lost” and also in terms of a cooling process, drawing on key Platonic ideas that associate divinity with fire. In the cosmos of the Timaeus and Heraclitus, for instance, divinity was associated with the element of fire. And as we saw in the previous chapter, cold and moisture are associated with grosser forms of matter, body, and generation.36 In his discussion of this cooling process, Origen identifies God as fire, angels as flames, and saints as “fervent in spirit,” clearly drawing the analogy between divine ardor and elemental thinking.37 According to Origen, the degree to which each created intelligence had cooled determined its subsequent place in the cosmos as a rational soul. Intelligences then acquired some kind of body reflecting the degree to which they had given in to “sloth and weariness,” and they subsequently became subject to both feeling and motion.38 One of Justinian’s anathemas included in the Second Council of Constantinople’s (553) condemnation of Origen summarizes these positions and highlights the taxonomic implications of Origen’s suppositions again in elemental terms. According to this statement, Origen supposedly held the view that as souls cooled to varying degrees, “they took bodies, either fine in substance or grosser, and became possessed of a name,” and this accounts for the difference in both name and embodiment that one finds among “the cherubim,” “the rulers and authorities, the lordships, thrones, angels and all the other heavenly orders.”39 These heavenly orders also include, as they do for so many of Origen’s contemporaries, the stars and planets. Unsurprisingly, he does not refer to them as gods, as Porphyry and Iamblichus will, but they are living, ensouled beings. Origen raises a series of what he refers to as “daring” questions about these creatures. He asks “whether their souls came into existence along with their bodies … and further whether we are to understand that after the consummation of this age their souls will be released from their bodies” and whether “they cease from the work of giving light to the world.”40 In the end, Origen chooses to include these beings in the larger cosmological story he tells by arguing that their preexistent souls entered their bodies at a later time, and leaves it up to his reader to conclude that they will also dispense with these bodies after the “consummation of this age.”41 In other words, the stars and planets are akin to species of angels in certain important respects.
Origen extends the logic that informed his systematic ordering of different kinds of spiritual beings to specific differences between the characters and circumstances of individual humans. He discusses how humans as both larger groups, such as Greeks and “barbarians” (ethnoi), and as individuals partake of very different fates, many living in diminished and difficult circumstances, some “from the very moment of their birth” being in a “humble position, brought up in subjection and slavery,” while others “are brought up with more freedom and under rational influences.”42 Origen once again bases these distinctions on the degree to which, as created intelligences, the ardor of these individual beings for the contemplation of their Creator was cooled prior to embodiment.43 He uses as his case study the tension between Jacob and Esau over their birthright, asking how God’s justice is preserved in the case where “the elder should serve the younger” and God should say, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Romans 9:11–13).44 According to Origen, Jacob’s supplanting of Esau in the womb was only just, “provided we believe that by his merits in some previous life Jacob had deserved to be loved by God to such an extent as to be worthy of being preferred to his brother.”45 And this situation mirrors the more general order of spirits prevailing in the cosmos: “so also it is in regard to the heavenly creatures, provided we note that their diversity is not the original condition of their creation.”46
As mentioned earlier, Origen constructed his framework in response to his interpretation of the cosmologies of individuals such as Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides. Origen rejected the implications of the view that differences in character and circumstance could be accounted for in terms of multiple creative agents and distinct orders of human souls, and he felt compelled to provide an alternate theodicy. In contrast to the explanation that posited multiple parallel cosmoi, Origen provided a single narrative that encompassed all spiritual beings—various classes of angels, humans, and evil daemons—and in important respects, he elided the differences between them by positing a single primordial ontological equality. Thus humans, angels, and evil daemons all share in the same cosmogenesis. And the difference between them is one of degree and not ontology in some important sense. Furthermore, this framework not only encompassed their original state and disintegration into diversity; it also had important soteriological implications.
Although scholars continue to debate whether Origen definitively held the view that all souls, including those of evil daemons, would eventually be restored to their original, created condition, a state of union with and contemplation of God, there is strong evidence that Origen entertained this idea seriously at a number of junctures, On First Principles being the main place where he alludes to this notion.47 In Book 3, Chapter 6, for instance, Origen interprets the destruction of the “last enemy,” “not in the sense of ceasing to exist (non ut non sit), but of being no longer an enemy and no longer death (sed ut inimicus et mors non sit),” and that the “hostile purpose and will which proceeded not from God but from itself will come to an end.”48 Butterworth notes that at this juncture in the text, Rufinus appears to have omitted some of Origen’s statements about “the final unity of all spiritual beings,” and directs the reader to the last four anathemas of the Second Council of Constantinople to fill in the lacunae.49 According to these anathemas, Origen was supposed to have taught that the devil and the spiritual hosts of wickedness “were as unchangeably united to the Word of God as the Mind itself” (i.e., Christ).50 In other words, despite the tragic choices of the primordial intelligences, the connection between the fallen souls and their Creator was never permanently severed.51 Furthermore, the anathemas accuse Origen of holding the view that “all rational creatures will form one unity” once again when these intelligences abandon their bodies and their names, ostensibly as the result of a purificatory process, making the beginning the same as the end, and the end “the measure of the beginning,” such that “the life of spirits will be the same as it formerly was.”52
This process of restoration is, in fact, how Origen conceives of the afterlife, the resurrection and judgment in On First Principles. In Book 2, Chapter 10, Origen outlines a universal path of salvation for all souls. He does this by turning to the question of the “contents of the Church’s teaching to the effect that at the time of judgment ‘eternal fire’ and ‘outer darkness’ and a ‘prison’ and a ‘furnace’ and other similar things have been prepared for sinners.”53 Using Isaiah 50:11 as the basis for explaining the idea of eternal fire, Origen interprets this fire as purgative and restorative, part of a purifying process commensurate in intensity and duration with both the original fall and subsequent actions of each rational soul. It is interesting that the element Origen associates with divinity is also part of the curative process whereby souls are purified. The verse itself reads, “walk in the light of your own fire, and in the flame which you have kindled for yourselves.” Origen argues that these words mean “that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into a fire which has been previously kindled by someone else or which existed before him.”54 This interpretation, of course, helps to mitigate the problem of theodicy in that it absolves God of any responsibility for tormenting souls. For a mere infliction of pain without remedial effect would be unworthy of God.55 According to Origen, the soul’s sin, “the history of its evil deeds, of every foul and disgraceful act and all unholy conduct,” will be exposed to each soul, and the conscience, “harassed and pricked by its own stings,” will become “an accuser and witness against itself.”56 Origen explains to his reader the way in which these torments already accompany evil deeds almost like shadows: “The soul is burnt up with the flames of love, or tormented by the fires of jealousy or envy, or tossed about with furious anger, or consumed with intense sadness.”57 In other words, the motions and feelings that accompany such deeds already prefigure and indicate the sorts of punishments that will work to purge the soul of the effects of these deeds after death. Their pain signals their harmfulness.