Note (return) — Chapter VI

The significance which this Christological attempt possessed for its time consists first in its complexity, secondly in the energetic endeavour to give an adequate conception of Christ's humanity, that is, of the moral freedom pertaining to him as a creature. This effort was indeed obliged to content itself with a meagre result: but we are only justified in measuring Origen's Christology by that of the Valentinians and Basilidians, that is, by the scientific one that had preceded it. The most important advance lies in the fact that Origen set forth a scientific Christology in which he was able to find so much scope for the humanity of Christ. Whilst within the framework of the scientific Christologies this humanity had hitherto been conceived as something indifferent or merely apparent, Origen made the first attempt to incorporate it with the various speculations without prejudice to the Logos, God in nature and person. No Greek philosopher probably heeded what Irenæus set forth respecting Christ as the second Adam, the recapitulatur generis humani; whereas Origen's speculation could not be overlooked. In this case the Gnosis really adopted the idea of the incarnation, and at the same time tried to demonstrate the conception of the God-man from the notions of unity of will and love. In the treatise against Celsus, moreover, Origen went the reverse way to work and undertook to show, and this not merely by help of the proof from prophecy, that the predicate deity applied to the historical Christ.796 But Origen's conception of Christ's person as a model (for the Gnostic) and his repudiation of all magical theories of redemption ultimately explain why he did not, like Tertullian, set forth a doctrine of two natures, but sought to show that in Christ's case a human subject with his will and feelings became completely merged in the Deity. No doubt he can say that the union of the divine and human natures had its beginning in Christ, but here he virtually means that this beginning is continued in the sense of souls imitating the example of Christ. What is called the real redemption supposed to be given in him is certainly mediated in the Psychic through his work, but the person of Christ which cannot be known to any but the perfect man is by no means identified with that real redemption, but appears as a free moral personality, inwardly blended with the Deity, a personality which cannot mechanically transfer the content of its essence, though it can indeed exercise the strongest impression on mind and heart. To Origen the highest value of Christ's person lies in the fact that the Deity has here condescended to reveal to us the whole fulness of his essence, in the person of a man, as well as in the fact that a man is given to us who shows that the human spirit is capable of becoming entirely God's. At bottom there is nothing obscure and mystical here; the whole process takes place in the will and in the feelings through knowledge.797