Thesis on "Origen's Doctrine of Reincarnation"

Thesis 18 pages (4907 words) Sources: 18 Style: Harvard

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Origen remains one of the most tantalizing, and often frustrating, thinkers of early Christianity for multiple reasons; Origen's own work is already complex enough, because his hypotheses regarding some of the theological and dogmatic issues facing the young Church necessitated the formulation of a complex cosmology, but the difficulty in understanding it is complicated by the fact that central components of Origen's work was subsequently deemed anathema, precipitating the destruction or alteration of many of his texts. In fact, there is even evidence to suggest that "his friends imposed a sort of informal censorship on works and passages that seemed to them to besmirch his orthodoxy," such that the only extant versions of Origen's work comes to us through a variety of redactors and Bowdlerizers (MacGregor 1990, p. 58). As such, he is alternately considered a heretic and "a kind of superhero of Christian piety and scholarship," depending on who happens to be reading him, and in the end one may only ever begin to approach the complete content of his ideas (Grafton 2008, p. 22).

This is why what is perhaps his most controversial work, De Principiis, appears to argue for a relatively straightforward form of metempsychosis, or reincarnation, wherein the soul inhabits multiple bodies (whether physical or spiritual) over the course of finite periods within an otherwise infinite universe, but elsewhere he directly rejects the notion of transmigration, claiming that it a notion external to Christianity. While Origen's subsequent condemnation as a heretic might lead one to assume that Origen was merely covering his tracks by arguing for a kind of reincarnation by a different name, at the time of his writing ecumenical standards had not yet been fully set, and by his own admission his propositions were theoretical exercises, "in the manner rather of an investigation and discussion, than in that of fixed and certain decision" (2007b, p. 260). While he ultimately produced a robust, complex account of the human soul, God, eternity, and the observable universe, he nevertheless maintained that these were merely propositions based on the available evidence, and that "how things will be […] is known with certainty to God alone, and to those who are His friends through Christ and the Holy Spirit" (2007b, p. 262).

Therefore, the goal of this study is to unambiguously determine Origen's position regarding metempsychosis, as well as the reason why this position, among others, was deemed anathema following the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Examining Origen's work in detail alongside the history of the early church suggests that Origen did advocate a complex form of reincarnation, and that this idea was ultimately condemned not strictly due to the content of Origen's texts, but rather because Origen's theories were taken up and altered by groups that would eventually come under the ire of Justinian I, the dictatorial emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, such that Origen and his notion of metempsychosis was condemned alongside the emperor's political and theological enemies.

Before examining Origen's theory of metempsychosis, it will first be useful to consider the instance where Origen appears to directly discard the notion of reincarnation, as a means of better understanding precisely how unique Origen's theory is. In Book XIII of his commentary of the Gospel of Matthew, Origen considers Matthew chapter 17, where, following Jesus' transfiguration, the disciples ask him "Why then say the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?" (NIV 17:10). Jesus responds by telling them that "Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him," after which "the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist" (NIV 17:12-13). Almost immediately Origen appears to take a firm position against any notion of reincarnation, stating that "in this place it does not appear to me that by Elijah the soul is spoken of, lest I should fall into the dogma of transmigration, which is foreign to the church of God, and not handed down by the Apostles, nor anywhere set forth in the Scriptures" (2007a, p. 474). Origen goes on to quote Scripture in support of this argument, stating that transmigration is:

In opposition to the saying that "things seen are temporal," and that "this age have a consummation," and also to the fulfillment of the saying, "Heaven and earth shall pass away," and "the fashion of this world passeth away," and "the heavens shall perish" and what follows (2007a, p. 474).

Origen goes on to list some fairly straightforward problems with the notion of transmigration in terms of sheer logistics; for example:

If any one soul is always being removed from the definite number of souls and returns no longer to the body, sometime after infinite ages, as it were, birth shall cease; the world being reduced to some one or two or a few more, after the perfection of whom the world shall perish, the supply of souls coming into the body having failed (2007a, p. 474).

A cursory reading of these lines would suggest that Origen rejects reincarnation outright, and indeed, it would be difficult to argue otherwise so long as one is talking about the most generally discussed notion of reincarnation; that is, the idea that the soul inhabits a succession of bodies as penance (or reward) for behavior, until that point at which the soul has effectively paid for any past sins and is granted access to a higher, final state (regardless of whether it is a state of pure spirit or some heavenly body). This evidence has led some scholars to argue that Origen is clearly anti-reincarnation, and views "reincarnation in the Pythagorean form that was transmitted to Plato implies a fatalistic conception of the soul's destiny" (MacGregor 1990, p. 51).

One must wonder, then, how Origen could square this unambiguous rejection of transmigration with his assertion in De Principiis that:

Both in those temporal worlds which are seen, as well as in those eternal worlds which are invisible, all those beings are arranged, according to a regular plan, in the order and degree of their merits; so that some of them in the first, others in the second, some even in the last times, after having undergone heavier and severe punishments, endured for a lengthened period, and for many ages, so to speak, improved by this stern method of training, and restored at first by the instruction of angels, and subsequently by the powers of a higher grade, and thus advancing through each stage to a better condition, reach even to that which is invisible and eternal, having traveled through, by a kind of training, every single office of the heavenly powers (2007b, p. 261).

Although Origen extends the possible bodies into which a soul might migrate to include those of the angels, at first glance this does not appear substantially different from the idea of transmigration he so clearly discards; while the potential bodies are different, the fundamental movements appear largely unchanged. However, there are subtle yet important differences between the two ideas, but in order to see them more clearly, one must examine the context in which Origen proposes his notion of metempsychosis.

The passage from De Principiis quoted above comes in chapter six of Book I, within the context of Origen's discussion of "the end or consummation." Origen reads Paul's statement that Jesus "must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet," to mean that in the end, everything will be reunited in God, due to the fact that God has "put everything under his feet," according to Psalm 8:6 (I Corinthians 15:25, 27, NIV). The subjugation of God's enemies, then, is in reality no different from "this very subjugation by which we also wish to be subject to Him, by which the apostles also were subject, and all the saints who have been followers of Christ" (2007b, p. 260). Origen is proposing an end wherein the ultimate fate of every created thing, whether angels, demons, or humans, is essentially the same; that is, all are recalled to once again be "in" Christ, in the same way "that in Christ and through Christ were all things made and created" (2007b, p. 262). However, Origen's goal is not necessarily to describe the beginning or the end, but rather "to explain the diverse, hierarchical and corporeal world that emerged from this pristine state, in such a way as not to implicate the Creator in an act of injustice" (Martens 2012, p. 230). Thus, he proposes a means by which the wide variety of actions and moral status seen in human existence might be reconciled with an eternal, inherently pure God.

From here Origen proposes a kind of cosmological inference regarding the relationship of the created, temporal existence of individuals (whether angels, demons, or humans) to the eternal existence of God; because "the end is always like the beginning," one may presume that just as "there is one end to many things, so there spring from one beginning many differences and varieties," such that the pocket of temporality… READ MORE

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