Origen is clearly subordinationist. We declare that the Son is not mightier than the Father, but inferior to Him. And this belief we ground on the saying of Jesus Himself: The Father who sent me is greater than I. (Con. Cels., VIII, xv) We know, therefore, that He is the Son of God, and that God is His Father. And there is nothing extravagant or unbecoming the character of God in the doctrine that He should have begotten such an only Son; and no one will persuade us that such a one is not a Son of the unbegotten God and Father. If Celsus has heard something of certain persons holding that the Son of God is not the Son of the Creator of the universe, that is a matter which lies between him and the supporters of such an opinion. (Con. Cels., VIII, xiv) Origen as the successor to Clement in the Alexandrian School: … envisioned the universe along Neoplatonist lines of hierarchical extrapolation. At the utterly transcendent apex, there is God the Father (De Princ. 1.1.6), alone source without source or, to use Origens favourite term (e.g., In Ioan. 2.10.75), ungenerate [agennetos]. But (De Princ. 1.2.3) the Father has from all eternity generated a Son, and (In Ioan. 2.10. 75) through his Son the Word, he has brought forth the Holy Spirit. The three, Origen maintains in the same passage, are three distinct individuals [hence persons] or *hypostases [cf. In Ioh. 2,10,75]. On the other hand (Frag. in Hebr.), with explicit reference here to Father and Son, they share together a community of substance. for the Son, he adds a moment later is of the same substance [*homoousios ] as the Father.(N.C.E., p. 297). J.N.D. Kelly in Early Christian Doctrines says of Origen’s theory of the Hypostases that: This affirmation that each of the Three is a distinct hypostasis from all eternity, not just (as for Tertullian and Hippolytus) as manifested in the economy, is one of the chief characteristics of his doctrine, and stems directly from the idea of eternal generation. Hupostasis and ousia were originally synonyms, the former Stoic and the latter Platonic, meaning real existence or essence, that which is a thing is; but while hupostasis retains this connotation in Origen [e.g. In Ioh 20,22,182f.; 32,16,192f.], he more frequently gives it the sense of individual subsistence, and so individual existent. The error of Modalism, he contends [ibid.. 10,37,246: cf. ib. 2.2.16; In Matt. 17,14.], lies in treating the Three as numerically indistinguishable (:¬ *4NXD,4< Jè •D42:è), separable only in thought, one not only in essence but also in subsistence... (p. 129) From De Orat. 15,1 and C. Cels. 8,12, Origen holds the true teaching to be that the Son is other in subsistence than the Father. The Father and the Son are two things in respect of Their Persons, but one in unanimity, harmony and identity of will (see also Kelly, ibid.). Kelly says that: Thus while really distinct, the Three are from another point of view one; as he expresses it [Dial. Heracl. 2], we are not afraid to speak in one sense of two Gods, in another sense of one God (ibid.). Origen thus held the Father to be theologically prior to the Son and that the Son was a product of the Father. He holds the unity to be a moral one rather than an assumed and incoherent Modalism. Origen relates the marriage of man and wife as one flesh as symbolic of this, and also equates the human relationship of the elect with Christ as being of one spirit. Thus, on a higher plane again, Father and Son though distinct are one God. Kelly holds that though Origen seems to speak of Christ as a creature this is as a conscious concession to Proverbs 8:22 and Colossians 1:15 and that it should not be pressed. He participates in the divine nature by being united to the Fathers nature (In Ioh. 2,2,16; 2,10,76; 19,2,6). Kelly states that: One must be careful, however, not to attribute to Origen any doctrine of consubstantiability between Father and Son. Origens union of the Father and the Son is one of love, will and action (Kelly, discounting the texts surviving in Rufinus whitewashed Latin translation, ibid., p. 130). Origen states of the Holy Spirit (Frag. in Hebr. PG 14, 1308): He supplies those who, because of Him and their participation in Him, are called sanctified with the matter, if I may so describe it, of their graces. This same matter of graces is effected by God, is ministered by Christ, and achieves individual subsistence (ßN,FJfF0H) as the Holy Spirit (see also Kelly, ibid.). Kelly (pp. 130-131) considers from this that the ultimate ground of the being of the Holy Spirit is the Father, but that it is mediated to the Spirit by the Son, from whom also the Spirit derives all its attributes (cf. ibid., 2,10,76). The three are eternally and really distinct but they are not a Triad of disparate Beings. The error is in the conclusion that the Son imbues the Spirit with all its attributes rather than being its controller in the elect. Co-eternality is logically compromised. The failure to understand the nature of the Spirit in the monotheist control of the elect is the fundamental error here (see the paper The Holy Spirit (No. 117)). The Platonist emanationism dictated that the structure descended in these forms from the Father, and thus the Spirit became the third form rather than the animating agency and the means by which Christ became one with God. Through the Spirit humanity could become one as Christ was but on a conditional basis, which the Greeks appear to have rejected. The intrusion of neo-Platonism into Christianity is widespread (see Mysticism). The failure to understand the distinction made by Origen above set the stage for the Council of Nicaea some 100 years later. The oneness of the substance was the oneness conferred by the substance of the Holy Spirit, which was of itself an attribute of God. Origen held that only the Father is God from Himself (autotheos) (In Ioan. 2.2.17). … and in Origens mind (C. Cels. 5.39) Christians rightly refer to the Son as a secondary [deuteros] (*,bJ,D@H) deity (N.C.E., ibid.). Origens postulation of eternal creation negated the concept of the co-eternality of Christ. From these texts we can see that Binitarianism did not really eventuate until Tertullian, where it emerges in a quasi-Trinitarian setting and this is appropriate as Binitarianism is really an incoherent, and seemingly ditheist form of Trinitarianism. Trinitarianism was not in any real form until after Origen. The first known instance of any mention of three elements acting in concert was made by Theophilus of Antioch (ca. 180 CE) who used the term trias, of which the Latin Trinitas is held to be a translation. Theophilus spoke of the trias of God, His Word and His Wisdom (Theophilus to Autolychus. The ANF translates trias as Trinity). The next mention we have of the term comes with Tertullian (De Pud., c. xxi, P. G., II, 1026). Whilst Tertullian was the first to assert the essential unity of the three ‘persons’, it is seen that his logic and his arguments are essentially subordinationist (see Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. II, p. 570). The nearest equivalent to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan doctrine of the Trinity was not until the Roman bishop Dionysius (ca. 262 CE), who became concerned with eliminating the process of reducing the three entities to separate Gods (Schaff, ibid.). This process is examined also in the paper Early Theology of the Godhead (No. 127).
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 23:03:34 +0000
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