Origen of Alexanria – Forging Ploughshares

Universal Salvation as Fullness of Embodiment: From Paul, Irenaeus, Origen, Maximus to Lonergan

The fundamental lesson of the incarnation is that embodiment in general is the carrier of meaning, and that His embodiment is the fullness of meaning extended universally.[1] “Universal” has a double meaning, in that it is all-inclusive not simply of all people but of everything about them, most particularly their embodied condition. In an ordinary sense, the incarnation locates meaning, not in disembodied thoughts or souls but in the flesh, which is the human connection with the world. Given the truth and implications of the incarnation, there is no disincarnate language or disembodied word as the Word, the ground of language, is enfleshed. In the incarnation Christ stands in the place of this interconnectivity completing it and infinitely extending it. Incarnation or embodiment is the shared condition, which God took up in Christ to impart final and full meaning.

Incarnation Extends Meaning Through All Creation

Being found “in Christ” (ἐν Χριστῷ) as part of his body (the church), a partaker of his body in communion, baptized into his body, and imitating and following Christ, is the means of being incorporated into the meaning he imparts. Christ’s embodiment is extended universally (to all people and all things), throughout every phase of his life, death and resurrection. The Word made flesh is meaning incarnate to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, and is incarnate in the manner of his life. His teaching is manifest in the materiality of his words and his life enfleshed makes his life and teaching imitable. He embodies a new sort of human, a new human community, shared in its material and sensuous form. The incarnation is meaning shared (Logos given) as incarnation fills creation with divine life and meaning.

Resurrection Eternally Extends Incarnation

This meaning takes on its full universal scope in the resurrection, which is the inauguration of Christ’s embodiment extended to all people. The resurrection does not bring incarnation to a close but is the ongoing extension of the incarnation. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies” (Jn 11:25). Eternal life is through bodily resurrection enacted now. God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet 1:3). Christian salvation, now and future, is being joined to the death and resurrection of Christ: “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Ro 6:4). This hope of being found in Christ, through baptism, the church, the body of Christ, the eucharist, is the extension of Christ’s embodiment to all people for eternity.

The salvation of Christ begins then in the incarnation, continues through the resurrection, through which Christ’s embodiment of meaning fills creation (which is to say corporately or corporeally). There will be a final restoration [apocatastasis] of all things, as God promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21) . This restoration is cosmic as God’s purpose is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1:9–10). “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). The hypostatic union of deity and humanity in the incarnation, bodies forth or makes Christ’s incarnate body the carrier of ultimate meaning, eternally extended (in heaven and earth), which constitutes salvation.

Alienation From Embodiment is the Human Problem

If resurrection or being re-embodied, restored, recreated, describes salvation, then salvation’s opposite is to be disembodied, dead, or alienated from life in the body. To wish for disembodied bliss in the Platonic Forms, or in Hindu melding with the One, or in Buddhist denial of the body, is the opposite of Christian salvation, but so too any form of refusal of the body, any form of death wish or orientation to death. In neurosis and psychosis, the mortal body is refused, such that one pictures the body as secondary. It is not that “I am my body,” but “I have a body,” and contained within my body is the special treasure of my soul or my essential self. (My body may have a toothache, in Wittgenstein’s mockery of disembodied notions of language.) There is an alienated distance from the reality of the body, as if salvation would be deliverance from the body, rather than eternalization of the body in Christ. The opposite of baptism or being joined to the body, is alienation, schizophrenia, or sacrifice of the body as (if it is) an obstacle. Masochism and sadism are an attack on embodiment. The biological, the fleshly, the mortal, is often viewed with disgust and is refused.

As Paul describes (in Slavoj Žižek’s extended interpretation describing the lie of sin), it is as if there are two bodies at work. Rather than acceptance of the body in baptism, in communion, in the church, in which the mortal is integrated and accounted for, there is alienation and antagonism (as depicted in Romans 7). The body or flesh is not an obstacle per se, but due to sin and the refusal of the created and embodied condition, the body (which is the self) becomes an obstacle. Salvation is not the overcoming of the obstacle of the flesh or body but the overcoming of this deception.

Being Embodied in Christ is the Resolution

Christian salvation is a defeat of the refusal of the body, a refusal of being incarnate, a refusal of God’s good creation. It is necessarily universal, in that embodiment is by definition, connectedness, communal, linguistic, and a shared condition. Recreation or restoration occurs through participation in a breadth and depth of embodiment. Thus, apocatastasis is universal in multiple senses. In Romans 5 all that are in Adam and all that are connected to him share in the world of which he is a part: the Garden which he tills, the children he bears, the wife that completes him, the earth which feeds him, and the cosmic order which provides him dimension and context. In Paul’s description all are found in Adam, and this all extends to the cosmos, which is in travail. Adam is not simply one separate body, but a body of connections, the head of a race, and the keeper of God’s good earth, co-creator with God in naming its creatures, and organizing their place. Adamah is not just from the earth, but constitutive of its purpose and goal.

To save Adam is to save all that he includes. Thus, the second Adam is by definition necessarily universal in his assumption of all that Adam is, which includes his body, his race, and the human world he constitutes. Death spread to all through Adam, and this is reversed in Christ. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). Salvation is corporate, corporeal, and cosmic in scope, exposing the lie behind alienation, isolation, absolute individualism, and disembodiment. Our tendency in sin may be toward the disincarnate, but in Christ we become fully incarnate in embrace of embodied reality.

Embodiment in Christ as Salvation is the Church’s Teaching

When Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom” (I Cor. 15:50), he does not mean that flesh and blood will be gotten rid of in the Kingdom, but will be transformed by the Spirit. As Irenaeus puts it: “Unless the flesh were to be saved, the Word would not have taken upon Him flesh of the same substance as ours: from this it would follow that neither should we have been reconciled by Him.”[2] Christ has reconciled us in the flesh by his flesh, not by getting rid of the flesh but adding to it the life of the Spirit, by means of which the flesh bears spiritual meaning. The hypostatic union is a fusion of God with humanity, and all this entails.

Origen describes an integrating of soul and body in Christ in a spiritual union with God, which does not separate but which eternally binds the human body, soul and divine Spirit: “For the Word of God is thought to be more in one flesh with the soul than a man with his wife. And, moreover, to whom is it more fitting to be one spirit with God than to this soul, which has so joined itself to God through love that it may deservedly be said to be one spirit with him.”[3]

The culmination of this understanding is found in Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 13 August 662), who maintains God’s purpose is to unite the world to Himself through incarnation: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[4] The extension of ultimate meaning to the world through Christ is in and through shared embodiment, aimed to envelope all creation. In Bernard Lonergan’s rediscovery of this understanding, “the embodiment of Christ in the hypostatic union, with all that this embodiment entails in terms of Christ’s life and ministry and sufferings, makes Christ’s body a symbolic and incarnate carrier of meaning” extended to all creation.[5]

[1] See Bernard Lonergan, The World Mediated by Meaning, unpublished talk given at MIT, 1970. Bernard Lonergan Archive https://bernardlonergan.com/archive/23430dte070/ This talk is typical of the direction taken by Lonergan which inspired this blog.

[2] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, the title of book 5 chapter 14.

[3] Origen, On First Principles, Vol. 1, Edited and translated by John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 2.6.3.

[4] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7.22.

[5] Matthew Hale, Knowledge, Virtue, and Meaning: A Lonerganian Interpretation of Maximus the Confessor on the Embodiment of the Word in the Christian (Catholic University of America, Dissertation, 2022) 183. As Hale points out, this understanding is definitive of the thought of Bernard Lonergan.

Origen’s Completion of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

My claim in this blog, is that the particular failures of William Lane Craig’s version of the Kalam Cosmological argument inadvertently point to something like Origen’s picture of the relation between time and eternity as found in Christ. The fact that Origen is wrongly accused of believing in the transmigration of souls may be an indicator of the flatness of the reason by which he was judged and the difficulty of recognizing the orthodoxy he represents.

The standard cosmological arguments (which usually make no reference to Christ) depend upon arguments which confirm, rather than challenge, the standard order of reason. The revolutionary realization of the New Testament pertains to how creation reconceived (as ex nihilo) in light of the resurrection of Jesus, gives rise to an entirely new order of rationality. These two beliefs (creation ex nihilo and resurrection) are at the center of a new identity (resurrection faith) and worldview, which arise together historically. The cosmic order and its material make-up are reconceived in the full recognition and meaning of Jesus is Lord. His Lordship demands a reconceptualization of all things (including time and eternity), and yet the standard arguments making this case tend to betray resurrection rationale, though this failure itself can be enlightening. One of the premiere apologists in the Western world, Craig and his Kalam Cosmological argument, demonstrates the point.

Craig states the argument as a brief syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. This cause is God. Throughout Craig’s argument the contradiction of an actually existing infinite series is indicated (the universe cannot be infinite but must have a beginning). For example, it cannot be rationally conceived that there is an infinite library, because if half the books go missing, there are just as many books (which is a contradictory outcome). By the same token there cannot be an actually existing infinity before creation commenced, as the point of the start would never be reached.

But then Craig, absent any reference to Christ, moves this contradiction, unwittingly, into the mind of God. “His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result” are conceived as two distinct points. The distinction is between, “His causal power in order for the universe to be created” and “God’s timeless intention to create a temporal world.” Causal forces exist in time (this side of the nothing in creation ex nihilo) and exist over and against the eternal (prior to nothing) and so the thought (which is eternal), and “God’s undertaking to create” (which has a definitive beginning), must be differentiated.[1]

Wes Morrison points out that Craig maintains that “’prior’ to the beginning of the universe God was outside of time.” As he writes, “Craig makes it sound as if God ‘used to be’ outside of time, but ‘then’ he created the world and put himself into time. But this can’t be right if there is no time prior to the beginning of the universe.”[2] Craig posits a point prior to creation when God decides to act, but he is dependent upon the sequence of before and after, which do not pertain in eternity. Is God temporal or non-temporal, in time or out of time. Can God cause the universe in time prior to the time of the universe? Can something “begin to exist” without there being a time before it began to exist? The way in which time and eternity are interrelated in Craig’s argument, creates a picture of time and eternity as related consecutively or sequentially. There is a divide between the “before” the beginning and the beginning, as a point in the decision making of God. Morrison’s critique of Craig is as stilted as Craig’s argument but neither of them relates time and eternity, through Christ, in the manner of Origen.

In Origen’s picture, it is the Logos, or Jesus Christ alone, who bridges the gap between time and eternity. Jesus Christ is simultaneously created and divine and in him all things (time and eternity) hold together. The “logoi” or “eternal things” or Wisdom of God or the Body of the Logos, pervade all of creation. All things hold together through the constituent parts of the eternal wisdom which Origen calls “logoi.” As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes, “Since the logoi are the object of creation and make up the Body of Logos, the logoi are the means through which the Logos becomes History. They are incorporeal causes (hence, they stand outside of time and space), and yet it is by means of them that Time is realised; indeed, in a hypothetical absence of logoi, Time would be blind and meaningless, actually, it could not exist at all.”[3] The reality of time continually takes place in and through its beginning. Christ is the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the source of reality.

Christ is not the beginning in a temporal sense, but in the sense of John 1:1 – the source (άρχή) of reality. Christ is the continual resource, the continual beginning, or the wisdom of God applied to the world. In Him there is an intersection between time and eternity: “In this Wisdom, who ever existed with the Father, creation was always present in form and outline and there was never a time when the prefiguration of those things which were to be hereafter did not exist in Wisdom.”[4] The Logos is the ordering matrix of eternity imprinted upon time.

Origen distinguishes between wisdom and Logos in that the Logos is the communication of God enacted. “Speaking either of Wisdom or of Logos one actually refers to the same person, namely the son of God himself. The difference nevertheless is that Wisdom indicates the living incorporeal personal substance in herself, without any allusion to the world or to anything else, while the Logos is the Wisdom conceived in her communication to rational creatures.[5] In Tzamalikos explanation, “Origen’s notion about ‘conceptions’ of the son is exactly what allows him to portray his perception of the correlation of timeless God to the temporal world. This correlation is possible through the assertions of Origen’s about the Logos. For the Logos actually becomes a kind of span, through which this relation is established.”[6]

In Origen’s description:

…it is along those ways that the son of God is moving decorating, taking thought for, making benefaction, favouring, into this [sic. the world] which was made in wisdom. In saying therefore that the Logos was in άρχή it is not implied that the Logos is different from her (sc. the άρχή, that is the wisdom) in terms of substance, but only in terms of conception and relation, so that it is the same being who in named in the scripture and who, in as much as she is conceived in her relation to God himself, is named wisdom, and again, in as much as conceived in her relation to creatures she is called as Logos the creator.[7]

In Origen’s conception, “Creation flows perpetually from the Godhead in the same way that rays of light flow from the sun.”[8] There is an eternal aspect to all of creation, though Origen certainly confirms creation ex nihilo. The corporeal world has a beginning in time, but its true beginning or resource for existence is beyond time in eternity. Origen holds that time arose with creation and did not precede it, so that the picture of a six day creation is simply to accommodate human capacities. He states emphatically that “everything was made at once…. but for the sake of clarity a list of days and their events was given.”[9]

The Logos created the world and sustains it, and is constantly related to it, and yet the world is external to God. “Hence we should conclude that Origen conceives the Logos as being both ‘in’ wisdom, that is to say into timelessness, and into the world, that is ‘out’ of the Trinity.”[10] The Logos is the mediator between the timeless God and the temporal world. The Logos is with God but also in the world, though not identified with the world. (Though He is identified with each rational being created in his image.)

So the distinction which Craig would attribute to God’s intention and God’s acting on that intention can be directly attributed to Christ. There is no “before” creation any more than there is a before Christ. According to Tzamalikos, “There are no turning points nor moments nor succession nor temporal flux in timelessness. Subsequently, any question pertaining to timelessness and involving notions of this sort is groundless and misleading.” [11] Succession, change, before or after, may be necessary to human thought, but are not proper to timelessness or eternity. It is not that the world is eternal, or that Origen thought as much, but God acts directly in the world through his Son who is divine and human.

The person of Jesus Christ explains how there is a beginning coming out of a timeless corporeal nothing. Science, and big bang cosmology do not presume to describe the big bang (in scientific terms as science breaks down). There is no actual, knowable, “infinite density” (describing what existed before the big bang) anymore than there is an actually existing nihilo. In this Origen accords with the Einsteinian notion that time and space are singular. As Gerald Bostock states, “Origen . . . would be quite happy with the concept of a ‘Big Bang’. He would also, to judge from his writings, be happy with modern scientific theories about the nature of matter.”[12] As modern theories indicate, and Origen would concur, matter is not fully knowable: “By the intellect alone the substance which underlies bodies is discerned to be matter . . . when our mind by a purely intellectual act sets aside every quality and gazes at the mere point, if I may so call it, of the underlying substance in itself, then by this artificial mode of thought it will apparently behold matter.”[13] But this is a theoretical exercise, on the order of modern physics. Matter can take on every possible form but it is the nonmaterial which makes its imprint. God can transform matter “into whatever forms and species he desires, as the merits of things demand. The prophet points to this when he refers to God making and changing the form of all things (Amos 5:8).”[14] As Bostock notes, “It is through the interplay of subatomic randomness and of transcendent causes that all the potentialities of life are actualized and the wonders of creation emerge. Whether we are looking at the indeterminacy of the electron and the stability of crystal or the interaction between genetic mutations and the ordered structure of a biological organism we are seeing the polarities of chaos and cosmos.”[15]

Just as God imposed order on the chaos of the primal waters, Origen sees God as continually bringing order into the cosmos. The order of the universe is God’s transcendent cause continually at work. “A cause is not the physical antecedent of a physical process but an active force impinging on a passive subject and, because reality is ultimately spiritual, such a force must be of a spiritual character. It is given expression in Origen’s concept of transcendent λόγοι or intelligible forms, which determine both the nature and the meaning of created things.”[16] As Origen writes: “the works of divine providence and the plan of this universe are as it were rays of God’s nature. . . . our mind understands the parent of the universe from the beauty of his works and the attractiveness of his creatures.”[17]

There is not a divide between time and eternity, in the manner conceived by Craig, but creation relies upon eternity in Christ. In turn, the world is comprehensible (Einstein called the world’s being comprehensible the most incomprehensible thing about it). It is comprehensible through the Logos bridging the creation and Creator in all who are made in His image. In Origen’s description, “The life added to us, when the logos in us is brought to fulfilment through our participation in the primary Logos, . . . becomes the light of knowledge . . . with some a potential light and with others an actual light.”[18] The light of Christ is available potentially to all, as this is the eternal image in whom all are made, and He is the eternal rationale undergirding the world.

[1] Wes Morrison “Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder,” forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy, 151. accessed at https://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.pdf

[2]Ibid.

[3] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 248.

[4] Origen, De Principiis 1,4,4. Cited in Gerald Bostock, “Origen’s Doctrine of Creation” THE EXPOSITORY TIMES February 2007. Vol.118, No.5, 2.

[5] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Concept of Time in Origen (University of Glasgow, PhD Thesis, 1986) 142.

[6] Time in Origen, 143.

[7] Origen, Commentary on John John, 1. Cited in Time in Origen, 143-144.

[8] Bostock, 5.

[9] Origen, FrGn 2,2. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[10] The Concept of Time, 144.

[11] The Concept of Time in Origen, 142.

[12] Bostock, 3.

[13] Origen, De Principiis 4,4,7. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[14] Origen, De Principiis 3,6,7. Cited in Bostock, 4.

[15] Bostock, 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Origen, De Principiis 1,1,6. Cited in Bostock, 7.

[18] Origen, CIo 2,24. Cited in Bostock, 7.