Brian Daley Origen and Augustine On The Person of Christ

Augustinian Studies 36:2 (2005) 299–326
Saint Augustine Lecture 2004
WORD, SOUL, AND FLESH:

ORIGEN AND AUGUSTINE ON THE PERSON OF
CHRIST
Brian E. Daley, S.J.

University of Notre Dame
299
DALEY: ORIGEN AND AUGUSTINE ON THE PERSON OF CHRIST
If we were asked to name the two Christian thinkers of the first five, or
even the first ten, centuries of the Church’s history who had the most pro-
found and lasting influence on the later course of Christian thought, most of
us would probably settle on Origen and Augustine. In many ways, they were
very different people. Origen lived and worked in the cosmopolitan Greek
culture of the third century: born around 185; brought up in Alexandria, the
center of literary, scientific and philosophical studies of the ancient Mediter-
ranean world, a melting-pot of ethnic and religious traditions; trained in Homer
and the Greek tragedians, in dialectics, in the handbook philosophy distilled
from Plato; yet an intensely committed Christian from birth, an ascetic, a
philoponos or “hard-core” believer, always ready to give the ultimate witness
of blood for his faith. Origen eventually moved from Alexandria, around 231,
to the smaller city of Caesaraea on the Palestinian coast, and established there
what amounted to the first Christian faculty of Biblical studies, an intellectual
center devoted to the study and interpretation of Scripture for Christians of
every level of education and interest. A lifelong member of the Church, and
probably always a layman, Origen was by profession a scholar, a relentlessly
learned and speculative mind in an age when Christian theology was still a
new and almost undefined enterprise, a game with few rules. As his treatise
On First Principles shows, Origen himself believed that the only key to un-
derstanding Scripture in the endlessly rich, life-giving ways God intended it
to be read was to read it within the framework of the Church’s traditional
“rule,” professed by Christians in baptism;1 but the process of elaborating that
rule into a dogmatic structure was only beginning, and Origen’s mind de-
lighted in playing with a variety of alternative plans for its construction.
Augustine was a century and a half younger, born in Thagaste, in rural North
Africa in 354. He was a Latin in language and culture, who, by his own admis-
sion, knew little Greek; a professional rhetorician, a world-class teacher of
persuasive speech, an artist and theoretician with words; a first-class product of
the educational system of his age, he always retained the dramatic, Rome-cen-
tered view of human history and society that years of reading Vergil and Cicero
had distilled in his soul. Unlike Origen, Augustine came to the full practice of
1. De Principiis Praef. 2. For an argument that the purpose of this treatise is in fact to develop a
detailed understanding of the “rule of faith,” as the basis for an authentic interpretation of Scrip-
ture free from Gnostic or Marcionite distortion, see my article, “Origen’s De Principiis: A Guide
to the ‘Principles’ of Christian Scriptural Interpretation,” in John Petruccione (ed.), Nova et
Vetera: Patristic Studies in Honor of Thomas Patrick Halton (Washington: Catholic University
of America Press, 1998), 3–21.
300
his Christianity only gradually and with great struggle. Yet when he did take the
step of presenting himself for baptism, at the age of thirty-three, Augustine
knew it was a commitment that would change every aspect of his life. After four
years attempting to form a community of celibate, educated friends bound by
prayer and contemplation, as well as by common possessions and a common
table, Augustine was called to a life of ordained ministry: first (in 391) as pres-
byter and preacher in the coastal African city of Hippo Regius, then four years
later as its bishop. Until his death in 430, Augustine led an extraordinarily busy
life: administering the spiritual and temporal affairs of his Church, filling the
bishop’s customary role of local magistrate and mediator, constantly involved
in the problems of the whole African Church, constantly in demand as preacher,
constantly being consulted by letter and by passing visitors on every conceiv-
able aspect of Christian faith and practice, yet still living with his priests in a
kind of proto-monastic community, still grasping at every opportunity for quiet
reflection on the larger mysteries of faith. Writing a century and a half after
Origen, acutely aware of the disputes over doctrine that had wracked the Chris-
tian community since Origen’s time, and of the normative guidelines that had
begun to emerge, after the end of persecution, in the canons and creedal formu-
las of Nicaea and later councils, local and general, of the fourth and early fifth
centuries, Augustine carried out the theologian’s tasks with an evident sense of
responsibility. Although the Christian vision of God, for instance, raises all kinds
of theoretical questions that challenge the human mind to its limits, Augustine
makes it clear, at the start of his great and unfinished work On the Trinity, that
his project is not one of unfettered philosophical speculation, but of searching
the Scriptures, in the light of the Church’s articulated tradition, for some deeper
understanding of the faith Christians professed; in doing so, he hopes to provide
“the talkative reason-mongers” of his day with a reasoned account of what is
already accepted as the fides Catholica, so that they may return to the beginning
and right order of faith, realizing at least what a wholesome regimen is provided
for the faithful in holy Church, whereby the due observance of piety makes the
ailing mind well for the perception of unchanging truth.2
Origen would have said the same, surely; but by Augustine’s time the bound-
aries between Catholic faith and heresy had become, on several issues,
considerably clearer.
Different as they were in time, language and profession, however, Origen
and Augustine appear to most of us, from our present vantage-point in the
2. De Trinitate 1.4 (trans. Edmund Hill; Brooklyn: New City, 1990) 67.
301
ongoing tradition of Christian thought, as remarkably similar. Both of them

were figures of controversy in their own day, and even more after their death;
Origen, until the end of late antiquity, and Augustine, in our own day, have
become the “theologians you love to hate” par excellence—the theologians
most widely blamed, especially by those who have not read much of their
work, for all that seems wrong about the Church’s presentation of the Gospel.
Both, on the other hand, have remained enormously influential on the way
Christians—even Christians who deeply disagree with them—have framed
theological discourse. In a very real sense, Origen and Augustine set the agenda
for later Patristic and medieval theological discussion, in East and West re-
spectively, on such key issues as God’s Trinitarian being; the single yet complex
person of Christ; human freedom in relation to God’s saving action in the
world; the principles of Scriptural interpretation; Christian hope for eternal
life, and—especially in Augustine’s case—the sacramental nature and struc-
tures of the Church.
Origen’s thoughtful triple analysis of the coherence of the Christian rule of
faith, in his treatise “On First Principles,” stands alongside Augustine’s bril-
liant syntheses of the same confession in Book I of “On Christian Learning,” or
in the opening sections of “On Primary Catechesis,” as landmarks in the sys-
tematization of the Church’s teaching. Yet neither was what one might call, in
the wake of the theological textbooks used in the medieval and modern univer-
sity, a systematic thinker. Both were occasional writers, who responded to
requests or perceived needs by writing treatises on particular theological sub-
jects; both were exegetes, commentators on Scripture, hugely prolific pastoral
preachers who spent a great deal of time expounding the Biblical Word—with-
out notes—to congregations of “ordinary” Christians, as the most fundamental
nourishment of their faith; both were thoroughgoing public intellectuals, criti-
cal of dominant thought-patterns in their own cultures, yet undaunted champions
of the value of traditional education for deepening and solidifying individual
Christians’ grasp of the apostolic teaching.3 Both, too, although radically Bibli-
cal in their approach to the task of theology, had been decisively influenced by
the philosophical tradition of ancient Platonism: that aesthetic, value-centered
3. It is interesting to compare Augustine’s discussion of the relevance of traditional learning—

especially the literary and rhetorical arts, but also mathematics, geography and history, natural
science and dialectics—in De Doctrina Christiana—with the description of Origen’s curriculum
for would-be exegetes in the Prosphonetikos ascribed to his pupil, Gregory the Wonder-Worker.
Joseph Trigg remarks: “Origen is the only early theologian comparable to Augustine in sheer
intellectual energy and power.” (“Origen,” in Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A. [ed.], Augustine through
the Ages: An Encyclopedia [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999] 604.)
302
approach to philosophy that moderns also “love to hate,” but which the an-
cients generally regarded as the system of thought most capable of speaking
meaningfully about transcendence. For both Origen and Augustine, it was the
Platonic philosophical tradition, with its conception of ultimate reality as a
non-material, timeless, benevolent, and active divine substance constantly
present in material and historical things, that provided the one plausible intel-
lectual alternative to the radical dualism of the Valentinians or the Manichees.
It was the libri Platonicorum, Augustine tells us, which finally led him to
“turn within” in his restless search for a God who would satisfy his critical
intellect, the “immutable light” supplying the mind with the criteria for mak-
ing judgments, the Truth which simply “is,” and is present, though often
unrecognized, to each of us. 4 And it was the dialogic, probing form of Pla-
tonic thought, immortalized in the whole tradition from the early Socratic
dialogues to the lecture-notes of Plotinus, that left an indelible stamp on both
the controversial style and the preaching of these early Christian thinkers.5
Although the content of their thought was the Christian Biblical message, its
intellectual idiom and its metaphysical framework owed more to Platonism
than to any other philosophical system.
Given even these external similarities, one might expect that Augustine
would have shown a lively interest in Origen’s thought, which was the center
of swirling, bitter controversy in the Church of his day. In fact, Augustine did
show signs of growing interest in Origen from the 390s on, but apparently had
difficulty getting reliable information on Origen’s teachings; it is hard to say with
certainty just which of Origen’s works, if any, Augustine had himself read.6
4. Confessiones 7.9.16.
5. For a discussion of Augustine’s adoption of the classical philosophical tradition of “psycha-
gogy,” or spiritual and intellectual formation, through question, hypothesis and discussion,
especially in his preaching, see the dissertation of Paul R. Kolbet, The Cure of Souls: St.
Augustine’s Reception and Transformation of Classical Psychagogy (Notre Dame, 2002).
6. There is a fair amount of scholarly literature on the question of Augustine’s actual knowledge of
Origen. Berthold Altaner, “Augustinus und Origenes,” Historisches Jahrbuch 70 (1951) 15–41 [=
Kleine Patristische Schriften (Texte und Untersuchungen 83; Berlin: Akademieverlag, 1967) 224–
252] argued from the appearance of similar arguments and exegetical interpretations that Augustine,
that Augustine probably had access to a number of his works, at least by 411–412 (date of Ep. 140),
and possibly as early as 388–389 (De Genesi contra manichaeos). Many of these similarities,
however, are less than conclusive evidence of textual dependence. Less helpful is Willy Theiler,
“Augustin und Origenes,” Augustinus 13 (1968) 423–432. Henry Chadwick’s survey, “Christian
Platonism in Origen and Augustine,” in Henri Crouzel and Richard Hanson (eds.) Origeniana
Tertia (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1985) 217–230 is largely dependent on Altaner’s list.
For further possible parallels, see Gerard Bartelink, “Die Beeinflussung Augustins durch die
303
Although Origen had been criticized by contemporaries as a theological risk-

taker, probably because of the exuberantly allegorical style of his Biblical
interpretation and his alleged hope for the ultimate salvation of all rational crea-
tures, including the demons,7 it was not until the very end of the fourth century
that criticism of his thought hardened into open dispute. Epiphanius of Salamis,
in 374, had drawn on earlier critics of Origen, in his Panarion or handbook of
heresies, to expound the “heretical” nature of Origen’s doctrine of the Trinity,
his theory that the material world, along with our material bodies, was created
as God’s response to a pre-incarnate “fall” of souls, and his overly spiritualized
conception of the resurrection body. As sympathy for Origen’s speculations,
and for the bold intellectual thrust of his speculative style, grew within some
learned monastic circles, opposition grew, as well; Epiphanius attempted un-
successfully to persuade John, bishop of Jerusalem, to condemn Origen’s writings
in the mid-390s, and at least succeeded in recruiting Saint Jerome as a cantan-
kerous and somewhat mercurial ally. The controversy took flight, apparently
spurred by a dispute among certain Egyptian ascetics over whether God should
be imagined as having a luminous human form—as some ancient rabbinic and
griechischen Patres,” in J. den Boeft and Johannes van Oort (eds.), Augustiniana Traiectina
(Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987) 14–18. Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, “Agostino di fronte alla
‘eterodossia’ di Origene,” Augustiniana 40 (Mélanges Tarsicius van Bavel; 1990) 219–243, of-
fers a balanced assessment of these parallels, in a judicious overview of Augustine’s knowledge
of Origen. Takeshi Kato offers an unusual Husserlian perspective in comparing Origen’s and
Augustine’s conception of “voice,” in “La Voix chez Origène et Saint Augustin,” ibid. 245–258.
Caroline P. Hammond Bammel has argued, on the basis of several close textual parallels, that
Augustine had read and was using Origen’s Commentary on Romans, probably in Rufinus’s
abbreviated translation, when he wrote De peccatorum meritis et remissione, his first work against
the Pelagians, in 411: “Augustine, Origen and the Exegesis of St. Paul,”Augustinianum 32 (1992)
341–368 [= Tradition and Exegesis in Early Christian Writers (Aldershot/Brookfield, VT:
Variorum, 1995) XVII]; “Rufinus’ Translation of Origen’s commentary on Romans and the
Pelagian Controversy,” in Antonio Scottà, Storia ed esegesi in Rufino di Concordia (= Antichità
Altoadriatiche 39; Udine: Arti Grafische Friulane, 1992) 131–142 [= Tradition and Exegesis
XVIII]. Most recently, György Heidl has offered an extended argument for Augustine’s use of
Origen in his very earliest works: Origen’s Influence on the Young Augustine: a Chapter of the
History of Origenism (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2003). At the time of writing, I have not
yet been able to consult this work.
7. See his apologetic “Letter to Friends in Alexandria,” written at the time of his expulsion from
that Church by Bishop Demetrius in 231, as discussed by Jerome, Apologia adversus Rufinum
2.18–19, and Rufinus, De Adulteratione Librorum Origenis (PG 17.624A2–625A2). For modern
discussions of his condemnation, see C. C. Richardson, “The Condemnation of Origen,” Church
History 6 (1937) 50–64; Henri Crouzel, “A Letter from Origen ‘to Friends in Alexandria’,” in
David Neiman and Margaret Schatkin (eds.), The Heritage of the Early Church (Festschrift for
George Florovsky; Orientalia Christiana Analecta 195: Rome, 1973) 135–150.
304
Syriac Christian sources had suggested—or was rather to be thought of as radi-

cally transcending visible shape, as Origen and his contemporary disciple
Evagrius insisted.8 This “anthropomorphite” controversy in Egypt reached a peak
in the formal condemnation of Origen’s notions of God and of the body (as both
being too spiritual, too ethereal) by Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, in his
festal letters of 400 and 401, but not before it had swept into the Latin-speaking
world as well, shattering the friendship of Jerome and his long-time colleague,
Rufinus of Aquileia, and stirring up spirits throughout the Western Church.9
Just what Augustine knew of this controversy, and just when he knew it, is
not entirely clear, nor is it clear how much of Origen’s actual work Augustine
ever read, even in the Latin translations that began to appear in fair abundance
in the 390s. Ambrose, his spiritual mentor in Milan in the months before his
baptism, was an avid reader of Origen and borrowed many of Origen’s ideas
and strategies in his own sermons and treatises; Hilary of Poitiers, whose work
Augustine read and admired, was also influenced by Origen. So the fact that
Augustine speculates, in some of his works of the late 380s and early 390s, on
the possibility of a pre-mundane existence and fall of created intelligent souls—
one of the ideas most closely associated with the Origenist tradition—does
not necessarily prove direct familiarity on his part with Origen’s writings. 10 In
8. For an illuminating discussion of the background and implications of this “anthropomorphite

controversy” in the 390s, and its roots in Semitic Jewish and Christian speculation, see Alexander
Golitzin, “Recovering the ‘Glory of Adam’: ‘Divine Light’ Traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls and
the Christian Ascetical Literature of Fourth-Century Syro-Mesopotamia,” in Dead Sea Scrolls as
Background to Postbiblical Judaism and Early Chrsitianity (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 275–308; “The
Vision of God and the Form of Glory: More Reflections of the Anthropomorphite Controversy of
A.D. 399,” in John Behr (ed.), Abba (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s, 2003) 273–297; see also
Andrei Orlov and Alexander Golitzin, “ ‘Many Lamps are Lighted from the One’: Paradigms of
the Transformational Vision in Macarian Homilies,” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001) 281–298.
9. The fullest discussion of the Origenist controversy of the 390s, in all its Eastern and Western
ramifications, is Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy. The cultural Construction of
an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). For a wider discus-
sion of the controversies over various forms of Origenism in Christian antiquity, see Antoine
Guillaumont, Les ‘Kephalaia Gnostica’ d’Evagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’Origénisme ches
les Grecs et chez les Syriens (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962). For the development of interest in
Origenism in the West, see Basil Studer, “Zur Frage des westlichen Origenismus,” Studia
Patristica 9 (= Texte und Untersuchungen 94; Berlin: Akademieverlag, 1966) 270–287.
10. Robert J. O’Connell has argued in a number of works that Augustine remained continually, if
cautiously, interested in this possibility through much of his career, at least up to the second
decade of the fifth century; see Robert J. O’Connell, Augustine’s Early Theory of Man (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); “Pre-Existence in the Early Augustine,” Revue
des Études Augustiniennes 26 (1980) 176–188; The Origin of the Soul in Augustine’s Later
Works (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994). O’Connell connects this with Augustine’s
305
a letter to Jerome written in 394 or 395, Augustine encourages the scholar of

Bethlehem to continue translating “the books of those who have so excel-
lently commented on our Scriptures in Greek,” especially “the one whom you
preferably cite in your writings,” which clearly means Origen.11 Probably in
397, he wrote again to Jerome asking, among other things, for a clear descrip-
tion of the theological errors for which Origen was then being attacked in the
East;12 in 404 or 405, he confessed in another letter to Jerome that he had not
read any of the six or seven authors—including Origen and his Alexandrian
admirer Didymus—whom Jerome now considers heretical, and seems ironi-
cally puzzled by Jerome’s own change of position.13 Caroline Bammel has
made a persuasive, if not conclusive case that Augustine had read Rufinus’s
abridged Latin translation of Origen’s Commentary on Romans by the time he
wrote his first anti-Pelagian work, On the Deserts and Punishment of Sinners
and the Baptism of Infants, in 411.14 But even after that date, Augustine re-
mained dependent on the reports of others, mainly of critics of Origen, for
information as to the doctrinal content of his works. So his little treatise To
Orosius, against the Priscillianists and the Origenists, written in 415, is a
careful analysis and critique of those positions the Spanish priest Orosius had
summarized for him, in a written memorandum or Commonitorium, and prob-
ably at greater length orally. 15 Augustine here offers a measured refutation of
what he understands to be those Origenist positions that clash with the re-
ceived faith of the Church: that the punishment of fallen angels and sinners in
Hell is not genuinely eternal; that Christ’s final “subjection” of himself and
his Kingdom to the Father, mentioned in I Cor 15.28, will mean the dissolu-
tion of creation in a featureless union with God; that the “place” of rational
creatures, in this world of very unequal destinies, is due to their fall from
union with God through a pre-cosmic sin; that creation is co-eternal with God;
that all spiritual creatures, including the angels, need to go through a process
of purgation before reaching full beatitude; that the purpose of the “new heaven
attitude to what he had learned of Origenism, in “St. Augustine’s Criticism of Origen in the Ad
Orosium,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 30 (1984) 84–99. For a representative example of
the contrary opinion, see Gerard P. O’Daly, “Did St. Augustine Ever Believe in the Soul’s Pre-
existence?” Augustinian Studies 5 (1974) 227–235.
11. Ep. 28.2 (trans. Roland Teske: The Works of Saint Augustine: The Letters [New York: New City,
2001] 92).
12. Ep. 40.6.9 (trans. Teske, 151).
13. Ep. 82.3.23.
14. “Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of St. Paul” (above, n. 6).
15. For both works, see CCL 49.157–178.
306
and new earth” promised in Scripture (Is 66.22; Rev 21.1) is only to be a place
of purgation for souls; and that the sun and stars are animated bodies.
Throughout his remarks on what Orosius had represented to him as Origen’s
theories, it is important to note that Augustine remains cautious and low-keyed,
commenting only that some of those propositions seem to him to be alien to a
“sound Christian faith”16 or that it would be “better” to take a different posi-
tion. 17 After observing that even the authors of the books of Scripture
occasionally make false or misleading statements about these things, he con-
cludes with an affirmation of the normativity of Scripture, “which God has set
up as a kind of sky over all human hearts,”18 and suggests:
Perhaps learned scholars [like Origen?] will teach you these things, if you
apply to them as much of a knowledge of how to learn as you do a concern
for knowing, so that you don’t form opinions about the unknown as if it
were known, or either believe what should not be believed, or not believe
what should be.19
Augustine does not comment, interestingly, on several other points Orosius
had identified as dangerous Origenist theories: that the “eternal fire” men-
tioned in the Gospel is a metaphor for the internal suffering of guilt, or that all
intellectual creatures will eventually be restored to God’s friendship—two
points Augustine would later soundly reject in City of God XXI—or that the
human body of Christ changed radically in its character in the course of sa-
cred history, and that its materiality is now “diminished,” although not totally
vanished, in his uncircumscribed, glorious state at the right hand of the Fa-
ther. One wonders if he was less sure than Orosius, in 415, that these ideas
were errors, or if he simply neglected to deal with them.
Augustine continues his attitude of cautious criticism in the occasional re-
marks on Origen that appear in his later works. In Book XI of The City of God
[written in 417] he expresses his “astonishment that a man so erudite and well
versed in the Church’s literature” as Origen could have been so wrong in sug-
gesting, in his work On First Principles, that God created the material world as
a place for the purgation of sin, rather than as a rich and variegated expression
of his own goodness.20 In Book XXI of the same work [from 426], Augustine
16. Contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas, CCL 49.170.161–162.

17. Ibid. 172.204.
18. Ibid. 178.380.
19. Ibid. 178.382–385.
20. De civitate Dei 11.23.
307
spends as number of chapters criticizing the view of “tender-hearted Chris-

tians” who believe that no one, not even the evil spirits, will be punished eternally
for their sins, and clearly has upholders of the Origenist tradition of universal
salvation in mind. In his little treatise On Heresies [428], heavily based on an
abbreviated version of Epiphanius’s Greek handbook, Augustine is again ex-
plicitly cautious about condemning Origen for doctrines that may not be his,
but says that any Catholic would be “violently shocked” by his doctrine of
universal salvation, and by the apparent corollary that since no judgments are
final, those ultimately converted from evil may again slip into sin, in an endless
cycle of fall and redemption.21 In two passages of his late Unfinished Work
against Julian (of Aeclanum) [429–430], Augustine again brands as the “error
of Origen” the notion that the devil will someday undergo conversion of heart
and be saved. 22 Vittorino Grossi has made the fascinating suggestion that
Augustine’s real purpose in rejecting these putatively Origenist positions in
these and other late works—the “watermark” or subtext involving Origen in
the late Augustine—was his concern to reject the possible charge, from the
followers of Pelagius and from others troubled by his own position on divine
election, that he was simply offering another form of what was thought to be
Origen’s conception of an inexorably victorious divine will, overriding rather
than mysteriously inhabiting creaturely choices.23 As Caroline Bammel has re-
marked, the theses ascribed to Origen in these works, in the bald, assertive
form in which Augustine rejects them, are in fact distorted, “a travesty of Origen
constructed by anti-Origenists” like Jerome and Epiphanius;24 the important
thing for us to notice is that it is these putative Origenist theses, rather than any
text of Origen himself, that Augustine criticizes, and that he always does so in
a context of respect for Origen’s continuing reputation as a scholar. One gets
the sense that even when Augustine feels he must criticize Origen, his restraint
is a sign he was aware of the risk involved in making polemical statements
based on second-hand information.
21. De haeresibus 43 (CCL 46.310.14–311.26).

22. Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum 5.47 (PL 45.1484); 6.10 (PL 45.1518).
23. Vittorino Grossi, La presenza in filigrana di Origene nell’ ultimo Agostino (426–430),”
Augustinianum 30 (1990) 423–440, esp. 430. The main Scriptural text at issue in these late
debates over divine election was I Tim 2.4: God “desires all people to be saved and to come to
the knowledge of the truth.” Augustine insists, in his later works on grace, that while God’s
mysterious choice of those on whom he will have mercy is not defeated by human freedom, the
effect of grace is not to override human freedom but to restore and preserve it in its ability to
choose the good. See, for example, De correptione et gratia 7.14; 8.17 [426–427].
24. “Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of St. Paul” (see n. 6 above) 346, n.26.
308
In any case, as I have already suggested, it is difficult to know precisely

just how much of Origen’s work Augustine ever read, or what he would have
thought of it had he studied it with care. More interesting, I think, and more
fruitful than the question of Augustine’s possible dependency on texts or pas-
sages of Origen, is a simple comparison of their ideas and their interpretive
instincts, reflecting on the similarities and differences between the theologi-
cal and exegetical visions of these two trail-blazers of Christian thought. How
Augustine came to articulate positions that resemble those of Origen can be
explained by indirect as well as direct influence; ideas have their day, themes
circulate in the bloodstream of religious as well as secular culture. What is
more helpful to our own theological formation is to see ways in which these
two powerful thinkers, whose influence was so determinative for the later
course of Christian doctrinal development, actually agreed or disagreed in
their approach to the central issues of intelligently articulating the faith.
As Henry Chadwick perceptively observed two decades ago—without much
further elaboration—“perhaps the most striking parallels [between Origen and
Augustine] occur in Christology.”25 What I propose to do here is to elaborate Dr.
Chadwick’s statement: to look, in a necessarily brief and summary way, at what
seem to me to be the main similarities and differences between the understand-
ing of the person of Christ, and of the mystery of our salvation through and in
Christ, that appears in the works of these two great early Christian thinkers.
I. Similarities. 1) Christ and Scripture. For both Origen and Augustine, it is so
clear as almost to go without saying that the meaning of the whole Christian
Scriptural canon, Old Testament and New, is revealed and summed up in the
Church’s understanding of the person and the work of Christ. Origen begins his
great elaboration of the rule of faith, On First Principles, by stating simply:
All who believe, and who are sure that “grace and truth have come through
Jesus Christ” (John 1.17) and realize that Christ is the truth—just as he said, “I
am the Truth” (John 14.6)—receive the knowledge which leads humanity to-
wards good living and happiness from no other source than the very words and
teaching of Christ. By “the words of Christ” we mean not only those which
expressed his teaching while he was made human and involved in flesh; for
even before that, Christ, the Word of God, was in Moses and the prophets.26
25. “Christian Platonism in Origen and Augustine” (see above, n. 6) 229.

26. De principiis Praef. 1. For classic surveys of Origen’s Christology, see Henri Crouzel, Théologie
de l’Image de Dieu chez Origène (Paris: Aubier, 1955); Marguérite Harl, Origène et la fonction
révélatrice du Verbe incarné (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1958); Michel Fédou, La Sagesse et le
monde. Essai sur la christologie d’Origène (Paris: Desclée, 1994).
309
For Augustine, too, the whole story of canonical Scripture is the story of
the involvement of divine Truth, the Wisdom of God, in the world of crea-
tures, to reveal the love that is God’s sole motive for creating, and for redeeming
those creatures who had fallen away from him; 27 the Word made flesh embod-
ies that love concretely, in his person and the deeds of his life.28
The whole of holy Scripture which was written before him was written to
proclaim in advance the coming of the Lord, and whatever was commit-
ted to writing and sealed with divine authority after his coming tells of
Christ, and urges us towards love. . . . Therefore there is, in the Old Tes-
tament, a hidden presence of the New, and in the New Testament a
revelation of the Old. 29
The starting point, Augustine argues, for grasping even the mystery of God’s
own being, which the Scriptures lead Christians to conceive as a Trinity of
persons in a single reality or substance, is nothing else than the New Testament’s
presentation of Jesus, as the one who “emptied himself” from being “in the
form of God” to take the “form of a servant” (Phil 2.7),30 and who asked his
Father to send on his disciples “the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot
receive” (John 14.15–17). Christ himself is the summation of Christian faith
and preaching, the only Word universally expressed in the Bible.
2) Jesus as Mystery. Both authors prefer to speak of the mystery of Christ in
concrete, personal, pastoral terms rather than in the analytic categories of for-
mal ontology. The first and most striking thing about Jesus, as the Gospel presents
him and faith understands him, is the paradox of God present in fully human
form, God living our life. Origen sums up his own sense of the challenge to
human faith Jesus embodies in a passage of On First Principles, Book II:
27. De doctrina Christiana 1.35: “The whole temporal economy of our salvation, therefore, was
shaped by the providence of God that we might know this truth and be able to act on it.” Cf.
ibid. 1.38.
28. The best survey of Augustine’s Christology is still Tarsicius J. Van Bavel, Recherches sur la
Christologie de saint Augustin (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1954). For briefer surveys,
with more recent bibliography, see Brian E. Daley, “A Humble Mediator: the Distinctive Elements
in Saint Augustine’s Christology,” Word and Spirit 9 (1987) 100–117; “Christology,” in Allan D.
Fitzgerald, O.S.A. (ed.), Augustine through the Ages (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 164–169.
29. De catechizandis rudibus 4.8 (CCL 46.128).
30. Origen, too, tends to refer back constantly to this text as the guiding framework for his under-
standing of the person and work of Christ, and of what it means to follow Christ: see, for
example, De Princ. 2.6.1; 4.4.5; Contra Celsum 4.15, 18; 6.15; Commentary on John1.32. For
a discussion of Origen’s emphasis on the “self-emptying” of the Word of God, see Michel
Fédou, La Sagesse et le monde. Le Christ d’Origène (Paris: Desclée, 1994) 311–331.
310
Of all the marvelous and splendid things about him, there is one that utterly
transcends the limits of human wonder and is beyond the capacity of our weak
mortal intelligence to think of or understand: namely how this mighty power
of the divine majesty, the very Word of the Father and the very Wisdom of
God, in which were created “all things visible and invisible,” can be believed
to have existed within the compass of that man who appeared in Judaea; yes
and how the Wisdom of God can have entered into a woman’s womb and been
born as a little child. . . . The human understanding, with its narrow limits, is
baffled and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder; it knows not which
way to turn, what to hold on to, or where to go. If it thinks of God, it sees a
man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds one returning from the dead.31
Although Augustine, in some works written after 411, begins to use more
technical, ontological categories to characterize the personal paradox of the
Word made flesh, he tends to avoid this as well, and to use more concrete
rhetorical tactics to invoke the inconceivable reality of what the Church pro-
fesses about Christ. An example from one of his early homilies, on Psalm 56,
may serve as an example of Augustine’s characteristic way of presenting the
Mystery of Jesus:
A whole human being is with the word, and the Word with a human being,
and the human being and the Word are one human being, and the Word and
the human being are one God.32
In the first book of his treatise On the Trinity, a section probably dating
from the early 400s, Augustine reflects on the theological implications of Paul’s
language in Phil. 2:
Because the form of God took on the form of a servant, each is God and
each is human, but each is God because of God taking on, and each is hu-
man because of the human being taken on. Neither of them was turned or
changed into the other by that “takeover”; neither godhead changed into
creature and ceasing to be godhead, nor creature changed into godhead and
ceasing to be creature.33
Augustine seems here to be deliberately straining the capacities of ordi-
nary human language, in order to confront the believer with the mind-straining
31. De Principiis 2.6.2 (trans. George Butterworth [New York: Harper, 1966] 109 [altered]).
32. Enarratio in Psalmum 56.5 [393–394] (CCL 39.698). Compare this passage from one of his
homilies on the Gospel of John, from 413: “Christ is the Word, and Christ is the Word of God,
and Christ the Word is God; but Christ is not only the Word, since ‘the Word became flesh and
dwelt amont us,’ Therefore Christ is both Word and flesh.” (In Joannis EvangeliumTractatus
23.6 [CC: 36.235–236]).
33. De Trinitate 1.14 (trans. Edmund Hill [New York: New City, 1991] 75).
311
mystery at the heart of Christian faith—something that more technical cat-

egories such as “person” and “nature” might well be too weak to capture.
3) Christ’s Human Soul. Nevertheless, both Origen and Augustine unequivo-
cally portray Christ as the eternal Word or Wisdom of God, acting in and through
a human being—a human soul and body—as his created instrument. Both writ-
ers simply assume a model of the human person that had become more or less
standard in late antique philosophy, in which the core of a person’s identity,
the center of a person’s activity and the subject of all qualities predicated of
the person, is the self-determining consciousness or soul. In this anthropol-
ogy, the soul plays a role in the human individual, the “little world” or
microcosm, analogous to that played by the divine Logos in the “big world” of
creation: of its own nature free from the vulnerabilities of matter, yet present
to matter and spiritually experiencing its needs, maintaining the order and
mutual support of all the parts of the material world as a functioning whole.34
Augustine observes, for instance, in his early treatise contrasting the practices
of the Catholic Church with those of the Manichaean community, “The human
person is a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body.” 35 For both authors,
this conception of the soul as a person’s active center or subject and the body
as the soul’s instrument offers the most obvious way of understanding the
incarnation of God’s eternal, transcendent Word in the world of human action.
Origen offers a hypothetical narrative framework to integrate this conception
of spiritual and mental action within a material universe with the Biblical story
of creation and redemption. “In the beginning,” he suggests in On First Prin-
ciples, the created universe consisted simply of a limited number of rational
souls, enjoying blessedness by being united with God in loving contempla-
tion, yet free in determining their own actions and relationships and so capable
of turning away from God in rebellious self-affirmation.36 After souls had fallen,
34. For examples of this analogy in the Church Fathers, see Athanasius, Contra Gentes 30–33, 41–
44; Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione [NPNF 433–436 (integrative role of soul),
439–440 (soul and passions)]. For this same conception in Augustine’s work, see his important
letter to Volusianus (Ep. 137) [411–412] [trans. 122–125] .
35. De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum 1.27.52 (PL 32.1332) [387–
388]; for a similar conception, see De quantitate animae (PL 32.1035–1080) [387–388];
Confessiones 10.6.9. For a discussion of this largely Neoplatonic conception of the soul, see
Ernest Fortin, Christianisme et culture philosophique au cinquième siècle. La querelle de l’âme
en Occident (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1959).
36. See especially De Principiis 1.4-8; 2.9. Although Origen offers this theory as an explanatory
hypothesis rather than as Church doctrine, it is a scheme that implicitly underlies much of his
exegesis and theological argument.
312
in the great and ultimately inexplicable event of sin, and God had created the
present material world as a place of medicinal exile and conversion, one still
remained faithful—the soul which was to become Jesus in human history; by
clinging to the Logos, he became inseparably one with him in spirit, as a lump
of iron plunged in fire becomes fiery through and through.37
Because this soul-substance acted as a mediator between God and flesh—
for it was not possible that God’s nature be mixed with a body without
some mediator—the God-man, as we call him, was born; this substance
took up an intermediary position, since it was not against its nature to take
up a body. But, on the other hand, as a rational substance, it did not find it
contrary to its nature to participate in God,38 to whom it had, as we said
before, totally yielded itself, as Word and Wisdom and Truth.39
For Origen, it is clearly the divine Logos, the agent of creation, who acts
in and through Jesus to communicate saving knowledge and power to fallen,
embodied intellects; he is the moving and expressive force in the soul of
Jesus, just as that soul is the moving and expressive force in Jesus’ body—
as Lothar Lies has phrased it, the “actual underlying subject” and “the
ultimate foundation of all Christological statements” for Origen. 40 Drawing,
somewhat fancifully, on a text in Lamentations, “The breath of our counte-
nance is Christ the Lord, of whom we said that we shall live under his shadow
among the nations,”41 Origen suggests in this same passage that Christ, the
eternal Son and Word of God “anointed” with his Spirit, is the inner “breath
of Jesus’ soul and body, which follow his intellectual movements as our own
shadow follows our physical gestures. 42 Without adopting Origen’s frame-
work narrative of the pre-incarnate life of Jesus (although, as we have said,
37. De Principiis 2.6.6.

38. In Rufinus’s Latin translation, capere deum: a phrase found also in the Latin translation of
Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 5. [praef.? Last chapter?].
40. “Das eigentliche tragende Subject [Christi] ist der Logos. Seine Persönlichkeit als der eine
letzte Grund aller christologischen Aussagen kommt in seiner Fürsorglichkeit aum Vorschein.”
Lothar Lies, “Vom Christentum zu Christus nach Origenes’ Contra Celsum,” Zeitschrift für
katholische Theologie 112 (1990) 176.
41. Lam 4.20.
42. De Principiis 2.6.7. See also Contra Celsum 3.41, where Origen affirms: “He, whom we think
and have believed to be God and Son of God from the beginning, is the very Logos and wisdom
and truth itself. We affirm that his mortal body and the human soul in him received the greatest
elevation not only by communion, but by union and intermingling, so that by sharing in his
divinity he was transformed into God.” (trans. Henry Chadwick [corrected edition: Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965] 156)
313
he did at least consider the idea of the pre-existence of human souls as one
way of articulating original sin), Augustine also identifies the soul of Jesus
as the dynamic link between the transcendent Logos and the world of physi-
cal bodies:
The Son of Man has a soul (he writes in an early Tractate on John’s Gos-
pel), and has a body. The Son of God, that is, the Word of God, has a human
being, consisting of a soul and a body. Just as a soul having a body does not
make two persons, but one human being, so the Word having a human be-
ing does not make two persons, but one Christ.43
And the place of contact between these two infinitely disparate beings is
Jesus’ soul, which—as a spiritual substance—is innately capable of participa-
tion in the spiritual life of God; so Augustine writes to his pagan correspondent
Volusianus in 411,
Unless the soul is mistaken in its understanding of its own nature, it is im-
material; much more immaterial is God’s Word. Therefore the combining
of God’s Word with a human soul ought to be more believable than the
combining of a soul and a body.44
One implication of this model for understanding the person of Christ is
that the conscious freedom of Jesus’ soul to determine his own actions is a key
element in the unity of his person.
Augustine anticipates later developments in classic Christological doc-
trine by clearly affirming the unconfused presence in the whole Christ of
both a human and a divine will. 45 Although Origen does not, as far as I
know, reflect directly on the importance of Christ’s two natural wills for our
understanding of the Christian message, as Maximus Confessor would do
four centuries later, this is clearly the implication of his portrait of Christ. It
is because “the soul which belongs to Christ so chose to love righteousness
as to cling to it unchangeably and inseparably, in accord with the immensity
of its love,” that it became one with the Word by quasi-natural bonds;46 yet
the Son’s own will, Origen argues in his Commentary on John, is “unchang-
ing from the will of the Father, so that there are no longer two wills but one
will; thus, because there is one will, the Son says, ‘I and the Father are
43. In Joannis Evangelium Tractatus 19.15 [413].

44. Ep. 137 [trans. 128].
45. See, for instance, Enarratio in Psalmum 93.19 [summer, 414]; Contra sermonem Arianorum
6.7 [419].
314
one.’” 47 The personal unity of Word with human being in Christ, in the eyes
of both writers, does not result in a mutilation of his humanity, but in its
perfection and free transformation.
4) Christ as Mediator. Both Origen and Augustine like to characterize the
central role of Christ in sacred history in the phrase of I Tim 2.5, as that of
“mediator between God and humans”: the one who restores God and intelli-
gent creatures to a harmonious and loving relationship with each other, such
as God had planned in creating them. There are differences, clearly, in the
way they tend to understand this mediation. For Origen, it is mainly identified
with the status of the Logos himself, even apart from his incarnation, as “im-
age of the invisible God” and “firstborn of all creation” (Col 1.15); it is the
Logos’s role to communicate to creatures knowledge of the inaccessible Fa-
ther, in a way that enables them to participate in wisdom and life.48 Although
Augustine also tends to speak of Christ’s mediatorship primarily in terms of
revelation, he usually emphasizes that this is due to his incarnation:
Therefore he is the mediator between God and humanity (he explains in a
sermon preached sometime between 409 and 411), because he is God with
the Father, because he is human among human beings. Divinity without
humanity is not a mediator; humanity without divinity is not a mediator.
But between divinity alone and humanity alone the mediating link is the
human divinity and the divine humanity of Christ.49
For both writers, the mediating work of the Son of God in the course of
created history involves movement, often described as a “journey” and usu-
ally linked with the pattern of his humiliation and glorification summed up in
Phil. 2.5–11, that key Pauline passage we have mentioned already. For Origen,
the real content of every human journey is growth in knowledge of the truth,
and in the holiness that is born of real knowledge. So, in a famous passage of
his Seventeenth Homily on Numbers, Origen sees the book’s long list of Israel’s
camping-spots in the desert, on their way to the Promised Land, as figural
47. Commentary on John 13.36. For a discussion of Origen’s treatment of the human and divine
wills in Christ and their role in determining his personal unity, see Rebecca Lyman, Christol-
ogy and Cosmology. Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius and Athanasius (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993) 74–80. Origen’s own reflections on the scene of Jesus’ agony
in Gethsemane, the classic New Testament text presenting the relationship of his human will
and the divine will, are in the Exhortation to Martyrdom 29 and the Commentary on John
13.249.
48. See De Principiis 2.6.1; Contra Celsum 6.17; 7.43.
49. Sermon 47.12.21; on humanity’s need for a mediator in order to find God, see also Confessions
7.18.24–21.27; 10.42.67–43.70; 11.2.4.
315
language for the soul’s growth in knowledge of spiritual things, guided by

God’s hand; we, too, need always to be ready to “fold the tents” of our own
particular stage of understanding and move close to our permanent place of
rest with God.50 In his own human life, the incarnate Word mirrored this jour-
ney of growth for us by first “emptying himself” of the sublime knowledge
that was his, and in taking on a human soul and body took on our human need
to grow, to learn, to question. Applying to Jesus Jeremiah’s words, “I do not
know how to speak—I am only a youth!” (Jer 1.6), Origen writes:
He learns, then, and in a certain way acquires knowledge—not of great
things, but knowledge of lower, smaller things; just as when I speak with
small children, I force myself to stammer in baby-talk, so the Savior, as
long as he is in the Father and remains in the majesty of divine glory, does
not speak human language, does not know how to talk to those below, but
then, when he comes in a human body, he says, “I do not know how to
speak, for I am too young”—young in terms of his bodily birth, but ancient
as the first-born of all creation.51
Jesus, for Origen, teaches us humility through a wide range of his human
actions, revealing for the first time that humility is a God-given virtue.52
For Augustine, too—and still more emphatically—the “way” marked out
for us by Jesus in his own history is the way of humility, which heals us
from the “swelling tumor” of pride. 53 The point of Jesus’ mediation, in fact,
is in Augustine’s view his role as way; so he writes, in Book XI of The City
of God:
It is as a human being that [Christ] is mediator, and through this, too, that
he is the way. If there is a way between the one walking and the point to-
wards which one is walking, one has a hope of reaching one’s goal; but if
there is none, or if one is unaware of how to get there, of what use is it to
know where one wants to go? There is only one way that is assured against
all error: that the very same person should be God and a human being—
God, as the goal to which we are going, and a human being, as the way by
which we go.54
Yet the very difficulty Augustine tells us he found himself in, as a young
Manichee learning to read the world anew through Platonist lenses, was that
50. Homily 17 on Numbers, 4 (SChr 29.348–349).

51. Homily 1 on Jeremiah 8 (SChr 232.212–214).
52. Contra Celsum 6.15.
53. A familiar metaphor; see, for example, Confessions 7.7.12.
54. De civitate Dei 11.2 [417]. For the same idea, see De doctrina Christiana 1.34.38.
316
he had not yet “embraced the Mediator” to walk on that way. And the reason
was that he had still not grasped the central direction of that way:
As yet I was not humble enough to hold the humble Jesus; nor did I under-
stand what lesson his weakness was meant to teach us. For your Word, the
eternal Truth, far exalted above even the higher parts of your creation, lifts
his subjects up towards himself. But in this lower world, he built for him-
self a humble habitation of our own clay, so that he might pull down from
themselves and win over to himself those whom he is to make subject to
him; lowering their pride and heightening their love, so that they might go
on no farther in self-confidence, but rather should become weak, seeing at
their feet the Deity made weak by sharing our coats of skin, so that they
might cast themselves, exhausted, upon him and be uplifted by his rising.55
To follow the way of the Mediator is to see in him the “mercy” of a “humble
God,”56 and to conform one’s mind and one’s heart to that humility. 57
5) The Goal of Faith. For both Origen and Augustine, too, the long-term
shape of Jesus’ saving effect on the life of the disciple is to lead him or her
more and more deeply into the knowledge of divine Truth that enables created
minds to participate in God’s life. Origen tends to identify this with a growing
ability to read Scripture not just “according to the flesh,” but “according to
the Spirit” (see II Cor 5.16), to be more and more aware of Christ’s presence,
as divine Word and Wisdom, in or beneath the surface-meaning of any given
text. In the introduction to his great Commentary on John, where he is talking
about the Christian’s ability to hear in all of Scripture the “good news” of
God’s promise fulfilled, Origen remarks:
One must be a Christian both in a spiritual way and in a bodily way. And
when it is required to proclaim the “bodily” Gospel, saying among fleshly
people that one “knows nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” (I
Cor 2.2) one must do that. But when they are found to be equipped with the
Spirit and to be bearing fruit in him, in love with heavenly Wisdom, then
one must give them a share in the Word that ascends upwards from the
Incarnation, towards what he “was in the beginning with God.” (John 1.2)58
55. Confessions 7.18.24 (trans. Albert C. Outler [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955] 152) (altered).
56. De catechizandis rudibus 4.8; cf. De Trinitate 4.4; De peccatorum meritis et de remissione
2.17.27.
57. The notion that humility is the condition for genuine knowledge of God and growth towards
union with him is a theme that runs through Augustine’s works; see, for example, Contra
academicos 3.19.42 [386]; In Joannis Evangelium Tractatus 25.11 [413]; De Trinitate 13.18.23
[416]; De praedestinatione sanctorum 15.31 [429].
58. Commentary on John1.7.43.
317
Significantly, Origen sees in the incident of Jesus’ transfiguration an invi-

tation to that same process of growth: one must “ascend” with him from one’s
worldly preoccupations and modes of knowing, after passing through the “six
days” of the present creation, to see him no longer in the “form of a servant”
but in the “form of God,” his divine identity shining like dazzling light through
the “garments” of the Scriptural text.59 For Augustine, too, the “way” laid out
for us by the Mediator—the way of humility—is precisely a way that leads
beyond darkness to light, beyond faith to knowledge, beyond the weighty
mortality of flesh to participation in God’s endless life. 60 This is the process
that he describes in Books 12–14 of De Trinitate as the mind’s growth from
the level of knowledge—which includes faith and characterizes our mental
process in this present life—to the level of wisdom, which is nothing less than
“the mind attaining to a share of [God’s] nature, truth and happiness,” “cleav-
ing to God” and seeing unchangeably everything that God sees.61 So Augustine
remarks, in a homily for Ascension Day, 410, “through Christ as human be-
ing, you find your way to Christ as God. . . . It is the same Christ, by which
you go and to which you are going”62—but the goal, he suggests, is to know
him not in the forma servi, but in the forma Dei. Or as he puts it in City of God
59. Commentary on Matthew 12.36–39. Frédéric Bertrand, in his now classic work Mystique
de Jésus chez Origène (Paris: Aubier, 1951) analyzes in much greater detail the ways in
which Origen presents this growth in knowledge of Jesus and personal relationship with
him, through Scirptural interpretation and through moral and spiritual growth. He classi-
fies this progress in terms of five images Origen himself uses in his Scriptural commentaries:
looking for Jesus (like Mary and Joseph at the end of Luke 2); approaching Jesus (like the
crowds and the sick, and like the disciples who “went into the house with him” in Matt
13.36); welcoming Jesus (like Peter in Mark 1.29, or Zacchaeus in Luke 19.6); following
Jesus (like the disciples ascending the mountain of the Transfiguration in Matt 17.1–8);
and touching Jesus (the hem of his garment: Mark 6.56; his feet, with penitential tears:
Luke 7.38; his head, with ointment: John 12.3; his breast, like the Beloved Disciple at the
Last Supper: John 13.23–25).
60. Although not explicitly described in terms of growth in and even beyond knowledge, August-
ine presents this progress as the purpose of the Incarnation in De Trinitate XIII: “For surely if
the Son of God by nature became son of Man by mercy for the sake of the sons of men (that is
the meaning of: “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us” [John 1.14]), how much easier
it is to believe that the sons of men by nature can become sons of God by grace and dwell in
God; for it is in him alone and thanks to him alone that they can be happy, by sharing in his
immortality; it was to persuade us of this that the son of God came to share in our mortality.”
(13.12; trans. Hill 353)
61. De Trinitate 14.20. This final state of participative consciousness or wisdom, which will only
be attained, by God’s free gift, after this present life, brings to perfection the image of God in
the created mind: ibid. 23–26.
62. Sermon 261.7 (PL 38.1206).
318
XI, “Humanity’s journey is to humanity’s God through the God who became
human.”63 As Henry Chadwick writes, “Both Origen and Augustine see the
historical Christ as a concession to our weakness, through whom we may rise
to the vision of the eternal.”64 And the reason is that for both of them human
salvation is ultimately nothing less than the loving, endlessly unifying con-
templation of God.
II. Differences. In a strikingly broad range of ways, then, I suggest, these
two great theological pioneers offer us a similar understanding of the role of
Christ as Incarnate Word and savior of a fallen creation. Clearly, however,
there are major differences between them, in emphasis, tone, and actual theo-
logical content, which we must keep in mind in order to grasp their
understanding of the person of Christ. In the brief space that remains for me
here, let me simply sketch out a few of these differences.
1) The Stability of Christ’s Bodily Nature and Appearance. One of Origen’s
most distinctive Christological themes is the variability or fluidity of Jesus’
bodily form. In a famous passage of his Contra Celsum, for instance, Origen
replies to the pagan Platonist’s suggestion that Jesus’ failure to reveal himself
as divine to all his contemporaries shows a lack of power:
Although Jesus was one (he writes), he had several aspects; and to those
who saw him he did not appear alike to all. That he had many aspects is
clear from the saying, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14.6),
and “I am the bread” (John 6.35), and “I am the door” (John 10.9), and
countless other such sayings. Moreover, that his appearance was not just
the same to those who saw him, but varied according to their individual
capacity, will be clear to people who carefully consider why, when about to
be transfigured on the high mountain, he did not take all the apostles, but
only Peter, James, and John. For they alone had the capacity to see his glory
at that time. . . . I think that at the time before he ascended the mountain
when his disciples alone came to him and he taught them the beatitudes,
even here when he was somewhere lower down the mountain, when it was
late and he healed those brought to him, delivering them from all illness
and disease, he did not appear the same to those who were ill and needed
his healing as he did to those who were able to ascend the mountain with
him and were in good health.65
63. De Civitate Dei 11.2 [417].

64. “Christian Platonism in Origen and Augustine” (above, n. 6) 230.
65. Contra Celsum 2.64 (trans. Chadwick 115).
319
Origen goes on to say that Jesus was generally visible to his contemporar-
ies only before he had conquered the powers of sin and death; “but after he
had ‘put off the principalities and powers’ (Col 2.15), all those who formerly
saw him could not look upon him, as he no longer had anything about him that
could be seen by the multitude.”66
Origen gives at least three explanations for what may seem to us a very
peculiar conception of Christ’s human form. One is to draw the analogy with
the Greek philosophical idea of “prime matter”: of itself, simple matter—the
metaphysical principle of continuity within change—is classically understood
as capable of receiving any form and quality, but as having no proper form of
its own; rather, “it is clothed with qualities such as the Creator wishes to give
it, and often it puts aside its former qualities and receives better and different
ones.”67 So the human body of Christ, he suggests, and in fact all human bod-
ies, should be understood as capable of transfiguration. Secondly, Origen
emphasizes that the Logos is the real subject, the controlling center, of the
personal form and actions of the human Christ, even though he has a complete
human soul and body. The human soul of Jesus freely chose to “cling” to the
Logos, Origen insists, and in the process was so transformed that it was no
longer susceptible to committing sin: “what formerly depended upon the will
was by the influence of long custom changed into nature.”68 Thirdly, Origen
sees the changing form of Christ’s appearance as an integral part of the
paedagogical process by which the Word leads fallen souls back to contem-
plative union with God. Origen writes, for instance, of Jesus’ transfiguration:
If you wish to understand the transfiguration of Jesus before those who
“ascend the high mountain privately with him,” you should realize that the
Jesus of the Gospels is understood more simply, and known, as one might
say, “according to the flesh” by those who have not ascended, through el-
evating works and thoughts, the “high mountain” of wisdom; but that he is
no longer known according to the flesh to those who have ascended, but is
understood as God throughout the Gospels, and is contemplated, by their
way of knowing, in the “form of God.” 69
Coming to know Jesus as God, as the Word with his human soul and
body, is the heart of the conversion process, in Origen’s view; and he seems
66. Ibid. (trans. Chadwick 115–116).

67. Ibid. 3.41 (trans. Chadwick 156).
68. De Principiis 2.6.5 (trans. George Butterworth [New York: Harper, 1966] 112).
69. Commentary on Matthew 12.37.
320
to have assumed that this could affect the very way Jesus’ contemporaries
actually saw him, just as it also determines the spiritual progress of the con-
temporary believer.
Augustine, on the other hand, offers no such speculations about Jesus’ physi-
cal form, and shows surprisingly little interest in the Transfiguration episode
in the Gospels. For him, the great contrast in Jesus’ redemptive “way” re-
mains that between the forma Dei, Jesus’ inner identity as eternal Word, which
is known only to the purified mind, and the forma servi, which the Word took
on to reveal to us his way of humility. Certainly, he assumes that the Logos
remained free with respect to creaturely necessity even when incarnate, and
therefore in some sense not bound by the laws of his human nature in the
same way that we are; but in fact, he assumed, the Logos did choose to make
these necessities his own, and to live under them.70 Whether even the eyes of
our risen bodies will be able literally to “see” God in heaven, too, is some-
thing Augustine discusses at length in the last book of The City of God; at
best, he suggests there, we will see him indirectly, in the renewed physical
forms of a new creation: “God will be so known by us, and shall be so much
before us, that we shall see Him by the spirit in ourselves, in one another, in
Himself, in the new heavens and the new earth, in every created thing.”71 But
Augustine never applies this notion of altered corporeality to the Jesus of the
Gospels, or to our knowledge of Jesus in the present life.
2) Grace, Freedom and Christ. One obvious difference in theological em-
phasis between Origen and Augustine is in their understanding of the present
condition of human freedom, and its dependence on the healing grace of
God to be effective. In the face of philosophical and Gnostic determinism,
Origen staunchly defends the continuing ability of created intellects to de-
termine their own moral choices, 72 even though he also affirms our need for
God’s gracious presence to be entirely successful in choosing the good;73 in
Augustine’s day, Jerome accused Pelagius and his followers of being
70. See Tarsicius J. Van Bavel, Recherches sur la christologie de Saint Augustin (Fribourg: Presses
Universitaires, 1954) 124–127.
71. De civitate Dei 22.29.
72. See especially De Principiis 3.1.
73. See, for example, Commentary on John, Greek fragment 45 (ed. A. E. Brooke 2; [Cambridge:
Cambridge Univeristy Press 1896] 259–261: good works are generated by Christ and the Church
together, as bridegroom and bride); Commentary on Matthew 10.19 (both human faith and
divine power are needed, if our lives are to bear fruit); Contra Celsum 7.83 (we need God’s
help if our conscience is to be completely pure).
321
Origenists in their affirmation of the human ability to pursue perfection. 74

Augustine, on the other hand, as his theological career progressed, empha-
sized ever more strongly the impotence of the human will to steer any of us
to perfection, or even to take the first steps in turning to God as savior.
This difference in perspective on the relationship of divine grace and human
freedom left traces in the ways Origen and Augustine understand the incarnate
Word. For Origen, the very union of Jesus’ rational soul with the Logos is rooted
in that soul’s unswerving, pre-incarnate choice “to ‘love righteousness’ (Ps 45.8),
so that, because of its immense love, it clung unchangeably and inseparably” to
the Word75 and “by yielding itself to the Word’s light and brilliance became with
him, from the beginning, one spirit.”76 For Augustine, on the other hand, the
Incarnation of God’s Word served as the ultimate model of God’s redemptive,
utterly unmerited gift of himself, a gift that stands at the origin of human free-
dom and choice rather than responding to it. So in his late work On the
Predestination of the Saints [428–429]—perhaps with a critical glance at what
he has heard of Origen’s Christology—Augustine remarks that “the most illus-
trious light of predestination and grace is the Savior himself—‘the mediator
himself between God and humanity, the human being Christ Jesus’ (I Tim 2.5).”77
The identification of God’s Son with the human Jesus is the cause of his full
humanity, including his ability to choose the good and bring it to realization; it
is by being taken up into the life and being of God the Son that the humanity of
Jesus, with all its faculties, comes into being—ipsa assumptione creatur!78
“Surely that gracious gift of his birth,” he writes in another late work, “joined
man with God, flesh with the Word, in the unity of a person. Good works
74. Ep. 133.3. On the connection between the Pelagian party and the Origenist tradition, see Clark
(above, n. 9) 194–244.
76. Ibid. 2.6.3.
77. De praedestinatione sanctorum 15.30 (trans. R. E. Wallis, in Whitney J. Oates [ed.], The Basic
Writings of Saint Augustine 1 [New York: Random House, 1948] 804) (altered). Augustine goes
on: “The human being {Jesus, how did he deserve this—to be assumed by the Word co-eternal
with the Father into unity of person, and to be the only-begotten Son of God? Was it because
any kind of goodness in Him went before [Incarnation}? What did he do before this? What did
he believe? What did he ask, that he should attain to this unspeakable excellence? Was it not by
the act and the assumption of the Word that that man, from the time he began to be, began to be
the only Son of God?” (ibid.) See also ibid. 31; Sermon 174.2 [413]: “The Word of God, God’s
unique Son, took up a human soul and flesh, not because it had first deserved this or labored
through its own virtue to receive this exalted station, but utterly gratis.”
78. Contra sermonem Arianorum 6.8 [419].
322
followed on that birth—good works did not merit it!”79 In us, too, it is our “new
birth” as God’s children by grace that enables us to be free for doing good.
3) The Body of Christ. In addition to differing understandings of the depth
and radicality of our human need for healing grace, Origen and Augustine had
different assumptions about the extent of salvation. Origen famously believed
that at the end of cosmic history, however distant that might be, God’s will to
“reconcile the world to himself” (II Cor 5.19) would be fully triumphant: evil
will come to an end, Christ will destroy all forces hostile to God, and all
intellectual creatures would be saved. 80 Augustine, on the other hand, remained
convinced that God’s final judgment of humanity would result in the eternal
damnation of those who remained hardened in the alienation of sin; in many
later works, he points out emphatically that the whole of humanity might justly
be damned because of its participation in Adam’s sin, and that the gratuitous
nature of God’s mercy is revealed precisely in that it is bestowed only on
some individuals. 81 This difference in soteriological optimism leaves its traces
in how Origen and Augustine use the term “body of Christ” in its corporate or
social sense. For Augustine, the “whole Christ (totus Christus),” a term that
often appears in his sermons as a key to understanding Biblical images, clearly
refers to the Church in its final perfection. Who is to be included in the Church,
Christ’s eschatological Body, is not yet fully clear, but certainly faith, bap-
tism, the transforming gift of the Holy Spirit, and perseverance in grace are
conditions for inclusion.82 Origen, on the other hand, does not shy away from
79. De correptione et gratia 11.30 [426].

80. See De Principiis 2.3.7; 3.6.1, 3; Commentary on John 1.16.91; Homilies on Joshua 8.5; Com-
mentary on Romans 8.9. For a discussion of his theory of apokatastasis or universal salvation,
and further literature, see my The Hope of the Early Church (2nd edition: Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson, 2003) 58–59.
81. See Ep. 186.4.12 [417]; Ep. 190.3.9–12 [418]; Ep 194.2.4–5 [418]; Serm 26.12.13 [418];
Enchiridion 25.99 [423–424]; De civitate Dei 21.12 [425–426]; De correptione et gratia 10.28
[426]; De praedestinatione sanctorum 8.16 [429]; De dono perseverantiae 14.35 [429].
82. See, for example, De peccatorum meritis et de remissione 1.31.60–33.62 [411]. In his Homilies
on the First Letter of John, Augustine uses the image of Christ’s Body, united by love and
mutual communion, as the boundary between the true (Catholic) Church and the false Church
(of the Donatists): see, for example, Hom. 10.3. For the concept of “Christ, head and members”
as a hermeneutical principle, see, for example, Serm 341.1; Enar. In Ps. 58.2; and see Michael
Cameron, Augustine’s Construction of Figurative Exegesis against the Donatists in the
Enarrationes in Psalmos (Diss. University of Chicago: Chicago, 1996); Michael Fiedrowicz,
Psalmus Vox Totius Christi. Studien zu Augustins Enarrationes in Psalmos (Freoburg: Herder,
1997); see also Fiedrowicz’s introduction to Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 1 (trans.
Maria Boulding: Hyde Park, NY.: New City, 2000) 43–60.
323
including all humanity, even all creation, in that eschatological Body, which
the Son will “hand over to the Father” (I Cor 15.28) in an act of final submis-
sion; so he writes, in a homily on Psalm 36:
The Apostle says that we are the body of Christ, and each of us individually
his members (I Cor 12.27). Christ, therefore, is the one of whom the whole
human race, perhaps even the totality of creation, is the body, and each of
us individually are his members. . . . When, then, he has healed all who are
called his body and his members, so that they no longer struggle in the
sickness of disobedience, and all the members are healthy and subject to
God, he rightly says that he will be subject to God, since we, his members,
will be obedient to God in all things.83
This conception of who is to be saved, who will be included in Christ’s
Body and who is affected, even now, by his grace, leaves its mark, in turn, on
the different approaches Origen and Augustine usually take to Scriptural ex-
egesis. Both of them, as we have said, regard the whole canon of Scripture as
containing a single message of salvation in Christ; but Origen’s usual approach
is to read this message, this Gospel, as good news for the individual seeking
God, for the soul whose only ultimate fulfillment is in union with God through
his Word, while Augustine’s common assumption is that the Gospel is for the
Church, and for those individuals whom God empowers to remain in the Church
by the grace of perseverance.
One example, of many possible ones, must suffice for us here. In the
eleventh book of his Commentary on Matthew, Origen offers an interpreta-
tion of the scene in Matthew 14.22–33, in which Jesus comes to his disciples
across the waves as they are being tossed by a storm on the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus allowed his disciples to sail alone and to fall into danger, Origen says,
to teach them
that the one who arrives at the other side reaches it because Jesus sails
along with him. But what is the boat into which Jesus caused the disciples
to enter? Is it perhaps the conflict of temptations and difficulties in which
anyone may be constrained by the Logos, into which one goes unwillingly,
as it were, when the Savior wishes to train his disciples… The Savior then
compels the disciples to enter into the boat of temptations and to go before
him to the other side, and through victory over them to go beyond critical
difficulties; but when they had come into the midst of the sea and the waves
in these temptations… they were not able, struggling as they were without
Jesus, to overcome the waves and the contrary wind and reach the other
83. Origen, Homily II on Psalm 36.1 (SChr 411.96).
324
side. And so the Word, taking compassion on them who had done all that
they could do to reach the other side, came to them walking upon the sea.84
For Origen, the familiar scene is a parable of human struggle with tempta-
tion, which providentially teaches us our need for the presence and instruction
of the Logos in our lives.
Augustine, on the other hand, in a sermon to his congregation on the same
text from about 400, sees in the passage a clear reminder of our need to be in
the Church. All of us are “foreign travelers,” he says, even though not all of us
are particularly eager to go home.85 Every voyage exposes one to storms:
So it’s essential we should stay in the boat, that is, that we should be car-
ried on the wood, to be enabled to cross this sea. Now this wood, on which
our feebleness is carried, is the Lord’s cross, with which we are stamped
and reclaimed from submersion in this world. . . . [Jesus goes off to pray
alone.] Meanwhile the vessel carrying the disciples—that is, the Church—
is being tossed about and battered by the storms of temptations and trials;
and there’s no easing up of the contrary wind, that is, of the devil’s oppo-
sition to her. But the one who is interceding for us is greater than he is. For
in this turbulent situation in which we find ourselves struggling, he gives
us confidence by coming to us and reassuring us. The one thing he has to
do is stop us from shaking ourselves loose in our agitation in the boat, and
hurling ourselves into the sea. Because even if the boat is being agitated
and tossed about, still it is a boat. It alone carries the disciples, and re-
ceives Christ on board. Sure, it’s in distress and danger in the sea, but
without it we all perish immediately. So keep yourself in the ship, and turn
to God with your requests. . . . If God enables seafarers to come safely to
port, is he going to leave his Church to her fate, and not bring her through
to the final haven of rest?86
The Church is our boat, our place of safety even when it appears to be
going down; the Church is where the frightened disciple can expect to en-
counter the absent Christ; the Church is what Christ will ultimately save, and
so will save all those still on board her. Christ’s Body, for Augustine, is a very
particular group of chosen individuals, sealed and nourished by the sacra-
ments and enabled by grace to remain faithful, and it is in them that his power
is felt and his presence realized.
84. Commentary on Matthew 11.5 (trans. John Patrick: Ante-Nicene Fathers 10 [repr. Grand Rap-
ids: Eerdmans, 1980] 434–435) (altered).
85. Sermon 75.2; for this same idea, see De Doctrina Christiana 1.4, from about the same time.
86. Sermon 75.2–4 (trans. Edmund Hill; St. Augustine: Sermons III [Brooklyn: New City, 1991]
304–305).
325
One could say many other things, obviously, about the understanding of
the person and work of Christ that runs through the work of these two semi-
nally influential Fathers of the Church. Despite differences in language and
theological culture, and despite Augustine’s own uneasiness about Origen’s
orthodoxy, based on the conflicting estimates of his own contemporaries, they
clearly share a great deal in their approach to understanding Jesus. Both were
unrelentingly Christocentric in their approach to understanding the story of
the world and the Mystery of God; both read Scripture as a single proclama-
tion of Christ, a single Gospel; both understood Christ as God the Son, present
in our world in the fullness of our human nature and sharing our human expe-
rience, yet in his central identity divine; both identified the way of salvation
as a journey with Christ, a journey through humility to participation in the life
of God that can be best understood in terms of the knowledge that is also
love—knowing Christ crucified, and moving through his death and resurrec-
tion, Good Friday and Easter, towards knowing him in glory, knowing him,
the Son of God, as he is.
Towards the end of The City of God, Augustine asks what Paul means in
saying, “No other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid: Jesus
Christ.” (I Cor 3.11)
In a building, the foundation comes first. Whoever, then, has Christ in his
heart, so that no earthly or temporal things—not even those that are legiti-
mate and allowed—are preferred to him, has Christ as a foundation.87
Surely Origen would say the same thing—as would countless later voices
in the Christian spiritual tradition. As disciples today, we still turn to Origen
and Augustine, still engage their thought and puzzle over its oddities, because
they have become for us a means of drawing closer to that foundation: be-
cause they teach us, as they have taught Christians for over seventeen centuries,
to build our lives on the Mystery and the Person of Christ.
87. De civitate Dei 21.26 [426] (trans. Marcus Dods; in Oates [ed.] [above, n. 76] 600) (altered).
326

Brian Daley Origen and Augustine On The Person of Christ

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Brian Daley Origen and Augustine On The Person of Christ

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Brian Daley Origen and Augustine On The Person of Christ

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Augustinian Studies 36:2 (2005) 299–326

Saint Augustine Lecture 2004

WORD, SOUL, AND FLESH:

Brian E. Daley, S.J.

ongoing tradition of Christian thought, as remarkably similar. Both of them

3. It is interesting to compare Augustine’s discussion of the relevance of traditional learning—

Although Origen had been criticized by contemporaries as a theological risk-

Syriac Christian sources had suggested—or was rather to be thought of as radi-

8. For an illuminating discussion of the background and implications of this “anthropomorphite

a letter to Jerome written in 394 or 395, Augustine encourages the scholar of

16. Contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas, CCL 49.170.161–162.

spends as number of chapters criticizing the view of “tender-hearted Chris-

21. De haeresibus 43 (CCL 46.310.14–311.26).

In any case, as I have already suggested, it is difficult to know precisely

25. “Christian Platonism in Origen and Augustine” (see above, n. 6) 229.

mystery at the heart of Christian faith—something that more technical cat-

37. De Principiis 2.6.6.

43. In Joannis Evangelium Tractatus 19.15 [413].

language for the soul’s growth in knowledge of spiritual things, guided by

50. Homily 17 on Numbers, 4 (SChr 29.348–349).

Significantly, Origen sees in the incident of Jesus’ transfiguration an invi-

63. De Civitate Dei 11.2 [417].

66. Ibid. (trans. Chadwick 115–116).

Origenists in their affirmation of the human ability to pursue perfection. 74

79. De correptione et gratia 11.30 [426].

83. Origen, Homily II on Psalm 36.1 (SChr 411.96).

You might also like