Stephen J Davis on the Mystery of Incarnation in the Writings of Origen

I love the writings of Stephen J Davis.  He has all the language skills necessary to draw a straight line from the very beginning of Alexandrian Christianity down to the modern Coptic religion.  He also has a very perceptive mind and always manages to connect the ideas in early writers like Origen and Athanasius with the evolving Alexandrian tradition.  My one criticism with Davis is that he doesn't develop his understanding of Alexandrian mysticism as being developed from the Papacy and its central image of the Patriarch sitting enthroned AS the living representative of God the Father in heaven.

The initiated members of the Church say God in the manner in which the ancient Israelites saw God - i.e. not with their mind's eye but WITH THEIR OWN EYES (Heb. khaza) both on Horeb and again when Moses appears before them enthroned in Deuteronomy chapter 33.  As I have noted many times before, the torches at the sides of the head piece on the stolen Episcopal chair of Alexandria take us back to this ULTIMATE revelation of Moses understood now as a FUTURE promise fulfilled only with the coming of Mark in Alexandria.

This, I believe, is the ultimate revelation in the tradition and connects Alexandrian Christianity with Philo and the Alexandrian Jewish tradition of the first century.  We can't afford to lose sight of the fact that the religion that Mark purportedly established in Alexandria was a mystery religion.  Celsus clearly intimates that the Christians venerate an enthroned man during those mysteries [Against Celsus Book III].  It's there in black and white for anyone who wants to disentangle his argument.

Of course all of this requires imagination, something most scholars shy away from like vampires from the light. Yet you can't fault them for this.  No one wants to be wrong.

In any event here is Davis's treatment of the mysticism of 'incarnation' in the writings of Origen from Coptic Christology in Practice. My comments will follow.

A generation after Clement, in the writings of Origen of Alexandria, one encounters really the first systematic attempts by an Alexandrian theologian to think about the problems of divine embodiment posed by the doctrine of the Incarnation.  In his masterwork On First Principles, Origen articulates the philosophical dilemma he faced in imagining how God became human, of envisioning how the perfect supreme Being took on imperfect flesh.


When ... he see in him some things so human that they appear in no way to differ from the common frailties of mortals, and some things so divine that they are appropriate to nothing else than the primal and ineffable nature of  deity, the human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake himself.  If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds one returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death [De Princ 2.6.2]


Origen expresses the paradox or mystery of the Incarnation as part of a divine 'economy' (oikonomia) that encompasses God's providential actions even before the Creation narrated in Genesis.  As in the case of Clement, Origen trains his attention on human souls as the prime beneficiaries of this plan of salvation, but he goes far beyond Clement in developing a fuller account of Christ's own human soul and the role it played in the Incarnation.


As a speculative theologian, Origen was keenly interested in conjecturing about the nature of the divine realms and raising questions regarding the existence of the cosmos before the creation of the material world.  In an attempt to answer such questions, he envisioned a primal cosmos in which all rational beings (oi logikoi) or 'minds' (oi noes) enjoyed a blissful union with God and shared in God's eternal attribute of love, which is conceived as a form of warmth or heat.


However, according to Origen's cosmology, this original union was disrupted by a heavenly fall of these rational beings from the singular, divine perfection.  He pictures this fall as one grounded in free will; after becoming distracted from the contemplation of God and choosing to sin, the rational beings begin to cool, condense and fall away from God.  In the process they become souls; for, as Origen observed, the Greek word for soul, psyche, comes from the verb psychesthai, meaning 'to cool.'  As these souls fall, God transforms their ethereal bodies into material bodies that differed according to their degree of merit or demerit.  Some souls ended up being assigned to archangels and angels, some to demons and the devil (who is cast as the most material of all beings).


According to Origen, the mind of Christ was the only one that did not become distracted and sink away from God; his was the only 'soul' that did not cool off in this primeval fall.  In remaining united with God, Christ's soul thoroughly assimilated God's 'essential attributes' (substantiae), and was therefore ideally equipped to function as the crucial mediating element between the divine Word and Christ's human body in the Incarnation.


Therefore in Origen's thought, the Incarnation marks the union of both the Word and Christ's human soul (which are bound together for eternity) with the body of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  As in the case of Christ's soul and its union with the divine Word prior to creation, so too in the case of his human body assumed by the Word in the Incarnation: in both instances the superior power of the Word effects a change in that with which it unites. Having already conferred the 'essential attributes' of his divinity upon Christ's soul, the word deifies Christ's body as well.  'We say that mortal body and the human soul within it have received the greatest things not only by their communion (koinonia) with him, but also by their union (henosis) and mixing up (anakrasis): after having partaken of his divinity, they were changed into God.' [Cels. 3.41.7 - 11]  This passage is taken from his apologetic work Against Celsus.  Earlier in the same treatise, he characterizes Jesus as a 'partaker in the divine nature' [cf. 2 Peter 1:4] and then goes on to emphasize that through the Incarnation 'the human nature and the divine began to be woven together, in order that the human, by communion with that which is more divine, might become divine, not in Jesus alone, but in all those who, with the help of faith, grasp hold of the life that Jesus taught.' [ibid 3.38.46 - 49]


In such passages one begins to discern how Origen's doctrine of deification takes the mechanics of the Incarnation as a generative model.  In Origen's other writings, 'this life that Jesus taught' is variously described as a form of progress into 'the order of angels', a process in which the faithful become 'sons of God' and 'one spirit' with the divine Son, and a means by which they 'become superior not only to their bodily nature, but even to the wavering and fragile movements of the soul itself', by which the soul itself casts off the vestiges of irrationality and is made 'wholly spiritual.' [De Princ. 1.8.4]  Thus through imitation of Christ's example, human beings too may be transformed (through the vital agency of the Godhead) into 'partakers of the divine nature' (2 Peter 1:4) [ibid 4.4.4]


Like Clement of Alexandria before him, Origen describes the fruit of such deification primarily in terms of the rational activity of the human mind or soul.  This is especially evident in chapter 2 of his Commentary on Gospel of John, where he emphasizes the connection between the Word's singular status as divine Reason and our multiple participation in the Word as rational beings: 'The Word (ho logos) is the source of the reason (ho logos) that is in each rational being  (ho logikos); the reason (ho logikos) which is in each creature is not like the former called, par excellence, the Word (ho logikos). [Com John 2.2.15]  Later in the same work Origen similarly describes how human beings are endowed with reason, how 'we become rational creatures (ho logikoi) in a divinely inspired manner (entheos) [ibid 37.268]


Thus Origen defines human deification in terms of a parallel correspondence between God's divine essence and our participation (metoche) in God's attributes. 'Everything that exists beside the Very God is deified by participation in God's divinity, and is not to be called 'God' (ho theos, with the article), but rather more properly 'god' ('theos', without the article). [Com John 2.2.17]  In the end it is the incarnate Christ who effects the transformation from the Godhead like water from a well 'so that they might be deified, he gave them a bounteous share of it according to his good nature.' [ibid]  Human beings are said to 'take the form of gods (morphousthai theoi) when they remain, along with the Word, 'in unceasing contemplation of the Father's depths.' [ibid 2.2.18]  Through such rational contemplation, human souls hold the potential for reattaining union with God.


While Origen could readily envision the divinization of the human soul, the human body also began to play a role (albeit, a somewhat more ambivalent one) in his doctrine of human salvation.  The fact that Christ's body attained union (henosis) with divinity to such an extent that it was changed into God (eis theon metabeblekenai) raises the potential that it should serve as a model for human bodies as well.  Indeed in Origen's Commentary on the Gospel of John, Christ is identified as 'the pattern for the entire unified body of the saved.' [Com John 1.35.225]  However, Origen notably characterizes the nature of Christ's bodily participation in divinity in terms of a 'lightening' of the flesh: 'It follows upon this to investigate whether it is possible to see in human affairs something between "the Word became flesh" and "the Word was God" - in such a way that the Word was reconstituted and made lighter little by little after he had become flesh, in order that he might become what he was in the beginning, God the Word who is with the Father.' [ibid 1.37.276. 1 - 6]  Thus, when Origen speaks about the deification of the body assumed by the incarnate Word, he is in fact envisioning a process whereby that body is increasingly divested of its fleshly aspects.


One sees a mimetic correspondence to this christological lightening of the flesh in Origen's eschatological descriptions of human bodies and the forms they are to take in their final redeemed (i.e. deified) state.  While he does not arrive at a definitive answer on the subject, he tends to support the notion that, in this state, human bodies either 'lead a bodiless existence' or at the very least are 'united to best and purest spirits' and 'changed ... into an ethereal condition.' [De Princ. 2.3.7]  


However in this life, it is the soul's contemplation of God that specifically anticipates and enacts the future condition: 'An intellect which has been purified and has transcended all material things is deified (theopoieitai) by what it contemplates in order that it may perfect the contemplation of God.' [Com John 32.27.338 - 339]  Furthermore, prayer and the cultivation of moral virtues are prerequisites for those who wish to be deified: by 'praying without ceasing' [1 Thes. 5.17], one acquires 'a condition that is being deified by the Word'  Through such a prayerful contemplation, souls are 'fed' (trephomenoi) by the Word - 'the supra-substantial bread' - and thereby experience a foretaste of deification.  Here, Origen invokes the image of eucharistic participation in the body of Christ, by (like Clement) interprets this participation as one that primarily pertained to the spiritual faculties of the human soul.