Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (26 page)

Any survey of Clement's teaching will reveal a great gulf between his concerns and those of the gnosticism we have described. He does speak as gnostics do of a special tradition handed down to his own teachers, but the tradition comes from the Apostles 'Peter and James, John and Paul', a collective, not some single gnostic authority. It is also firmly based on all scripture, Old and New Testaments.
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He emphasizes the Christian doctrine of creation and the positive value of our life on earth, presenting earthly existence as a journey towards knowledge of God, the result of hard work and moral progress. Salvation did not come through some random external gift, as many gnostics might assert; knowledge of God was found both in scripture and in such achievements of the human intellect as the writings of Aristotle and Plato: 'Philosophy is a preparation, making ready the way for him who is being perfected by Christ.'
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Clement was so concerned to stress the Christian progress in holiness that he saw each individual's journey as continuing after physical death: 'after he has reached the final ascent in the flesh, he still continues to advance'.
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He spoke of these further advances in afterlife in terms of the cosmic hierarchies which would have been familiar to gnostics, but he also spoke of this progress as a fiery purging - not the fires of Hell, but (borrowing a concept from Stoicism) a fire of wisdom.
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An opportunity for further purging was a comforting doctrine for those who feared a sudden death which might leave them helpless before God without adequate preparation; the concept bore rich fruit in Christian thought. In the course of centuries it flowered into the complex family of ideas about the afterlife which the medieval Western Church called Purgatory (see pp. 555-8).

Since Clement made so central the idea of moral progress, he wrote much about the way in which the Christian life should be lived on a day-to-day basis; he was one of the earliest Christian writers on what would now be called moral theology. He discussed worldly wealth, a very necessary concern in a Church where there were more and more wealthy people, but one rendered slightly problematic by Jesus having told a rich man to go and sell all he had before becoming a follower. Clement pointed out that 'He who has cast away his worldly abundance can still be rich in passions even though his substance is gone . . . A man must say goodbye, then, to the injurious things he has, not to those that can actually contribute to his advantage if he knows the right use of them.'
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In defending a Christian's responsible stewardship of riches, he provided an extended framework for Christian views of money and possessions for centuries to come. Like any Stoic teacher, but framing his discussion in biblical terms as well as in commonplaces familiar to well-educated Alexandrians, he laid down principles of moderation in eating and drinking for those who had enough money to leave moderation behind. He was also concerned to affirm the value of human sexuality, which, like gnostics, many mainstream writers viewed as too contemptible, fallen and dangerous to merit their consideration. However, he did so with a very particular agenda, which is indebted to the more-or-less scientific notions of the non-Christian Aristotle more than it is to the Tanakh or to Paul. Emphatically Clement did not base justifications for marriage on romantic love, but on the necessity for procreating children: he was capable of saying 'to have sex for any other purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature'. One might call this the Alexandrian rule, and it still lies behind many of the assumptions of official moral theology in the Roman Catholic Church.
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Origen succeeded Clement in the Christian school of Alexandria: a boy from a devout Christian household, thrust into a leading role while still in his late teens by that major imperial persecution in 202 which drove Clement to Cappadocia. From then on, his life was a constant intellectual exercise: research, presenting his faith to inquisitive non-Christians, and acting as a one-man academic task force in various theological rows throughout the eastern Mediterranean. We know a good deal about him thanks to a biography by his great admirer the fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea. Origen's fiery nature led him to near-destruction in 202, as he was saved for his later work in the Church only by his mother's hard-headed decision to hide all his clothes when he wished to run out into the street and proclaim himself a Christian. Embarrassment won out over heroism.
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Later his combativeness made Origen many enemies, not least his bishop, Demetrius, who was doing his best to pull together the Church in Egypt, laying the foundations of a formidable ecclesiastical machine which later made the Bishopric of Alexandria one of the major powers in the Church. It was not surprising that Demetrius felt himself sorely tried by this independent-minded thinker who followed Clement's line that what really mattered in the Christian life was the pursuit of knowledge. Demetrius and Origen clashed over what the Bishop rightly saw as successive acts of insubordination while Origen was visiting admirers in the Palestinian Church. First they asked Origen to preach, though he was only a layman, and on a later occasion they ineptly tried to get round this problem by securing his ordination as presbyter without reference back to Alexandria. This second incident led to a complete breach with Demetrius, and Origen retired to Caesarea in Palestine to continue his scholarly work, handsomely funded by a wealthy admirer; Eusebius's account of these unfortunate events betrays a certain embarrassment.
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Origen's thirst for martyrdom came close to formal fulfilment when he died as a result of brutal maltreatment in one of the mid-third-century persecutions.

Origen's importance was twofold as biblical scholar and speculative theologian, in which roles he exhibited interestingly different talents. As a biblical scholar, he had no previous Christian rival. He set standards and directions for the giant task which was already occupying the Church, of redirecting the Tanakh to illuminating the significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plan: creating the text of the Bible as Christians now know it. His biblical commentaries became foundational for later understanding of the Christian sacred texts.
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Origen's biblical work showed a concern for exactness and faithfulness to received texts, something very necessary in an age when the text was still uncertain in many details; on that was based the exuberant adventure of the imagination which was his theology. As we will see, his theological work contains statements of extraordinary boldness, though often presented simply as theoretical suggestions for solving a particular problem. So radical were some of these that a whole group of his ideas were labelled 'Origenism' and condemned at a council at Alexandria a century and a half after his death, in 400. Origen's thought and speculations have nevertheless gone on quietly fermenting in Christian imaginations ever since his time, providing a counterpoint to those who have seen him as a bad influence on Christianity. We will discover his admirers more than once setting their thinking over against the formidable Augustine of Hippo (see pp. 315-16 and 601-2).

Much of Origen's work consequently remains in fragments, though censorship cannot account for the loss of most of his unchallengeably admirable work, the crown of his biblical labours, the
Hexapla.
This was a sixfold transcription of the Tanakh in six different columns side by side, apparently beginning with the Hebrew text and a transliteration of it into Greek alongside four variant Greek translations, including the Septuagint. This columnar arrangement, which had precedents in official documents, but is likely never to have been used before in a book, was partly designed for use in the still-continuing theological debates with Judaism over the meaning of the sacred text of the Tanakh. There are various explanations of why there might have been different Greek versions of the Tanakh - the most obvious being that there simply were - but by the second century one possibility is that Jews had ceased to trust their Septuagint Greek version of scripture precisely because Christians habitually used it. We have noted one instance of this in relation to the virginity of Mary (see p. 81), a good illustration of why Jews might turn to more-literal translations. It is a mark of how far Christianity and Judaism had now drifted apart that Origen, the greatest of third-century Christian biblical scholars, was hesitant in his grasp of Hebrew. But still the result was staggering: an unprecedented tool of reference, occupying perhaps forty manuscript books when it was complete - one of Christianity's first works of scholarship and a remarkably innovative project in anyone's terms. The fragments gathered by an unusually accomplished Victorian editor fill two printed volumes, and more have turned up since in archaeological digs.
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How should a firmly established Christian biblical text now be used? Origen turned his attention to biblical commentaries, the first major collection to survive in Christian history. He affected to despise Greek thought, unlike his master Clement, but in reality he was just as voracious a consumer of its heritage; he used Aristotelian method in his arguments and he brooded on the legacy of discussion of divine truths to be found in Plato and the Stoics.
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That meant that when he read the Bible, he shared Greek or Hellenistic Jewish scepticism that some parts of it bore much significant literal meaning. Looking at the Genesis account of creation, 'who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?' Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly. He would try to tell them that such things were true, because all parts of the scriptures were divinely inspired truth, but they should not be read as if they were historical events, like the rise and fall of Persian dynasties. He insisted that this rule should even be applied within the text of the Gospels.
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In viewing the biblical text in this way Origen followed Clement in relishing the use of an 'allegorical' method of understanding the meaning of literary texts, which by then had a long history in Greek scholarship. This is how learned Greeks had read Homer (see pp. 24-5) and how learned Alexandrian Jews like Philo had read the Tanakh. Allegorical readers of scripture saw it as having several layers of meaning. The innermost meanings, hidden behind the literal sense of the words on the page, were not only the most profound, but also only available to those with eyes to see. Once more we meet that Alexandrian Christian elitism already encountered in Clement. Allegorical approaches to scripture proved very influential throughout Christianity, because they were hugely useful in allowing Christians to think new thoughts, or to adapt very old thoughts into their faith which derived from sources beyond the obvious meaning of their Old and New Testaments. The Latin West tended to have more reservations early on, but the great Augustine of Hippo found allegory useful, and subsequent commentators in the Western Church frequently threw caution to the winds in their enthusiasm for proving truths which were not otherwise self-evident. There were contrary currents in the East too: the Syrian city of Antioch was home to theologians who were inclined to read the Bible as a literal historical record. The contrast in approach between Alexandria and Antioch, not merely to the Bible but to a whole range of theological issues, resulted in the long term in some ugly power struggles in the Eastern Churches, as we will see (see pp. 222-37).

Origen's preoccupation with the classic concerns of Greek philosophy was as apparent in his work on systematic theology as in his biblical commentaries. Particularly in his book entitled
On First Principles
, one of the first attempts at a universal summary of a single Christian tradition, he grappled with the old Platonic problem of how a passionless, indivisible, changeless supreme God communicates with this transitory world. For Origen as for Justin, the bridge was the Logos, and like Justin Origen could be quite bold in terming the Logos 'a second God', even tending towards making this Logos-figure subordinate to or on a lower level than the supreme God, whose creature he is - a doctrine known as subordinationism.
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In concentrating on explaining this relationship of Father and Son, Origen had little to say about the Holy Spirit, who, he could quite boldly say, was inferior to the Son. As far as Origen was concerned, the main role of the Holy Spirit was to bring strength to those who were full members of the Church. He frankly admitted that there were questions about the person and work of the Spirit which puzzled him and which still needed clarification by the Church.
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Few early Christian writers had much to say about the Spirit in the unhappy aftermath of expelling the Montanists, with their particular devotion to the Spirit.

One of the boldest parts of Origen's theological scheme is his suggestion as to how to relate the Fall and the Incarnation. He says that God created inferior spirits with free will and that they had abused this gift, following the example of a ringleader - Satan. The degree of their fall then determined which part of the cosmic order they occupied, from angels through humankind to demons. It is thus our duty to use our free will to remedy the mistake which we had made in this fall (the reality of which was allegorized in the story of Adam and Eve). Like Clement before him, Origen asserted that humankind will be saved through its own efforts with the help of Christ, through purging which goes on past human death. He could not accept that humankind or creation was totally fallen, as that would destroy all moral responsibility: 'A totally wicked being could not be censured, only pitied as a poor wretch'.
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Origen tried to explain this proposition with yet more adventurousness. He suggested that amid the catastrophe of the Fall, one soul alone had not fallen, and that it was this soul which the Logos entered when finally he decided that he must come himself to save humankind.
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The point of this idea was to safeguard Christ's free will in his earthly life: he enjoyed the free will granted to that soul, so he was making real choices, not playing a Docetic charade, as gnostics maintained. Thus our free will also has value, because it is seen most perfectly in Christ, and it is a gift for us to use properly. The whole scheme was intended to affirm the majesty of God, as Plato and Paul had done, but also to affirm the dignity of humankind. Divine majesty and human dignity have never been easy concepts for Christianity to balance. This was a very different approach to the radical pessimism about the human condition which has come to dominate Western Christianity, especially thanks to Augustine of Hippo. But Origen had not finished with his startling speculation. Since the first fall was universal, so all, including Satan himself, have the chance to work back towards God's original purpose. All will be saved, since all come from God.
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