Origen and the Orgin
by Brian Robertson
© 2003 Brian Robertson, all rights reserved
Imagine a Christian teacher, renowned for his teaching and brilliance, who taught that souls preexisted before early life, that reincarnation was a fact, that at the end of time all things would be restored to God, including, it would seem, the figure of the Satan himself. A person who spoke of various levels of existence, both visible and invisible. Someone who wrote passionately that following the bare letter of holy texts was a mistake and that the entire story of God planting a garden in Eden was "silly."
We're not talking about a teacher whose newest book is being written. Instead, we're talking about Origen, disciple of Clement of Alexandria, who lived from 183-253 A.D.
In writing of the Genesis story, Origen said:
"Very many mistakes have been made because the right method of examining the holy texts has not been discovered by the greater number of readers....because it is their habit to follow the letter....
"Scripture interveweaves the imaginary with the historical, sometimes introducing what is utterly impossible, sometimes what is possible but never occured..the sam with the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles; for not even they are purely historical, incidents which never occured being interwoven in the 'corporeal' sense.
"And who is so silly as to imagine that God, like a husband-man, planted a garden in Eden eastword, and put in it a tree of life, which could be seen and felt...And if God is also said to walk in the garden in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that any one will doubt that these passages, by means of seeming history, though the incidents never occured, figuratively reveal certain mysteries."
Origen speaks to another point which was largely dismissed in the development of the Church that followed, namely the divisions of human beings into their own kind of Trinity. Rather than the idea of Body and Soul, Origen put forth there were three divisions.
Origen (and he wasn't alone in this) divided humans into: the spirit (in Greek, the pneuma or "breath"), the soul (psyche in Greek) and the physical body. This idea is something akin to Paul in one of his insightful moments in which he speaks of being raised as a spiritual body -- a reference not wholly to soul and certainly not to a physical manifestations. This point is absolutely essential when contemplating Jesus's ressurection as a spiritual and not physical event, insight and realization that began (for Paul and others) as purely spiritual and somehow de-progressed in the writings of the Gospels that followed into a concrete, historical and essentially historic "fact."
In reading Origen on this point of how humans are basically put together, it strikes me that we are standing amazingly close to a moment of amazing insight and kinship with other spiritual approaches in life. Although Origen does not make this connection out of his explanation, I will, and it has to do with the concept of the spirit.
While it is often intrinsic in Christianity to consider God as something far off, a creator totally distinct from his/her creation, humankind, this is not the case in such approaches as Hinduism, for example, where the relationship between God and human is considerably closer (if not identical if one can say the wave is identical to the vast ocean). Yet in Genesis, we read in our mythology that God, in essence, took a lump of clay -- lifeless -- and brought forth the first human.
And how? According to Genesis 2:7:
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
In other words, quite clearly, what animates a human is not the soul (psyche) but rather the breath -- pneuma -- or spirit and it is the Spirit of God that animates us that, in fact, is our very essence and gives power to the functioning of our soul, our personality or individuation.
How and at what point the soul intermingles with the Spirit is a matter of discussion and may appear to vary from tradition to tradition, but does it really?
But, moving back to Origen's teachings and ideas, he applied this three parts of a human to the reading of Scripture. The result? That one cannot expect to understand what riches are contained by merely clinging to the letter, by insisting that the entire work is literal and unchanging.
"One must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one's own soul -- so that the simple man may be edified by what we may call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were, and the man who is perfect and like those mentioned by the apostle: 'We speak wisdom among the perfect; yet a wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory' -- this man may be edified by the spiritual law, which has 'a shadow of the good things to come.' For just as man consists of a body, soul and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture."
It is apparent that Origen's beliefs are just one example of the exciting range of opinion regarding Jesus at a time far closer to the original events and teachings than now. Origen beleved that there are addtional realms of reality beyond this life, but not the wrath of eternal damnation. Instead, he said "for the correction and improvement of those that need it there will be yet another world, either similar to the one that now exists, or better than it, or possibily much worse."
Would that be such a surprise? It was Jesus himself who reminded us, "In my Father's house there are many mansions." (John 14:2).
