiality is a necessary result of their finite nature, that is, of their being created; and this applies both to angels and human souls.766 Now Origen did not speculate at all as to how the spirit world might have developed in ideal fashion, a fact which it is exceedingly important to recognise; he knows nothing at all about an ideal development for all, and does not even view it as a possibility. The truth rather is that as soon as he mentions the naturæ rationabiles, he immediately proceeds to speak of their fall, their growth, and their diversities. He merely contemplates them in the given circumstances in which they are placed (see the exposition in περι αρχων II. 9. 2).