Below is a precis of some salient points on Origen's theology from
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The author is Mark J Edwards, whom I have had the (dubious) pleasure of reading and observing in action. I say dubious because he is a formidable intellect, doesn't take prisoners and expects a great deal from his audience! Sorry if they're a bit complex, Mr Edwards is like that ...
Origen was the first Christian to speak of three
hypostases in the Trinity and to use the term
homoousios (though only by analogy) of the relation between the second of these
hypostases and the first.
For Origen, God cannot be known to us in His
ousia, His essence or being, but only by his
dunamis, or power, by which he acts upon other beings (On Prayer 25.3). This
dunamis is mediated by the Second Person of the Trinity, and is the source of every
dunamis that is exercised by creatures, even by those who have fallen into apostasy and rebellion (CommJohn 1.39.291).
(Aside: At the time of the schism between East and West, Eastern Orthodox theologians generally regard a real distinction between
ousia and
energeia. Western theologians tended to reject the essence–energies distinction as real in the case of God, regarding it as a potentially heretical introduction of an unacceptable division in the Trinity, suggestive of polytheism)
The Second Person of the Trinity is spoken of as "another god" in his Dialogue with Heraclides (2) and a "second god" on two occasions in his work Against Celsus (5.39, 5.61). It does not occur in works addressed to Christians, perhaps avoided because it savoured of polytheism.
It is inconceivable that the Father could ever have lacked wisdom, and equally inconceivable to Origen that this wisdom could ever have taken a different form from the one that it now possesses as the Second Person or
hypostasis of the Trinity (Princ. 1.2.2). He is the first theologian to state unequivocally that the “three hypostases” which constitute the Trinity are eternal not only in nature, but in their hypostatic character;
there was never a time when wisdom was the latent thought of the Father and had not yet come forth as speech. (My emphasis – here Origen refutes Arius absolutely.)
Since the Word created the world, it was argued, there would have been no reason for it to exist before the creation as a distinct
hypostasis. If He (the Second Person) existed at all, it was as the
logos endiathetos, the word within, which had not yet emerged from the mind as
logos prophorikos, or verbal utterance. In this latent phase Logos could be identified with the world of forms, which supplies the Platonic demiurge with his pattern for the creation. Clement of Alexandria accepted this equation, albeit perhaps without denying the hypostatic eternity of the Logos. Origen, however, resists the interpretation of Logos as “speech” because there are some who take this to imply that the Second Person is merely a function or
epiphenomenon of the First (CommJohn 1.24.151).
Logos, in his view, is one of the numerous designations (
epinoiai) which are conferred on the Second Person to define His relation, not to the Father (as “Son” and “Wisdom” do) but to his creatures (CommJohn 2.9.66): He is Logos as the paradigm and parent of all the
logikai, or rational beings, who exercise reason only by participation in Him.
He cannot be identified with the world of forms, or Platonic ideas, because to Origen these ideas are imaginary entities which the Greeks absurdly suppose to be independent of the Creator (Princ. 2.3.6). Origen holds that all genera, all species and even the archetypes of all particular things are eternally present in the mind of God (Princ. 1.4.5).
From Genesis 1.1 we learn that God created the world in the beginning, and from John 1.1 that the Logos was with him in the beginning; but as we are also told that God created all things in wisdom, Origen takes this beginning to be not a temporal origin but the eternal
desideratum of existence who is also the Second Person of the Trinity (CommJohn 1.39.289).
If this temporal world is the only one, an infinite cause has exhausted itself in a finite effect. Origen interpreted Solomon’s dictum, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1.10) to mean that worlds have existed before the present one (Princ. 3.1.6). This suggests an infinite succession of worlds before and after the present one, but even Origen’s enemies do not say that he went so far.
Origen posits a
noetic realm, created but eternal, populated by
logika, or rational entities, under the hegemony of the
logos, and preceding ours in the ontological hierarchy rather than in the temporal continuum (Princ. 2.9.4). Evidence for this he found in the creation of a heaven and earth at Genesis 1.1 before the creation of the visible firmament (Genesis Homilies 1.5). This exegesis is not that of any Greek school, but of a Christian who has set himself a conundrum by his fidelity to Moses. It is a striking observation that the forms of particular things which coexist in the mind of God with the genera and species are not attested in any pagan Platonist before Plotinus, who happened to be Origen's younger contemporary and (as most believe) a fellow-pupil of Ammonius Saccas (cf. Plotinus, Enneads 5.7).
From the above, it would seem unlikely that Origen would have signed the Nicene Creed of 325, in which the Son is declared to be from the
ousia of the Father, and therefore
homoousios (of one essence, substance or nature) with Him (cf. CommJohn 20.18.157). A community of nature between the two is asserted at CommJohn 2.10.76); and in his Commentary on Hebrews, he deduces from Wisdom 7.26, where Wisdom is styled an
aporroia or emanation of the Father, that the relation between the two persons of the Trinity is analogous to that which holds between an ointment and the exhalation which is
homoousios with it (Pamphilus, Apology 99–104).
Although the Son is not “from the
ousia” of the Father, He is said in the Latin translation of Origen’s Commentary on Hebrews to be
ex substantia patris, from the
hypostasis of the Father. That
hypostasis, not
ousia, was the original noun in Greek can be deduced from the text of Hebrews 1.3, where the Son is described as an impression of His [the Father’s]
hypostasis. Here
hypostasis appears to signify the reality disclosed by a phenomenon; the formula
ex substantia patris was already axiomatic for Origen’s contemporary Tertullian (Against Praxeas 7.9). In Latin of this period
substantia was used indifferently to represent both
hypostasis and
ousia; these Greek terms are not explicitly distinguished in Origen’s writings, though he refrains from attributing either one
ousia or three to the Godhead. Some difference in concreteness is implied by his strictures on those who fail to qualify the
ousia of the Son and thus deny him a
hypostasis altogether (CommJoh 1.24.152): it seems, then that the
hypostasis is a specific determination of the more generic
ousia. Origen stipulates in his treatise On Prayer (15.1) that the Son should not receive the prayer of adoration which is offered to the Father because He differs from the Father in
ousia and in substrate (
hupokeimenon); the latter word is best understood with reference to the body that He assumed in the incarnation, and we cannot therefore be sure whether the
ousia of which Origen speaks is that of the exalted Christ in His eternal or His human character. It is generally true that he takes fewer pains than later Christian authors to winnow what is said of the Son as Second Person of the Trinity from what is said of him as Jesus of Nazareth.
It may be that this restriction of the Son’s office implies a Greek rather than a biblical understanding of the term
logos, but Greek thought knows of no supernal being who acts in the realm assigned by Origen to the Spirit. This Trinitarian hierarchy has been compared with that of the
noetic principles being, life and mind in the system of Proclus, for whom being encompasses all that exists, life the more limited sphere of living creatures and mind the still more limited sphere of the rational. The correspondence, however, is far from exact, and, as Proclus wrote two centuries after Origen and under later influences, more compelling arguments will be required before we assign to a Platonic source the doctrine that Origen draws so effortlessly from the scriptures. No evidence has been produced to show that the Spirit functions in Origen as the soul of the world; he surmises on one occasion that the Logos is the soul of God (Princ. 2.8.5), but only because he needs to account for an anthropomorphic metaphor at Psalm 84.6.
I learn here.
