Origen: the problem of interaction between religion and philosophy

Contents From the author Introduction Chapter I. Interaction of cultures: causes and results. Specifics of the genesis of Christian culture Paragraph 1. Development of culture in connection with intercultural interaction Paragraph 2. Specifics of the genesis of Christian culture. The concept of religion and its place in culture Paragraph 3. Origen and the formation of the Christian religion and culture Chapter II. Culturological reconstruction of Origen's worldview Paragraph 1. Biographical prerequisites for Origen's synthesis 1. Education 2. Specifics of teaching and patterns in writing works. 3. The problem of teaching Origen from Ammonius Sakkos Paragraph 2. Synthesis of Origen - metaphysical foundations of the system 1. Origen in the context of the era of Stoicism Platonism of the 2nd-3rd centuries (Mesoplatonism) 2. Platonic themes of Christian culture and Origen The origin of the soul The doctrine of freedom and reason The Fall 3. The role of heresies in the genesis of Christian culture in the bosom of antiquity Gnosticism Monarchianism - the end of the second and the beginning of the third century Paragraph 3. Origen's synthesis - theological foundations: the framework of a new culture 1. Christian sources of Origen 2. Reconstruction of the theological foundations of Origen's synthesis A) Ontology - philosophy in the service of the design of Christian dogmatics God and his disclosure. Trinity Salvation and restoration B) Anthropology C) Ethical thought - optimistic spirituality 3. Exegetical method and the doctrine of knowledge A) Exegetical method - the doctrine of the interpretation of sacred Scripture B) The doctrine of mystical knowledge. Revealing exegesis B) Spiritual themes - an example of Origen's exegesis Conclusion. Origen and the genesis of Christian culture in the bosom of antiquity Sources Bibliography In Russian historiography, there has long been a need for a study concerning the life and work of the great theologian, founder of the Eastern patriotic tradition, Origen of Alexandria. Both the personality of Origen himself and the period in the history of the Christian Church that this personality personifies appear before us as extremely interesting. We are talking about the time when Christianity, overcoming the initial tendency to isolation, appears on the world stage, about the time when Christianity puts its inherent potential into the foundation of a new culture, in the area of ​​which we all form our worldview, our value systems. Origen was not afraid to accept the challenge of the new era, but with faith he accepted everything that the circumstances and conditions of his time provided him with. Do not reject anything that was not first thought through, that was not first understood. His opponents were his main teachers. This approach to assessing the cultural and historical values ​​of the past and another culture appears to be very relevant today. It is hoped that this work will make its contribution to understanding the position of this person and his role in the formation of Christian culture. I express my deep gratitude to all those whose advice, comments, and involvement made this work possible: Joseph Mahe, Nal Aleksandrovich Khokhlov, Vladimir Nikolaevich Akulinin, Stalin Sergeevna Rozova, Kirill Alekseevich Timofeev. The relevance of the study lies in the need to study a number of problems that arise in situations of mutual influence of several cultural phenomena, which primarily occurs in the interaction of such “cultural” phenomena as philosophy and religion. In our time, when the influence of the religious factor on the life of society has increased significantly, the habit of contrasting religion and philosophy has taken root in the minds of contemporaries, where philosophy is understood as a general reflexive theory of self-consciousness of the individual and society, based on rational principles, capable of contributing to the unity of society and its sustainable development, and religion means the irrational confidence in the existence of the transcendent, expressed in fanaticism and opposing a person to society. At the same time, it is obvious that, historically, religion and the religious consciousness it generates had a significant positive impact on the development of both European civilization, laying its value foundations, and a number of other civilizations. The modern understanding of religion, drawing an impassable boundary between these two phenomena, neglects the fact that both of them are cultural phenomena that interact in complex ways, but at the same time complement each other. The most important factor in the development of world culture was precisely the mutual influence and interaction of these two cultural phenomena. An example is not only the formation of Christianity on the basis of Jewish and ancient worldviews, but also the complex processes of rooting Buddhism and Islam in new cultural areas, when it was the mutual influence of the existing worldview and “imported” theological ideas that determined the face of the new culture that emerged as a result of this mutual influence. However, such mutual influence acquires particular importance on the basis of the Christian worldview, since it, having appeared within the framework of ancient culture, which believed in its main features the goal of human development in wisdom, the path to which was philosophy, and growing out of the purely religious principles of Jewish thinking, was forced from the very beginning of its existence to make its way in the unfriendly environment of Hellenistic philosophers, thereby interacting with Greek philosophy, which sometimes led to identification with her. The choice of Origen as the main figure of the study is not accidental. In the history of Christianity, this is the first thinker who consciously accomplished a synthesis of Christian and ancient worldviews in the area of ​​ancient culture, which became possible by understanding the complex nature of the nature of culture itself, as a mechanism for the interaction of various phenomena of human spiritual activity. Without Origen, the history of Christian culture and its such an important element as theology (in this case, Eastern) would have been torn apart. The struggle of many different directions of the emerging Christian teaching of the 2nd-3rd centuries. suddenly “resolved” by the “golden age” of Christian thought of the 4th century, which seems to have no basis in the previous tradition, since in comparison with it it appears as a set of “heresies”. This is certainly not true. It is the study of Origen that helps and allows us to understand the continuity of the Eastern tradition. Before Origen, Christianity, from an intellectual point of view, acted primarily as part of the Jewish tradition, or as a source of new ideas and characters for people of essentially ancient culture, even if they called themselves Christians, fiercely defending Christianity itself; Christianity as a culture has not yet formed. Only doctrine was perceived as separate in Christianity. With Origen, it becomes possible for the emergence of a new culture, the ideological basis of which was religious consciousness. The main problems of ancient culture were solved in the field of philosophy. Origen translates their solution into the plane of religious teaching. In general, we can talk about the emergence of religion in the strict sense of the word, since thanks to the introduction of the concept of “Transcendent,” the very methodology of thinking and solving any problems changes. Thus, the emergence of such a cultural phenomenon as religion leads to the formation of Christian culture. In this process, Origen plays a huge role. It is important to emphasize the following: a clear distinction between theology and philosophy is undoubtedly a feature of our time, which emerged only in the era of late scholasticism. However, in the era under study, there was not only a clear, but no distinction at all between philosophy, i.e. strictly speaking, wisdom (σοφία), the path to which was knowledge (in the sense of γνῶσις), and ancient religiosity was not. Ancient philosophy was highly religious (it must be borne in mind that the theory typical of the Marxist point of view that at that time it was possible to distinguish the materialist tradition (for example, in Epicurus, Democritus, Lucretius, etc.) undoubtedly does not stand up to criticism, since all this so-called “materialism” of antiquity is completely plastic, dependent on the general dominants of that era, which is correctly noted by A.F. Losev 1 Ancient philosophy is religious because ancient culture in general is religious. Religious metaphysics (especially in the form of theogony) was necessarily an integral part of ancient culture; the status it acquired within the framework of the ancient worldview is another matter. Therefore, it is incorrect to talk about the interaction of philosophy and theology, meaning Christian theology, in late antiquity at the time of the birth of Christianity. We should be talking about the interaction of cultures, namely cultures taken from the point of view of the characteristic features of their theoretical speculation, speculation, expressing the defining cultural features, the general state of mind of the bearers of the culture. Moreover, ancient philosophy was by no means based on rational thinking, that is, it is impossible to draw a strict distinction between religion and philosophy in antiquity from the point of view of the modern understanding of this difference - philosophy is a space of thought derived from rational foundations, while religion is from irrational ones. That is why we should talk specifically about the cultural study of the interaction of two worldviews in the process of the genesis of a new culture. How did Christianity think of itself as a continuation of antiquity and what did it see as its characteristic features, since it perceived itself not so much as a successor to ancient culture, but as a new culture? So, a purely philosophical analysis of the problem of the relationship between philosophy and theology in this period is incorrect. Thus, the essence of the problem that forms the problematic field of research is precisely the lack of a holistic cultural analysis of the problem of interaction between the Christian religion and ancient culture in the process of the genesis of Christian culture. It must be borne in mind that the formation of the Church’s views proceeded gradually and even in a zigzag manner, sometimes leading to a dead end. At the same time, every church thinker tried, to the best of his ability, to help the Church in solving its problems; and, despite the fact that his point of view often only harmed the Church, he deserves to be appreciated in connection with his original position. Let us try from this point of view to look at the role of its major representative Origen in the history of theology and show that the activities of this man, whose orthodoxy in some matters was controversial, undoubtedly laid the foundations of Christian culture. 2. There is currently no comprehensive study of this topic. The researchers primarily concern the problem of the relationship between “faith and reason” in the context of the formation of European philosophy, but not religion and philosophy as the determining phenomena of Christian and ancient cultures, respectively, in a culturological sense, and the second requires the solution of a number of special problems, and most importantly, as has already been said, research is only possible in a culturological manner. In accordance with the goals of our work, we classify essays devoted to this topic. – The first group of researchers: the works of philosophers and cultural scientists who set a general understanding of such terms as culture, the phenomenon of culture, used in developing the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of research, the conceptual matrix, or language of research (in the words of T. Kuhn), within the framework of which the work was carried out, the matrix that set the specific author’s understanding of culture, “since there are no facts independent of the paradigm, and therefore, a neutral language of observation” 2 It is the theory that determines what facts will be included in meaningful experience. Such philosophers and cultural experts were: A. Toynbee, Y. Lotman, D.S. Likhachev, L. Gumilyov, O. Spengler, N. Berdyaev, K. Jaspers, N. Konrad, E. Markaryan, V.V. Zenkovsky, M.S. Kagan. The methodological significance of the category “culture”, its relationship with other philosophical categories has been deeply studied in the works of A.I. Arnoldova, E.A. Ballera, V.P. Fofanov and others, who showed the complexity of the concept of culture, due to the ambiguity of the spiritual activity that constitutes the substance of culture. – Second group: studies related to the study of both specific aspects of the life of early Christian culture and late antiquity, as well as the thinker in question in the context of his synthesis: A. Kruzel, A. Spassky, V.V. Bolotova, A.V. Kartashova, M.E. Posnova, R. Barra, V.V. Bychkova, P. Minina, Henri de Lubac, G. G. Mayorova, V. V. Sokolova and others, who in their research developed a vision of Christian philosophy, determined its place within the framework of the ancient worldview and its relationship to the modern type of thinking, which is very important in understanding the specifics of early medieval thinking, and consequently, in understanding the meaning of the interaction of different cultural phenomena of that time. A significant role in the study of this problem was played by such researchers as S.S. Averintsev, M.M. Bakhtin, V.N. Lossky, L.N. Karsavin, Ch.F. Copleston, who pointed out the incorrectness of transferring the modern understanding of the difference between philosophy and theology to the period of the formation of Christianity. The first of these groups also belongs to the “Annals” School, which focused its attention on the study of the entire society in its integrity and diversity of social connections. This approach required the involvement of data from related sciences, a comprehensive synthesizing description, which necessarily gave rise to the anthropological principle of research, knowledge of the historical and cultural process from the inside - through a person, through penetration into the self-consciousness of the people of the era being studied, into the everyday conditions of their existence. This principle is the basis of our work. At present, there is no comprehensive study of the life and teachings of Origen in Russia, despite the fact that Origenology has a long scientific tradition in Europe. We have only small studies of individual aspects of Origen’s activity (the doctrine of the Trinity, anthropology, the practice of asceticism), and even then from the beginning of our century or even the end of the past, and rather only in a summary presentation, with rare happy exceptions. There is not even a strictly established biography of Origen, and what is available about his biography is adjusted by the authors so that they can substantiate their constructions concerning the evolution of Christian philosophy (first of all, I mean such an important issue or supposedly important as Origen’s studies with Ammonius Saccos and through him his connection with Neoplatonism and Plotinus himself). However, it should be noted that since the coverage of the ideological views of any thinker cannot take place without connection with his life and work, a frivolous attitude towards the study of the latter should not take place in works dealing with such topics. First of all, it must be said that for the general public in Russia, most of the works of the Doctor of the Church under study were unknown. Only four works of Origen have been translated into Russian: On Principles, Against Celsus, On Prayer, and An Exhortation to Martyrdom. Therefore, it was possible to fully study Origen only by knowing the Greek and Latin languages, which, of course, is a completely natural condition for a historian of the early Church, however, it does not contribute to sufficient fame of this person and, accordingly, does not attract attention to him. Secular historians and philosophers. In the post-revolutionary period, due to the prevailing paradigm, interest in theologians could not be great, and if they were nevertheless touched upon, then primarily in the history of philosophy. The life and theology of the Church Fathers has been treated very incompletely. One of the best (and very few) works on early Christian philosophy in general and Origen in particular in its connection with medieval philosophy, The Formation of Medieval Philosophy, which has rightfully become a classic, was written by G. G. Mayorov. However, the author sometimes sacrifices objectivity for the sake of greater systematicity and, so to speak, progression of presentation, because to show that Christian thinkers are not independent at their best was very important. To a large extent, this work of Mayorov is duplicated by Sokolov, who further ties Origen’s system to Neoplatonism in his Medieval Philosophy, where he devotes a chapter to Origen entitled Origen and the first attempt to synthesize Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism. In this work, the author, having mentioned that Origen made the first attempt in the history of Christianity to give a systematic presentation of all its “truths,” further points out that this presentation was greatly influenced by the principles of Neoplatonism, because Origen went through a philosophical school with Ammonius Saccos, who had a decisive influence on his other student, Plotinus 3. In fact, the very fact of Origen’s studies with Ammonius still needs to be proven. In addition, V.V. Sokolov speaks without due seriousness about other points of Origen’s teaching, considering it only a fantasy on the topics set by Plato. For example, he attributes to him the doctrine of the infinity of God, although Origen speaks of its certain limitations, however, emphasizing with this statement its concreteness and personality. He does not undertake a cultural study of Origen's thought. In general, it must be said that for the sake of bringing together, or even deducing, the teachings of Origen from Neoplatonism, Origen researchers often forget about the existence of Plato. Indeed, in fact, it is much easier to assume a connection between Origen and Plato than with the nascent Neoplatonism. It is not entirely true that philosophy was regarded by Origen as the best introduction to the Christian doctrine, and it is not at all true that, developing the views of Clement, he considered Christianity as the completion of Hellenic philosophy. Sokolov only speaks about the influence of Origen on subsequent theologians by the fact that this took place, and, speaking of Arius, he incorrectly considers him a successor to the traditions of Origen. Indeed, there is a very big difference between the understanding of the Son as an internal necessity for the Father and His eternal radiance and the teaching about the Son as a creature that did not even exist from the beginning of the world. Orthodox researchers. Russian scientists paid special attention to the study of the purely formal side of Origen’s teachings, first of all, this concerns criticism of Origen’s teaching on the Trinity based on the most important work of Origen On the Elements, which was corrected by the translator. The most striking examples can be the work of Professor Bolotov “Origen’s Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” in which the famous historian, linking it with the teachings of previous Christian philosophers and theologians, calls it “underdeveloped” to the correct vision of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, although striving for this, considering this teaching not from the point of view of its achievements and meeting the needs of the era, but rather from the point of view of its compliance with the finally formed standards of dogmatics; and a relatively large chapter in “History of dogmatic movements in the era of ecumenical councils” by A. Spassky, in which the author, on the one hand, does not forget about the significant merits of the church figure under study, but on the other hand, without proving it at all, very strongly ties the studied side of his teaching to Neoplatonism. In general, one cannot help but notice that in historiography the name of Origen usually appears not independently, but as a chapter in textbooks on the history of the Church. An example is the classic work on Church history “History of the Christian Church before the Division” by M.E. Posnova. In it, the author almost does not talk about the influence of Origen’s own ideas on Christian theology and philosophy, but gives historical information about his school after the death of his teacher. There is no cultural understanding of the role of Origen for Christian culture. However, the author does not do any research as such, but mainly emphasizes the doctrine of the Trinity according to his revised work On the Principles, or the no less classic Bolotov Lectures on the History of the Ancient Church, in which the entire presentation comes down to the same problem of the Trinity and cosmology according to the work already indicated. Archbishop Philaret (Gumilyovsky) penetrates much more deeply into the thought of Origen and his era in his three-volume work Historical Teaching about the Fathers of the Church. In it, the author tries to take a more holistic approach to Origen, a man and theologian raised in the Christian tradition, whose worldview cannot be reduced to any borrowing from the ideas of philosophers and theologians. At the same time, all of the above authors pay almost no attention to characterizing Origen’s influence on the development of subsequent theological thought. A certain emphasis is placed on this by historians who set as their goal to trace the evolution of a certain problem and its solution during the period of the early Church. So, L.P. Karsavin, like A. Spassky, exploring the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, speaks of the use of Origen’s ideas by the Cappadocian Fathers, 4 who, of course, corrected Origen’s errors. Archbishop Cyprian, who studied the anthropology of the Eastern Church up to Gregory Palamas, speaks of Origen’s influence on subsequent teaching about man, but what exactly this influence consists of is not entirely clear from his presentation. P. Minin devotes a small but valuable chapter to Origen. He talks about the significance of Origen in the history of ancient church mysticism and testifies to his greater orthodoxy in this matter than Clement 5. Catholic scientists. A major researcher of Origen is currently Professor A. Kruzel, who expounds in sufficient detail the spiritual teachings of Origen, and accordingly gives his cultural reconstruction, in the Dictionnaire de spiriitualite and his teaching as a whole, and also touches on the problem of Origenism and the influence of Origen on subsequent theological thought. Cruzel is clearly aware of the difference between Origen and Origenism and never reduces the former to the latter. He primarily studies Origen's exegetical method in order to better understand him. He talks a lot about the distinctive features of his spirituality, considering it in the context of the problems of his era - the formation of Christian culture, in the intellectual sphere still in the bosom of antiquity. In the opposite approach, he sees the reason for the misunderstanding of Origen by the eras closest to him. This also includes the work of Dario Antiseri and Giovanni Reale, History of Philosophy from the Origins to the Present Day. If Crusel speaks of Origen from theological point of view, then the above authors study him in the history of philosophy. These authors pay great attention to Origen, but again, as in Russian historiography, they look at him through the prism of On the Principles and Neoplatonism. The famous Church historian Duchenne generally describes the teachings of Origen, summarizing his work On the Elements. Protestant researchers. In the famous work of Earl E. Kearns, The Roads of Christianity, Origen is not devoted to a special chapter; he is considered along with Clement when characterizing the Alexandrian school. The information here is very trivial and, apparently, the author wants to see Origen through the prism of Origenism, which is characteristic of all “too orthodox Protestantism,” while regretting that Origen considered the Son subordinate to the Father and believed in the pre-existence of souls. American researchers G. Chadwick and Nanson study the place that Origen occupied in the context of his era, noting his deep involvement in the philosophical searches of his era, but without dwelling on the originality of Origen’s thought. Currently, the Roerich societies are showing great interest in Origen (all the newest editions of Origen’s most important work On the Elements were made by them). And this interest is not accidental. Moreover, this interest is partly cultural. Being eclectics and theosophists in religious terms (similar to some extent to Celsus, in refutation of which Origen wrote a whole large work, rightly emphasizing that such a teaching cannot, due to its weakness, attract many people), the Roerichites consider their teaching to be the most perfect and containing everything, i.e. containing the values ​​of all religions, including Christianity. They would very much like to find such a Christian theologian, through whose views they could prove their closeness to Christianity. Origen was chosen as such a theologian, based on his characteristic features, which will be examined in their place. However, it is clear that such “admirers” explore only topics that are beneficial to them, developing those guesses of Origen that have no special relation to his system as a whole. First of all, they try to present Origen as a proponent of metempsychosis, which is very controversial and incomplete. In connection with foreign historiography, a few words should be said about the features of its source base. The situation with sources in the West was much better than in Russia. Firstly, almost all of Origen’s surviving works have been translated into national languages, and secondly, texts in the original languages ​​are easily accessible, i.e. in Greek, in which Origen wrote, and in Latin, into which some of Origen’s works were translated very early. Moreover, the publications of the works of church teachers in general and Origen in particular have been carried out many times since the Reformation. The tradition of studying Origen, which runs deep through the centuries, can be traced quite clearly. After the condemnation of Origen at the V Ecumenical Council and, as a result, his oblivion in the “too orthodox” East, the West continued to read Origen and value him as an exegete and teacher of spirituality until the end of the 12th century (primarily as the founder of a special type of spirituality - monasticism; Cistercian monks Bernard of Clairvaux, William de Saint-Thiery and others, who learned a lot from him spiritual exegesis, especially on the Song of Songs, following Origen, they showed interest in the theoretical aspects of contemplation); but the rise of Aristotelianism, the interest in rational reasoning, led to the eclipse of his star. Thus, interest in Origen was based on a worldview compatible with Platonism and some spiritualism. Along with the Renaissance and the awakening of interest in antiquity and the attitude of Christianity towards it, the figure of Origen also emerges (for example, in Pico della Mirandola 6 and Erasmus 7), who embodied the unity of these two traditions. The Renaissance is characterized by interest in Origen precisely as a cultural phenomenon. On the issue of his cultural affiliation, Origen has become a stumbling block between his historians ever since. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, he was considered more of a Greek philosopher than a Christian theologian; he was accused of preaching Plato throughout his life, thinking that he was preaching Christ (Harnack School). But in 1931 W. Völker gave his spiritual teaching the value it deserved, and in 1950 Henri de Lubac rediscovered the technique for understanding his exegesis. From this time on, despite variations in the assessment of his teachings, modern critics can no longer ignore these two aspects of his teachings and a holistic study of the personality and teachings of Origen begins, both in its parts and in its principles. Despite the general popularity of Origen's name, very few works are devoted to him personally. A comprehensive study of this thinker is just beginning. Usually very little attention is paid to his spirituality, that is, precisely the cultural aspect of his system, and its influence on subsequent theology. The development of many negative phenomena in the history of the Church, such as Arianism or the Origenist monks, is often uncritically placed in close connection with Origen. His personality is rather considered somewhere on the periphery of the main events of the Church. Origen's own teaching is usually considered through his work On Principles, to the content of which Origen's thought is not reduced. 3. As sources, the study draws on materials from original texts, first of all, Origen, and other philosophers and theologians of his era: Clement, Philo, Gregory the Wonderworker, commentaries on Plato, the works of Philo of Alexandria, etc. These materials can be classified as follows: 1) the first group includes the works of Origen himself, and mainly his interpretation of the Gospel of John, which has undoubted cultural significance; 2) to the second, the works of those Christian authors whose achievements formed the basic material for Origen’s intellectual intuition; 3) to the third, surviving excerpts from the works of those representatives of ancient philosophy, whose thoughts were used by Origen to build his teaching. Works of Origen. The fate of Origen is very dramatic and even tragic, and from this side, being the most “prolific” (in terms of the number of works he wrote) and famous theologian of the Church (first of all, this applies, of course, to its eastern half, since his views penetrated to the West in an era that adopted a new understanding of orthodoxy, within the framework of which Origen’s ideas were no longer perceived as church ones, in addition, other names reigned there, Tertullian, Cyprian, Hippolytus), this man, or rather his views, caused many problems and complaints in the further development of theology due to his authority and was ultimately condemned at the V Ecumenical Council; and as a result, an almost complete loss of interest in him and the destruction of most of his works. Eusebius of Caesarea speaks of Origen writing 6,000 works. Many researchers consider this an exaggeration. It seems to me that the point of view of those researchers (for example, Archbishop Philaret Gumelevsky) is correct, who believe that it is necessary to proceed from the fact that Eusebius, who set himself the goal of justifying and popularizing his most revered Teacher of the Church, counts absolutely all of Origen’s works, counting even his numerous, daily preached sermons, which were recorded not by him personally, but by numerous stenographers assigned to him, as will be said in its place. In addition, all the ancient theologians and church leaders who mention him agree that Origen really wrote an incomparable number of works. However, little has reached us. And even then, half of what has survived is available only in Latin translations, which were written specifically in his defense, and some were corrected in accordance with “orthodoxy.” First of all, this concerns Origen’s very important work On the Elements. Recently the main apologetic work of Origen Against Celsus was republished and the old edition of On Martyrdom and On Prayer was still preserved. Unfortunately, this is all that is available in Russian from the works of Origen. To fully study this topic, I used Origen’s texts in the original language from the fundamental codex Sources Chretiennes (Christian Sources), first of all we are talking about Origen’s huge work “Commentary on the Gospel of John.” The concept of cultural reconstruction is generally associated with the use and introduction into scientific circulation of Origen’s works in addition to his work “On the Elements.” I also had to use translations of Origen’s works into European languages. In the last few years, interest in the personality of Origen in Poland has revived, which necessitated translations into Polish, which the author very actively used; First of all, we need to name such translations as Commentary on the Song of Songs, Homilies on the Song of Songs, Commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and John. All these translations are made by specialists in the field of early Church history and are accompanied by very valuable notes. When studying original sources, it was very important for us to study Origen’s conceptual apparatus, the semantics of basic terms in the context of the whole work; therefore translations into Latin were little used as not serving this purpose; It is clear that there cannot be adequacy in the concepts of Latin and Greek, especially in a period of terminological uncertainty. We also gleaned sources from works containing many passages from Origen. After all, a significant part of Origen’s heritage that has reached us has been preserved precisely in passages with which Russian researchers almost did not work, but which are collected and studied in Western historiography. I will name the following works containing passages from Origen. The book Catholicism by Henri de Lubac translated into Russian. The author is interested in the social aspects of the dogma of incarnation. The fundamental work of the Spanish scientist El dinamismo trinitario en la divinizacion de los seres racionales segun Origenes 8, containing a huge number of fragments both translated into Spanish, and in Greek and Latin, depending on the language in which this fragment is preserved. There are also a large number of passages in the Paternite de Dieu chez Origen. A man whose virtue and strength of soul were comparable to his genius and incredible power of work, Origen left a valuable work, only part of which survives in Greek or in the Latin versions of Rufinus of Aquileia, St. Jerome, or the unknown translator of the Commentary on Matthew into Latin. The list of his works, preserved by Jerome in a letter to Paula (epist. 33, 4), contains exegetical and other writings, including those not directly belonging to him. Origen's works are divided into several sections: 1. Biblical-critical works, such as the lost Tetrapla and Hexapla, where a comparative study of the text of the Hebrew Holy Scripture and seventy with other translations is given. 2. Biblical-exegetical works, consisting of scholia, conversations and commentaries, for example. Commentary on the Song of Songs. 3. Dogmatic writings, e.g. Stromata and About the Beginnings. 4. Apologetic writings, e.g. Against Celsus in 8 books. 5. Essays of an edifying nature, e.g. On prayer, Exhortation to martyrdom. 6. Letters to various persons. The Exegetical Writings Εξάπλες a huge work of biblical criticism, presented the entire Old Testament in six columns, Hebrew in Hebrew letters, then Greek letters and four Greek versions, aquila, summaque, theodotion, septuagint; some editions add three other Greek versions, called quinta, sexta, septima. All of them are provided with critical notes showing the differences between one text and another: abbreviations or additions. Commentaries “scientifically” examined the content and number of books. We possess partial commentaries on John, Matthew, the Epistle to the Romans and the Song of Songs, as well as numerous fragments of commentaries on other books of the Bible. Homilies - sermons on Scripture. 20 homilies have reached us in Greek on Jeremiah and one on 1 Samuel, 28 (Saul at the Summoner of Spirits), in the Latin translation of Rufinus: 16 on Genesis, 13 on Exodus, 16 on Leviticus, 28 on Numbers, 26 on Joshua, 9 on Judges, 9 on Psalms 36, 37, 38 and perhaps 1 on 1 Samuel 1 (birth of Samuel), in Jerome's Latin translation: 2 on Song of Songs, 9 on Isaiah, 14 on Jeremiah, 14 on Ezekiel, 39 on Luke. It seems quite plausible that it is necessary to “return” to Origen the numerous homilies on the Psalms attributed to Jerome, who was only their translator - adapter. Finally, scholia are short notes on exegetical problems, sometimes combined into collections: they exist only as fragments scattered in a mass. 2 letters and several fragments of other letters are the only remains of extensive correspondence. Treatise On Principles (Περἱ αρχῶν), the first great essay of theological speculation. It was written around 230, as if crowning his vigorous activity in Alexandria, because after some time he will be expelled from it. In it, Origen gives the first complete exposition of Christian doctrine in the history of Christianity, classifying it well by topic, but often repeating itself. Here Origen allows all his intellectual abilities to come out, including unbridled imagination, which later caused so much controversy. However, Origen himself apparently did not intend to publish this work. At least, when he then defends the unorthodoxy of some of his views, he will say that his friend and patron of the arts Ambrose published his work of his own free will. Some ancient and modern writers consider On the Beginnings to be a youthful, immature work of Origen. The grounds for such a view are usually indicated by the fact that in this work all of Origen’s original views were especially clearly and fully expressed, as well as by the indecisiveness and uncertainty of many of his judgments. But such a view, first of all, contradicts the circumstances of the origin of the essay On Principles. When starting to compile his system, Origen was approximately 42 years old; at that time he had been tirelessly studying the Holy Scriptures for about 25 years, had been studying and teaching philosophy for about 18 years, and, in addition, had already written several essays in whole or in part. Obviously, in his essay On Elements, Origen set out in a system those views on which he settled after long-term scientific and theological studies and reflections. This work can be looked at as a scientific and systematic presentation of Christian doctrine, which was intended for educated readers. According to Pamphilus, Origen wrote this work in his spare time from ordinary scientific studies, alone with himself; it was rather the confession of a Christian theologian-thinker. This work contains the same thoughts that we find in other works of Origen, but here they are specially collected together and presented coherently, without digressions of a non-dogmatic nature. The exhortation to martyrdom, addressed to his arrested friends Deacon Ambrose and Presbyter Practetus, was written during the persecution of Maximin, when around 236. Origen, at the invitation of Bishop Firmilian, hid in Caesarea in Cappadocia for two years and at that time immersed himself in writing works. Origen, who himself stubbornly sought martyrdom from his earliest years, urges his friends, as he once did his father, not to change their minds and endure everything to the end. Structurally, it is a magnificent mosaic of well-chosen passages of Scripture, very skillfully juxtaposed, so that the whole book is a continuous interpretation of it. There are very few misconceptions in this piece. Treatise On Prayer, with a systematic commentary on the Lord's Prayer. This work, like many others, was written by Origen at the request of his friend Ambrose after Origen moved to Caesarea, i.e. after 231. In form, this work of Origen resembles a scientific work with the initial postulation of certain provisions, and then their justification with a strict, logically verified structure of presentation. In this work, Origen distinguishes several forms of prayer requests (ἐυχαί): δε ή σις - prayer, the humble request of a needy creature; petition, ἐντεύξις, which presupposes in the one asking boldness and confidence in the fulfillment of the request - this is how the Spirit intercedes for the saints; thanksgiving, ἐυχαρίστια, as an expression of gratitude for a benefit. These three types of expression of feeling can be addressed even to an ordinary person, and therefore to Christ. But prayer in its proper sense, προσευχή, should be offered only to God. In the same work, Origen refutes in detail the heresies that consider prayer useless. Against Celsus is the most important apologetic work of Origen, written against the mesoplatonist Celsus around 248. This work crowns all the achievements of apologetic thought of the ancient Church and marks the end of the apologetic period. Today we would call Celsus a traditionalist intellectual. What he defends against Christians are his father’s customs, traditions, and values. For him, Christians are rebels from Jewry, just as Jews are rebels from Egypt. Celsus finds in Christianity only the disintegration of fatherly traditions. Origen answers. If, according to the theory of Celsus, each nation has its own paternal laws, which it must adhere to, then what can we say about such paternal laws, according to which one can kill old people, marry a mother or daughter, sacrifice children to the gods, etc.? Such ideas lead to the idea of ​​natural law or law. There are two types of laws. One is a natural law given by God, the other is written in states. So, in case of disagreement between them, it is good that the natural, that is, God's, is preferred. And this is even more so when the laws relate to the worship of God. And it is precisely in this area that such discrepancies are observed that let Celsus tell us what to do. (Here Origen lists different ideas about deities that exist among different peoples). Celsus says nothing against those who, according to paternal traditions, worship crocodiles, and Christians who are taught to avoid wickedness, turn away from bad deeds, and honor virtue born of God are, for Celsus, worthy of reproach. Origen also reproaches Celsus, saying that in general the worst evil lies in ignorance of God and his true worship, and not in matter, as Celsus believes. The guiding spiritual force (ἠ γημονικόν) of everyone is the cause of his inherent evil. Only actions directed by it are evil, except for which nothing is evil for us. Conversation with Heraclitus. The full title is Origen's Conversation with Heraclitus and his fellow bishops on the Father, Son and Soul. This work allows us to appreciate Origen's contribution to the development of the doctrine of the soul of Christ. The proposition that man would not have been redeemed unless Christ had received him entirely finds its final formulation in this work. One of Heraclides’ colleagues asked Origen to explain to him the following words of the Lord: “Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit.” Origen, who distinguished in man σάρξ, ψυχή and πνεύμα, answered: “‘Here we are talking about the human spirit of Christ, because The Word took on the three elements that make up man.” The following passage contains the basis which Origen gives regarding this problem. Since our Redeemer and Lord wanted to save man as much as he chose to save him, he also wanted to redeem his body, just as he wanted to redeem the soul and the rest of man: the Spirit. But the whole man would not be redeemed unless he received the whole man. (Some) destroy the redemption of the human body when they claim that the body of the redeemer is spiritual; destroy the redemption of the human spirit by those about whom the apostle said: no one knows what is in a man except the Spirit of man, which is in him... Because he is the spirit of man, about whom the apostle said so. Since He wanted to redeem the spirit, He also took on the spirit of man. These three elements were separated during the suffering, but they were united during the Resurrection 9. It is clear how much Origen wanted to base his anthropology and Christology on a biblical basis. Latin translations pose the problem of their criticism, especially with regard to the essay On the Beginnings. The same can be said about the many fragments that have come down to us under the name of Origen: 2 collections of selected passages, the Apology of Origen by the martyr Pamphilus of Caesarea, who was helped by his student - the historian Eusebius (we only own book 1 in the translation of Rufinus) and the Philocalia of Origen, collected by Gregory the Theologian and Basil of Caesarea and existing in Greek, “exegetical chains” - collections of exegesis of various fathers regarding each book of the Bible, verse by verse, finally in quotations from subsequent authors, friends or enemies 10. Origen's numerous works, filled with an inexhaustible wealth of original thoughts and philosophical and theological creativity, constituted such a varied and complex legacy for his successors that entire generations of church leaders were nourished by his thoughts and ideas. Sources on the biography and teachings of Origen. First, let's say that due to Origen's extreme popularity, a lot was written about him during his lifetime, but especially after his death, and there was also a very large correspondence between him and most of the bishops of the east and other persons, primarily clergy. But most of these sources have been lost. The main surviving sources on this issue are: 1) The Church history of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, written around 320, considered the first attempt to write the history of the Church (Eusebius himself began to be called the Father of Church History for this work), in which he gives little information on the actual content of the teachings, but says a lot about those events in the lives of the people he describes that most characterize them as true Christians or as godless their opponents. Being a faithful Origenist, Eusebius speaks very enthusiastically about Origen and cites a lot of information from his biography of the period of Origen’s life in Alexandria, however, almost without touching on his stay in Caesarea, information about which we can glean from (2) Panegyric on Origen by his disciple St. Gregory the Wonderworker, written in the form of a letter of gratitude (the first panegyric in the history of the Church), in which the grateful student in every possible way praises the time he spent in the school of his beloved teacher (however, the rhetoric of this work obscures the actual information about the teacher) and gives interesting information about the spirit that was created by Origen in his school, from which many prominent representatives of the Church came out, who had a great influence on its development 11 3) Anti-Originistic Letters of St. Jerome, with which he wants to justify his earlier passion for Origen by criticizing, in principle, not the most essential, purely formal side of Origen’s teachings (his cosmological fantasies, to which his works are not reduced); 4) Some letters and excerpts from the works of Aurelius Augustine, who in his own way characterize the teachings of Origen; 5) Excerpts from various chapters of the Library of Patriarch Photius of Constantinople and surviving fragments from the letters of Emperor Justinian. These excerpts and fragments are taken only from Origen's On the Principles for the purpose of exposing heresy. Most of them are given in the publication On the Beginnings, Samara, 1993; 6) from the works of the Cappadocian fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, who, as we know, “sinned” by venerating Origen. Methodological notes. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was the work of major experts, both domestic and foreign, in the field of culture, medieval philosophy, early Christian philosophy and theology. Their classification is presented in the paragraph “the degree of knowledge of the problem” The research methodology is based on philosophical traditions, characterized by an understanding of the active, practical, sociocultural nature of human cognition in general and scientific research in particular. Solving the identified problems required the use of adequate methodological tools. The theoretical basis of the study is the understanding of culture as a reflection of the diverse spiritual activity of a person seeking an answer to the fundamental questions asked by his very nature. A convenient model of culture is the idea of ​​it as a trinity: man – society/world – spirituality. The last element acts as an adaptive mechanism for a person’s adaptation to society and the world around him. When this mechanism, the structure of which must be understood as philosophy, religion, science, etc., ceases to fulfill its adaptive functions, the culture undergoes a crisis, its ideological basis is shaken, and the process of choosing a new worldview begins that can ensure the system’s exit from the crisis. This view echoes the position of T. Kuhn. Although the latter was developed to solve problems of the philosophy of science, and not the interaction of cultures, it is still appropriate to transfer its principles to the indicated problems. It is especially important that the choice of new ideological attitudes is carried out not logically, not on rational grounds, but sociologically, psychologically, since the adoption of subsequent attitudes in our problems is determined not by the logical development of the ideas of the “old” culture, but by an escape from them, recognition of their falsity, incommensurability to the solution of new problems. The emergence of a new culture in the cultural area of the old, or old cultures, is always associated with a kind of ideological “revolution”, an initial total rejection of old paradigms, but soon there appears an understanding that the establishment of a new culture as the ideological platform of a new society is possible only as a result of the reception of a significant number of old ideas, allowing representatives of the old culture to join and be included in the new worldview, since on the one hand, otherwise the constant tension between the two camps of “old” and “young” will not allow the establishment of a lasting cultural unity of the new society, and any society strives for balance, and on the other hand, those representatives of the old culture who are not ready to abandon their attitudes inevitably bring them into the new culture. At the same time, the synthesis of cultures is always carried out neither abstractly nor gradually in the literal sense of the word; it occurs in the consciousness of a specific person, who fully represents in his personal destiny the future history of the development of a given culture. Therefore, our analysis would be meaningless if we limited ourselves to general considerations only. For this reason, I will consider this issue using the example of the life and teaching of a specific person, namely Origen of Alexandria, who created the first synthesis of the ancient philosophical tradition and Christian theological consciousness and, at the same time, realized a new problem posed in Judaism, the problem of the world’s relationship to the absolutely transcendent God, the solutions of which will determine the specifics of the entire intellectual intuition of Christianity. The phenomenon of religion in the strict sense of the word appears. The presentation should be in the nature of a culturological comparison of metaphysical consciousness, which characterized the essence of ancient culture, and the theological worldview, on the basis of which Christian culture was able to form, and not the problem of agreement between philosophy and religion within the framework of general philosophical constructs. Human activity is considered as the substance of culture, and the concept of activity in relation to our topic reflects the specificity of the spiritual form of the movement of human consciousness, constantly in search of the meaning of itself. The birth of a new culture as a response to existential problems insoluble within the framework of the old culture occurs as the establishment of a new criterion for assessing reality set by the old cultural tradition. Thus, a new culture that emerges within the old one is always a form that structures the previous experience in a new way, gradually becoming a new experience. Therefore, we are talking about the inculturation of one worldview into another and about the problems of inculturation regarding the self-determination of Christianity within the framework of an old, initially hostile culture. To what extent can a new culture accept old paradigms without losing its identity? Thus, research methods are determined by the subject of research itself. First of all, these are methods of empirical research: sociocultural comparison of the phenomena under study, cultural reconstruction of the content of the object under study based on relevant empirical material from the point of view of the goal, the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, i.e. from formulating general theses of sociocultural interactions to analyzing the content of the reconstructed object and synthesizing the results obtained. By cultural reconstruction I mean the practical application of a systematic approach to the problem at hand; and the systemic style of thinking is generally a specific paradigm of modern science. After all, the systems approach is not only a structural analysis, but combines element-structural analysis with functional and historical, and therefore, it is extremely effective in studying sociocultural reality and human existence. This approach is applied to the study of the foundations of Origen’s teachings, taken in those aspects that indicate the mechanism of formation of Christian culture, more precisely, its ideological basis and aspirations. The specified anthropological principle became fundamental for the ongoing research, since, existing within a certain culture, a person is not exhausted by it. The very fact of the development of cultures proves: there is something in a person that goes beyond the boundaries of a particular culture. This is human nature. It is she who is the measure of culture; thanks to her, a person does not become a prisoner of his own cultural tradition, but asserts personal dignity, living in harmony with the deep truth of his existence. For this reason, human nature is precisely the connecting link between different cultures, since it is constantly in search of a more complete answer to its mental and cultural needs. Culture needs to be learned through a person, and therefore a secondary, but fundamental method for our research, was the biographical method. Any culture, in our opinion, can reveal its own inclinations only in communication with another culture; in this sense, we accept the point of view of M.M. Bakhtin on the assimilation of culture to personality. The stated theoretical and methodological foundations of the study set a certain logic for the presentation of the material, structure, and differentiation of the main content of the text of the work. The dichotomous understanding of cultural studies determined the division of the text into two sections, the first of which is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of culture according to the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, i.e. first a general understanding of culture, then an understanding of the meaning of the specifics of Christian culture and, finally, a study of the place in this latter of the actual object of study - Origen’s worldview. The second section carries out a cultural reconstruction of the object of study, and first, in accordance with the importance of the anthropological principle and the biographical method, the elements of the biography of the “main character” that help clarify the content of the work are studied, then the content of Origen’s teaching, which is determined by his inclusion in the world of ancient culture, and in the third chapter that special thing that, being expressed by Origen, began to determine the mental specificity of Christian culture. Chapter I. Interaction of cultures: causes and results. Specifics of the genesis of Christian culture Culture – Christian culture – The role of Origen in the formation of Christian culture. Paragraph 1. Development of culture in connection with intercultural interaction From the point of view of E.S. Markarian, the adaptive function most fully expresses the general strategy of social life. In the conditions of a constantly changing natural environment, the reproduction of life is possible only by changing its forms, i.e. through adaptation. As part of the study, of the three subsystems of culture identified by E. S. Markaryan (natural-ecological, socio-economic and socio-regulatory), we will be interested in the socio-regulatory one, which contains mechanisms for the implementation of spiritual energy in the process of social development, allows culture to carry out its functions and achieve an adaptive effect. The emergence of new values ​​forces the value system to strive for development. M. M. Bakhtin introduced the idea of ​​a “dialogue of cultures,” which was born under the influence of the ideas of O. Spengler, however, polemically turned against these latter. If world cultures are in some sense “personalities,” then, from Bakhtin’s point of view, there must be an ongoing dialogue between them. For Spengler, the isolation of cultures, their self-isolation leads to the unknowability of foreign cultural phenomena. Spengler transfers his intuition of boundless loneliness in the world to cultural studies. For Bakhtin, the “extra-location” of one culture in relation to another is not an obstacle to their communication and mutual knowledge, as if we were talking about a dialogue between people. Each culture, being involved in dialogue, for example, with subsequent cultural eras, gradually reveals the diverse meanings contained within itself, often born beyond the conscious will of the creators of cultural values. Bakhtin introduces into cultural studies his idea of ​​the dialogical nature of all meaning, thanks to which his concept is transformed into a kind of cultural hermeneutics. In the first group of researchers discussed in the Introduction, the following schools of thought can be distinguished. Some researchers understood culture as a worldview complex that grew on the basis of a certain ethnic group, then the interaction of cultures turned out to be interethnic interaction (for example, L.N. Gumilyov), others took value attitudes as the basis for identifying culture (M. Weber), but presented them strictly sociologically. The third direction, in solidarity with the second, developed cultural constructs (S. Averintsev). The fourth direction of researchers, on which the author of the study is ideologically dependent, is represented, for example, by K. Wojtyla. Culture for him is an area where different people meet, mentalities of peoples, their customs, beliefs and traditions, different times. The concept of enculturation is introduced as a fundamental factor in the development of culture. Wojtyła warns against exaggerating the role of culture: existing within its certain framework, a person is not exhausted by it. The very fact of the development of cultures proves: there is something in a person that goes beyond the boundaries of a particular culture. This is human nature. It is she who is the measure of culture; thanks to her, a person does not become a prisoner of his own cultural tradition, but asserts personal dignity, living in harmony with the deep truth of his existence. Let us add that human nature, for this reason, is precisely the connecting link between different cultures, since it is constantly in search of a more complete answer to its mental and cultural needs. As for the second group of scientists, this group of authors applies the general ideas of culture to that specific material, the study of which in the culturological plane is devoted to this study. Copleston examines the problem of the relationship not between medieval and ancient cultures, but between faith and reason. Platonism and Aristotelianism coexisted in the Middle Ages, but Platonism was perceived as theology, and Aristotelianism as logic. Aristotelianism was subsequently elevated by the fact that theological questions began to be approached with logical tools. Thus, the interaction of two cultures did not exist except due to the need to use the logical tools of antiquity to solve theological questions posed by Christian culture. Early Christian writers especially emphasized those aspects of the philosophy of antiquity that allow us to consider it as a search for happiness and salvation. And they, naturally, viewed it as a genuine “philosophy”, as the fulfillment of long-standing desires and the completion of quests. However, if we understand the word “philosophy” in the light of the later sharp distinction between philosophy, on the one hand, and theology, on the other, then the characterization of the Church Fathers as philosophers would indeed be deeply erroneous. After all, the use in theology of concepts taken from philosophy does not in itself transform theology into philosophy.” 12 For Cruzel, the very rooting of early Christian thinkers in the tradition of antiquity was the basis for the assertion of close interaction between the two cultures. The heuristic nature of the term “culture”, the breadth of its use and the versatility of its application explain the presence of various theoretical constructs in the interpretation of the concept of culture. Culturology is an integrative field of knowledge that has as its subject historical forms of social existence, accumulating the social experience of the collective life of people, reproduced and developed through systems of social communication; it studies a person in the context of his cultural existence, i.e. in the aspect of what this world is for a person, what meaning it is filled with for him. Behind all the diversity of definitions of culture, two semantic dominants, two images of culture clearly appear - a generalized reflection of reality in the form of knowledge about it and about methods of changing it, scientific theories and artistic images, on the one hand, and the actual life interaction of a person with reality, a socially historically determined reflection of the forms and methods of such interaction in the inner world of people, their beliefs, convictions, tastes, in their behavior, everyday life, relationships, habits, mores, on the other. Currently, a special role in defining culture is played by a systems approach, which is increasingly gaining ground in the domestic philosophical and cultural tradition, in which a certain concept of a holistic idea of ​​culture as a kind of systemic formation has developed. The advantage of a systematic approach in the study of culture was one of the first to be substantiated by M.S. Kagan in his work “Human Activity”, who understood culture as the result of human activity, distinguishing three layers in it: material, spiritual and artistic culture. A different division is proposed by G. G. Kotozhekov, who considers artistic culture a subsystem of spiritual culture. The systems approach allows us to consider culture as a self-developing system, the source of movement of which is the interaction of its subsystems. Culturology includes a theoretical section - the construction of certain invariant models of culture, as well as a historical section - showing the real process of development of culture, the functioning of its stereotypes, images, worldviews, and norms governing it. As soon as a historian moves from studying a particular era to constructing a general history of culture, he inevitably turns to its philosophical understanding, to the theory of culture. Historical and theoretical ways of considering the forms of human cultural existence are in unity in cultural studies. It is the dichotomy of the historical and the theoretical inherent in cultural studies that prompted us to divide the work into two chapters, of which the first sets the theoretical basis, the framework for assessing the material studied in the second chapter. All activities are aimed at a single goal - the social integration of people and the satisfaction of their interests and needs. So, M.S. Kagan proposes the following scheme for the functioning of culture, which reveals a dialectical connection between two modes of human existence in culture: as its creator, on the one hand, and as its creation, on the other. Man as a creator of culture - the activity of objectification and communication - the objective existence of culture - the activity of deobjectification and communication - man as a creation of culture and an accomplice in its creativity. Conclusion. All that a person can do is to create (in language, art, science) his own universe - a “symbolic universe”, which opens up the opportunity for him to understand and interpret, connect and organize, streamline, synthesize and generalize human experience, as well as gain individuality through familiarization with the cosmos of culture. Culture expresses the fundamental human need to organize one’s existence and make it meaningful. This ordering occurs in different ways and is expressed by different means. In this study, we consider two ways of being of culture as a mechanism of human adaptation to solving the issues posed to him - these are philosophy and theology. These ways of being of a culture, each of which forms a certain dominant worldview that characterizes a given culture, will be called cultural phenomena. The interaction of cultures finds its concrete expression precisely in the interaction of cultural phenomena. Paragraph 2. Specifics of the genesis of Christian culture. The concept of religion and its place in culture Each culture has its own doctrine of salvation. Culture itself is a transformed form of a certain expression of religious feeling, that is, that level of human existence at which such questions as What is the meaning of everything?, with which human existence coincides, are born. The search for these answers gives rise to this culture. Culture could be called a “symbolic system of answers” ​​to the existential questioning of humanity. A culture is destroyed when the answer that structured it is no longer accepted. Each culture is characterized by the dominance in the public consciousness of a certain phenomenon of universal human culture, for example, for ancient culture it is philosophy as the path to wisdom and self-knowledge as a person in harmony with nature, for Christianity it is theological thinking at its core. But a new culture never arises “out of nothing”; it stems from the old one, and therefore is assumed to be the mutual influence of new and old types of thinking that characterize different cultures. One of the questions of our research is how two mentalities interact when they meet, giving birth to a new culture. How do the private and the general interact with each other in the new culture? The general, which becomes the connecting link of the new culture with the universal culture, and the particular, which individualizes this culture. To talk about culture means to talk about the entire human structure of our presence in the world, because culture is what a person draws all his behavior from, what guides his behavior as the source of everything and in which the awareness of the ultimate goal of what a person does, that is, his destiny, is formed and clarified, according to the course of things and life. The synthesis and interaction of cultures can occur both consciously through a meeting and direct assimilation of another tradition, and as the involvement of different cultures in a certain common source, which sets a different understanding of the mutual influence of cultures. The advent of the nuclear era, the emergence of planetary problems that could lead humanity to destruction, the involvement of all countries and regions in a single socio-historical process, etc. marked a turning point in history, when former ideological guidelines are broken and melted down: the cult of reason, science, technology; Anti-scientist, irrationalist doctrines are flourishing, the interaction between the cultures of the West and the East is intensifying, the need for a moral revolution, no less radical than in the scientific and technical sphere, is being realized, and the priority of universal human values ​​is being recognized. An essential and active component of these processes is religion, which remains the dominant worldview for the vast majority of the population. And therefore, its deep understanding in our time, which can rightly be designated by K. Jaspers’ term “Axial Age,” when the matrix of cultural development for the coming millennium is laid, is the most fundamental task of human thought. Religion is one of the most complex social phenomena. Generations of the greatest thinkers have tried to penetrate its essence. Once upon a time, during the period of militant atheism, the development of culture was reduced to an irreconcilable struggle between two principles: science (reason, “light”) and its completely opposite religion (ignorance, “darkness”), a struggle that was steadily bringing closer the complete expulsion of faith in God from the consciousness of people. Hence the sacramental (essentially absurd) question: “Has religion ever played a progressive role in history?” - to which a staunch atheist was supposed to respond only indignantly: “No, never. Religion has always only “appropriated,” “slowed down,” “perverted." This approach, in the end, resulted in a special historiosophical concept, according to which religion is not part of human culture at all, but represents “ersatz culture,” “anticulture.” However, this assessment hardly corresponds even to the Marxist approach. Thus, Engels considered Christianity one of the most revolutionary elements in the spiritual history of mankind. This revolutionary nature, first of all, consisted in the fact that Christianity proposed a new scale of values, categorically condemning cruelty and violence, exalting the “suffering and burdened” All this was expressed in a mystified form, but it could not have been otherwise. The fact remains, however, that for many centuries the broad masses expressed their social ideals and hopes in the language of Christianity; it was an ideology in the bosom of which freethinking and humanism grew. And in this role she played an extremely complex, contradictory role, which can only be reliably determined as a result of a very specific historical approach. Returning to the terms of the previous paragraph, it should be said that such a cultural phenomenon as theology, in ancient culture expressing its desire to solve the existential issues of man through philosophy, acquires a dominant, system-forming character in Christianity, that in connection with the new understanding of the relationship between man and God gives rise to the phenomenon of religion, as a specific feature of Christian culture, based on the relationship of an individual with the transcendental God, the Creator, - such a relationship is called faith. The phenomenon of philosophizing in faith appears. Before starting to study philosophy, one or another of its foundations, one should try to understand what we are actually talking about, to set the “space” of research. This is obvious. This is especially true for the philosophy of Christianity, since Christianity and philosophy stand in complex, ambiguous relationships to each other. At the same time, Christianity took a step towards philosophy only because it, in turn, turned to it. The Christian world inherited from antiquity the idea of ​​philosophy as a system that embraces all forms of mental work, all spheres of spiritual life. But ancient philosophy itself was at the same time a kind of theology, of course, in accordance with the religious consciousness of antiquity. At one time, it grew out of mythologies created by religious consciousness, and it ended with Plotinus and his followers with constructions in which philosophical ideas are inseparable from theology. But for the Christian consciousness, the religious world of which was deeply different from ancient religiosity, the constructions of antiquity were only philosophy, one might say “pure philosophy,” the construction of “pure reason.” Early Christianity was also insensitive to the religious content of ancient thought and only gradually, using its constructions for apologetic purposes, became familiar with the theological side of it. Different levels of understanding of biblical texts created a space for theological, moral and philosophical reflection. In addition, there arose an urgent need to defend against the attacks of opponents (from Jews, pagans, heretics, Gnostics) who distorted the gospel message, to defend the identity of Christianity at all its levels. In this period of the formation of Christian culture, which lasted for several centuries, three stages can be distinguished: 1) the “Apostolic Fathers” of the 1st century, so named because they were associated with the spirit of the teaching of the apostles, where there are no philosophical problems, only moral ones (Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna); 2) four apologist fathers who led a systematic defense of Christianity in the second century, often including philosophers among their opponents. At the same time, the use of philosophical tools to build a defense began; 3) finally, the period of patristics proper from the 3rd century to the beginning of the Middle Ages, in which the philosophical element of the Platonic type played a particularly noticeable role. It is obvious that the main interests of these people, including the most educated of them, were religious and theological. Philosophy has always acted in a service sense. The basic thesis of rational mediation and systematization of Christian philosophical doctrine was the prologue to the Gospel of John, where we speak about the “Word”, about Christ as the “Word” - “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It was with God in the beginning. Everything happened through Him, and without Him nothing happened that happened. In Him was life, and life was light for men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it... He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to his own, and his own did not receive Him. And to those who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the power to become children of God, who were born not of blood, not of the will of the flesh... but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, the glory as the only begotten of the Father... For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed Him.” This text, like a map, shows us all the essential aspects of the Logos problematic, the beginning of which was given by Hellenistic thought. This is precisely why Origen’s Commentary on the Gospel of John was chosen as the main source of this study. Greek philosophy devalued faith and beliefs by viewing them from a cognitive point of view. Faith related to things sensual, changeable, and therefore was a form of opinion. The ideal of Greek philosophy remained knowledge. Knowledge was pointed out as a great virtue expressing the very essence of man. The biblical message calls man to rise and step over this horizon. Of course, faith has its own cognitive value, but this value is completely different from that possessed by reason. Consequently, we are talking about cognitive value, significant only for those who have faith and live in its space. The Apostle Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians says: ... the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and destroy the understanding of the prudent. Where is the sage? Has not God turned the wisdom of this world into foolishness? For the foolish things of God are wiser than men, and the weak things of God are stronger than men.” As a result, a truly new anthropology is born from the ruins of all traditional schemes. Man no longer appears in two dimensions, as before “body” and “soul”, but in three: “body”, “soul” and “spirit”, where spirit is participation in the divine through faith, man’s openness to the divine word, divine wisdom, which fills him with new strength and gives a new ontological status. The space of reason was opened to the Greeks, but a new space - the space of faith - was opened to Christians. In the biblical message, the understanding of history is expressed not as a cyclical trajectory, but as a linear one. Consequently, a person can better understand himself: where he came from, where he is and where history is calling him. The extraordinary richness of Greek thought was surpassed in its essential points by the Christian message. However, it would be a grave mistake to see these two cultures as antitheses. The Greeks were wrong when they ignored, with the help of an armada of dialectical arguments, that reality that did not fit into their ideal constructs: evil, suffering, death, sin. However, the Greek measure of man was revised by Christian thought, and it turned out that the human heart is deeper than the depths of ancient wisdom. In a grandiose attempt to set a new standard for man, a new dimension and horizon for his life, Christian humanism was born 13 Conclusion. Christian philosophy is historically a very unique type of theorizing, the essence of which was the inculturation of Christian thought into the existing worldview, but, more importantly in connection with our topic, the instrument of this inculturation was philosophy itself, thus becoming a conductor of Christian ideas, at the same time leaving its strong imprint on Christian thought. Philosophy is not a meta-worldview reflective theory for Christianity. The latter is theology. In a word, only theology determines that basic position, the initial experience on the basis of which judgment is made about everything else. However, the place of philosophy within the Christian worldview is enormous. But it is enormous primarily due to its theological and metaphysical aspects. The metaphysical should be understood as a rethinking of the philosophical heritage of antiquity, while the theological is what this rethinking is aimed at, the expression of the theological content of the Christian worldview in a language adequate to the cultural context. Ancient culture paid too much attention to “pure philosophy”, the constructions of pure reason. This is exactly how it appeared to the eyes of Christians, whose religious world was very different from the ancient consciousness, which grew out of mythology, to which Christianity was completely immune. He was only interested in the conceptual tools of ancient philosophy, the use of which would not allow Christianity to remain at the level of the Jewish sect, but to “swim out” into the open sea of ​​the then Mediterranean culture. Paragraph 3. Origen and the formation of the Christian religion and culture Let's try to understand Origen's place, on the one hand, in the formation of Christianity as a religion, and on the other, his role in establishing the continuity of Christianity with ancient culture. Ancient culture, in its religious interest, always remained within the framework of a monistic picture of the world. God and man were on the same side of existence. The hierarchy of existence did not pass along the line God - man, but sage man - foolish man, thereby establishing the primacy of wisdom. At the heart of ancient culture was the ideal of man, who served as the goal of the cultural process. The path to this ideal, a kind of standard, ran through constant education and upbringing, the essence of which was to absorb the values ​​of the ancient worldview. The ideal was usually associated with beauty, physical perfection, and even physical superiority over others, while ancient man did not lose his unity with nature, and the feeling of belonging to it grew into admiration of the cosmos, into direct contact with it, into speculation. Independent, self-sufficient ancient man was proud of his strength and intelligence, his ability to live “according to nature” and “according to institution.” However, he always remained an individual - an extrovert, and not an inward person. If he looked inside himself, it was only to see there his identity with the order of the cosmos, with the all-leveling ideal. All of his originality was reduced, essentially speaking, to an imperfect measure of likeness to the ideal. Such a position, when the political situation changed, was no longer capable of satisfying ancient man. Doubt in all values, extreme skepticism, cynicism, on the one hand, and dogmatic belief in fate and predestination, on the other, characterize the absent-mindedness of ancient man in the face of social cataclysms, authoritarian power and petty arbitrariness. The prestige of education and knowledge is falling. The core of Greek education - the system of rational knowledge and the formation of a person according to a civil model - turns out to be unclaimed. Irrational faith, which the Greek was accustomed to treat with condescension and ridicule, takes possession of the souls of people. A need arises for a spiritual absolute as an expression of a person’s perceived dependence on uncontrollable and beyond his control social processes. Christianity, which emerged from the environment of Jewish culture, fully accepted the idea of ​​a transcendent God, with whom the world has nothing in common. Origen realized himself as a contemplator of God beyond this world and tried to illustrate this thesis with the means provided by ancient philosophy. At the same time, peering closely into the depths of his own soul, Origen discovered the originality, uniqueness and inexhaustibility of personality. But seeing such a personality in himself, he understood what the divine personality is. Instead of an impersonal absolute, which was represented by the “divine order” of things, now we are talking about a divine spiritual personality, relationships with which define a completely new content and form of human reality, human existence in the world, that is, a new human culture. When evaluating Origen, many researchers choose an inappropriate point of view. He is hailed as a philosopher and accused of piling up uncoordinated assumptions. Meanwhile, Origen is only a religious thinker. He knew Greek philosophy well and borrowed a lot from it; but in his system it plays a decorative role and serves the paramount interests of soteriology. She gives him not so much principles and a method, but a mood, noble boldness, holy freedom, which allowed him not to be a servant of a simplified understanding of Christianity, which grew up against the backdrop of the lack of culture of the bulk of believers. His constructions sometimes have striking similarities with the Enneads, but, taken from the general treasury of the era, they serve a completely different service for Origen than for Plotinus. At the same time, despite the fact that the manager of Origen’s thoughts is religion, his system can just as little be called scholasticism as the philosophemes of Philo or Plotinus. More precisely, Origen’s system can be defined as a corrected, almost churched gnosis. Of course, Origen in the strict sense cannot be called a philosopher, but this does not mean that he did not have a philosophy, that is, his own philosophy, in the sense in which this term can be understood in relation to Christianity. At the same time, his philosophy does not boil down to borrowing ideas from ancient philosophical systems; it is about cultural interaction. Because philosophy is, first of all, a reflection of one’s place in the world. Origen came to philosophy through theology, through the solution of his problems. He never came to Christianity in the same sense as what, for example, happened with Clement, Justin and other apologist-philosophers: he was already born into a zealous Christian family. The period of philosophy neophytes in his person is over. This determined the style and content of his works, his approach to philosophy as an auxiliary factor in the disclosure of Christian doctrine. And since we are talking about foundations, we should talk about what is the basis for why and why. This means that it will be necessary to look at Origen not as an isolated thinker, but to reveal his source base, the contextual space in which he formed his ideas. Speaking about the theological and metaphysical foundations of Origen's worldview, we should therefore talk about the synthesis of theology and metaphysics as a specific feature of Origen's intellectual intuition, and with him Christian culture. Culture cannot be created if the space of thought in which a particular person lives is not considered as culture. A sectarian never recognizes the state as an essential form of human culture. Let's look at Origen's attitude towards the State. If we talk about Origen as a man of his era, it is impossible not to say a few words about his attitude towards the state, whose culture he perceived. Let's consider some provisions from the book of Origen Against Celsus. The beginning is dramatic. Celsus reproaches Christians for holding secret meetings. What is public and good should be public. How does Origen respond? It admits both principle and fact. But, he adds, there are exceptions, for example, in the fight against tyranny. And since we are fighting for the truth in a world where the devil rules as a tyrant, secret meetings are also needed. Everyone at that time, of course, knew that secret meetings were needed because of persecutions that often broke out. Origen speaks precisely about this, but without naming the facts. Because of this, for Origen the Roman Empire does not become a kingdom of evil. It even serves an important historical purpose. Celsus finds that the sun, which sanctifies everyone, first shows itself. This is what the Son of God should have done. And so it was done. Origen notes: God, when he wanted the peoples to be ready to accept his teaching, provided that they should all be under one Roman Emperor. Otherwise, if there were more kings and nations separated from each other, then it would be much more difficult for the apostles to fulfill the covenant of Jesus, who said: “Go and teach all nations” 14 Regarding military service, Origen replies that even among the pagans, priests and other people are exempt from military service, so that they do not stain their hands with blood. Such people are useful with their prayers. So we, Origen continues, pray for emperors and all those in power. And this is more useful than if we served as weapons and killed people. Speaking about the civil service, Origen does not want Christians to hold official positions, but not because this is bad in principle, but because, as Origen says, “we reject power-hungers, and we ourselves need those who are capable of governing and those who are reluctant to rule for the leadership of the Church” 15 Against the traditionalists, Origen argues that the laws of the state are only good when they correspond to the will of God. Clement and Origen stand at the very origins of the ideological movement of Christian mysticism. Origen puts forward such a beginning of inner life as Christian love and understands deification as the imagination of Christ in the soul 16 Origen is one of the most profound Christian theologians, who relied specifically on Platonism in its then-born Neoplatonic form. 17 After all, Plotinus’ worldview reflected the needs of the culture of that time, which Origen understood so well. It was to the demands of that time that Origen responded in his teaching on freedom, which became the core of Christian culture. The starting point of Origen's worldview, which helps to better understand the above principles of Origen, is the doctrine of the opposition between spirit and matter. The world is the place of the deposition of the spirit, which, after its fall, accepted the shell of a body alien to its essence. The life of a person in this world is the yearning of a materialized spirit in foreign captivity for his own fatherland. In his striving for a purely spiritual life, a person must first of all renounce the sensory-material side of existence. Hence the need for renunciation of the world, ascetic self-mortification and the cathartic nature of Origen’s ethics. It is here that Origen suggests the participation of human freedom perceiving divine grace. But asceticism and necessity, so to speak, dematerialization of the spirit, are only the conditions for the ascent of the soul to those ideal heights from which it once fell. The beginning of ascent is faith. Behind faith in the original sense of the word is knowledge, behind knowledge is wisdom, and, finally, direct contemplation of truth. This contemplation is faith in the highest sense of the word, for to believe means to directly contemplate the Logos. Here Origen is still a faithful student of Clement. It is also easy to see here the general vision of ethical issues, which was most sharply expressed by the Gnostics, with whose teaching Origen was well acquainted, as well as by his contemporary Platonists. The ideal of a true Christian appears to him in the image of an ascetic sage who spends his life in the knowledge of God and contemplation of truth. His divergence from all previous thought on this matter begins where he seeks to connect the facts of mystical life with the person of Christ and the ethical teaching of Christianity. He is reluctant to use the word gnosis itself. Conclusion. Origen understood perfectly well that the essence of Christianity does not lie in a sectarian closed state, but first of all offers man new criteria for assessing reality; This kind of assessment, becoming a judgment about a person’s place in the world, lays the foundations of a new culture. It was impossible even to preach Christianity in a purely practical way without getting involved in the vicissitudes of ancient speculation, since the mission presupposes reliance on existing value systems. That is why the Christian religious worldview had to turn to the perception of the ancient cultural heritage. The very understanding of God as a Transcendent Being lies at the basis of the worldview of both Judaism and Christianity. The latter is undoubtedly the successor to Jewish culture from the point of view of this most important criterion. At the same time, Judaism derived from transcendence the absolute unknowability of the deity. But the human heart does not at all want to live under the insurmountable cover of Egyptian darkness. Christianity showed a new horizon of what was possible in the sphere of human knowledge. The transcendent, having ceased to be synonymous with the unknowable, became capable of enriching the world of human ideas. Understanding this concept has set a completely new paradigm of thinking and attitude to reality. Thus, using the word synthesis, the author first of all wants to say that the amorphous and inferior concept, the idea that underlay Jewish thinking, needed to be explained and filled with living content through ancient philosophy. It must be said that this process took place in the Jewish world from the time of the first contacts with the Hellenistic world, especially in the dispersion. Moreover, it gave its abundant fruits in the person of, for example, ingenious systems such as Philo of Alexandria and others. But these systems turned out to be too far from reality; they were not capable of becoming the core of the formation of a significantly updated worldview. The narrow national spirit of the chosen people was too strong and the understanding of human individuality was too weak. Conclusion. We devoted this chapter to a cultural understanding of the conceptual apparatus that makes up the methodological framework of the work and in terms of which the main conclusions of the study are presented, to an analysis of the methodology for studying the processes and results of the interaction of cultural phenomena. The main concepts in which the process of culture formation can be described are continuity and tradition. We were all formed in a certain environment, in a specific culture, the paradigms of which determine the view under which we characterize reality. But cultural paradigms are very general concepts; we always also belong to some specific environment, with our own more specific concepts. Consideration of anything connected with these concepts and outside of them is impossible. They are the basic position of any author. The author of this study belongs to the Christian tradition, which determines the possibility of studying the event under consideration from the inside. And this is the only way the author understands the objectivity of the research. In our work, we build on the results of research obtained by the philosopher Henri Kruzel, which are briefly described in the paragraph “degree of knowledge.” Thus, my position is determined by Professor Kruzel’s belonging to the same Christian tradition. On the basis of this rich tradition, the history of the Church, its dogma and philosophy is interpreted as a personal testimony, transmitted without interruption from the founding of the Church to the present day - this is a testimony of the experience of one’s own belonging; the form of this certificate depends on the circumstances and demands of the time. But, what is most important today, it is time for us to free ourselves from the superstition according to which that theoretical system of doctrine and theology, which in its various directions and varieties, for example, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, grew on the common basis of Greco-Roman culture, is the only possible 18 Thus, the specific way of expressing the experience of specific belonging to Christianity is less important. This position allows us to appreciate what is positive in any way of expressing this experience. And Origen, based on this position, is considered fully, not only as a mediator in a certain tradition, but also as, at a certain stage, a synthesizer and a kind of finalizer of it. Such psychology does not contrast different eras of the development of Christianity, but reveals their common goal to create a Christian culture. When studying literature, it is often striking how many authors use methods that are impossible to use. First of all, the absurdity of using such methods concerns the study of the problem of the influence of Neoplatonism on the thought of Origen and, consequently, on the formation of Christian culture. Having pushed into the background for now the very idea of ​​​​the possibility or impossibility of Origen studying with the founder of Neoplatonism Ammonius Sakkos, which will be discussed in the section Biographical prerequisites for the synthesis of Origen, we will try to formulate this hardly acceptable method. It can be called the method of searching for analogies. A good example is the research of Professor Spassky. Without trying to delve particularly deeply into the particular principles underlying the systems of both thinkers (or both theologians, since in Plotinus Hellenic philosophy became completely religious, even a religion, albeit very individualistic), without asking the question of the possibility of a direct connection between these people, a comparison is made of the systems of both thinkers in their formal presentation in order to identify analogies. Analogies, of course, exist and that is why they are found; on this basis, a conclusion is made about the connection between the two systems and even direct theoretical continuity between thinkers, and this result is interpreted in turn as evidence of the existence and continuity of so to speak biographical, or personal relationships, during which there was a transfer of philosophical knowledge, or at least training from one teacher, which determines the great similarity of ideas. Of course, belonging to the Christian tradition determines a strong feeling that Christianity is a deeply independent movement in world civilization that cannot be reduced to any synthesis, which, even if it touches the ideas of any other culture, completely transforms them in accordance with its initial premises. This is what is universally agreed upon: in the pagan religions and philosophies is to be found much of what is generally accepted as Christian truth, whether in its infancy or in some aspect thereof. Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity exists in both the East and the West, as does the ceremony of ablutions and the ritual of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Logos is of Platonic origin, the doctrine of the Kingdom of God is of Jewish origin; the doctrine of angels and demons originates from the magicians, and the connection of sin with the body - from the Gnostics; the idea of ​​celibacy was already known to the bonzes and Talapoians; we find the idea of ​​a sacred hierarchy in Egypt, the idea of ​​a new birth in China and Eleusis; belief in the effectiveness of the sacraments belongs to Pythagoreanism, veneration of the dead belongs to polytheism. This, in general terms, is the factual side of the matter that appears before us. (Newman deliberately exaggerates the situation). Millman 19 concludes from this: “All this is found among the pagans, therefore, does not belong to Christianity.” We, on the contrary, would prefer to say: “All this belongs to Christianity, therefore, none of this belongs to paganism 20 And also: Should all this be condemned for the fact that it was proclaimed by a pagan 21 In the works of many philosophers, many points resemble, for example, the teachings of Plato, but this does not necessarily characterize them as Platonists. Thus, the connection between Origen and Neoplatonism, even if it exists, which still needs to be proven (and this cannot be proven), says little. Therefore, historical circumstances should always be taken into account to identify continuity and should never be automatically deduced from the similarity of ideas. The question of succession criteria for the topic under study is very important. The key concepts we use are related to the tasks and goals of the work. By continuity I intend to understand not the formal similarity of some ideas and not the borrowing by one author of the thoughts of another, but precisely the conscious perception of the very initial principles of a certain person’s system through communication with him in tradition and translating them into the basis of his entire epistemological speculation. Consequently, we are talking about “entering” a certain tradition of thinking and spirituality. The ways of expressing spiritual experience in humans are limited, and human existential needs are identical in their depth, therefore it is not surprising that the results of this experience are very similar, at least externally. From fundamentally different fundamental positions, conditioned in particular by different upbringing, different formation environments from which a person evaluates his experience, the same or almost identical ideas, feelings, etc. in their formal expression may well arise, but at the same time, in their very basis, the positions (and they will directly influence the attitude to reality, the behavior of the individual, his interests) will remain different and even sincerely irreconcilable. And on the basis of these different positions, different cultures can develop, although they will operate with the same terms and ideas. Therefore, it is necessary to say a few words about the concept of tradition, which determines the author’s position. Tradition is understood as a special way of perceiving reality, transmitted in direct communication. Generally speaking, it is impossible to restore a tradition theoretically, according to its description. Compliance with the principle of belonging to a tradition is absolutely necessary when determining the continuity of views. Tradition is associated with a meeting with a person, which changes the very criteria for assessing reality by a person. A system of philosophy, like systematic theology, is understood not so much as a presentation of as many ideas as possible, systematized in some way, but rather a definition of criteria for solving set philosophical and theological problems. Chapter II. Culturological reconstruction of Origen's worldview Biographical background – metaphysical background – theological background Paragraph 1. Biographical background to Origen's synthesis Origen - born of Oros, Greek by birth. His place of birth, in all likelihood, was Alexandria. The year of birth is controversial: most scientists consider it to be 185. Origen already comes from a Christian family 22, which in itself is an indicator of the beginning of the deep rooting of Christianity in the conglomerate of the empire. Origen's father is not just a Christian, he was a teacher at a primary Christian school; his position was designated as γραμματικός. It was the father who was the son’s first teacher. But he was able not only to instill in him a love of Christian wisdom, but also to give personal testimony to Christian martyrdom, which became the goal of Origen’s entire life. Origen's initial training consisted, as was customary in those days, in memorizing famous texts and answering questions, and Origen amazed his father by delving into the text of Scripture. As Eusebius notes, Origen studied Scripture more than he should have. He really wanted to know what the meaning of the inspired book was. 23 Being passionate and determined by nature, Origen sought martyrdom with his father in 202 (203), from which he was skillfully rejected by his mother, who hid her son’s clothes. Shame defeated zeal and the young Origen could only write his first admonition to his father: “Hold on, don’t change your mind for our sake 24, the first evidence of his sincere faith. The father did not change his mind. All family property was confiscated. The mother was left alone with seven children, of whom Origen was the eldest. He was 17 (20) years old. At first, Origen was taken in as an adopted son by a rich and famous woman in Alexandria. But together with Origen, she sheltered a certain Paul from the Valentinian heretics, which prompted Origen to refuse the guardianship of this woman. He did not want to stand in prayer with this Paul, who was gathering a lot of people around him. His zeal is once again proven by Origen’s Christian upbringing. As Eusebius says, from childhood he kept church canon 25 Now he earns his living by teaching lessons, while supporting his mother and brothers. He became in the habit of accompanying Christian martyrs to the place of execution, without fear of being captured by Roman soldiers or torn to pieces by a raging crowd. All this created for him, at such an early age, enormous popularity in Alexandria, which was supported by his enormous education in the field of philosophy and Christian apologetics. His father advanced him in the Hellenic sciences; after his death, he devoted himself entirely to their study, sufficiently preparing himself for the duties of a grammarian; Soon after his father’s death, he took up teaching and generously provided himself with everything necessary for his age 26 In 202, the famous Clement of Alexandria, head of the Christian catechetical school, with whom Origen studied for some time, leaves Alexandria and goes east, after which his trace is lost. Then, in 203, it was Origen who was invited to the school by numerous admirers of his sermons, and soon Bishop Demetrius (189–231) confirmed him as head of the largest school in the Christian world. Origen was eighteen years old when he became head of the school for catechumens 27 People came to Origen in crowds who wanted to learn from him, and pagans came in crowds who wanted his punishment. One of the first disciples and converts of Origen was Herakles, the future bishop of Alexandria. At this time, Origen led a strict ascetic life, refusing to accept help from friends. Such a life attracted many people to him, but “in the end he began to face severe pulmonary illness.” 28 Without fear of danger, he accompanies the martyrs to the very place of execution and suffers all sorts of insults from the pagans for this. One day there was a turning point in his life. Deciding that he could not cope with the large influx of students, Origen considered that teaching grammar was incompatible with teaching the word of God and sold all the works of ancient authors, which he had lovingly collected for a very long time. It is believed that at about 18 - 19 years old, literally understanding the words: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven” 29 Origen castrated himself. This also had a “practical” meaning: he had to preach and talk not only with men, but also with women, which gave rise to various unpleasant rumors and slander from the pagans. Self-castration was considered a mortal crime in the Roman Empire, and some Judaizers, based on the Old Testament tradition, believed that it was impossible to ordain people with such a physical defect and that in due time Origen’s ill-wishers would take advantage of this offense of his youth, but at first the bishop praised Origen for such “zeal.” It should be noted that the very fact of a normal attitude towards Origen during this period and the absence of complaints casts doubt on the validity of such an operation. Modern Origen scholars consider this incident to be a later fabrication intended to discredit Origen. Conclusion. We have examined some aspects of Origen's life path, which provide an understanding of the specifics of his teaching as a synthesis of two cultural phenomena - philosophy and religion. When writing this chapter, the author proceeds from the fact that no cultural research is possible without considering the specific material of the formation of the corresponding cultural phenomena. The spiritual activity developed by a person is closely related to its reflection with the dynamics of human life, which presupposes a given culture. Origen was immersed in the world of contemporary culture and was not afraid of it, which was still typical of the majority of Christians at that time. He without a doubt accepts the content of ancient culture, which can become a factor helping him to comprehend the Christian worldview in terms of ancient culture. He reconciles both worldviews, without which their full interaction would be impossible. 2. Specifics of teaching and patterns in writing works. Having devoted himself to the ministry of the catechumen, which consisted entirely in explaining the Scriptures to new converts, he soon comes to the conclusion that simply reading the Scriptures is not enough. In his audience sat philosophers, scientists, people of great knowledge. Christian teaching and, above all, the word of God had to be explained to them as the highest Revelation, to prove to them all its depth. But to do this, you need to use the very methods that all philosophers use in the search for truth, you need to master their culture. Origen's school quickly outgrows its original purpose; it is open to everyone, it is a forum where Christian wisdom collides and fights with pagan wisdom in the throes of the birth of a new culture. But in Origen, Christian wisdom does not simply discard pagan wisdom: here the first turning point is made, the first acceptance of “Hellenic values" by Christianity to turn them into the service of Christ. “I would like you to use all the powers of your mind for the benefit of Christianity, which should be your highest goal,” writes Origen to his friend and student Gregory. - In order to achieve this, I wish you to take from Greek philosophy a circle of knowledge that can be an introduction to Christianity, and those information from geometry and astronomy that can serve to explain the sacred books; so that what philosophers say about geometry, about music, about grammar, about rhetoric, about astronomy - namely, that they are assistants to philosophy - could be said about philosophy itself in relation to Christianity." the highest Revelation, to the comprehension of Scripture. A huge stream of students rushed to Origen. Then, no longer able to manage such a number of students alone, he divides the school into two levels and invites his former student Heraclius to be his assistant for the lower classes. Having freed himself a little from business, he again took up the study of the Holy Scriptures and the study of the Hebrew language. This happens around 215. The interpretation of Scripture for Origen is the core of his theological speculation. But first you need to know what to interpret. To do this, Origen begins to define the canon of sacred books. It was so important for Origen to diligently study the word of God that he even learned the Hebrew language, acquired from the Jews the original sacred books written in Hebrew script, and looked for translations that exist in addition to the seventy and in addition to the commonly used translations of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion 31 In “ἑξάπλοι” he rewrote the entire Scripture six times, in parallel columns, giving, next to the Hebrew original and its transcription in Greek letters, all its Greek translations. Having brought all the translations together, dividing them into stanzas, mutually comparing them and comparing them with the Hebrew original, he left us the so-called Hexaples. The translations of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, together with the translation of the seventy, were placed in the Tetraplas 32 In this work, he applied the methods of the famous Alexandrian literary school, which studied ancient Greek literature, and through him they forever formed the basis of the Christian study of the Bible. It was previously noted that Origen's activities in the catechetical school were based mainly on the interpretation of Scripture; it is precisely this that forms the basis of all Origen’s constructions, at least that’s what he himself thinks. Thus, Origen sets the main task for a correct understanding of Scripture, and through it God, to be a “critical” study of Scripture. The Bible is the only complete collection of all possible truths, communicated to humanity by divine grace for all times. Therefore, it is enough to understand the meaning of biblical sayings in order to receive unmistakable answers to all questions. But this meaning is encrypted and hidden in the text of the Bible. The task of the exegete-philosopher is to decipher, reveal and explain the sacred writings. But for this it is necessary to determine the exact canon of sacred books and clarify their authentic text. Only on this basis is it possible to truly talk about the correct interpretation of the Bible, the method of which, as already noted, should be allegory, penetration into the spiritual meaning hidden under the letter. All of Origen’s activities revolve around this task. This reveals the importance of Origen’s seemingly exclusively philological work ἑξάπλα. Origen determines which books are included in the canon. To do this, he compares the style, vocabulary, thoughts of books, the canonicity of which he is not sure, with the same criteria of books, the authenticity of which is indisputable. So, for example, here is what he writes about the scripture "To the Hebrews" "In the language of the Epistle, entitled "To the Hebrews", there are no peculiarities characteristic of the language of the apostle, who admits that he is "unskilled in speech," that is, in the ability to express his thoughts. The Epistle is composed in good Greek, and everyone who is able to judge the difference in styles recognizes this. The thoughts in this Epistle amazing, not inferior to those found in the Epistles, recognized as truly Pauline... If I had to speak out openly, I would say that the thoughts in this Epistle belong to the apostle, and the choice of words and style of speech belong to a person who remembers what the apostle said and writes, as if explaining what the teacher said “33 It is necessary to note the interaction of exegesis and the teachings of Origen. It is impossible to appreciate his spiritual exegesis unless we understand that it is spiritual in the truest sense of the term, i.e. full of spiritual meaning. The interpretation of the Old Testament consists in stopping at its central line and showing that, following the example of the New Testament itself, all the ancient Scriptures are prophecies of Christ, who gave them their true meaning. But the interpretation of the writings of the New Testament shows that everything that is said about Christ applies to a Christian, however, this becomes obvious only in spiritual experience, on a spiritual level. The flame that bakes the bread of spiritual interpretation (understanding Scripture in terms of its relation to the Person of Christ) is the Love of God and the inspiration of the Spirit; the bread that preachers cut into pieces to distribute to the crowd, like the apostles, is the very spiritual meaning. The oven is not only the basis of mental comprehension, but the highest part of the soul, the place of human participation in the image of God, since “only like knows like” The true state and, one might say, the place of spiritual interpretation is contemplation and prayer, from which this comprehension stems, descends like Moses from the mountain, when Jesus (for Origen, from his belief in the pre-existence of souls, the existence of Christ is deduced before the incarnation only without visible physicality) removed the veil from his face (2 Cor. 3, 4-18) and this interpretation gives rise to the synthesis of theology, the teaching of the preacher and professor, the struggle apologist and especially the way of all Christians, whose strength is their deepening into the meaning of Scripture. If Origen wants to find a spiritual meaning in the narratives of the Bible, in legal precepts and ceremonies, the literalness of which was abolished by Christ, if he sometimes very critically evaluates the literal, meaningless meaning, unworthy of the Holy Spirit or even outrageous, then this is what he learned from Paul in 1 Cor. 10 that the Old Testament was written for us Christians means that all these things must have a meaning capable of teaching us by explaining the mystery of Christ. In his exegesis, Origen relies on the conceptual apparatus of antiquity to make the meaning of the Christian message accessible to his listeners. Thus, it is through exegesis that the interaction of antiquity with Christianity takes place. Spiritual aspirations are at the heart of Origen's theology, at the risk of seeming paradoxical, we will limit ourselves to showing this through the example of the treatise On the Beginnings. At the center of the cosmology described in this work is, as its prime mover, the dialectic of Providence and Human Freedom, which accepts or denies it. The life of νούς 's (minds, intellectual souls) in a state of pre-existence (that is, before they are clothed in material bodies) is described as life in a monastery - they are immersed in the contemplation of God. The initial mistake found in this world of pre-existence is the cooling of love, which made souls out of νούς’s ψυχαί. Here Origen derives the Greek noun ψυχή from the adjective ψυχός, cold 34 Elsewhere he uses the word κόρος (satiety, satiety), an unpleasant feeling from continuous contemplation, which, according to later Eastern representatives of spirituality, would be a temptation for a monk. The soul, pre-existent to the appearance of Christ in the flesh, is united from the moment of its creation to the Word in such a way as to make it infallible (incapable of sin) by the intensity of the love of the Word, which in a certain way transforms it into word, just as iron immersed in fire becomes fire. The number of examples could be increased. The modern reader is sometimes amazed when he feels Origen praying not only in his homilies, but also in his “scientific” commentaries. Just as from Kant’s notes to his course on Aristotle’s logic arose his brilliant philosophical system, so from Origen’s notes on the basis of contemporary philosophy to his outstanding ἑξάπλα his entire theological system arose. This work, let me remind you, was the first genuine work of Origen; he worked on it around the period 215–220. despite the fact that his most famous dogmatic, exegetical and apologetic works were written after 225, for example. About the beginnings - 230. Against Celsus - 248, commentaries on the Bible in the late 20s. Singling out as the second fundamental factor in the formation of Origen’s views the ideas he received in his studies with Ammonius Saccos, as Spassky does, should be considered groundless. Origen’s similar approach to the interpretation of Scripture caused many misinterpretations. The reason for the accusation is this: the dangers inherent in his approach to the Bible cannot be overlooked. This danger is extreme allegorism, thanks to which every word in the Bible acquires countless meanings, sometimes the most fantastic and unconvincing. Modern scientists, however, try to distinguish in his interpretations “typology,” that is, the search for authentic images and spiritual meanings, from “allegory,” that is, arbitrary meaning invested in certain events and words. Apparently, Origen himself was aware of this difference. But in fact, it is difficult to draw the line between these two approaches, and “allegorism” remains for a long time a dangerous method in Christian theology, often replacing the sound and vital meaning of the Word of God with rhetorical tricks. At the end of the 40s, Origen wrote a letter to his student Gregory, from which one can determine what the teaching method was at Origen’s school in Caesarea. I would like you to take, if possible, from the philosophy of the Hellenes that which can serve for Christianity as a kind of general science or propaedeutics, and from their geometry and astronomy that which can be useful for the explanation of the Holy Scriptures, so that what the sons of the Hellenes assert regarding geometry, music, grammar, rhetoric and astronomy, as auxiliary to philosophy, we could say about philosophy itself in relation to Christianity. And carefully engaged in divine reading, with firm faith in God, look for the thought of the divine Scriptures hidden from many 35 Conclusion From what has been said, it is clear what role the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture plays in Origen. What kind of “loophole” does this method hide for the influence of ancient culture on Christianity? However, the method itself is an achievement of the ancient genius, adopted by Origen with the aim of deepening Christianity. 3. The problem of Origen learning from Ammonius Saccos This question is undoubtedly the most important and interesting in the biography of this major Teacher of the Church, and what is most surprising is practically unexplored. Usually it is decided for the sake of the history of philosophy. Ammonius Sakkos was the teacher of Plotinus (205 – 270), the greatest philosopher of antiquity and the man who completed and synthesized all Hellenic philosophy. At the same time, it is known that, according to Plotinus’s own conviction, it was Ammonius who had a decisive influence on the formation of his personality and view. 36 It is clear that many philosophers are tempted, when discussing the issue of Christian philosophy borrowing the ideas of Neoplatonism through Origen, to abuse the fact that he attended the school of Ammonius and directly derive Origen’s theology from Neoplatonism. First of all, this is characteristic of Soviet historiography, which causes a response from church-orthodox historiography. We will present the three most common views, and then we will express and try to argue our point of view on this important issue. 1. The most direct connection between Origenism and Neoplatonism. Origen of Alexandria... studied with Plotinus under Ammonius Saccos, and then at the catechetical school of Clement... In Caesarea he was ordained bishop 37 This is what Mayorov says about Origen. Historiography has already spoken about Mayorov’s erudition and knowledge of sources, so it is very strange that such a person makes so many factual errors in a small sentence. But this is not only strange, but also characteristic. This is an excellent example of how unacceptable for history the method of working with it by philosophers is. Firstly, Plotinus’s personal acquaintance with Origen is excluded, because Origen was expelled from Alexandria by Bishop Demetrius in 231 and never returned there, and Plotinus arrived in Alexandria only a year later, in 232 (he would leave Alexandria 10 years after the death of his teacher in 242). Secondly, Origen studied at Clement’s school much earlier than attending Ammonius’ lectures. He studied at the school until he was 18 years old and then he did not yet have any need to delve deeply into Greek philosophy. Third, Origen was ordained presbyter (priest), not bishop. Professor Spassky adheres to the same point of view, only he does not make as many mistakes. “The lessons of Ammonius did not pass without a trace for Origen and were reflected in his entire theological worldview, in which he often resembles Plotinus, the most important representative of the Neoplatonic school, who expounded the teachings of Ammonius in his lectures.” 2. Denial of the personal connection between Neoplatonism and the teachings of Origen through denial of the fact that Origen attended the school of Ammonius Saccos. Heretics and pagans, attracted by the glory of Origen, called him to disputes about their philosophy and objects of belief, forced him to examine their various objections to the Truth of Christ. This, as Origen himself wrote, forced him to more carefully study the philosophy of his time, and from his own words we learn that he listened to lessons from the philosophy teacher with whom Heraclius, converted by Origen to Christianity, studied for five years, and, therefore, his teacher was one of the Alexandrian philosophers, but they unfairly believed that it was Ammonius Saccos 38 - Plotinus’ mentor. Archbishop Philaret, listing the sources on the basis of which he formulated such an opinion, polemicizes with St. Jerome, St. Augustine, Eusebius, disagreeing with them, which in itself casts doubt on the correctness of his conclusion. He goes on to clarify the real reason why he refuses to recognize Origen as a student of Ammonius. Origen says only τῶ διδασκαλῶ: the article before the name only shows that his teacher was famous, and from the connection it is clear that this teacher was also the teacher of Heraclius. But Ammonius Sakkos was not famous at that time; his glory began only with the glory of his disciple Plotinus. Hence, the conclusions drawn regarding Origen’s philosophy as Neoplatonic lose their historical basis. 39 The reasoning itself is unlikely to be correct, since these lines were written after Ammonius became famous, and the important goal is to deny Origen’s connection with the philosophy of Neoplatonism. But this connection is, however, obvious. Even if Origen did not study with Ammonius, this does not mean that he has no connection with Neoplatonism, if only because Neoplatonism is not an absolutely new teaching, but a successful synthesis of the philosophical ancient tradition on which the culture in which Origen lived and worked was based. Thus, it makes no sense to prove the fact that Origen did not attend the school of Ammonius, while setting the goal of rejecting the connection between Neoplatonism and Origen. Besides, it's unscientific. 3. Ignoring this issue due to its unprovability. This view is shared by Losev A.F. in his work History of Ancient Aesthetics. Late Hellenism. But it is unacceptable to ignore such a question. Let's try to look at this issue from the point of view of sources. This is what Eusebius of Caesarea quotes about Origen from the work of Porphyry Against the Christians with the conviction of the correctness of this testimony. Ardently wanting to preserve the dirty stories of the Jewish scriptures, they [Christians] turned to an interpretation that does not fit at all with the content of these stories: there was not so much a defense of these absurdities as a smug praise of their own writings (it is quite obvious that we are talking about the allegorical method, which was fully and even exaggeratedly developed only by Origen and after him was not used to such an extent by anyone). They solemnly declared the clear words of Moses mysterious and swore by God, assuring that they, like the sayings of oracles, were full of secret meaning; Having lost their common sense in this dope, they introduced their own interpretation. This is only applicable to Origen. As you know, Origen saw three meanings in Holy Scripture: literal, moral, spiritual, especially focusing on the last. This absurd method (allegorical) was borrowed from a person with whom I often met in my youth (Porphyry 232 - 305, i.e. chronologically it is possible and it is known that Porphyry visited Palestine in his youth), very famous at that time, famous even now for his writings - I mean Origen; (two Origens are known, but Porphyry also writes about the second, clearly distinguishing Origen - a Christian theologian and Origen the pagan, who was really a friend of Plotinus. Nothing more is known about this second Origen. History does not know another famous Christian Origen) his fame spread widely among the teachers of this faith. He was a student of Ammonius, who in our time excelled in philosophy; Ammonius introduced him to science and gave him a lot, but in choosing the path of life, Origen turned onto the road opposite to the path of the teacher... he thought about the material world and about God like a Hellenic, but he introduced fables into Hellenic philosophy that were alien to it. He always lived with Plato, read Numenius (his works - 2nd century one of the most important sources for Neoplatonism)... used the books of Chaeremon the Stoic and Cornutus; Having learned from them the allegorical interpretation of the Hellenic mysteries, he applied it to the Jewish writings. 40 There is no doubt that this could only be said about the Origen we know. It may seem incongruous that a little further on Eusebius speaks of Ammonius as a Christian throughout his life and even cites as an example the presence of his writings for Christians. But history, indeed, knows a second Ammonius and, apparently, Eusebius has him in mind when he speaks of the writings of this Ammonius in this case, confusing Ammonius the Christian and Ammonius the teacher of Origen. However, it is known that in his youth this latter was indeed a Christian and, perhaps, that this influenced Origen’s choice of his teacher. In addition, both Jerome and Augustine, characterizing the phenomenon of Origen’s philosophical and theological synthesis, agree that Origen actually studied with Ammonius, Plotinus’ teacher. And in the fourth century Plotinus was already well known. It was used by the Fathers and therefore they did not reproach Origen for studying with the teacher Plotinus. If we have determined that Origen actually studied with Ammonius, the teacher of Plotinus, then at what time this was. Alexei Maksyutin writes “in 209–210 Origen listened to the lectures of Ammonius Saccos” 41 But he has no motivation. It is impossible to accurately determine this date, but it can only be within the boundaries of 206–210, when in 206 Origen, due to many matters at the school, divided it into two parts, taking only the highest classes for himself and, having freed himself a little, took up the study of the Hebrew language and delving into ancient philosophers. Thus, Origen visited Ammonius, firstly, already being a very famous and educated man, even probably more than Ammonius, and, secondly, he visited him with a specific purpose - to master the set of concepts with which the pagans came to him in order to preach more adequately and successfully. It follows from this that, despite the connection with Neoplatonism in content, which, however, has already been said specifically, it cannot be derived through personal relationships between these people, its essence is much deeper. It is in the unity of interests and questions asked by the era. This is similar to the connection between Arianism and Pelagianism - no direct historical connection, although there is a unity of content: Pelagianism is the answer from the point of view of anthropology to those questions that were resolved in Arianism from the point of view of metaphysics. Of course, this is not the best example, but it shows well that one cannot help but see a deeply personal element in the formation of any teaching, which, even if the content is identical with another, makes the teaching truly new, since there is a truly new experience. Conclusion. The purpose of introducing this paragraph is as follows: above, some problems associated with understanding the relationship between Origen and Neoplatonism have already been pointed out. The desire of some historians and philosophers, including Christian ones, is obvious not only to link the teachings of Origen with the system of Plotinus, but also to derive the former from the latter. It's not fair. In order to determine your attitude to this problem, it is necessary to grasp the initial ideological positions and religious goals of the founders of Neoplatonism, Ammonius Saccos and Plotinus, while, by the way, not forgetting that the ideas of both were preserved only in the notes of their students. We know about the philosophical system of Ammonius Sakkos only on the basis of the texts of Plotinus and outside the latter we have no specific information about it. It is therefore very strange to attach great importance to the influence of Ammonius on Origen. The philosophy of Plotinus is one of the most original manifestations of the ancient Hellenic mind, striking in the subtlety of its thought, logical consistency, integrity and completeness of the worldview, which marked the last flowering of the philosophical genius of Hellas. The basis of his philosophical teaching is the idea of ​​the “single,” the first principle of being, defined in an extremely sublime and abstract tone. The One is not only the opposite of everything plural, but also its complete negation. No definition is applicable to it: we cannot say that it is in itself, but only that it is not. All this, in fact, had already been sufficiently developed in the previous century, as will be shown in the section Platonism of the 2nd–3rd centuries. Of course, this does not detract from the originality of Plotinus, because it is enough to read a few pages to get the feeling of a single, incomparable, inimitable tonality. 42 Moreover, in his philosophy there is something original not only in tone, but also in material. For example, a new approach to the idea of ​​unity. Any creature remains itself only due to its unity. Unity exists on different levels, but they are all subordinate to the highest principle of unity, which is called the One. Plato does not raise the question of the criteria of unity with such acuteness. Plotinus is almost a mystic, he is a kind of first existentialist, in the sense that he gives primary importance to deep inner experience. But in their special, specific doctrines, Plotinus and Origen do not agree (for example, the Soul of Plotinus is not at all the same as the Holy Spirit of Origen). The similarity appears only in what is the general context of the era. The One Damus is impersonal, while Origen's relationship with God is that of a friend. For Plotinus, what we said about the understanding of the transcendent among the Jews is true. Transcendence is unknowability. For Origen these are not synonyms. Striving to be “scientific,” Neoplatonists had a very negative attitude towards various kinds of allegories that the Stoics provoked. However, their works, of course, represent interpretations of the texts of former philosophers. It was impossible to write otherwise at that time. For Origen, allegory is an adequate method of interpreting Scripture. Origen's connection with Neoplatonism exists only through the mental context of the culture of that time, and not through direct continuity. Thus, the biographical moments of Origen’s activity that we have given allow us to culturally comprehend both from a general theoretical point of view the role of the biographical factor in the process of formation of a worldview, which sets the main mental constants that determine the functioning of culture, and from a practical point of view to see what role the circumstances of Origen’s life played in the process of the formation of Christian culture. Paragraph 2. Origen's synthesis - metaphysical foundations of the system 1. Origen in the context of the era Porphyry the Neoplatonist, quoted from by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History, indicates the following thinkers whom Origen read and who, we must assume, had a considerable influence on him, according to Porphyry. He always lived with Plato, read Numenius (from Apamea. 2nd century. Syrian neo-Pythagorean philosopher who gravitated towards Plato’s philosophy, which is why he is often called a Platonist), Cronius (2nd century commentator on Homer, friend of Numenius), Apollophanes (3rd century, Stoic from Antioch), Longinus (Cassius 213–273, Athenian rhetorician, philologist and Neoplatonist philosopher. According chronology shows that if Origen read this philosopher towards the end of his life, then it is not serious to talk about his influence on him), Moderatus (from Hades, 1st century BC – 1st century AD. Pythagorean philosopher. Known from the work of Porphyry “The Life of Pythagoras”), Nicomachus (Neo-Pythagorean philosopher, 2nd century) and writers known in Pythagorean circles. He used the books of Chaeremon the Stoic and Cornutus (the Stoic philosopher) 43 From this it is clear that Origen was particularly influenced by Plato, Stoicism and Neopythagoreanism. But the latter, in the era under study, merged with Platonism (sometimes with Stoicism). Therefore, it is worth considering only the first two directions. At the same time, it is necessary to consider exactly what could intersect with the sphere of interests of Christian thought, and therefore with the teachings of Origen: the attitude towards God, epistemological constructs, questions about the soul, the eternity of the world, free will... The task of philosophy, according to the views of the Stoics, is the scientifically based, rational and moral activity of man. Together with the Cynics, the Stoics saw in human knowledge only a means to virtuous behavior and the achievement of good, and the main purpose of philosophy was considered to be a guide to virtue, to correct actions, through exercise in them. Therefore, they defined philosophy simply as “the exercise of virtue” as ἄσκησις ἀρετής, i.e. an exercise in intelligent activity. But reasonable behavior is behavior that corresponds to the nature of man and all things, and for this you need to know the laws of nature and man. Therefore, philosophy, defined as the exercise of virtue, is at the same time the knowledge of the divine and human, that is, two sciences are needed - physics and ethics, in addition, logic, to which methodological significance is attributed. The Stoics' theory of knowledge is sensualistic in nature: the Stoics are empiricists. All our ideas (φαντάσιαι) arise from the influence of the object (actually represented, φαντάστον) on the soul, which, being from birth a blank slate, acquires content only through perception. Thus, perceptions are the only source of our ideas. From perceptions memories remain, from many monotonous memories experience is formed, through conclusions concepts are derived from experience. General concepts are based on naturally formed concepts, as undoubtedly true propositions that do not require scientific research. These concepts are higher (good, deity). On the path of methodological artificial formation of concepts, science emerges as a system of similar concepts. The Stoics, together with Plato, define the real as something that has the power to act or suffer, but they find this property only in bodies, therefore, there can be no reality other than bodies. Under the concept of “body” they include the soul, and virtue, and other similar substances, although they do not expand the concept of body at all, for they attribute to it spatial extension and all the properties of corporeality in the proper sense of the word. The Stoics also consider the qualities of things to be bodies. Good is a body, for good is virtue, and virtue is a certain state of the soul—the body. The First Cause is also corporeal, for it is reality. There is no real difference between deity and prime matter. Everything develops from the deity and returns to it. The Stoic system is therefore strictly pantheistic. Every creature, every object, before its appearance in the world, was thought of in the world mind as concepts and desired as specific goals for the development of the deity. All these ideas of the world mind, which must certainly be realized in time, are called - λόγοι σπερματικοί as a kind of embryos of the world. Universal reason as a world-forming force bears the name λόγος σπερματικός. In relation to man, this is the creative potency of the soul, like that part of the soul ἡγεμονικόν, which must be thought in the same way in relation to the human soul as the above-mentioned λόγοι σπερματικοί to the world soul λόγος σπερματικός. Just as the world spirit is nothing more than a fiery breath, so the human soul must be thought of as fire, as breath, or more precisely as a warm breath, which in the same way should spread throughout the body and impart unity and integrity to it, just as the world soul spreads in the world and embraces it. The world is dominated by ἑιμαρμένη - fate, i.e. everything in the world happens due to the natural and inevitable connection of causes and effects, as required by nature and the law of the whole, and man is a part of the whole and is not removed from this law, but belongs to the general world process. The human will is woven into an unbreakable chain of natural causes. The whole difference is that we may or may not know the reasons that determine our will. Our will is determined not from the outside, but under the influence of internal states, through our own nature. Our soul can neither develop activity independent of the whole, nor escape the fate of the whole. All individual species and forms of matter develop from the deity, or primordial fire, only during time, but at the end of the world period they will all return to it. The two principles included in the content of the concept of the body—active and passive—correspond to force and matter. In order to try on philosophical consciousness with ordinary consciousness, so that the former would recognize ideas related to it in the images of the latter, scientific media was necessary. This mediation lay now for the Stoics as later on the same path for Jews and Christians in allegorical explanation. To build a bridge between ancient religion and new philosophy, the Stoics made extensive use of the allegory of myth, while distorting the content of popular beliefs almost beyond recognition. The Stoics try to merge Hellenic philosophy with universal religion. In late Platonizing Stoicism, which very significantly influenced Origen, the extra-worldly and incomprehensible nature of the Divine is becoming increasingly clear, which leads to the denial of the sensory-material, to a thirst for salvation and mediation. Conclusion. The cosmology of the Stoics, which collected all the main features of Hellenistic philosophy in its principles, was borrowed by Origen in full. The idea of ​​the cyclical nature of time and the worlds of the Stoics undoubtedly had a great influence on Origen. He will take it as self-evident; to such an extent did it become part of the worldview of the era. The ending according to the Stoics is identical to the beginning. He will also accept the idea that the luminaries are living beings. The Stoics, at the same time, represented the tradition of those who taught about the inexorability of fate, which was completely unacceptable for Christianity, especially Eastern Christianity. Stoicism placed the moral ideal at the center and believed that the solution to life’s moral problems should be sought in the very essence of existence, i.e. in God. The Fathers of the Church would not only highly appreciate the writings of the Stoics, but would also largely adopt their style and concepts 44 . However, in general it must be said that the Stoics influenced Origen; rather, “negatively” Origen would argue a lot with them. Platonism of the 2nd*3rd century (Mesoplatonism) Porphyry says that some of his contemporaries reproached Plotinus for blindly copying Numenius 45. Excerpts from the works of Numenius that have come down to us in the writings of various philosophers confirm this 46 . Some students (based on the books) of Numenius smoothly moved on to Plotinus, 47 in whose classes, in particular, excerpts from this philosopher were read. He also says that Origen loved to read him. Of the Neoplatonists - Neo-Pythagoreans, Numenius of Apamea was the most revered predecessor of Neoplatonism. All this is said in order to understand that there is no need to explain the origin of Origen’s views by the influence of Plotinus, who, although he was clearly the most original thinker, did not himself live outside his era. Thus, we clearly see the analogies in the ideas of Plotinus and Origen in their common foundation - Platonism in its meso form. It is impossible to understand Plato without interpretation; such is his style, which involves the interpretation of the mythologemes contained in it, since “myth” in the philosophical sense of the word is an inevitable form for expressing super-rational truths. Therefore, it is very important to look at how Plato was interpreted before Origen and in his time. In what guise did this Philosopher appear to his spiritual gaze? Mesoplatonism and its role in shaping Western thought are rarely presented in their true light. However, without it it is difficult to understand the depth of Christian thought, and patristics, and the attempt at a philosophical justification of faith. 48 This is what Dario Antiseri and Giovanni Reale write in their Western philosophy to this day. And this is absolutely true. 1. Medioplatonism restored the concepts of the supersensible, immaterial, transcendental, destroying the bridge that connected them with materialism, which had dominated for quite a long time. The body is increasingly seen in the original Platonic sense, as the prison of the soul. 2. This logic led to a new formulation of the theory of ideas. Some of the Medioplatonists, in the process of rethinking the doctrine, tried to integrate Plato’s position with Aristotle’s. Albin and his circle, for example, interpreted ideas in a transcendental aspect: as the thoughts of God and as the immanent forms of things. This led to a parallel transformation of the entire structure of the incorporeal world, which became a prelude to Neoplatonism. 3. Pythagorean elements gained great importance (see below). But the theory of Monad and Dyad remain in the background. 4. Ethics occupied a central position, but built on a new foundation. “Follow your nature” is replaced by “follow God”, “imitate God” Among the representatives of Medioplatonism there were many talented people, but there was no brilliant synthesizer. He was precisely the background of the era. Unable to occupy a leading position itself, Medioplatonism was the material for the creativity of both early Christian philosophers and the brilliant finishers of Hellenic civilization. The Neopythagoreans, in parallel with the Medioplatonists, came to a new discovery of the incorporeal and immaterial, i.e. what was lost during the Hellenistic era. The incorporeal was understood by the Pythagoreans differently than by the Medioplatonists, not with extracts from Aristotle, but rather on the basis of the theory of the Monad and Dyad, as well as on the basis of Plato’s unwritten theories and their own arguments. The numbers were already something metanumerical, i.e. referred to something deeper and simpler. In their original formulation, the Monad and the Dyad represented the highest pair of opposites, where the Monad occupied an absolutely privileged position - all reality was derived from it with the help of the Dyad. Hence the cosmogonies of both Origen and Plotinus. The doctrine of ideas was supplemented by the theory of numbers, which were understood in a theological, moreover, a theosophical way. They insist on the thesis about the spirituality of the soul and its immortality. They see the goal of man in overcoming the sensual and in unity with God. Ethics takes on distinct mystical features. Philosophy is a revelation, the ideal philosopher is a being close to the Demon or to God, or he is a prophet. Numenius of Apamea. What is existence? It is not matter, for it is indeterminate, disordered, and therefore unknowable. It is not a body, for it is constantly changing and is conditioned by the connecting factor. This means that it is incorporeal (intelligible); Only this principle guarantees stability and constancy. Numenius is also convinced that Plato’s teaching about unchangeable and indestructible existence correlates with the message of Moses, with the biblical “he who is.” Plato is the Attic Moses. What is the structure of the incorporeal? According to Medioplatonism of the 2nd-3rd centuries. immaterial reality must be understood as hierarchical. Numenius, even before Plotinus, took this tendency to its extreme. The first God has a connection exclusively with pure entities, i.e. with ideas. It coincides with the idea of ​​the Good about itself. The second God - Demiurge is busy with the formation of the cosmos; he is good, but not the Good itself. The first God produces, the stability and salvation of all creatures depends on him. The second God is dual. He contemplates the incorporeal and acts on matter. The third God is the Soul of the world. In principle, Philo is not so far from this, which speaks of these ideas as inherent in this era. Numenius anticipates the theory of the origin of hypostases, according to which, just like later with Plotinus, when God gives, he does not impoverish himself with the gift given. “The light lit from another light does not extinguish it, but on the contrary, the matter illuminated by its light thereby became closer to the fire.” “It is necessary that a person, having first removed himself from sensory things, should enter into intimate unity with the Good, one on one, where there is neither man nor any other creature, but where there is a bewitching sweetness of indescribable loneliness.” It is characteristic of that time that Numenius was a syncretist. He not only accepted Platonism and Pythagoreanism, but has nothing against correlating his ideas with the biblical Moses. The apparent biblical realism attracted not only Numenius, but many philosophers of this period. It is quite possible that Origen sympathized with Numenius's benevolent attitude towards Moses and the foundations of his Scripture. For Moses, God is not something abstract, vague, pantheistic, but a concrete, unified personality who reveals himself in human experience. Gnostic heaps no longer attract deep philosophers who want something specific. And it is hardly possible to compare the aeonology of the Gnostics with the hierarchy of being of Numenius. The incorporeality of God in Origen is undoubtedly connected with the philosophy of Numenius. Both of them have absolutely identical concepts of the First and Second God. The criterion for borrowing can be the presence of similar ideas in the Bible. The Bible does not say anything about the relationship between the First and Second God. Therefore, it is logical to assume that purely philosophical ideas were indeed borrowed by Origen. Discrepancies begin in discussions about the third God, the third hypostasis. For Hellenic philosophy it is the soul of the world, for Origen it is the soul of Christ. Numenius is the forerunner of apophaticism. He seems to ascend from the lowest to the highest, constantly refusing to attribute to the next step the predicates of the previous one. Therefore, if the second God is Good, then the First is higher than Good, etc. Origen fully accepts this logic. Weakly expressed in Numenius, but coming from Plato and the Stoics, in Plotinus the idea will take center stage that in order to know, one must be similar to the object being known, i.e. be able to detect in oneself some image of a cognizable object. This Platonic principle is obvious to common sense and will become the core of Origen’s mystical knowledge, and through him, to a large extent, will become the property of Christian culture. Conclusion. Looking at the situation with the worldview quest of that century, we can say that Origen is organically woven into the general course of reasoning characteristic of the people of that era. This is a conscious choice of Origen, for whom ancient culture represents the true wealth of thought with which God prepared humanity to perceive a new culture. 2. Plato's themes of Christian culture and Origen First of all, it was a number of Plato’s doctrines that formed the basis of the ontology of Christian culture. The fall of created spirits and its consequences. Plato is one of the pillars of ancient culture. The level of acceptance of his teachings can say a lot about the influence of antiquity on Christianity. Origen at this point in his system entered the history of Christian thought with a strong reputation as a supporter of the pre-existence of the soul. But it should be noted that in this matter he speaks hypothetically, pointing out that there is no indisputable church teaching yet. God created purely spiritual beings in the beginning, because... only the spiritual could have its origin from God the Spirit. Origen presents the initial state of these spirits as completely equal. They are all perfect, for this “is required by the wisdom and truth of God." Only personal merits or sins can be the cause of subsequent different fates, i.e. inequality. After all, God is no respecter of persons. All this is said by Origen in order to understand the reason for the division of people. The fall of spirits comes from the cooling of their love for God. But this cooling is different and therefore the degree of fall is different. The history of the world began with the fall. In the Greek word καταβολή 49, which Christ used 50 to designate creation, instead of the usual ποιέω, Origen likes to emphasize precisely the moment of falling away, of being cast down. This is one of his philological arguments. The fundamental corruption of man's spiritual nature colored the entire worldview of the great Alexandrian. Having created a certain number of spirits, God also creates a certain amount of matter for these spirits to inhabit. This matter, which in its essence was also perfect, falls according to the fallen spirit, the shell of which it serves, and takes on a more or less rough corporeal form. The soul, clothed in a body, is sent to earth for correction. In connection with the teaching about the infusion of the soul into the body and about their mutual connection, he develops the idea that the bodies into which souls had to descend after their fall represent the type and properties of the souls they accepted and serve as a completely appropriate vessel for them. The soul acquires a form corresponding to its state and a special individual seal, by which the soul differs from the soul. In all this, Origen greatly influenced Gregory of Nyssa. Doctrine of Freedom and Reason In the doctrine of man, the theme of freedom occupies the first place. None of the writers, not only of the first centuries, but also of the pre-Khalkino writers, paid such attention to the topic of freedom of human will. It is interesting because it concerns the very essence of a person, what is eternal in him. In his doctrine of the free fall of spirits even before the existence of this world, Origen, as always, acted very freely with the biblical text. From the letter of Scripture he soared upward on the light wings of allegories, drew logical conclusions from his premises, and moved away from the traditional understanding of the six days. This cannot be ignored. But one cannot help but admit that Origen felt the urgency and importance of the problem of freedom in the doctrine of man. The spirit is not so much against matter and against the body as before them, independent of them. He correctly understood the primacy of the human mind, and with this is connected the primacy of freedom in the entire world. In addition to human freedom in general, Origen also talks about free will in a narrower sense. Based generally on the Stoics, Origen distinguishes the following. Creatures are divided, first of all, into those that move for an external or internal reason. For an external reason, those who are transferred from place to place and have lost the ability to grow move - in a word, all matter, the principle of unity of which is properties and abilities. Animals and plants have a driving cause within themselves, i.e. those beings whose connecting principle is in nature, in nature or in the soul. But some move out of themselves because they do not have a soul, but only simple nature. Others do not move from themselves, but from themselves and are animate beings, and imagination is inherent in them. To these three sections of Stoic psychology (literally, the doctrine of the soul), Origen also adds a fourth section, namely the movement of intelligent beings moving through themselves. The activity of the mind (here Origen even uses the Stoic term ἠ γεμονικ ό ν) consists precisely in the fact that it judges the images or attractions that appear before the being and chooses between them. This freedom is the freedom to choose motives. Thus, following the example of all ancient philosophers, Origen did not distinguish between will and reason. It was freedom that caused the discrimination of spirits and their fall. This question is very difficult for Origen, because... he cannot solve it without changing the already established understanding of the Fall. Therefore, sometimes he treats it as a historical fact, and sometimes allegorically interpreting the fall of the spirits. And sometimes he combines both views. But in general, it must be said that he takes away the historical reality from this event. However, Origen notes the heredity of Adam and Eve's sin. But by this, apparently, we need to understand the universality of the fall. Thus, Origen is not able to make a proper contribution to the formation of Christian culture where the philosophical understanding of a certain phenomenon becomes an end in itself, ceasing to be a means of explanation and integration into the ancient worldview of the concepts of Christian religiosity. Conclusion. Greek theories (especially Plato as interpreted by the Mesoplatonists and Stoics) were used by him as conceptual elements of a rational interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The hierarchical nature of his concept is the result of both the influence of mesoplatonism and the previous tradition. While the Father is absolute unity, the Son, being himself one, includes many activities, and therefore in Scripture is called by different names, in accordance with one activity or another. The typical view of the Greeks, as adopted by Origen, is to understand the world as a series of worlds. This view implies that everything spiritual will eventually be purified. There will be no more enemies. According to Origen, the ending should be the same as the beginning. Origen's subordinationism, in accordance with the general spirit of the era, must be understood in the sense of an attempt to understand the process of formation of reality as the consistent disclosure and differentiation of a single being striving to know itself. When Origen talks about the soul, its origin, its fall, Plato, of course, cannot help but notice it. When Origen says that a person, living here on earth, remembers a previous, better life 51, he repeats the thought of the student Socrates: “knowledge is nothing more than recollection.” The same Plato, discussing the true meaning of names, claims that the word σῶμα (body) comes from σῆμα (prison), because the body is the prison of the soul. The Gnostics greatly developed this idea, which became the stamp of that time. Thus, Origen is not only close to Plato in the content of his opinions, but also in his methods, especially the method of etymological analogies. Origen’s idea that the difference between souls and in general between living beings does not come from God, who does not have this difference, but exclusively from the freedom of the beings themselves, was previously expressed by Plato, for example in the “Laws,” but most likely has a biblical origin in Origen. At the same time, Origen rejects the sensationalism of the Stoics. Recognizing the role of the senses and their organs in the cognitive process, he does not consider it possible to limit cognition only to them. Man can know God because there is an affinity between God and man. But only a mind purified from passions is able to rise to the knowledge of God. This is a Platonic principle. It is also the main epistemological principle of Origen. But from the Stoics, Origen completely takes the entire structure of free will. His distinction is made between movement from oneself, through oneself, from oneself and due to an external cause. Even in this matter he uses Stoic terminology, which in this case he prefers to his own. This is already a sufficient criterion to declare that Origen really borrows from the era the ideas inherent in it. 3. The role of heresies in the genesis of Christian culture in the bosom of antiquity There is no doubt that polemics with heresies forced us to better study one or another side of our own views and even borrow something from the enemy, to place special emphasis on some part of our teaching. Therefore, it makes sense to look at the content of those basic teachings against which the pen of the theologian under study was directed. Gnosticism //-/&#47/; ev. represented not just a Christian heresy, but a whole complex movement of the then world. In essence, it was a phenomenon of a religious nature; it can even be directly called a religion. He expressed the most secret thought of the entire pagan world of the last centuries before the birth of Christ - how to save a person from disasters and save him Since Gnosticism looked at this world not as a creation of a good God, but as a product of evil demons who held the human soul in their power, the main mood of Gnosticism is deep pessimism. It was not just a Christian heresy, but anti-Christianity. “He did not deny a single dogma, but in general everything” (F. Buonanti). Possessing the treasures of knowledge of the ancient world and often having among its followers very talented, richly gifted people who stood at the height of the scientific education of their time, Gnosticism developed widespread and very successful propaganda among Christians, for whom, on the contrary, the main teaching was not formulated, life was not organized, and scientific work had barely begun. The success of Gnostic propaganda under such conditions was quite understandable, and it was indeed very significant. The best representatives of Gnosticism applied their scientific education and knowledge to the disclosure of Christian teaching in a tendentious direction. There was a tendency towards great freedom in the study of the sources of Christianity - Holy Tradition and Holy Scripture, as well as in their interpretation. In Gnosticism, the idea of ​​salvation acquired a special influence, which actually made it possible to bring it closer to Christianity. The Gnostics felt with all acuteness that the world is an insurmountable imperfection, an irresistible evil, an oppressive necessity, governed by the inexorable movement of the heavenly bodies. The more painfully they experienced the need for “liberation” and unity with the “Incomprehensible God.” In the Gnostic experience, sadness and anxiety are fundamental states, since they reveal the ins and outs of consciousness, its connection with the negative, exposing the radical gap between good and evil, thereby denoting our true nature, belonging to the original good: after all, if a person suffers from evil, then this means his involvement in good. This means that a person comes from another world and must return there. This world was created by the evil Demiurge, the God of the Old Testament. It is clear that such an Old Testament God, the creator of the world in its depravity, is opposed to the good God of the Gospel, Christ the Savior. The most important point that Christianity had to respond to was the aeonology of the Gnostics, since it negated the transcendence of God, and therefore affirmed the idea of ​​man’s salvation through himself. Christ in such a system did not act as the grace necessary for salvation, but only as a figurative helper and example (later this idea would be promoted by the Pelagians). As has already been said, Origen’s system can be defined as a corrected, almost churched gnosis. He follows the same path that the Gnostics followed. When reading the treatise “On the Elements”, it is striking that Marcion, Valentinus, Baselidas and others are the main opponents with whom Origen considers, and that all the particular themes of his reasoning are dictated to him by Gnosticism. Unlike Irenaeus and Tertullian, Origen, in criticizing Gnostic constructions, does not always take a position directly opposite; rejecting points that are completely inconsistent with Christianity, he tries to find a middle path, makes concessions, and sometimes maintains a common language with the Gnostics. But to the central question, which became the terrible weapon of the Gnostics, with which they devastated souls - Where does evil come from? – Origen gave a completely different answer. The reason for it is freedom. Monarchianism - late second and early third centuries All researchers admit that when constructing the formal side of their theological system, i.e. cosmology, cosmogony, theogony, psychogony - in one word, transcendental theology, where, relying only on your reason (even if sometimes trying to confirm it with references to Holy Scripture), you can invent any constructions. Origen had in mind monarchist ideas, starting from which and polemicizing with which, he revealed his teaching. The struggle against Gnosticism, which strained all the forces of the Church, was already ending and the most brilliant Gnostic teachers, who had captivated crowds of Christians, were leaving the scene; Gnostic schools ceased to merge with the Church, separated from it and formed special societies, which, due to their isolation, were no longer dangerous for the Church. Meanwhile, the energy of theological thought caused by polemics with Gnosticism could not weaken along with its fall. Not distracted by external tasks, Christian thought in this peaceful era turns to its own content and strives to understand it, regardless of apologetic and polemical goals. It was in this era that the question that lay at the basis of all the dogmatic movements of the ancient Church appeared before the Christian consciousness with all its force, the question of the relationship of Christ, the Son of God, to God the Father. The theory of the incarnate Logos did not meet the scientific interests of the theologians of that time, because, accepting the hypostatic Logos next to God at a time when the word Hypostasis was equal in meaning to the word essence, it did not preserve the strict unity of the Divine being, which was what the philosophy of that time insisted on. It also did not meet the interests of faith, because, understanding the Logos as an instrument in the work of creation and redemption, it thereby placed him lower than the Father and through this diminished the Divine dignity of Christ. Preoccupied with its own content, theological thought clearly felt this mutual insufficiency of apologetic Christology. In order to supplement or correct the apologetic formula of the theological thought of that time, it was most natural to go in two ways: either in the interests of science to reject the hypostatic existence of the Logos and in Christ to recognize man in whom God was not incarnate, but only acted, or in the interests of faith to affirm the divinity of Christ, recognizing Him as the incarnation of the one God the Father. The answer and full expression of these newly arisen needs were the so-called monarchist teachings, which spread in a wide stream in the Church at the end of the second and beginning of the third century. Monarchianism, which was a logical consequence of the development of previous theology, immediately breaks down into two directions: some, modalist-dynamists argue that Christ is a simple man in whom a special Divine power acted; others, monarchic modalists, teach that Christ is God the Father himself, who took on flesh for the sake of our salvation. From here it is clear that the essence of the monarchist movement lay not so much in trinitology as in Christology, and that the conventional term monarchianism or anti-trinitarianism refers to two diametrically opposed directions that coincided only in one of their final conclusions - in the denial of the idea of ​​the God-man. Origen wrote: “Many who love God and who have sincerely devoted themselves to Him are embarrassed that the teaching of Jesus Christ, as the word of God, seems to force them to believe in two Gods.” These people went so far as to reject the fourth Gospel, just to avoid raising such a problem. There was no place for Christ in their teaching, thus, just as in the fight against Gnosticism, the question now was about the very existence of Christianity. The entire basis of Origen’s ontology stems from an attempt to solve this problem of the relationship between the Father and the Son, which was solved in such a non-Christian spirit by the monarchians, polemics with whom (especially the Theodotian sect) occupies a significant place in Origen’s works. From what has been said about the monarchians, it is clear that the philosophy of that time very strictly set the boundaries and principles of theological constructions, making it practically impossible to imagine Christianity as an original movement. Therefore, Origen’s task was obvious: to make philosophy an instrument for the integration of theology, an instrument for its affirmation. As you can see, most heresies in one way or another denied the fullness of human freedom. Understanding human free will was the demand of the era; answering it, Origen reveals this side of his teaching in great detail. Some researchers even believe that On the Elements was written precisely with the aim of justifying the idea of ​​free human will contrary to the Gnostics. 53 This, of course, is unlikely, but in polemics with these teachings, the position of the Church was clarified and a tradition was created, whose representatives in the fourth century, in the fight against Arianism, would finally formulate the teachings of the Eastern Church. Conclusion. So, an attempt was made to show the rootedness of Christianity in the person of Origen in the soil of ancient culture. What Christianity received from antiquity became a metaphysical component of Christian culture. By the beginning of the third century the situation in the field of philosophy was as follows. Philosophical systems gravitated towards realism and one can feel the desire of philosophers to find a place in their systems for biblical revelation. Philosophy is gradually acquiring its own meaning after a long period when it was associated with religious elements, as a result of which it became implausible and frightening. More and more, philosophy is approaching a state that will no longer frighten away Christian thinkers. Elements of philosophy, devoid of religious overtones, became suitable for use for Christian purposes. The main elements can be identified as follows: monotheization and concretization of God; the need for a mediator between God and the world, which conceals its plurality, is seen. A person who somehow reflects God in himself and is therefore able to cognize him attracts more attention to himself. By giving birth to this Mediator, God, as it were, splits into two, by this act establishing multiplicity in this Mediator himself. The divine Dyad appears. Striving towards the One and self-abasement as multiple (not single) beings, understanding the modesty of one’s existence leads to a narrow understanding of human freedom. If this is not submission to the fate of the Stoics, then at least the need to distance the Mesoplatonists from themselves. The cyclicality of worlds and times has been transferred to this century. In general, with all the insights, the criterion for the correctness of the teachings was the principle of compliance of any constructions with antiquity. This is a time of strict traditionalism. The innovations were suspicious. Therefore, the main method of philosophy becomes the interpretation of long-known teachings, primarily Plato and Pythagoras. An implausible allegory develops. The main heresy was Gnosticism, which was also characterized by its disregard for man. The value of a person is determined not by his humanity itself, but by the degree of his knowledge of God. Gnosticism had a strong desire for salvation, understood as detachment from the world through intellectual asceticism, i.e. such asceticism, with the help of which freedom of knowledge of the higher spheres would be ensured for man. In contrast to the Gnostics, Adoptians and Modalists, Origen argues that the Son of God was begotten from eternity by the Father, but not like everything else, but as the will of reason. The Son is eternal by nature. What separates it radically from Neoplatonism and other philosophical systems is creation from nothing. The body is not negative, although it appeared after sin. It is an instrument of redemption and purification, not punishment. The soul pre-exists, but not in the Platonic sense, for it was created from nothing. In the dogmatic system of Origen, the Son had the same meaning as the zones and pleroma in the best, most developed Gnostic systems. This is the totality of divine predicates revealed in diversity, actually realized in the living personal Spirit, presupposed in the Father, but still in an indifferent unity. Through the perception of a number of provisions of antiquity, Origen preserves the continuity of the foundations of the new culture with the previous tradition, subordinating them to the foundations of Christianity that he perceived. It is clearly visible that regarding the time of the formation of Christianity, it is possible to talk only about a cultural study of the mutual influence of such cultural phenomena as religion and philosophy, since both of these phenomena are not present equally in ancient culture and the emerging Christian one, but in themselves requiring replenishment from another cultural phenomenon determine the mutual influence of antiquity and Christianity. Paragraph 3. Origen's synthesis - theological foundations: the framework of a new culture Having spoken about the metaphysical foundations of Christian culture, which are the connecting link between it and antiquity, the “common” that lies in the foundations of both, we should move on to what is special about Christian culture (in its nascent form). But the particular became a culture-forming factor only to the extent that it was accessible in the language of the general. The subsequent research would be completely useless if it were not said about both the methodology of the work and the metaphysical foundations of Christian culture. Origen was aware of the birth of a new culture - Christian, therefore he not only tried to define Christianity negatively, going into philosophical constructions, disputes with ancient philosophers, which would make him one of them, but set out to formulate the main provisions of the new culture outside of polemics with Hellenism as such. Therefore, having identified what Christianity was like before Origen, we will examine the content of the new culture that Origen gave to Christian culture. 1. Christian sources of Origen In order to understand what new Origen brought into the theological consciousness of the Church, it is necessary to dwell first on the teachings of those theologians who most vividly embodied all Christian thought. Let us consider their thought from the following points of view. The criteria and principles of their teaching, especially the doctrine of the Trinity (more precisely, what they meant by it), because The first three centuries of the development of Christian thought are strongly connected with the understanding of what God is in his transcendence. Apologists. Philo. The first experience in theoretical construction of the doctrine is offered by apologists. The task of the generation of apologists, led by the name of Justin the Philosopher, was not only to defend Christianity from the accusations brought against it, but also to present its teaching as true philosophy, pure and sublime in content, divine in origin. According to this task, apologists did not reveal all points of Christian doctrine with equal completeness, but isolated and explained only those aspects of it in which it came into contact with the main demands of the philosophical thought of their era and on these aspects they showed its superiority over human teachings. This trait also affected the teaching of the apologists about the Trinity; They do not take this teaching in its entirety - so they touch the teachings about the Holy Spirit only on the side and do not pay much attention to it at all - and they bring to the fore not the trinity of the deity, but its unity, they defend and reveal the doctrine of the divine monarchy. In their teaching about the Logos, the apologists were not independent. The idea of ​​Logos, introduced into Greek philosophy by Heraclitus and partly used by Plato and the Stoics, found its full treatment in Philo, the most outstanding representative of the so-called Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy. Defining the divine being in an extremely abstract way and contrasting God and the world as mutually exclusive concepts, Philo was the first to create and formalize the idea of ​​the Logos as a mediator between God and the world. On the one hand, the Logos stands in the closest relationship with the absolute God: He is His image, shadow and place of His dwelling, the second God; on the other hand, He is the thought of God about the finite world or the totality of divine ideas realized in the world, the seal, the imprint of which is everything that exists, the prototype of all things and man, and therefore represents a transition or mediator between the absolute God and the world. Philo teaches about the Logos as a divine principle, fertilizing the souls of the righteous with the incorruptible seed of the Word, the seed of truth and goodness, as the Heavenly Spouse, entering into union with whom and perceiving the seed of divine life, the soul bears the fruit of true wisdom, righteousness and all virtue, becomes the organ of divine Revelation, becomes the incarnate law and joins the very Source of the Word; but one should not lose sight of the fact that the Logos of Philo in its final basis is not a divine personality, but an impersonal cosmic force that mediates between God himself and man and leads the latter to Divinity. Deification itself is accomplished in the act of direct unity of the human spirit with the Divine, when man from the son of the Logos becomes the son of God and reaches a state higher than the Logos. It was all the more natural for the apologists to assimilate this idea of ​​the Logos because, in their historical position in relation to Christianity, they occupied the same position as Philo in relation to Judaism. Just as Philo sought to combine the Old Testament revelation through an allegorical interpretation of the sacred Jewish scriptures with the best results of Greek thought, so Christian apologists set themselves the goal of justifying Christian teaching not only as consistent with the most valuable conclusions of Greek philosophy, but also as superior to them in content and origin. Nothing was so suitable for this purpose as the idea of ​​Logos, and the apologists used it all the more confidently because the very term Logos to designate the Son of God had been used even earlier in the Gospel of John. In terms of the general versatility of his knowledge and deep biblical interests with a fantastic bias towards exegesis, Philo is very close to the subsequent Origen; in his mystical sensitivity in theology, St. Gregory of Nyssa will be close to him; Based on his knowledge of Greek philosophy and great respect for it, Clement approaches him. However, one should not overestimate or overextend Philo’s influence on Christianity. Thus, the main thing for Christian theology and the source for the doctrine of human salvation, “The Word became flesh,” finds no place at all in the system of the Alexandrian Platonizing Jew. Philo would not know what to do with this flesh of the Word, for him, the cause and beginning of sin. But we need to look at the influence that this man had on the Alexandrian school, from which Origen came. Based on Platonism, Philo introduces the concept of an ideal person into his system. He clearly distinguishes the really existing, created man from his prototype, from the idea of ​​man. This “celestial” is created in the image of God, while the created is from dust. Thus, a real person is not actually the image of God, but only an imprint of this image. "Created man is sensual and partakes of quality; he is composed of soul and body; he is male or female, and is mortal by nature. Man in image, on the contrary, is some idea, intelligible, incorporeal, neither male nor female, and by nature incorruptible" This man is not the Logos himself, but is correlated with Him, as the image of God and as the totality of ideas in their whole. According to this ideal man, the perfect Adam was created - he contains the entire fullness of humanity, the entire human race. He liked to say, in accordance with his pantheistic tendencies, that the human soul is part of the world soul. His entire perception of the world, the division of everything in the world into animate and inanimate, which he borrowed from Stoicism, will subsequently influence the cosmology and psychogony of Origen with his distinction between the movement of creatures from themselves, from themselves and through themselves, depending on their properties or nature 54 The apologists independently developed the idea of ​​the Logos, borrowed to a large extent from Philo, in the Christian spirit. They made it the central point of the Christian religion and from this point of view illuminated all issues not only of a purely religious nature, but also of a historical and cultural nature. In the views of apologists on the Logos, two sides must be distinguished: 1) their teaching about the Logos as a cultural, progressive-historical force and 2) the teaching about Christ as the incarnate Logos. First of all, the Logos appears before them as the source of goodness, goodness and everything reasonable in the world and man. Everything that is valuable and sublime in the soul of man and in his past history traces its origin to the Logos. "His seed is sown throughout the entire human race. The entire human race is involved in the Logos" Hellenic philosophers and poets, whose names it would be tiresome to list, acted under the influence of the Logos, and their works are a wonderful manifestation of the rational principle reigning in the world. So, Hellenism in its best expressions and Christianity come from the same source and serve the same goal - the reign of the Logos in the world. The entire past culture of mankind was reconciled with the Christian religion and inextricably linked with it. Jesus Christ is the firstborn of God, himself incarnate by the will of the Father - the Logos in its integrity, while all other people possess only the seed of the Logos. The person of Christ here receives a universal meaning, extending to the whole world and all humanity. Therefore, only Christians have the true vision and the right way of life, because... they are guided in their behavior “not by part of the Logos sown in them, but by the knowledge and contemplation of the whole Logos belonging to Christ” Despite the reconciliation of all human culture with the Christian religion, the period of apologists is a time of negative definition of Christianity. They fought against ideological enemies, borrowed something from them, but did not strive for a synthesis of the Christian religion with antiquity. They considered themselves still separated from the world, or, on the contrary, they saw in Christianity a means of improving ancient culture, without imagining Christianity as an independent culture. They did not seek to formulate the main provisions of the new reality, Christianity, outside of polemics with antiquity, positively. Asia Minor school. Irenaeus. It is very important to understand the main idea of ​​Irenaeus, because, according to the correct remark of M.E. Basis (albeit incomplete), Origen “laid the system of Irenaeus as the basis of his theology” 55 Among the church writers of the second century, Irenaeus occupies a special place. A native of Asia Minor, a student of Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius the God-Bearer, he introduced a new stream into the dogmatic teaching of the church, which became the most important factor in the further development of dogmatics. An opponent of all speculation, who resolutely rejected all metaphysical problems, he is a positivist and traditionalist in the field of theology, relying on the stories of the elders, Holy Scripture and Tradition. At the head of his polemical work against the Gnostics he places the creed, demanding from his readers unconditional obedience to the words of Holy Scripture. An implacable enemy of Gnosticism, he nevertheless learned a lot from it, and his theology, in those specific features in which it differs from the apologists, was determined by his polemics with gnosis. Irenaeus does not give any theological or philosophical basis for his teaching about the Logos - the Son of God. On the contrary, polemicizing with the Gnostics, who so confidently talked about the processes of divine birth, as if they themselves were obstetricians, he resolutely refuses any explanation regarding the act of origin of the Logos from the Father. It was not philosophical, but purely religious motives that led him to the recognition of the full Divinity of the Logos the Son, and they lie mainly in his view of Christianity as a religion of redemption, accomplished once and for all through the incarnation of the Logos in Christ. Irenaeus’s views on the face of Christ and on the redemptive significance of His merits stand in connection with his teaching about the composition of man, his purpose and fall, i.e. with the whole range of his anthropological ideas, and in them they find their explanation. “The perfect man consists of three parts - flesh, soul and spirit.” The Spirit is a supernatural principle that brings a person into close communion with God and makes him like Him. He makes the flesh mature and capable of incorruption, imparts immortal life to the soul, leads a person to true knowledge of God and participation in all the good things that He has. The soul determines its value only to the extent that it follows the Spirit. The first people were in possession of the Spirit and all the benefits associated with it before the Fall, but their disobedience to God, manifested by them in breaking the commandment, entailed, as its necessary consequence, separation from God, accompanied by the deprivation of all the benefits that He has. Spiritual and physical death became the lot of fallen humanity, because “it is impossible to live without life, but the existence of life comes from communication with God.” To restore the original state of man, it is necessary that the deity really unite with man again, the incorruptible nature would form a physical unity with the corruptible and impart to it the properties of divine life. In Him, Divinity and humanity were once again united together in one person. He had to have an affinity with both: "if man had not defeated the human enemy, then the enemy would not have been legally defeated; and again, if God had not granted salvation, then we would not have it firmly, and if man had not united with God, then he could not have become a participant in incorruption. Christ must be and is truly man and truly God" 56 Christ is not only the restorer of each individual person, but at the same time the Redeemer and Savior. The Logos of God restores in Himself the ancient enmity between the devil and man, which was ended by the Fall. From here, not only the person of Christ, but his whole life receives a new redemptive meaning. It is easy to notice that the symbolism and allegorism of Irenaeus is devoid of any metaphysical images, but any illustration of biblical history is closely connected with salvation, very specifically understood. Irenaeus' theology had a strong influence on subsequent theological thought. The foregrounded idea of ​​the fullness of the Divine revealed to people in Christ became the starting point for the struggle against Arius in the Nicene Age. But for Irenaeus, it was not the central thought of his system: it was only a theoretical postulate arising from his anthropological views, and did not have strong foundations in his teaching about God and Logos, as the self-revelation of the Divine. Irenaeus's way of interpreting the Bible is very different from that developed by the Alexandrian school and most clearly represented by Origen. This is not an allegory, behind which the literal meaning itself is completely lost, but a symbol related to the salvation accomplished by Christ; Thus, the interpretation of the Bible helps to understand the works of Christ, and without such an approach this interpretation makes no sense. In general, Irenaeus does not use ancient metaphysics to substantiate his reasoning. He is alien to it, ready to limit himself only to the postulates of religion. It is difficult to build a culture on this foundation. However, Origen adopts from him an understanding of the central role of Christ in Christianity. From now on, Christianity is primarily an experience of the act of turning to new values. Alexandria School. Clement. We know little about the beginning of the Alexandrian school: in all likelihood, it grew out of the “catechumen” of converts. Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world, and here every sermon acquired an “academic” character and was clothed in intellectual garb. Therefore, it is natural that it was here that the beginning of “scientific” philosophy was laid and it was recognized as the last and highest calling of a Christian. Already for the first of the Alexandrian theologians - Clement - Christianity is the highest “knowledge”, gnosis in the full and absolute sense of the word 57 “If a Gnostic were offered a choice between the salvation of the soul and knowledge, assuming that these two things are different, while they are identical, he would choose the knowledge of God” Gnosis is the vision of God “face to face”, mystical illumination of His Truth; The Christian prefers this knowledge of God to everything else; he sees in it the goal of his whole life. But Clement is also characterized by a joyful acceptance of the world, its “justification.” This is a new experience for which Christianity has already firmly established itself in the world and is triumphant. “How does a rich man escape?” - this is the name of one of Clement’s works, typical of his general worldview. For him, Christian life is a series of stages, through which a person approaches perfection; the various levels of perfection are called the “mansions of the soul.” These mansions are defined as awe, faith and hope, and finally love. In reality, not all souls reach the highest state, and therefore Christians are divided into “ordinary faith” Christians and true Gnostic Christians (who have achieved perfect faith). The Gnostic or perfect Christian is characterized by contemplation, observance of the commandments and the ability to educate people in the spirit of virtues. Contemplation for St. Clement, of course, is the pinnacle of gnosis and consists of knowing God, seeing God and possessing God. Therefore, gnosis is closely related to prayer (which, according to Clement, strives to become internal, wordless and continuous) and love, in which it finds a solid foundation. The highest state of Christian gnosis is a state of dispassion, achieved as a result of complete control over passions and desires, as well as as a result of detachment from everything material. It is peace and unity that comes from love. He does not reject the world, but on the contrary, he tries to make everything Christian; we find him discussing laughter and even home organization. Everything is permissible if it is accepted in moderation, but, most importantly, if it is subordinated to the last value: the knowledge of God and the Truth in Him... This is the optimism of the first, but not yet deep and often dubious synthesis between Christianity and Hellenism. But it was not Clement who really started scientific theology. He was replaced by the young Origen 58 Conclusion In persecution and temptation, church consciousness is forged and the Church is strengthened. And nothing better expresses the already approaching victory than that first dawn of Christian thought, those first shoots of Christian culture that marked the first centuries. In the first place here we should name the Alexandrian Christian School and its famous teacher Origen. Until the third century, Christian writing either had a “defensive” character - it was directed against heresies and paganism - or it consisted of a simple presentation of the main points of church doctrine. The significance of the Alexandrian school is that for the first time an attempt was made to think through this doctrine as an integral system, to identify the truths contained in it as a source of thought and knowledge. Taken in general, Christian teaching before Origen gives the impression of a very motley mosaic, composed of various theological systems and views. Theological thought here proceeds as if groping, not along any specific channels, but scattering in all directions, taking an awkward step forward and retreating back again. Each church writer builds his own system of theology, tries to independently penetrate into the depths of Christian teaching and explains it in accordance with the spirit of the time, his philosophical education and individual inclinations. Christian thought drew its content from Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition, that is, from the same sources that fed all subsequent dogmatic activity of the Church, but both of these sources were not yet presented to it in the processed and easy-to-use form that was given to them by the fourth century. Study of St. Scripture in the first three centuries had not yet reached the height necessary for comprehensive philosophical and theological constructions; correct, scientifically based methods of interpretation did not yet exist; exegesis was just emerging and collecting materials for the future. Turning to Scripture with theological queries, thought not disciplined by science and experience could not immediately become accustomed to the fullness of its content and was often amazed by its individual passages, by any one aspect of it, on which it then based its speculations. On the other hand, the leadership of church tradition could not protect the theologians of that time from errors and one-sidedness. The Church offered its teachings in symbols or rules of faith, but due to their brevity and elementary nature, these symbols were completely insufficient to guide church speculation. The church teacher of this time had to philosophize at his own peril and risk, relying on his personal conviction and sense of confidence. Thus, the very conditions under which the philosophical and theological thought of Christianity arose opened a wide door to subjectivism in the systematization of the teachings of the Church and made inevitable that individualism in the understanding of the teachings, which was observed not only among theologians before Origen, but also among himself. However, the main features of the Christian proclamation have already received quite specific content. However, Origen himself would not agree with this. Since many of those who recognize themselves as believers in Christ disagree not only in the smallest and most insignificant, but also in the great and greatest, that is, in questions either about God, or about the Lord Jesus Christ, or about the Holy Spirit, and not only about these (creatures), but also about other creatures, i.e. or about dominions, or about holy powers, then for this reason, it seems necessary to first establish an exact boundary and a certain rule about each of these subjects, and then ask about the rest. 59 It seems to me that Origen exaggerates the backwardness of theology and philosophy before him. But the reason for this is nothing other than Origen’s greatest curiosity and his zeal for the knowledge of God. About many subjects the apostles only said that they exist, but how or why they kept silent, of course, with the aim that the most zealous and wisdom-loving of their successors, those of them who would become capable of perceiving the truth, could have exercise and show the fruits of their minds 60 . This is how Origen himself imagined the content of church tradition. The apostolic teaching, clearly conveyed, boils down to the following provisions. Firstly, that there is one God - the God who created everything... and who brought everything from non-existence into being... in the last days, according to what he had previously promised through his prophets, sent our Lord Jesus Christ to call first Israel, and then the Gentiles... gave the law and the prophets and the Gospel... Jesus Christ Himself was born of the Father before all creation. He served the Father during the creation of everything... recently, having humbled Himself, He became incarnate, becoming a man, although He was God, and, having become a man, remained what He was before, i.e. By God. He took on a body similar to our body... born of the Virgin and the Holy Spirit... born and truly suffered... truly risen and ascended... in relation to honor and dignity, the Holy Spirit participates in the Father and the Son... but at the same time it is impossible to clearly see (who he is)... however, he inspired each of the saints... and he is one... the soul, having its own substance, will receive reward according to its merits... the body will rise in incorruption... every rational soul has freedom of decision and will... we are forced, but we are not necessarily forced to to do good or bad... (but it is not specifically said about the soul)... the devil and angels exist, but it is not clear how they exist... the world was created and began to exist from a certain time and must be saved... but what happened before it and what will happen after is not clear... The Scriptures were written by the Holy Spirit and have not only an open meaning, but also hidden from the majority 61 Along with indicating unresolved questions in Tradition, Origen asks new ones, setting himself the task of resolving them according to the Scriptures. 2. Reconstruction of the theological foundations of Origen's synthesis A) Ontology – philosophy in the service of the formulation of Christian dogma In the East, the revelation of church teaching took place on a philosophical basis. Eastern theologians took philosophical concepts in their entirety. Origen stands at a turning point in Eastern thought. Completing the previous apologetic period, absorbing all the best from it, and freeing himself from the significant shortcomings of his theology, he clears a wide path for further work in the field of dogmatic creativity. Not only the advantages, but also the disadvantages of his system gave such a powerful impetus to the future that its echoes are felt even in the sixth century. Origen's system is strictly monistic; breaks down into three parts: - a. God and his revelation; – b. The falling away of created spirits and the consequences of this (discussed in the paragraph “Plato’s themes of Christian culture and Origen”); - V. Rescue and restoration. God and his revelation. Trinity God the Father. God is essentially simple, unchanging and good. He does not allow any complexity in himself; He is unity (μονἀς) and singularity (ἑνἀς). By virtue of His goodness, He opens up and enters into communication, and by virtue of His immutability, He has done this from eternity. The nature of the deity is incomprehensible. God is above everything imaginable. But He is a rational and self-knowing Person. "God is a simple rational nature. He is the whole mind, and how the mind can move and act" 62 The concept of God thus merges in Origen with the concept of the Father. He has full and perfect knowledge of Himself as of the Son and of all things. In contrast to Plotinus (from a terminological point of view), according to Origen, God is not ἅ πειρον (limitless) and it is impossible to say about Him in the literal sense that He is infinite, because everything that is limitless, as containing elements of uncertainty, is unknowable, and therefore God, if He were limitless in His essence and power, could not know Himself and affairs His would remain outside the scope of His own knowledge if they were limitless. In fact, Origen, with this original image, wants to emphasize the personal and concrete nature of the Christian faith, contrary to pantheistic tendencies that blur the very concept of God. “If the power of God were limitless, then it would necessarily not know itself, because by nature the limitless is not knowable.” 63 Understanding God precisely as a person is an essential distinguishing feature of Origen’s theology from Plotinus’ system, as well as limitlessness. The unknowability of the being of God is a common idea for all late Hellenistic philosophy and Judaism and does not depend in any way on Plotinus. Son-Word. But since it is unthinkable to allow direct relations between being simple in essence and a random multitude, then God from the beginning (logically, not chronologically) must Himself become in such a position that such relations become possible. Hence the origin of the Word, a separate Person, a derivative deity, θεός, and not ὁ Θεός, much less ἅ υτοθεος. Since God is unchangeable either in the field of activity or in the field of thought, He must have a Son from eternity and not only have Him from eternity, but also always give birth to Him. “The Father could never, at any moment of His existence, exist without giving birth to Wisdom, because if we assume that God gave birth to Wisdom - the Son, who did not exist before, then He either could not give birth to her before He gave birth, or He could, but did not want to give birth. It is clear that this cannot be said: in either case it would be discovered that God either did not rise from the state of inability to the state of ability, or he delayed, delayed giving birth to Wisdom. 64 However, in addition to its origin from the Father, Origen’s Word is inferior to the Father in that it contains within Himself the prototype of everything finite, plural. From this point of view, it belongs to the category of creation, κτίσμα, expressed in the words of the Bible 65 The doctrine of the birth of the Son from the Father, as an act not only eternal, but also continuously ongoing, first expressed in Christian literature by Origen, constitutes the most brilliant point in his dogmatic system (it really makes him the founder of positive Christian theology 66 But the conditionality of this birth is not unambiguous. On the one hand On the other hand, the origin of the Word, again as with the apologists, is connected with creation, which leaves Origen within the framework of the apologetic period. We can say that if creation did not exist, then the Word would not have any basis for its existence. But here, too, Origen is consistent - the inherent goodness of God requires that there always be a creature. Is then the origin of the Son different from the origin of the world, if both are necessary? If so, then it is necessary to somehow bring the Father and the Son closer together, and the best thing would be to recognize their coexistence, but Origen stubbornly rejects this idea, although it was known to him not only from the works of heretics, but also from the works of Western theologians known to him. For him, being consubstantial is tantamount to dividing the divine essence. However, already in Origen a distinction is outlined between essence and hypostasis. He contrasts ὑπόστασις and ὑποκέιμενον (subjectum). But Origen did not maintain a separate understanding of these terms. 67 For him, ὑποκέιμενον and ὀυσία are usually not separated and three persons can be understood as three ousia. Here is the beginning of the confrontation between the trinitarian systems of the West and the East. In the future, the Eastern Fathers will understand consubstantiality rather as the complete identity of the essences of the three hypostases, while the Western Fathers will understand the Trinity as the action of the single essence itself, differentiated by the nature of divine life. God, according to Origen, gives birth to the Son just as will is born from thought. “The Son is born from the very thought of the Father, as will from thought” 68 The analogy of thought and will, so carefully developed by Origen, contained undeniable advantages: eliminating emanatic and bodily ideas, it depicted the birth of the Son from the Father as a deeply internal act, incomparable with any physiological process and in this regard was much more suitable than the analogy with the internal and spoken Word. But the birth of the Son from the Father, as will from thought, is not just one image out of many similar ones: it underlies all of Origen’s ideas about the relationship of the Son to the Father, “is the result of all Origen’s studies on this subject in the most systematic of his works and is considered as given in Holy Scripture” 69 “One must imagine the power of God - that omnipresent and all-sufficient power with which He contains everything and controls everything. of great power there occurs an evaporation and, so to speak, a power that has its own hypostasis. Although it comes from this power as a will, the very will of God becomes a power. Thus, another force appears, existing in its own particularity, a certain evaporation of the first and unborn power of God from it receiving its being and essence” 70. The power by which the Divinity lives concentrates in itself the entire vitality of the Divinity and, if formally it differs from the essence, then in any case it is its integral expression. From this power the Son is born, like evaporation - the power and light of all this whole, immeasurably great power, like its energy or an external expression adequate to it. And this process takes place not only inside the Divine, it goes out, so to speak, and becomes objectified. The evaporation of the Divine - the Son - becomes another force, existing in its own particularity, having its own hypostasis. There is a certain illogicality of Origen here. For the existence of the Son, a certain splitting of the Father, so stubbornly denied at first by Origen, is necessary into the very essence and adequately reflecting its internal power, the reflection of which in turn is the Son. This is an extra step. In principle, this internal force can be considered as consubstantial with the Father, since it is completely internal, but the old stereotype hangs too heavily over Origen - the impossibility of emanation in any sense. In the future, it will be enough to understand the unnecessaryness of this extra step in order to agree with the idea of ​​consubstantiality. So, in Origen, the Son receives his existence from the Father, as an evaporation of power, energy (ἡ ἑνεργεια της δυνάμεως) of immeasurably great divine power and exists in its own particularity, as an independent hypostasis. As energy inextricably linked with power (God) in its being and action, the Son represents a necessary condition for the existence of the Father, is an eternal and unchanging manifestation of him. True, He is born for the sake of the world, but He is not conditioned in His existence by the world. The world and man are a goal looming in the distance. The existence of the Son is caused by the internal need of the deity (in the future, such a thought - the need of God for something external - will be an undoubted heresy, but the need of the Son for the Father will be completely resolved in the dogma of the consubstantial Trinity, for which the Son is not something external, but an immanent and necessary hypostasis by nature; in principle, this is the same thought of Origen, but corrected in accordance with the new terminology), - in what lies in Him, as a force, a constant and eternal desire to manifest itself in the Son, as His energy. The Greek word energy must be translated as action, otherwise it will create confusion, the essence of which I will touch on later. The concept of “Father,” thus, is primary in Origen’s system in relation to the concept of “Creator,” and the existence of the Son receives a transcendental character, independent of the world. But the constantly emphasized idea of ​​​​the subordination of the Son does not allow Origen to consistently pursue the idea of ​​​​the independence and unconditionality of the Son by the world, and therefore the previously stated thesis that, according to Origen, if there were no world, then there would be no basis for the existence of the Son, remains relevant. It is important to understand that the concept of the Son as unconditioned by the Father's need for creation completes the process of understanding God as absolutely transcendent, at the same time, to some extent knowable, in the sense that one can enter into communication with him. The psychology of Christian culture, the Christian worldview is entirely based on this idea. The Son is wisdom itself, the Word itself, the truly existing Truth itself, Life itself, Truth itself, Holiness itself, but it cannot be said that God the Father Himself was Wisdom, Truth and Life: He is above them, as their source; in Him all these properties exist, as it were, in a hidden state, as something necessary; in the Son, all these properties manifest themselves actually, as a present fact, and are identical with the Son. The Son, therefore, is the entire fullness of the Father's divinity, actually realized. This fullness, actually expressed in the Son, necessarily entails a certain multiplicity of qualities in the Son. God is a monad. “God is completely simple and one, but our Savior for the sake of many becomes many.” 71 He is not only the self-revelation of the Father, but also the first beginning of self-revelation in the world. This makes Him more accessible to the knowledge of finite beings. So, Origen draws a sharp line between the Son and the creature. Although it has been pointed out that the Son is sometimes called a creature, it is in the sense that he contains within himself the entire creation. However: a) the Son is born from the will of the Father, the moment of non-existence does not take place in his existence. The world is called from non-existence to being and is subject to change; b) The Son is always referred by Origen to the sphere of divinity. The creation of the world is the self-revelation of the Father through the mediation of the Son-Wisdom, which from time immemorial contains within itself the potentially and ideally existing plan of the universe. And in the terminological field, Origen is an innovator, anticipating future terminology. God the Father, despite the abstraction that Origen assimilates to him, is a self-conscious person, a hypostasis. The Son is also the animated wisdom of God, conscious of itself and distinguished from the Father, as an independent hypostasis and the Holy Spirit is a hypostasis. Together they constitute the “Governmental Trinity”, the “worshipped Trinity” 72 And this is the true thought of Origen. Origen's merit is obvious: the thought of Three Hypostases - One Trinity was then adopted by all church theology and became its starting point. Origen was the first to try to determine the distinctive functions of the hypostases. Being belongs to the Father, rationality belongs to the Word, and holiness belongs to the Holy Spirit. This approach can be called subordinationism of properties or functions, and since a person cannot fully think about such things outside of some subordination, then in the era of the Cappadocians, when subordination as a difference in power (hierarchical subordination) will be largely rejected by church consciousness, the fathers will be actively engaged in developing a definition of the differences between hypostases according to properties (subordinationism of properties); this process will reach its limit in the theology of Gregory Palamas with its differing foundations of existence for each hypostasis. The Only Begotten Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, is the “Wisdom of God, essentially existing.” In this “Wisdom lies the virtue and form of every future creature that was created originally, and which came into being by chance.” Plato’s ideas are thus expressed as the wisdom of God. We can say that the Son and the Father are of one nature, if we consider incorporeality by nature. Conclusion. As for Origen’s accusation of subordinationism, it should be said that the source of Origen’s subordinationism must be sought in the following: in the influence of Philo, who accidentally invaded his system and violated its integrity. Philo was the first to define Logos as the mediating nature between born and unborn being, in contact with both. Lying at the basis of all apologetic theology, this idea received a dominant position in Origen and was developed with the consistency and thoroughness of which this outstanding mind was capable. Origen made the ungeneracy of the nature of the Father and the originality of all his properties the starting point of his judgments about the Son of God, and therefore subordinationism did not take on the casual and external character that we see among apologists. He established it on the origin of the Son and the Spirit from the Father, and pointed out their reason at the very basis of their existence. Therefore, even in the fourth century, this subordinationism represented such a force, against which the defenders of the Nicene creed had to spend a lot of time and effort. At the same time, despite the affirmation of the equality of all three hypostases, in general the system of relations between the persons of the Trinity was built on Origenistic theology, and the idea of ​​consubstantiality itself was only a variant of reasoning based on Origenian logic. Christ has two natures: he is true man and true God: not externally a man, but with soul and body. The soul of Christ is the mediator between the Logos and the human body. Christ incarnated only once and His incarnation is destined to remain a unique, non-reproducible event. Origen is most attentive to the individualization of the Holy Spirit, its sanctifying action. "God the Father, who embraces everything, extending his power to each of the creatures, participating in his being, makes him what it is; the Son, being lower than the Father, reaches only rational creatures; even lower is the Holy Spirit, he reaches only the saints. Therefore, the potential of the Father exceeds the potency of the Son. It is directly aimed at both saints and sinners, at rational people, dumb animals, and at soulless creatures, in general at everyone. On the contrary, the action of the Spirit does not extend in any way to soulless beings or to those who are given reason, but they are in the power of evil, absolutely deaf to good.” In the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, it is especially clearly visible how Origen stepped forward in comparison with his predecessors. How uncertain, little and superficial the apostolic men and apologists spoke on this topic, and how unclear the point of view of even Clement of Alexandria was, so Origen tries to comprehensively cover this problem. He not only professes his belief in the resurrection, but also touches on this fundamental Christian dogma from various angles. He speaks with absolute confidence about the resurrection, while criticizing those who take it literally, i.e. believes that after the resurrection people will get married, eat, etc. The specification of the resurrection was very relevant for his time. Speaking of Mary as Θεοτόκος, according to the testimony of Socrates 73, Origen is the first theologian who clearly affirms her eternal virginity. Origen created the word ἀυτοβασιλεία (kingdom in itself) to show that Jesus is the Kingdom of God Himself, and that belonging to the Kingdom is determined by a person’s relationship to Christ. Thus we return to the basic doctrine that in, with, and through Christ we become children of God. God the Father, acting in Christ, establishes his Kingdom in the hearts of people and in the world. Rescue and recovery Incarnation. The point in Christianity that representatives of ancient culture could neither understand nor accept was the concept of incarnation. The transcendental enters into hypostatic unity with the sensory-comprehensible world. Origen was the first to develop it holistically, but the influence of the ancient conceptual apparatus is obvious here too. Of the many souls created by God, only one did not shy away from contemplating God, did not grow cold in love for Him. The same soul about which Jesus said that “no one will take My life from Me,” from the very beginning of creation and in subsequent times inseparably and inseparably abided in Him, as in the Wisdom and Word of God, as in the truth and eternal light and, perceiving everything (the Son of God) with its whole being, and, entering into the light and radiance of it, became predominantly one spirit with Him, as The apostle promises those who should imitate her: “he who is united with the Lord is one spirit with Him.” 74 She became the mediator between the Word and human flesh. She is called the Son of God and Christ. This is a completely unsatisfactory understanding of the incarnation, for which Methodius of Patara will rightly criticize him, but the consequences that Origen brings from the very fact of the incarnation have entered the treasury of Christian thought. Despite his fall, a person can return to the Creator. The Incarnation of the Word is the last and most perfect revelation. The Savior is the “teacher of the divine sacraments." He is a priest and a sacrifice. The atonement performed by the Savior is essentially the enlightenment and complete revelation of the human race, the ransom of sinful man and the true, perfect sacrifice. It is universal in nature. Christ died not only for man, but also for other rational beings. We must partake of this atoning sacrifice. And then, “in the communion of what is most divine, human nature becomes divine not only in Jesus, but also in all those who follow Jesus with faith.” The stages of this path for man are as follows: faith, perfect knowledge (γνῶσις), deification of the mind 75 Resurrection. In the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, it is especially clearly visible how Origen stepped forward in comparison with his predecessors. First of all, Origen expresses the church’s conviction in the immortality of man: “the soul, having its own substance and life, will receive reward upon leaving this world” and “the time of the resurrection of the dead will come, when this body, now sown in corruption, will rise in incorruption.” Otherwise, if there were no resurrection of the dead, i.e. “If anyone dared to attribute substantial corruption to someone who was created in the image and likeness of God, then he would, I think, extend his wickedness even to the Son of God himself, because He is called in the Scriptures the image of God.” 76 The desire to know the meaning of what God has created is not put into us in order not to bear fruit. But in this life it is far from being realized completely and perfectly. And the knowledge of God is infinite, which means our knowledge must be infinite, i.e. Life must be eternal. He rebels against the literal understanding of the resurrection. He means those who await the resurrection of bodies that are not deprived of the ability to eat, drink, etc. “The end and consummation of the saints, I think, will consist in their invisible and eternal state.” 77 Discussing how this resurrection will take place, Origen proceeds from the Stoic doctrine of “seed logoi” “We need to think, and our bodies, like grain, fall into the ground. But there is a power invested in them, the power that contains the bodily substance, according to the word of God, will raise from the earth, renew and restore bodies, although they have died, collapsed and disintegrated, will restore, just as the power inherent in a grain of wheat, after decomposition and death, renews and restores the grain in the body of the stem and ear” 78 By such an application of the hypothesis of seminal logoi to the question of resurrection, Origen wanted to overcome two extremes, namely, on the one hand, the excessive rudeness and literalism of the understanding of resurrection in the spirit of the Sadducees and Samaritans and, on the other, the heretical idealism of Valentinus and Marcion with their spiritualistic understanding of the resurrection of only the soul, but not the body. But under such conditions, isn’t resurrection a purely physiological phenomenon? Eschatology. Apokatastasis. The end will be completely equal to the beginning. All souls at the end of time will return to their original state. It is impossible to prove that Origen's teaching regarding apokatastasis or universal restoration at the end of time is heretical. It is extracted by him from the texts of Paul and is not pantheistic. It does not entail the destruction of individuals, as evidenced by the reproaches made by Origen to the Stoic teaching about the final fire. None of his text suggests the salvation of the devil; in fact, he impulsively protests against the idea in a letter to friends in Alexandria, which is mentioned by both Jerome and Rufinus; his speculations admit of two interpretations. He certainly prefers to speak of purgatory, the baptism of eschatological fire, of which he was one of the earliest proponents, than of eternal punishment. His restraint shows a certain compulsion, but nothing more can be said; the rule of faith at this time was not yet fully defined. Origen's categorical statement regarding apokatastasis would contradict his hypothesis of the eternal cycle of things, which he sometimes assumes, even criticizing this idea among the Stoics. Obviously, this teaching cannot be compared with one of his main ideas, namely, about free will. This idea was nothing more than a good hope on his part. Conclusion. Origen's ontology, despite the fact that it directly concerns the consideration of problems related to Christian culture, reveals at almost all points the strongest influence of the conceptual apparatus of antiquity. Origen goes for it without any doubt about the acceptability of this method. Before moving on to the study of Origen’s ethical thought, let’s say a few words about his anthropology, including the theology of the image of God, since it is anthropology that determines his mystical and ascetic teaching, especially with regard to the topic of spiritual struggle, the main ideas of Origen, in which his ethics are revealed. Ethics, considering the question of human behavior to achieve one or another goal of human life, concerns the structure of the human personality, its anthropology, since it is the impulse to follow one’s nature that forces a person to develop the principles of his behavior as a means to achieve those goals, in the achievement of which the mentioned human nature is revealed. Self-knowledge. Origen, who affirmed the need for self-knowledge in order to arrive at virtue, distinguishes two forms of self-knowledge. The first has as its objects virtues and vices: inclinations, feelings, passions that the soul experiences in itself 79 The other is attached to the definition of the nature of the soul: a deeper and more difficult other is self-knowledge, which is located in the soul... let's look and begin, to the best of our ability, to talk about this knowledge... The soul must know what its substance is, whether it is corporeal or incorporeal, simple or complex, whether it has two parts or more. Thus, the study of anthropology in Origen is carried out with the goal of self-knowledge in order to be able to live in virtues. Anthropology is trichotomous, a) The distinction between spirit (πνεύμα, and not νο ῡ ς), soul and body dates back to 1 Thessalonians 5: 23. The determining element in this is spirit (derived from the Hebrew word ךןאה - ruah) - a sign of God’s action, different from πνεύμα of the Stoics with its absolute incorporeality. This trichotomy is often poorly understood when it is compared with Plato's trichotomy. According to Plato, it is expressed even in other terms (νο ῡ ς - mind, θυμός - spirit, ἐπιθυμία - attraction, passion) and refers only to the soul, while Origen's trichotomy refers to man in his integrity. We find it more or less obscurely in earlier Christian writers, and it receives its original elaboration from Irenaeus and the Valentinians. Origen has 3 elements - spirit, soul and body. But the soul itself is divided between the higher part νο ῡ ς and the lower part. But rather than talking about parts, we need to talk about tendencies (inclinations, directions), because here we are not talking about static theology (although each term corresponds to ontological reality), but about dynamic anthropology in the perspective of spiritual struggle. The soul struggles between spirit and body; and the two parts of the soul express its involvement in each of the opposite principles. b) Spirit is a divine element present in the soul, without constituting a part, strictly speaking, of the personality. He does not participate in the sins of man, because he cannot perceive evil within himself, but these sins put him in a state of numbness, interfering with the action of the spirit in man. He is the teacher of the soul, which he leads to the practice of virtue; one might say that it merges with moral consciousness. He reveals to him the knowledge of God and his mysteries and leads him to prayer. The soul that submits to him, without ceasing to be a soul, becomes spiritual and carries with it both its lower part and the body. This is exactly what happened in Christ. This spirit is different from the Holy Spirit, but it is the created participation of the human soul in the Holy Spirit and the place of the presence of the Holy Spirit in man. Origen speaks of this spirit as light, life, nourishment, etc. Closely related to this teaching is the teaching of the Church about sanctifying grace: it is a gift of grace created by God in man. However, it is present in all people, not only in the baptized. The spirit does not leave the sinful soul, but remains in it in a state of sleep, because it can no longer act on the soul that denies it, but its immutability determines the possibility of its conversion. Along with this πνεύμα, “attached” by God to the substance of man, Origen knows a charismatic πνεύμα, given for a specific purpose, the type of which is prophetic divine inspiration. In his polemic with the Montanists, who believed only one type of sacred madness, he presents this inspiration as the conscious and voluntary cooperation of the prophet with the Holy Spirit. c) In anthropology and psychology, Origen is more interested in the question of the origin of the soul and the purpose of man than in the abilities and functions of mental life. He created an imaginary person in his mind more than observed someone who actually existed in nature. This is very reminiscent of Philo's ideal man. The soul in its integrity is the place where free will, the power of choice, personality resides: it is the essence of man. If she follows the spirit, she will become spiritual even in her lower part, which will submit to the higher. But if it turns to the flesh and remains insensitive to the voice of the spirit, then it becomes carnal, its lower part takes away the power of power from the higher. d) The highest part of the soul is designated either by the Platonic term νο ῡ ς (mens), the Stoic term ἡγεμονικόν (the main part /heart, soul, mind/) or the biblical term κάρδια. The soul represents this highest part "in its pure form" only in a state of pre-existence. It is the seat of the soul's participation in the image of God and elevates it with the splendor of the spirit in contemplation, prayer and virtue. If the spirit is the active element of grace, then the soul νο ῡ ς is its passive element, its business is to perceive, the ability to perceive is its main function. Πνεύμα and νο ῡ ς are clearly different and indistinguishable from one another. They express the subtle dialectic of two aspects of grace: the gift and its acceptance. e) The lower part that appears after the fall is a constant attempt for the soul to turn away from divine realities in order to allow itself to be attracted by the body. The principle of the imaginations and passions, sometimes assimilated into the two internal elements of Plato's trichotomy (θυμός, ἐπιθυμία) without distinguishing the nobler from the lower aspirations, is often designated by Rom. 8, 6–7 by the expression φρόνημα της σαρκός (sensus carnis or carnalis) the thought of the flesh, or even more simply σάρξ (flesh), thereby expressing, as in Paul, the attraction to sin. This thought of the flesh is not confused with what in scholasticism will be called concupiscence, because by uniting natural faculties, it can even become spiritualized without being destroyed when the soul turns to the spirit. That is why Origen strongly affirms the absence of an attraction to evil in Christ, although he does not deny the presence of this lower part in Him, without which he would not have been a man like us. But this part of Christ’s soul is completely spiritualized. g) The body must be distinguished from the flesh. The concept of body and the concept of incorporeality in Origen are not unambiguous; he seems to notice this himself at the end of the preface to the Treatise on Elements; in addition to earthly bodies, there are more subtle bodies, called airy (ethereal), these are the bodies of angels and demons, bodies of souls in a state of pre-existence, bodies resurrected at the end of time; the text quoted by Methodius (On the Resurrection 14, 7) even states, in connection with the teaching of the meso- and neo-Platonists about the “cart of the soul” that the soul retains a certain bodily shell between death and resurrection. The Treatise on Elements states in three places (1, 6.4; 11, 2.2; 4, 3.15) that only the Trinity is absolutely incorporeal: the body is a sign of the state of creation, expressing its contingent character before the necessary character of God. If the soul itself is incorporeal, then it is nevertheless always clothed in a body. Despite unfair objections, Origen simultaneously asserts regarding the earthly body and the resurrected body their identity and their otherness, similar to the grain and the plant according to 1 Cor. 15, 35–38; the same can be said about air bodies in a state of pre-existence and earthly bodies (according to Procopius de Gaza). Moreover, it should be noted that incorporeality is often a moral concept, denoting life that is not the slave of the body: this applies not only to the blessed, but also to the righteous still living on earth. The four polemics in the treatise On the Beginnings about ultimate corporeality or incorporeality should be considered in accordance with the literary genre of this scripture: these are polemics. In the rest of Origen's work there is no mention of finite incorporeality. h) The trichotomous composition corresponds both to the state of pre-existence of souls led by their spirit: they are dressed in etheric bodies, and to the eschatological state, at least as regards the righteous resurrected. If those who will be resurrected in condemnation have a body similar to the dark body of demons, designated “external darkness,” then they will also no longer have a spirit. The Scripture that suggests this is Matt. 24, 51 and Luke 12, 46: if the owner, upon his return, finds an evil servant beating his comrades or getting drunk with drunkards, then he will cut him in two, taking away his spirit, which will return to God, who gave him. The damned has no more spirit; Origen, it seems, deprived him of every opportunity to convert. There is also an argument to reject what we have heard about the apokatastasis (return) to grace of demons and the damned. In Irenaeus we find an identical concept. This coherent and grandiose synthesis, everywhere profound in the works of the Alexandrian, almost never returns after it, even among its most ardent adherents, for example, Didymus the Blind, who puts forward several systems, or Evagrius Pontus, who, putting the mind (νοῡς) in the place of the spirit (πνεύμα), damages the unity that represents one of the most reliable criteria for the authenticity of fragments attributed to Origen. Theology of the image of God. The theology of the image of God in man dominates not only in asceticism, but also in the mysticism of Origen as a basis: “only like knows like” 1) The image of God in the strict sense is only the Word, man only “in the image” or “the image of the image" because it is the Word that conveys (communicates) the image of God. In Genesis 1, 26-27, “let us create,” with which the Father addresses his Son, shows that this latter is the Father’s assistant in the creation of man, but he is also a model, because he is the image according to which man is made. The Human Soul of Christ, still in a state of pre-existence united with the Word, like all other souls, they were created “in the image,” i.e. she is the image of the image. “But as such she is also the shadow of Christ the Lord, under which we live among the nations.” She stands between the Word and us, as a second image, a mediator. 2) Origen interprets, following Philo, but in a different way, two passages from Genesis 1 and 2 as two different creations: the first - the only one produced “in the image” - is the creation of souls in a state of pre-existence; the second, if we follow the texts that have come down to us, is the creation of bodies after the fall. This interpretation creates a problem: how could Origen see in Gen. 2 the creation of earthly bodies after the creation of souls and after the Fall, while this Fall is described only in Gen. 3? The evidence given by Procopius of Gaza, explaining Origen's Commentary on Genesis, resolves this problem, and quite in the spirit of Origen. Message in Gen. 2 does not speak of the creation of an earthly body, but of a sparkling body (ἀυγοειδές), which clothes souls in a state of pre-existence, and the difference between these two creations here is nothing more than a difference of causes, because these creations coincide. After the fall in Gen. 3. 21 sparkling body hides its radiance under the “shell of skin”, denoting not the corporeality that already exists (completely incorporeal, as already said, only the divine triad), but its earthly and mortal quality. It is into this corrupted physicality that God places man as in a correctional facility. The place “in the image” is the soul, or rather its highest part, νο ῡ ς, ἡγεμονικόν or heart. She is the only thing that exists in a state of pre-existence, she participates in the sonship of the Son and in his many names, such as wisdom, life, truth, light, logos, etc. Only the holy truly exists, but not the evil, which has rejected participation in “He Who Is.” The Λογικός (reasonable) progresses or regresses in this capacity according to his actions of virtue or sin. The holy is only logicos; demons and the damned are likened through their action of freedom to ἀλογικο ί (unreasonable). 3) But sin clouds this original participation and its effect is represented by the imposition of hostile images that hide “in the image.” This is the image of the earthly according to 1 Cor. 15, 49, earthly, which in most of Origen’s texts is not Adam, but the Devil, the author of the Fall. Ultimately, sins imprint on us animal images that differ in the nature of sin and vice. This theme of animal images, while remaining moral and symbolic, prompted the attribution of the myth of metempsychosis to Origen, despite the fact that numerous and very reliable texts reject this idea. But these devilish and animal images drive out participation in the image of God. It is filled up like the water in Abraham's well, which the Philistines filled with mud. Only Jesus, our Isaac, has the power to cleanse the wells of our soul from the impurities thrown there by our enemies. 4) “In the image” is better than the ability (potency) to deify in the Aristotelian sense; rather, “in the image” must be understood according to the Stoic scheme: in this potency there is a seed that must be made to grow until the complete deification that is the resemblance. Origen read the difference between image and resemblance (the latter was the goal of human life among the Pre-Socratic philosophers) in Gen. 1, 26–27. If God connected likeness with image when he announced his project in v. 26, Scripture no longer speaks of this in v. 27 when it shows the accomplished creation in the image. That's true. If the image is given from the beginning, then the likeness remains until the end of time according to 1 John 3:2: “We know that when he (Christ in the coming glory) appears, we will be like him, because we will see him as he is.” 5) The similarity will be perfect only after death, in resurrection. It will be accomplished in the image of Christ; we will then be completely identical in his death and in his resurrection, not only “through mirrors,” i.e. in a reflected image, as in the first resurrection, accomplished in baptism and the Christian life that followed, but “face to face” We will henceforth live behind images and shadows in the realm of genuine realities. We will be like the glorious body of Christ, his soul, the image of the Word, in the Word to himself, and through him to God. We will be gods, participating in the knowledge, in the virtue and in the happiness of the divine persons. We will behold God “face to face” as his mediatorial Son beholds Him. Now these are only thoughts about the Son, but then there will be an advanced stage, since people will have the qualities of the Son that allow such contemplation and eternal unity with God. The whole soul will be united with the logos, God will be all in all (Origen never accepted this statement in a pantheistic sense). 6) Man's participation in the image of God constitutes our “basic substance,” the essence of our being. Man is a being distant from his center, which is God for him. If you know yourself, you can see the image of God in yourself. Plotinus had an identical idea, but he borrowed it from Christianity rather than vice versa. C) Ethical thought - optimistic spirituality Origen's ethics reflects traces of efforts to neutralize Gnosticism. In Gnosticism it is inevitably pessimistic: man is bankrupt; matter is evil; Man cannot defeat it on his own. Origen also takes a middle position on this issue. He defends free will, but through this bodily life does not cease to be a prison, from which the sooner you leave, the better. Freeing oneself from the disturbances of flesh and blood is always desirable. Origen thus lays the foundation for the asceticism that flourished in the Church and is one of the creators of Christian mysticism. However, in asceticism he preaches moderation, and in mysticism, realism. Ascetic teaching. The ascetic teaching of Origen, as well as his moral teaching (not different from each other, which is already clear from my previous discussions) contain a very vast and not yet sufficiently studied area. Eusebius (Ts.I. 6, 3, 9–13) describes the ascetic life of Origen himself, and Gregory Faumaturge emphasizes it in his Homily. Origen turned his teaching into “philosophy,” that is, into the ascetic life, because, unlike the philosophers, he practiced what he taught (2, 133–136) and made efforts to form his students in the love not only of speculative theology, but also its practice in life (14, 137). His ascetic teaching greatly influenced the beginning of monasticism, which he anticipated by the life he led (according to the Word of Thanksgiving) in Caesarea with his disciples, as well as on Latin monasticism of the Middle Ages up to the 12th century. Martyrdom. The idea of martyrdom occupied a huge place in the spirituality of Origen from childhood: in the memoirs (homily on Ezekiel) of his father, who died as a martyr under Septimius Severus, in the Exhortation to Martyrdom, which he addresses during the persecution of Maximinus Thras to his assistant and friend Ambrose and the Caesarea priest Protoctetus, in numerous texts, in commentaries and homilies, during his own sufferings and tortured in prison under Decius. Martyrdom is a witness given to Christ in physical and moral suffering and in death. There are two essential elements in this confession: faith, which no incompleteness of thought should devalue, and the open manifestation of this faith, which presupposes the renunciation of all idolatry. God is a jealous God, who in himself does not suffer from our unfaithfulness, but it is in our interests that He is jealous, because to confess Him means to unite with Him; to renounce Him means to separate from Him. A martyr is a Christian who remains faithful in all circumstances to the commitment he took on in baptism; his sacrifice represents the action of graces received in good deeds: the martyr offers himself to God as a priest offers God everything he has on earth: happiness, family, earthly life, himself. This is a fighter, an athlete; he is in the arena fighting with the devilish forces that want to take away his strength upon his defeat: he is surrounded by earthly spectators, but especially by heavenly ones, awaiting his triumph, which will make him the conqueror of the authorities and demonic forces. He is not alone in struggling, because divine help does not leave him, the Spirit tells him what he must answer. He is the most perfect imitator of Jesus and companion in his suffering. It is here that the common thing that unites the martyrological literature of the period of its formation. The martyr bears his cross with Christ, he renounces himself so that Christ may live in him, he follows Jesus in his suffering and therefore in his glory, in order to sit with Him at the right hand of the Father. He also takes part in the redemptive work of Christ; martyrdom - his confession - baptism, completely cleansing from sin; it is the highest baptism, the mystery of baptism with water, a mysterious image, for it actually accomplishes the construction of a martyr in the death and resurrection of Christ. But the martyr is not the only one who through these sufferings has the forgiveness of sins: his sufferings will work together with the sufferings of Christ for the redemption and purification of the world. The sacrifice of the martyrs, joining the sacrifice of Christ, defeats the devilish forces. There is no proportionality between present suffering and the glory that will follow: the martyr will live near the Lord, possess knowledge and perfect bliss. The ardent desire for martyrdom, expressed in other texts in the beautiful impulse of the Meeting with Heraclides, does not make Origen a fanatic. In his commentary on John, he condemns all incitement to martyrdom and even demands that confrontation with the authorities be avoided, if possible: the deepest basis is the love that a Christian should have for the enemies of his faith, avoiding committing a crime against them. Bernanos in the dialogues of the Carmelites will return this intuition, corresponding to the general opinion of the early church, which was given an example during the persecution of Decius, in addition to Cyprian of Carthage, two of Origen's greatest disciples, Gregory the Wonderworker and Dionysius of Alexandria. However, it seems that for Origen, as for Cyprian, feelings of martyrdom can inspire every death of a Christian, who then becomes a martyr “in secret,” even apart from the execution that made them “open martyrs.” Self-denial. The thought of martyrdom in Origen sanctifies the doctrine of self-denial. In the Exhortation to Martyrdom, he seems to give a charter for Christian life, talking about the responsibilities assumed in baptism. Martyrdom is a decisive means of fulfilling them at once. Expecting martyrdom, the best Christians prepare for it in their inner state of mind and strive for complete self-denial 80 . Renunciation of the world 81 voluntary poverty 82, especially virginity 83 encourages one to follow the crucified Christ. It is even necessary that “all our disputes, all our thoughts, all our actions should be a renunciation of ourselves, a confession of Christ in Christ... Removal from sin is a renunciation of ourselves in order to attract ourselves to Christ 84. Origen also advises the practice of ascetic exercises, which constantly dispose us to renunciation 85. The doctrine of virginity and chastity. Origen was the first to clearly teach about the virginity of Mary after childbirth; he expressed this not as a free opinion, but as a statement closely related to faith: it is the only sound opinion (Commentary on John 1, 4, 23); those who deny this certainly become heretics (homily on Luke 7). Mary contains the beginnings of virginity in women as Jesus contains in men (Commentary on Matthew 10, 17). A) The basis of this teaching is the mystical marriage of Jesus with the Church and with the soul, which makes chastity possible and virginity perfect, despite the fact that marriage in this teaching is an image of what is accomplished according to the flesh. Virginity - restoration of the paradise state and prophecy of the state in resurrection: only after the fall, according to Genesis 4, 1, Adam “knew Eve his wife.” The body of a person who has already risen with Christ in the “first resurrection” belongs through virginity only to the Lord; it is then the church of the Lord, in which the virgin soul serves as a priest, offering natural friendship to the Holy Spirit, which unites it with the body of the Lord. Respect for the body for Origen, according to 1 Cor. 6, 13–20, one of the essential foundations of chastity under all its forms, including marital chastity. Virginity after martyrdom is the most perfect state, the one that brings about the most complete union with Christ. This can only be understood in relation to eschatology, because it would have no meaning for a life limited to this lower world. She makes a prophet and witness of life from a virgin being, where nothing will hinder unity with Christ. B) Virginity is Christian only under certain conditions, when it corresponds to a strong position of the soul, and is not just the state of someone who simply has not found a spouse; when it is accepted not for purely philosophical reasons, still less for heretical reasons, like the chastity of the Marcionites - out of contempt for the body; This is an insult to God the Creator. Through these heretics, Satan himself feigns chastity in order to catch the soul like a bird-catcher in his snare. Virginity that comes from vanity, vanity or the desire for profit has no value. True virginity is only that which is accompanied by all virtues. In the first place is the virginity of faith: a virtuous husband who lives chastely in accordance with his condition is a hundred times better than a bachelor devoted to other vices, i.e. Having chastity of the body, he neglects the chastity of the heart, which means the soul. He who does not protect his heart from impure imaginations or desires is also not chaste, even if he is so in body. On the contrary, in the case of rape (according to Deut. 22:25–27), the shame of the body cannot stain the soul: the virginity of the body makes sense only through the virginity of the heart, which is the goal; violence against the first is important only if it is also violence against the second. c) Virginity and chastity are a mutual gift of God and man. Without divine grace they are impossible: virginity presupposes the gift of the Holy Spirit. Only God and his Word protect him in his soul. Just as Jesus the son of Nun circumcised the second generation of Jews with a stone knife (Joshua 5:2-9), so “my” Jesus circumcises his people (circumcision is an image of chastity) with a stone knife, which He Himself is, because He is a sword (Heb. 4:12) and a stone (1 Cor. 10:4), circumcising evil desires from the soul. The power of the conversion of God's Word to bring chaste lives to those who had previously led chaste lives is one of the greatest apologetic arguments against Celsus. If virginity is a gift from God, you need to pray to preserve it. But also virginity, together with chastity, is a gift that a person gives to God, the most perfect after martyrdom, a gift that has as a reward the knowledge of God, which can only be accepted by one who has freed himself from all desires. Every Christian must offer God the gift of chastity in accordance with his condition, but according to the fragment on 1 Corinthians 39, which clearly distinguishes commandment and advice, virginity is not any kind of command. This is additional work. It presupposes, however, first love for God and neighbor: virgins, obsessed with the parable, remain at the door, because they did not receive with it (with virginity) the oil of mercy. d) This gift of man to God is manifested in mortification: he preserves the heart, preserves thoughts, this is the circumcision of eyes, ears, lips, etc., which the Old Testament already spoke about. Origen also speaks of fasting, of flight from circumstances, symbolized by the flight of Jacob. If a storm of temptation befalls the soul, there remains the prayer that awakened Jesus sleeping in the boat, Him who alone can calm the winds and the sea. These temptations come first from the very nature of man, for any state in which a person finds himself can be the cause of temptation. If you begin to succumb to them (give in), the devilish action strengthens them. The measure and method of killing are not the same for all people, because they are tempted in very different ways: some have almost natural chastity, others must always be on guard. But the absence of temptations is not achievable in this world, where we always remain slaves of the flesh; perfect freedom from them is possible only in a state of bliss. e) Virginity and, to a lesser extent, chastity bring freedom to serve the Lord, despite the fact that the married person is necessarily attached to his spouse (1 Cor. 7:32-34). Liberation from the flesh makes sense only through serving God. This is why virginity, or to a lesser extent chastity, is a spiritual virtue necessary for the believer. The prophetic spirit comes only to a pure soul. Sins of the flesh remove one from the contemplation of divine realities, deprive one of the spiritual taste, dull and kill the five spiritual senses. Virginity is fertile in a spiritual sense: like Mary, it gives birth to Jesus in the soul. Spiritual struggle. Origen's trichotomous anthropology is oriented towards the perspective of spiritual struggle, which on the one hand is connected by the higher part of the soul with the “spirit”, and on the other hand by its lower part is connected with the body: spiritual struggle has its roots in the very heart of the soul, which is the arena and goal of the struggle. The theme of spiritual struggle is also focused on Origen’s angelology and demonology: guardian angels and demons. Angels are responsible for such and such a virtue or such and such a vice, angels are administrators of various forces of nature, angels and demons of nations, this whole invisible world fusses around the soul before the two leaders of the armies - Christ - the angel of the great council and Satan, the prince of this world. Origen describes their opposite tactics, as we will see below regarding the discernment of spirits. But Satan is not the opposite of God or Christ. Good action is, first of all, the work of God and His Son in us: the role of man is to accept this in the fullness of his freedom. Origen is in no way a semi-Pelagian: if some of his texts give such an impression, then they must be read in the perspective of the subsequent presentation; on the other hand, many of the commentaries preserved in Greek describe the relationship of grace and freedom with even greater nuance. As far as the devil is concerned, the order is reversed: according to the treatise On Elements 3, 2–4, we are the first to be responsible for our mistake. Satan and his angels intervene only when we make ourselves available, yielding to the first impulses of desires and evil thoughts. Free will and liberty. Free will refers to the power that a person has in choosing between good and evil, and plays a large role in the cosmology presented in the Treatise On Elements, in particular because freedom is one of the points that poses the greatest danger of the age in connection with pagan astrology (Platonic, Pythagorean and Stoic). Another such point is the Gnostic doctrine of predestination (Valentinian doctrine of the nature of souls). But Origen has a deeper concept of freedom, which manifests itself especially in his spiritual teaching and stems from the ἐλευθερ ί α of Paul. One who approaches God is liberated, but only those who are happy in a state of bliss have complete freedom. Contrary to the hypothesis of the Beginnings, which we often think of, unfortunately, as representing the whole system of Origen while it is only an aspect in the antithesis, this complete freedom coincides with the infallibility to which the righteous man living on earth strives, without fully achieving it here. On the contrary, sin makes a slave: although it comes from the action of free will; it deprives freedom, burying the soul under the slavery of animality, which designates the animal images covering the image of God. Virtue. Origen's teaching on virtue is, in general, similar to Plotinus's (Enneads 1, 2). According to the latter, the One is the source of virtues, the paradigms of which are ideas located in the second hypostasis, in νο ῡ ς -e: virtues are present both in the third hypostasis, the Soul of the world, and in the individual soul in the state of participation in the Soul of the world. Not enough attention is paid to the fact that the most suitable analogue of Origen for the third hypostasis of Neoplatonism is not the Holy Spirit, about which the treatise On Elements (1, 3, 1) says that the pagans could not have had a lesser idea, but the human soul of Christ: just as the Soul of the world according to Plato contains in itself all individual souls at the same time different and indistinguishable, the same for Origen is the human soul of Christ from the state of pre-existence to resurrection - the Bridegroom of the Church, which means humanity called to deification. The image or “shadow” of the Word, the human soul of Christ conveys to us the “shadows” of the virtues of those virtues that a person can perceive. In the Father, and through participation in the Word, in the human soul of Jesus, the virtues are substantial, but in man they are accidental, that is, perceived and capable of both growth and decline. Virtue in man is thus a substantial participation in the Word, perceived through his humanity. Origen could have said with the Stoics that the virtues are the same in God and in men. And Gregory the Faumaturge does not deprive himself of the opportunity to do so in his Acknowledgment (11, 142; 9, 124); but he would not add that “the wise man is equal in virtue to the first God” (9, 124). Sin. Origen's fundamental concept of sin is connected with his characteristic vision of the world, coming from Plato: the same world is considered on two planes, the world of divine secrets, which man will contemplate in eschatology, and the world of sensual beings, images of secrets, which, according to the divine plan, are intended to lead to mystery and awaken desire with their beauty. In themselves, as creations of God, sensual beings are good, but for man, due to his egoism, they can be a source of temptation. The fundamental sin is to dwell on the sensible, which is only an image, without continuing its path towards the mystery: in this case, the image takes the place of the mystery that it should reveal; Therefore, the sin of people is idolatry. The sin of the Jew who carries out his cult - the image of true realities - is that for the sake of saving the cult he is ready to kill the Truth itself; the sin of the addict is that he demands from creation that happiness that only God can give him; The sin of the philosopher is that he constructs his own idol, his own system and worships it; The sin of the heretic is that he imitates the philosopher by constructing his own separate system “according to Scripture,” and thereby desecrates the Church of God. Repentance. The apostolic men, especially Hermas, preaching μετάνοια (conversion of the mind), do not talk about κατανύξις (repentance, i.e. etymologically sting). Origen was the first to discover in the Bible the idea of ​​constant pain, which should maintain our sense of sin. He also uses another theme of Scripture, namely πένθος (sadness, longing). Origen, being surrounded by the mentality of eudaimonism, for which any voluntary sadness is absurd, identifies from Scripture a very important theme of “sorrow for God” 86. His homily on Jeremiah calls the Christian to constant sorrow, mourning and tears, feeding on the consciousness of sin and their traces in the soul. Faith in judgment about God encourages people to live virtuously and flee from sin. “Pain can change them completely, even if their natural tendency towards evil has grown into a habit” 87 “He who fulfills the commandments out of fear of punishment is a child of Abraham and receives a reward, but he is inferior to him who is perfect in the freedom of love” 88 Apathy. The word apathy, constantly used by Clement and Evagrius, rarely used by Origen, who is closer to metriopathy (ἁ παθεια - dispassion, μετριοπατεία - moderation in passions, from the verb πάσχω - to suffer). The desire to have offspring is commendable. Natural tendencies become bad only when they cross the boundaries 89. Of course, the human passions attached to God by the Old Testament are symbols of certain Divine realities, but the work of redemption had at the beginning in the Father, as in the Son, the passion of Love and because of this same love for people - "πέπονθεν ὁ ἀπατ ή ς " - He suffered Impassively 90 3. Exegetical method and the doctrine of knowledge A) Exegetical method - the doctrine of the interpretation of Holy Scripture “The cause of false, wicked, and unreasonable opinions about God is nothing other than understanding the Scriptures not according to the spirit, but according to the letter.”91 If you ask the question of who Origen was in the first place, then the clear answer to this question, of course, will be that he was an Exegete. Let us remember that Origen's first work, and undoubtedly his most important, was a study of the canon of Holy Scripture. Thus, Origen prepared himself the basis for all subsequent speculation. Having completed this monumental creation “Hexaplu”, Origen begins its interpretation, which actually introduces man into the world of divine realities. He devotes his entire subsequent life to its interpretation. Most of his works are called “Interpretation (in Greek ΕΞΗΓΗΤΙΚΩΝ) on such and such a book.” The exegetical method was already actively used by the Alexandrian school, but Origen gave it paramount importance in his philosophy. Origen himself describes it in detail in his last book On Elements. It is noteworthy that Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great, when they compiled the Philocalia, almost completely included this book in it, while they only partially took other books from On the Beginnings. So we have this book in two versions. The passages from Origen's writings with literary, critical, grammatical and historical explanations of scripture are countless, but the literal meaning of the text is the basis for its spiritual interpretation. He believed in the historicity of the περικοπή (passage), even when he gave it an allegorical interpretation, for the fact that a certain fact serves to refer the reader to some more sublime reality only increases and determines its value, helps to penetrate into it, and does not make it just a secondary sign. However, sometimes he admits that the “bodily” meaning is not significant. Sometimes Origen made do with figurative or anthropomorphic passages and referred to the “materiality” of the metaphor as the literal meaning, contrary to modern practice, which considers the literal meaning to be the meaning intended by the author. Sometimes he dealt with passages that were incomprehensible in the Greek text or that presented great exegetical difficulties that he was fully aware of, but no longer had the opportunity to resolve. Sometimes he failed to take into account the literal, literary, psychological or historical context, but in general this is rare in his writings. The literal meaning was not, according to Origen, the reason why the Holy Spirit gave the Scriptures to Christians. The legal and ceremonial precepts of the Law were abolished by Christ, and historical narratives in themselves are of no use for spiritual guidance. The true meaning, bequeathed by the Holy Spirit, is the spiritual meaning. Ontologically, it corresponds to the highest part of his trichotomy - the spirit, to which human life in its integrity (in the flesh - letter, in the soul - morally) should be likened. Christ is the center of history. The Old Testament is revelation only insofar as it is a prophecy relating to Christ. In each of the characters of the Old Testament, in each of the stories and instructions, the interpreter finds the image of Christ (This also corresponds to cosmological reality. Origen strictly separates potentiality - the principle of corporeality and actualization - the imparting of qualities. We can say that God creates potentiality, but our co-creation lies in imparting the appropriate qualities to the created. Thus, the world is not static, but is conceived in dynamic correlation with its image - the Word, Christ) or the Church, the realities of the New Testament and, especially, the sacraments. The first coming of Christ still retains its prophetic character. It raised eschatological expectations that have not yet been satisfied. We contemplate eschatological realities, i.e. The “eternal Gospel” is only in “reflection,” but we have the desire to possess them completely. But the “Gospel in Time” is identical in substance with the “eternal Gospel of Beatitudes.” The difference is only in the ἐπινοία, or imperfect manner in which men contemplate this latter. Thus, Origen expresses an essential fact of Christian sacramentalism. The spiritual meaning is a harbinger of future blessings and determines for the faithful their behavior during the period between the two parousias, the comings of Christ and brings them heavenly gifts as they ascend spiritually. In this vision of the world on two levels - symbolic and mysterious, which he adopted from Plato - Origen describes the sacramentalism of the New Testament and the symbolism inherent in any true knowledge of God. But with all this, Origen can be criticized for the fact that he did not pay any attention to human authorship and even denied its certain autonomy. According to Origen, there has never been a time when Divine dignity dictated even one useless word. This means that in the most insignificant detail or pleonasm it is necessary to reveal some intention of the Holy Spirit (the Kabbalistic principle of interpretation of scripture. However, despite all the analogies in the application of this principle, for example in Philo, most likely it is completely original for Origen, corresponding to the type of his piety). Thus, the artificiality of a significant part of such comments is revealed, despite their beauty and depth in general. They are often introduced by etymology or arithmetic symbolism. This procedure is biblical, but Hellenistic in origin. One can distinguish between Origen's typology (the search for the true meaning of the text) and symbolism (allegorism - giving the text an artificial meaning). Typology example. Isaac carried the wood himself. This is a symbol of Christ carrying the cross. Isaac and Abraham walk parallel. Perhaps this means that Isaac has the same priesthood as Abraham. “Where is the sacrifice?” asks Isaac, “God will provide a sacrifice for himself,” answers Abraham.” Why Abraham answers in the future tense, perhaps he is prophesying about the future sacrifice of Christ. Unfortunately, in Origen’s works it is often almost impossible to distinguish between typology and allegory, so confusing is his interpretation of this or that passage of Scripture. Conclusion. The fullness of Christian truth is given in the rule of faith, i.e. in apostolic or church preaching, specifically in Scripture and Tradition, but is given in the form of an elementary teaching, addressed to the “simple”, which, however, also contains a deeper, hidden, esoteric meaning. The more perfect and learned, capable of philosophizing about the rational, must rise above the most beautiful laws and teachings, which are only necessary for the majority, and illuminate for themselves the light of knowledge. This requires an allegorical method of interpreting Scripture. After all, according to the division of man into body, soul and spirit, the words of Scripture contain a triple meaning: “corporal”, or “commonly understood and historical”, “mental”, or “moral”, and “spiritual”, or allegorical. Of course, a necessary condition for the fruitfulness of the allegorical method is the Inspiration of Scripture, which is perceived as a kind of divine feeling and carries its own authenticity. Therefore, the path of the Christian philosopher is commentary on the Holy Scriptures. Almost without exception, Gnostic systems express hostility to the Old Testament in harsh forms. This was inevitable: Jewish monotheism made no concessions to Gnostic dualism; on the other hand, the optimism of the Old Testament religion was the mortal enemy of Gnostic pessimism and asceticism. Origen devotes the 4th and 5th chapters of the second book On Elements to an analysis of the claims of Gnosticism at this point. But theoretical proofs, no matter how skillful they were, could not be the decisive moment in a purely religious dispute. The Gnostics, especially Marcion, relied on texts. Many quotations from the Old Testament are merciless; Origen believes that it was they who threw many into the arms of Gnosticism. “The reason for false, impious and unreasonable (Gnostic) opinions about God is nothing other than the understanding of Scripture not according to the spirit, but according to the letter.” 92 To get out of the difficulties, it is necessary to distinguish a threefold meaning in the Holy Scripture according to the fact that man consists of body, soul and spirit. The allegorical method of interpretation gives Origen, as before Philo, the opportunity to read in the Bible such things that the authors of the sacred books themselves would marvel at. But only by this method could one escape the attacks of Gnosticism. However, there is another interesting point in the interpretation of Scripture. It is easy to see that the discussion about the multi-level structure of the biblical text corresponds to the ontology of the Incarnation. The Word, in order to reveal the creatures of the Creator, puts on the lower levels: soul and body, thereby interpreting God in these spheres. Interpretation is the only way possible. Origen’s (original) idea is very interesting that the very fact that the divine can be said on the pages of Scripture foreshadows the Incarnation, since it already testifies to a certain level of the incarnation of God on the pages of Scripture. God is expressible, and therefore the real Incarnation is reasonable. Moreover, since the Word did not disdain to take on flesh, the literal meaning has its real meaning. Thus, in its foundations, Origen's allegorism is realistic, despite the fact that it often took completely incredible forms. B) The doctrine of mystical knowledge. Unfolding Exegesis Having examined the doctrine of the interpretation of Holy Scripture, we return again to the epistemological thought of Origen, taking into account what has been said about his anthropology and ethics, since knowledge according to Origen should be looked at from two points of view, as a means of achieving unity with God, i.e. a return to the original state, and to its goal, since unity with God is precisely a process, the dynamics of cognition. Without cognizing, without constantly delving into divine secrets, the soul is not able to maintain the fire of God's presence within itself. Mystical knowledge is the goal of ethics. Here we are talking specifically about knowledge, and not, as often happens, about “gnosis,” because I see no reason to distinguish knowledge according to Origen from what it means in the rest of the Christian tradition, and to bring it closer by this term to the concept that heretical Gnosticism had about it. Of course, Origen could not avoid using the word γνῶσις, since this is the usual term in Greek for the concept of “knowledge,” but his desire to completely separate himself from gnosis with a false name is clearly evident in his stock of words, his vocabulary. Never, unlike his teacher Clement and his later student Evagrius, does he designate with the term Gnostic what is called “perfect” or “spiritual” in the language of Scripture. Thus, it will not be correct to say about Origen’s system “Gnostic”. Cognition - we are, of course, talking about the knowledge of God and divine realities - presupposes the presence of: a) a cognizing subject, b) a cognizable object, c) an instrument or starting point that can serve as the beginning of cognition, d) a path to be followed in the process of cognition and, finally, e) an action that determines its points to be considered. Cognizing subject. A) In Origen’s anthropology, especially in the doctrine of the image of God, I have already spoken about the cognizing subject. In order to cognize, you need to be similar, to be able to detect in yourself some image of the cognizable object. This Platonic principle is obvious to common sense. Man cognizes the beings that surround him because of the cognizability that unites him with them. If he can come to some knowledge of God, it is precisely because he is created in the image of God. He further develops this similarity through moral and ascetic life, detachment from the body, renunciation of sin, and practice of virtues. Then he becomes capable of knowledge. In a state of bliss, our similarity to Christ will be such that, according to 1 John 3:2, we will see Him as He is. Thus the soul goes beyond mere faith to embrace the charisma of knowledge—the kind of renunciation of realities that faith teaches. Faith is the source of knowledge, and knowledge is the perfection of faith, which has no other content than the content of faith. Even more, the charisma of wisdom is characterized by participation in the Wisdom of God, his Son and encourages one to experience participation in divine realities. In this, Origen consistently pursues Clement’s thought about mystical knowledge. Faith and the prerequisite and goal of knowledge. Knowledge is progressive because if God reveals himself, the soul comprehends Him only to the extent that it is able to behold the divinity penetrating through the man Jesus. To do this, you need to have spiritual vision or, together with the three apostles, climb the mountain of transfiguration. The freedom of man must accept the freedom of the revealed God. But between the Christian who remains in the simplicity of faith and the perfect believer, there is no impassable border. Origen never ceases to exhort the listeners of his homilies about perfection and often emphasizes the distance separating the spiritual man in a state of bliss from the imperfect realities that we can admire on earth. When he describes the charisms of the spiritual man and the communication which he has with mystical realities, he is aiming at an ideal which will only be truly realized in a state of bliss. Whatever we may say, Origen has no aristocracy, i.e. arrogant esotericism. One can speak of his teaching as esoteric, in the sense that it requires listeners to be particularly profound for its acceptance; however, everyone is called to this knowledge that Origen speaks of. Known object. B) The object of knowledge is the world of secrets (μυστήρια), realities (πράγματα), truth (ἀληθεία); he is by nature intelligent (νοητός), spiritual (πνευματικός), reasonable (λογικός), but, however, invisible (ἀορατός), hidden (κρυπτός), secret ( ἀπορρῆτος) and ineffable (ἀρρῆτος). This world forms a higher plane, analogous to the ideas of Plato, and only in it resides complete being and perfect rationality. It initially contains ideas or logoi, which serve as images for the creation of beings, then the secrets of souls, angelic, human, and finally, images of the Word and images of God. It is the Word itself that contains secrets, since it is Wisdom - this is its first name - the intelligent world where these ideas-logos and secrets are located. They were created in Him by the Father in the very act of His birth, and thus form a creation that is co-eternal with God. The mystery in the last analysis is the divine Person, the Unknowable Son, for He is Darkness. But, however, He contains within Himself, such is His paradox, the highest object of knowledge. It can only be partially comprehended, gradually and by grace, when the three divine Persons teach it in the depths of the soul, imparting into it the free knowledge of themselves. All of this is reflected in several of the mystical themes that I am going to study: Light, which is the grace of knowledge coming from the Three Persons, Nutrition, i.e. Christ, feeding the soul with the divine nature, with which he himself is constantly fed by the Father, Wine, pleasing the soul, delighting it with the knowledge of mysteries. But to learn the secrets, you need a soul that would spiritually unite them. If she is not ready, the revelation will be useless, often even harmful, like food that is too solid for someone with a fever. This is the basis of spiritual experience, which serves as the basis for the foundation of what we sometimes incorrectly call the esotericism of Origen, which we actually find in all the teachers of the Church. If Origen sometimes hints at the secret traditions preserved by the Jews and attacks the traditions of the Gnostics, then he does not know about such secret traditions of the Christians. C) Means of cognition. The starting point of this (mystical) knowledge is an image (ἐικῶν), shadow (σκία), symbol (σύμβολον), type (τύπος) or riddle (ἄινιγμα); it is noticeable (ἄισθητος), bodily (σωματικός), visible (ὀρατός). It has no being and intelligibility in itself, its very essence is to be outgoing, it aims to lead to mystery. It consists of sensory-comprehensible beings, especially those of which Scripture speaks. To man, who is a body, God speaks through bodily images and through pedagogy leads him to the knowledge of true nature. But the symbol must be transcended. The sin is to linger on it, breaking it. the impulse of the soul, which must continue its path towards the mystery. The Old Testament must be surpassed and it is the sin of the Jews not to notice that, focusing on rituals, on laws, on quotations from the Bible, they lose sight of the fact that all this, first of all, has value to the extent that it refers to the Other. There is, however, a great difference between the two Testaments in their relation to the everlasting gospel. It seems that Origen took the Apocalypse (14, 6) as his starting point, which for him denotes the eschatological world of divine mysteries. The Old Testament contained only shadows of divine realities. But, having become incarnate, Christ brought these realities themselves. The temporal Gospel is identified through ὑπόστασις, its substance with the eternal Gospel. The only difference is in ἐπίνοια (names), the human way of looking at things. In fact, since we see “through the mirror” - the only knowledge possible here, we possess truly mysterious realities, but hidden under the veil of symbol. Origen expresses here the deep structure of the sacrament, which is both an eschatological reality (res, translation πράγμα) and a sign (sacramentum). As the soul ascends, the symbol reveals more and more the mystery that it stands for, without, however, achieving a “face to face” vision here in this world. D) The path of knowledge. The path of knowledge, which begins with spiritual interpretation, is the presentation of Christianity in terms of Platonic dialectics. The text Against Celsus does this through an exegesis very similar to the passage in Plato's Letter 8. Here are the stages of the path he proposed: 1. From John the Baptist to the Word Incarnate (spiritual exegesis of the Old Testament). 2. From the Word incarnate to Christ present in the soul (spiritual exegesis of the New Testament). 3. From Christ in the soul to Christ the Wisdom, about which we speak among the perfect (spiritual ascent). 4. From Christ the Wisdom to Christ in unity with the mysteries (beatific vision). The Old Testament, which found its peak in John the Baptist, the forerunner leading to Christ, is only a shadow of the true realities, it does not bring real participation in the mystery. If the greatest of the patriarchs and prophets could have knowledge of the secrets that were signified by their words and their gestures, then they did not have true possession of them. They only hoped for them. Moses saw the day of the Lord only at the moment when, together with Elijah, he was sanctified by the glory of the transfigured Christ. The New Testament brings with Christ all the divinity hidden under His humanity (his human nature), granting possession of the divine realities themselves. But in order to see the divine light penetrating through the humanity of Christ, one must have spiritual vision capable of recognizing it. To those who do not possess it, Jesus has “neither form nor beauty” (Isaiah 53.2). They see Him only as an ordinary person. We acquire this spiritual vision as Jesus is born in the soul, uniting it with himself, as He ascends like the three apostles to the mountain, where the soul will see the divinity transforming the humanity of the word, when it hears the words of Wisdom spoken of among the perfect. The more she ascends, the more she acquires through knowledge the mastery of the divine realities which she perceives, in order to thus become a participant in them, for she becomes more and more like them. The more she is co-present with them, the more she connects with them, the more she draws them into herself. There is, of course, a gulf between even the highest contemplations of Christ here on earth and seeing him face to face in a state of bliss. The first remains always through the mirror, fortune-telling. But as one ascends spiritually, knowledge tends to “face to face,” which it achieves in perfection only in a state of bliss. Scripture serves as the starting point for understanding the mysteries. You need to read it and meditate in a state of grace. D) The action of cognition. The nature of this action of contemplation (θεάσται, θεορε ί ν), understanding, grasping (νοέιν, χωρε ί ν) or knowledge (γιγν ό σκειν) tends towards vision or direct contact without an intermediary, endowed with a rich conceptual or discursive imagination, which implies participation in a knowable reality; this is expressed through various images, especially the theme of the five spiritual senses. Cognition presupposes the unity of subject and object, which become one without ceasing to be two. In a certain sense, God does not know the sinner because, while rejecting sin, He does not mingle with it. However, this does not prevent Origen from asserting with force the omniscience of God, because. God knows the sinner from the general knowledge of everything by the action that created him, not because he is a sinner, but because he is a man, and this knowledge is mixed with an endearing love that tries to save him. G) This is exactly what Origen designates with the expressions: knowledge or mystical contemplation (γνῶσις or θεορία μυστικη). The idea of ​​ongoing knowledge constitutes his ideal and the constant object of his desires. Even when it comes to knowledge of the sensory world, it is highly religious, because it ultimately comes down to the knowledge of the Son, the Intelligent World, Ideas in the Platonic sense or causes in the Stoic. The act of cognition is a meeting of two freedoms, divine freedom, because knowledge is grace, the gift of love of free will, consistent with the impenetrable plans of the absolute freedom of God, and human freedom, because man is free to accept or reject the divine Presence. The categorical refusal with which Origen responds to the unconscious ecstasy of the Montanists shows that God does not seize the soul against its will, but that spiritual knowledge is accomplished in full consciousness and freedom. Obviously, we are not talking here about mental or physiological phenomena more or less extraordinary, but about fundamental freedom, the freedom of the soul, which strives to cleave to God with the very depth of its being, wants to be in a state of freedom, and prepares to perceive it. It is in this context that Origen's insistence on ascetic and moral conditions of knowledge lies, his insistence on the necessity of a certain spiritual level in order to accept truths of this kind. Finally, knowledge according to Origen presupposes a genuine existential assimilation of truth and even more than unity, but merging with it, mutual co-presence without any pantheistic connotation, but as if showing one’s rejection of the unconscious. As we ascend spiritually, human nature, clothed with the Word (we are talking about His physical body, His church body or His body according to the Scriptures), surrenders itself with more and more trust to the divine. The result is the presence of one in the other, the interpenetration of the divine and the human, without any intermediary, sign, image or concept. C) Spiritual themes - an example of Origen's exegesis Origen is one of the great creators of mystical language. He inherited some of his themes from the previous tradition, but gave them a consonance hitherto unknown. However, for the most part these themes are his own invention. All of them have their source in the expressions of Scripture, but sometimes Platonic and even Hellenistic images played a role. Subsequent tradition fully accepted them. 1) Mystical marriage. The Old Testament developed after Hosea the image of Yahweh's marital union with Israel to express the union between God and his people. The New Testament reinterpreted it as the union of Christ with the Church. But Scripture, like previous apologetic literature, usually gives the Bride a collective meaning, while the individual meaning of the Bride was inspired by St. Origen. Paul (1 Cor. 6, 17, 7, 34) and three passages from Tertullian, addressing widows (Ad uxorem 1, 4, 4) and virgins (De resurrectione 61,6, De virginibus velandis 16, 4). Origen, who seems to have hardly known Tertullian, very often uses in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (as well as in his works in general) two images of the bride according to Tertullian: the Church and the Human Soul. However, these two images are very closely connected, because the Church is the Bride of Christ, but human souls can also be connected by marriage. The more the human soul becomes a bride, the more the Church is a bride. This topic also has its reverse side, sin - adultery (adultery) of the soul in relation to its true Bridegroom - Christ. Thus, sin leaves it to its lover, Satan. Origen also uses this idea in a collective sense to express the drama of the Church, which left her bridegroom Christ and conspired to put Him to death with the help of the devil. The unity of Christ and the Church begins, according to Origen’s favorite theory, in a state of pre-existence. His human soul has been united to the Word since creation. This unity makes her the image of God. Christ is the Bridegroom of the Church, composed of souls. The fall separates the Bride and Groom. In the Old Testament, the Word was the active force of all theophany. It addressed the prophets, appearing in the form of an angel or a man through the human soul of Christ, which, not being sinful, retained the original indistinguishability between angels and men. In the Incarnation, she leaves the image of God to take on the form of a slave, becoming incarnate in the womb of Mary to save her fallen bride. The wedding will take place at the moment of resurrection, when, according to the parable, the Father will celebrate the one marriage of his Son with deified humanity. 2) Wounded by love. Origen seems to be the first to bring together Isaiah 49, 2 (which puts into the mouth of the Servant, that is, Christ, according to spiritual exegesis, the following words “He has laid me as a chosen arrow, he has laid me in his quiver”) and Song of Songs 2, 5 according to the Septuagint (the bride is led to say) “I am wounded by love.” The Hellenistic concept of the infant Eros with his bow and arrows, transferred to the heavenly Eros in Plato's Symposium, probably played a role in the formation of the theme. For Origen, the Bride is always an individual soul, never the Church. The archer is either the Father or the Son, the arrow is obviously the Son, who therefore becomes the wound that the arrow inflicts on the soul identified with Christ, who has become immanent to everyone. 3) The birth and growth of Christ in the soul. The soul is not only the bride of the Word, it is also his mother. She conceives the Word and gives birth to Him. This theme is already found in Paul (Gap. 4, 19), in the writing “To Diognetus” (11, 4, 12, 7) and in numerous texts of Hippolytus, who is close to recognizing that the dwelling of Christ and the Trinity is in the soul. Often found in Paul (Gal. 2:20, 2 Cor. 13:3) and John (14:23, Apoc. 20). According to Plato, Philo and Clement, the unity of the soul with God gives rise to good deeds and virtues. Origen deals with this topic very often. He proceeds in his exegesis of the New Testament from the fact that everything said about Christ applies to every person. Mary is the image of a Christian who, like her, gives birth to Christ. This generation is the work of the Father and is manifested in the virtues identified with Christ. He, in fact, is all the virtues and each virtue separately. If Christ is not born in me, as he was born in Bethlehem, I am excluded from salvation. It is this Christ, who is born in everyone, who is destroyed by sin; in a sluggish person He vegetates like an anemic baby. It grows only in those who leave room for it within themselves. There are cases when the place is so great that the Word and the Trinity wander through the soul. This theme allows for variations - by assimilating Christ, a Christian becomes the Son of Mary; The Father begets Him in each of His good actions, just as He continually begets the Son. 4) Climbing the mountain. This theme - the exegesis of the Transfiguration - is inherent especially in his last works in Alexandria. To see Jesus under His divine Form through His human, it is necessary, on the one hand, that He also want to reveal Himself, because the divine person is known only if he himself is revealed, on the other hand, that a person prepares to accept this revelation by an ascetic life, which is an effort to climb a mountain. To those who remain on the plain, spiritually sick, Jesus appears “without form, without beauty” (Isaiah 53:2) as a simple man, even if by faith they have believed in Him as God. He is the doctor who takes care of them. But on the mountain His divine glory shines through His humanity or through other bodies of the Word, the letters of Scripture, as fire shines through the glass of our lamps. The Transfiguration is usually an image of the beatific vision, but it is one of the highest visions of God in His Son that is possible here. The Word appears here as “Wisdom, which we speak of among the perfect” (1 Cor. 2:6). If the humanity of Christ and his Body soften the radiance of His divinity so that we can bear it, they do not hide it, or soften it only to the extent that the soul, for lack of preparation, is unable to grasp the identical. The opinion that Christ is clothed in different forms according to the one to whom he is shown is not a remnant of Docetism in Origen, but conveys a spiritual experience: the divine appearance of Jesus is perceived only by those to whom He wants to reveal it, and who are ready to accept this revelation. 5) Light. This theme has biblical and Platonic origins; light is the most natural symbol to express the one who allows one to know. Each of the three personalities has its place in the gift of light. The Father is light (“we will see light in the darkness”), which means - we will see You - You are the Father in Your Son. If the Father is the beginning of light, the Son is His mediator and servant. A whole series of names (ἐπινο ί αι) of light suits Him: The light of the world, the true light, the light of people, the light of nations, the sun of righteousness, the east, the morning opposed to the evening, the day different from the night, denote the time, when he enlightens the soul. The Holy Spirit enlightens the Church - the moon, since they are stars, receive their light from Christ, the Sun of Truth. The devil is darkness, even if he transforms himself into an angel of light, if he pretends to be the sun with his moon, the church of evil. Darkness is the refusal of light. Along with darkness worthy of blame, Origen often mentions darkness (darkness) worthy of praise. The place where God hides is an expression of the mystery of His deity. 6) Life. Life is the name of Christ, one of the frequent expressions of sanctifying grace. Parallel to the distinction of three types of death: death without relation or physical, death from sin, characterized negatively, and death of sin, characterized positively. Origen distinguishes between an indifferent or physical life, which we have in common with animals, a bad life, led in sin, and a good life, which involves death to sin. 7) Food. The only food of an intelligent creation is the Word of God, which imparts to it the divine nature in the act of being both eternal and constant (continuing) of its birth, in which it is constantly nourished by the Father. But the Word adapts to the abilities of those who must accept it, and takes various forms for this: grass for the still animal soul, which He grazes in green pastures (Ps. 22 according to the Vulgate), milk for childhood (1 Cor. 3:2, Heb. 5:13, 1 Peter 2:2), vegetables for the sick (Rom. 14:1-2, according to exegesis). It becomes strong and mature for the soul through solid food, the body of the Lamb (Exodus 12) and the bread that came down from heaven (John 6:32–58). The theme of feeding also expresses grace in a realistic way. Just as man's food becomes His substance, the divine food, which is the person of the Word, is transformed into us, and we are transformed into Him. It accomplishes the gradual deification which is the goal of spiritual ascent, imparting life to the Word itself and the mysteries it contains. The Eucharist is hidden under this theme, which in turn deepens its spiritual meaning. 8) Wine that pleases the soul. We are talking about the true wine - Christ, and this theme insists on the emotional results of knowing the sacrament. It comes from the “sober intoxication” of Philo, but Origen explicitly denied in his polemic with the Montanists all appearance of “sacred madness, unconscious ecstasy,” while Philo seems to sometimes give in here. There is, of course, a “going out, an exodus” from the human, but there is no coming out of the spiritual (from ΘΡΞ 9'a): to come out of the soul would be the action of the evil wine of false teachings that came from the vineyard of Sodom and the shoots of Gomorrah. The wine of the sacraments expresses joy, inexpressible pleasures, bliss, tranquility, peace, sweetness: it ignites the heart, just as the word of the risen Jesus generated pleasure on the road to Emmaus; finally, it communicates “enthusiasm”, i.e. the feeling experienced from the divine presence in the inner world of the soul, like a trace of “enthusiasm”, which reveals divine inspiration to the reader of light books. 9) Five spiritual senses. Origen seems to be the originator of this famous theme: he drew it from biblical anthropomorphism, using the organs of sensory knowledge to designate the organs of spiritual knowledge. But there are enough philosophical, in particular Platonic, sources for this topic. The topic of the five spiritual senses is a special and privileged subject for him, it consists of explanations of biblical anthropomorphism and the law of homonymy, which defines these senses, using a certain image of bodily expressions to indicate spiritual operations. If spiritual sight, hearing or touch often denote the contact of the soul with mystery, then the emotional senses themselves, smell and taste, add to this the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe enjoyment of knowledge. The analogy with bodily senses highlights several aspects. First, because only like is known by like, there is a certain intimate relationship between the organ of a certain sense and the objects which that organ perceives, between the eye and light, between the ear and sound, etc., and consequently between all eyes and all ears capable of perceiving the same objects: Origen holds this view at the end of his treatise On Elements (4, 4, 9-10), arguing the immortality and incorporeality of the human soul, capable of comprehending divine realities that are clearly immortal and incorporeal. Secondly, sensory knowledge appears to us as direct, intuitive and immediate knowledge. In the same way, the theme of the five spiritual senses expresses the intuitive and direct knowledge of the divine mysteries in a spiritual way because of its co-nature with them. 10) Recognition of spirits. An expression coming from Paul (1 Cor. 12:10). The teaching on the recognition of spirits is already found in the Shepherd of Hermas. In Origen it is scattered, but is especially emphasized in the chapters On the Beginnings, which talk about the struggle of demons with people (2, 1, 2–4). Origen's fundamental rule, which allows us to judge under whose influence the soul is at a given moment, whether under the action of God or under the influence of demons, is a direct consequence of his polemic against the Montanist doctrine of unconscious ecstasy under prophetic inspiration: God, His Spirit, His angels respect the consciousness and freedom of the one whom God created conscious and free. They truly motivate the soul with their inspirations, but ultimately respect its decision. On the contrary, the devil wants to possess the soul, darkening it and enslaving its will. This can be verified by contemplating the obsessed and passionate, when these latter allow it into themselves without resisting evil inclinations from the very beginning. Discernment of spirits is the charisma given by the Holy Spirit. The word χαρ ί σμα in Origen expresses a concept close to what scholastic theology would call “acting grace,” and the Holy Spirit is the “material” or nature of charisma. Close to the discernment of spirits is the discernment of doctrines, which allows the Christian people to distinguish the ecclesiastical (which belongs to the universal great church) from the heretical, the false prophet from the real one. In this case, Origen often uses the unwritten (belonging to oral tradition) saying of Christ: “Become experienced money changers,” capable of distinguishing a counterfeit spiritual coin from a real one. The discernment of spirits, which allows one to cast out Satan under his mask of the Angel of Light, and the discernment of teachings, which is able to distinguish the beauty of the Church from the abomination of heresies, require, like all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, great diligence and a virtuous life. Conclusion. Origen and the genesis of Christian culture in the bosom of antiquity The very era in which Origen lived was conducive to broad generalizations. It was the age of the North, the age of religious upsurge and syncretism. Eastern religions, which began to flow into the Roman Empire back in the second century, by the third century had become accustomed to each other and were preparing to merge into one whole. At the palace of Alexander Severus, a grandiose plan was undertaken to unite all religions into one under the leadership of the cult of the Sun (Logos), and by the beginning of the fourth century this plan was fully realized in the worldview of pagan society. Christianity seemed ready to become one of the components of this cult. Alexander Severus in Larium had statues of Orpheus and Apollo of Tyana, and next to them Abraham and Christ. On the walls of his palace, he ordered the gospel saying to be nailed: “In everything that you want people to do to you, do so,” and he was guided by it in some official judgments.His mother Julia Mammea, who had a strong influence on her son, was seriously interested in Christianity. Hippolytus dedicated his essay on the resurrection of the dead to her, and Origen, with an honorary guard, was called to her when she was in Antioch and stayed with her for some time, expounding to her the Christian teaching. Philosophy itself became religious and, in the person of Plotinus, set its goal to the salvation of the soul. The Christian Church began to feel more confident. The long period of peace, ensured by the legislation of the Antonines, brought the pagan and Christian populations closer together, and the episcopal system, which embraced the entire Church, gave it the appearance of a closely united organism and affirmed the hope of a quick victory over paganism. Thanks to the works of apologists and their successors, theological science already possessed all Hellenic philosophical thought; ideas became akin to each other, ceased to be separated by an impassable line, and if, in the person of Plotinus, Hellenic philosophy began to turn into religion, then nothing prevented Origen from making an attempt to turn religion into philosophy, leaving its Christian content intact. 1. The dispute between Christianity and classical philosophical thought began almost at the same time as the conflict between Christianity and Judaism. However, if the attitude of the Jews towards Christianity in the first centuries of our era was sharply negative, then the attitude of the Hellenes was rather indifferent. For many representatives of ancient culture, Christianity was first a part of the Jewish world, its sect with the isolation typical of a sect. This attitude was also due to the incomprehensibility of Christian postulates to a person of ancient upbringing. However, over time, disputes between the two camps grew. Philosophers write their works against Christianity, which responds polemically. It was impossible to properly respond to the claims of the Hellenes without becoming familiar with their views, without trying to answer in their own language. In the end, Christianity is accepted by people deeply educated in the field of ancient culture, who can no longer imagine a Christian worldview without relying on certain provisions of the ancient worldview. Christianity is included in the sphere of philosophical discourse of the classical world. 2. No culture can develop without connection with another culture, through which it gains access to universal human values. Christian is no exception in this regard. Throughout the entire period of its formation, it relied on the achievements of ancient thought. Her worldview became the metaphysical foundations of Christian culture. Wisdom was considered in antiquity as a way of being, as a state of a person who exists completely differently from other people, and is a kind of super-human. If philosophy is an activity, the meaning of which is an exercise in wisdom, then this exercise necessarily consists not only of speaking or reasoning in a certain way, of acting, of looking at the world. Consequently, if philosophy is not only a discourse, but also a life choice, an existential preference and an active exercise, it is precisely because it is the pursuit of wisdom. Similar to Greek philosophy, Christian philosophy will appear as both a discourse and a way of life. During the era of the emergence of Christianity, philosophical discourse in all schools predominantly took the form of interpretation of the texts of their founders. Naturally, the discourse of Christian philosophy will be exegetical, and in the schools of exegesis of the Old and New Testaments the same type of teaching will be established as in the philosophical schools of that time. Of course, the exegesis of Christianity was directed specifically to Scripture. Taking the idea of ​​a transcendent God from Judaism, Christianity rethought everything based on this idea. The instrument of this rethinking often became the concepts of ancient speculation. The idea of ​​the transcendental determines Christianity as a culture built on religious principles, since without it the world loses its aspiration to the ultimate goal. The theological foundations of Christian culture are what determine its special, distinctive features. 3. The interaction of different worldviews remains a fruitless exchange of thoughts until someone, a specific person, who has realized the dead end of one of them, tries to give new, complete answers to questions that are insoluble within the framework of the old worldview. An important criterion in this is the reliance in the process of establishing new values ​​on the norms of an obsolete culture, since it is not so much the norms themselves that are becoming obsolete, but the increasingly complex cultural context itself, which requires a more comprehensive approach. Thus, an important principle in the formation of culture is ultimately the anthropological principle, the functioning of which is illustrated by the example of Origen. 5. From the very importance of the anthropological principle in the process of forming a new culture comes the need for a cultural approach to the problem of the interaction of different cultural phenomena during the genesis of a new culture, since this genesis is inextricably linked with the processes of self-awareness of a particular person. Different cultural phenomena, in our case religion and philosophy, or reason and faith, do not oppose each other as different currents of thought, but interact in the individual consciousness at the moment of crisis of the value systems of a certain culture. That is why it was worth conducting a cultural analysis of the mechanism of interaction between antiquity and the early Christian worldview in the process of the genesis of Christian culture. 6. On this path, we found out the degree of permissibility of borrowing from one culture for the functioning of another using the example of the formation of Christian culture. The degree of permissibility of borrowings turns out to be determined by the type of functioning of these borrowings within the framework of the emerging culture. Thus, in Christianity, classical ancient philosophy becomes a means of explaining Christian theology, a way of rooting the latter in the minds of representatives of the old culture. 7. Origen consciously sets himself the goal of presenting an exposition of the entire Christian doctrine. In a sense, it would be correct to say that Origen breaks the previous tradition of theology. Tradition for him is a very abstract enumeration of the main dogma. It is not enough for him to know them to feel that he has truly known God. He demands more and finds this more in the interpretation of Holy Scripture. It is around the interpretation of Scripture that his entire system, his synthesis, grows, since Origen’s synthesis is not the systematization of as many ideas as possible, but the subordination of the entire system to a single principle, its derivation from a common source. However, the text is only material for the work of the mind, and the mind is involved in the ideological vicissitudes of the era; It is here that the loophole is found through which the ideas of his time penetrate into Origen’s system, not polemically, but consciously. Thus, it is clear that he approaches the interpretation of Scripture already armed with philosophical ideas, and since his entire system depends on this interpretation, we can talk about its certain dependence on these very ideas, i.e. about cultural interaction. There is no doubt that ancient culture, or rather its attitudes, were no longer able to satisfy the new needs of man, therefore, at the beginning of our era, the majority of the population of the Roman Empire rushed into various kinds of eastern cults and sects, trying to find in them the meaning of their mortal existence. However, the practical aspiration of the Roman consciousness did not allow it to fully immerse itself in the purely irrational nature of the Eastern mysteries, which concerned only the feelings, exciting them and acting on the aesthetic sense, but were not able to enter into the very lives of people and ensure the emergence and sustainable development of a new culture. The Christian message offered itself as the basis for the latter. The extraordinary richness of Greek thought was surpassed in its essential points by the Christian message. However, it would be a grave mistake to see these two cultures as antitheses. The Greeks were wrong when they ignored, with the help of an armada of dialectical arguments, that reality that did not fit into their ideal constructs: evil, suffering, death, sin. However, the Greek measure of man was revised by Christian thought, and it turned out that the human heart is deeper than the depths of ancient wisdom. In a grandiose attempt to set a new standard for man, a new dimension and horizon for his life, Christian humanism, a new Christian culture 93, was born. Under Origen, a scientific movement began for the first time in the history of Christianity: the desire to objectively understand the thought of the enemy. He learned from everyone he fought with; all his opponents were his teachers. The ancient influence on Christianity can best be illustrated by the example of Origen. The synthesis of Christian culture should in no case be confused with cultural syncretism; the main goal of this synthesis - the preservation of self-identity while actively preaching one's teachings - was achieved by using ancient culture, i.e. of its philosophical heritage, in the role of religion's assistant in the matter of its own revelation, religion thus became the cement that firmly held together Christian culture, preventing it from turning into an eclectic collection of heterogeneous ideas. It is very interesting to compare the criteria for true knowledge of God according to Origen and according to Irenaeus. For Irenaeus, such a criterion is communication with the head of one of the apostolic sees, primarily with the Bishop of Rome. This system touches on the problem of obedience and social institutions on the one hand, and on the other, the fundamental principle of human knowledge - knowledge through similarity to the knowable, i.e. cognition is impossible outside of human communication, and it imposes some social obligations. This very profound revelation will be the rock on which Western Civilization is built. Origen has a fundamentally different position, and in this he is a faithful son and prophet of the Byzantine Civilization. True, in one place Origen declares that we must preserve church tradition. But this is just a wish. For him, the criterion of knowledge of God is the derivation of ideas from the Bible. A person can be left alone with the Bible and he will become a true Christian. Communication with God, generally speaking, occurs through ideas. The need and joy of human communication are significantly diminished. This is an underestimation of the Incarnation, i.e. Christ's perception of the fullness of humanity. Origen's teaching surprisingly adequately responded to the needs of the individualistic consciousness of that time, highlighting the role of freedom in human life. The question of the freedom of every rational being was so important for Origen’s entire system that it was posed not only on an ethical plane. His entire theology is built on this problem. Danielou even says the following: “absolutely everything in Origen’s doctrine is derived from these two principles - beneficent Providence and the freedom of creatures.” Origen’s Universe is a world of freedoms. The original equality of pre-existing spirits and perfection, which presupposes love of God, are the main principles of Origen. From freedom in Origen the conclusion is to diversity, and from the difference of falls - the degree of solidity. It was from this moment that the patriotic tradition of Christian mysticism acquired specifically Christian features and took the path of original development. This merit of Origen is not diminished by the fact that in his teaching about the mediation of the Logos-Christ he was not completely original and partly followed the path paved by Judeo-Alexandrian theology. Origen's thought about deification, as a close mystical union of the soul with Christ, left a deep imprint in Christian mysticism. After Origen, it becomes a lasting property of the mystical consciousness of Christian writers and a guiding principle in their interpretation of the main facts of mystical life. This influence was all the deeper and wider because Origen, in his interpretation of the Song of Songs, clothed it in a visual image, which became extremely popular among writers of the movement in question. Origen's tendency to indulge in logical fantasies is of particular interest, because exposes in him an independent mind, which was not afraid to pose acutely and deeply a number of problems that were closed to the church consciousness before him. One cannot help but see a huge step, not to say a leap, forward in comparison with the thought of the apologist fathers, Justin and Irenaeus. There was heard the voice of a timid and often hesitant defense of aspiring Christian writers; here is a bold flight of the theological mind. He feels the problems surrounding him, is not afraid of them, and boldly questions. This exposes his independent mind, which was not afraid to pose a number of problems that had previously been closed to the church consciousness. It was this purely philosophical spirit, this free-thinking mood that made him a true theologian and religious thinker. Thus, philosophy and theology are combined primarily in the personality of Origen, his dynamic experience, and not in his theoretical positions, which were only a weak reflection of this philosophical existential tension. He was the first among Christian thinkers to put forward the idea of ​​theological synthesis and implement it, creating on the basis of Holy Scripture and Church Tradition a philosophical and theological system that embraces the entire content of the Christian faith, established the basic principles of church scientific theology and took a decisive step towards the “churchization” of classical science. An extremely deep and versatile mind, a man who, in his convictions, was undoubtedly and sincerely ecclesiastical, Origen sometimes did not know how to restrain the flight of his thoughts, to humble and hold it within the framework of the “rules of faith,” although not yet entirely established, but still clearly designated by the Church. Therefore, she sometimes carried the Alexandrian teacher to the forbidden heights of divine wisdom, inaccessible then to the human mind, and, getting too close to the Sun of Truth, lost her wings and fell, like Icarus, onto the hard ground of untruthful opinions. The Church, with its universal reason, cut off these wrong opinions of Origen, but the best and very numerous fruits of his theological heritage were assimilated by patristic tradition. The theological and metaphysical foundations of Christian culture appear to our eyes as a kind of dialectic of Christian religious thought and the ancient worldview. Origen lives his life in a Christian manner, but in his views on what has been done and the Divine, he is Hellenistic 94 . 1. Origen. Ωριγἑνονς τον εις το κατα Ματθ ἁ ιον Εναγγἑλιον εξηγητικων – Paris: Sources Chretiennes, t. 43.1992. 2. Origen. ???? – Paris: Sources Chretiennes, t. 120.1996. 3. Origen. 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Christologie, Soteriologie, Mariologie, Reich Gottes und Kirche. Faszikel For (1. Teil) Urstand, Fall und Erbsunde, 1981 von Leo Scheffczyk 89. Band IV. Sacramente Eschatologie. Faszikel 7a Eschatologie, 1986 von Brian Daley. 90. Les oevres philosophiques. – Paris, 1995 91. Nemeshegui Peter. La patemite de Dieu chez Origene. – Toumai (Belg), 1960. 92. New Catholic Encyclopedia. T 11. – NY., 1995. 93. Bardenhewer Otto. Geschichte der Altkirchlichen Literatur. T.2. – Freiburg, 1914. 94. Beatrice Pier Franco. Introduction to the Fathers of the Church. – Vicenza, 1987. 95. Pietras Henryk. Poczatki teologii Kosciola. – Krakow; "WAM", 2000. 96. Christentum als neuheitserlebnis. – Freiburg im Breisgaü “Herder”, 1939. 97. Adalbert - G. Hamman. Les peres de l'Eglise. – Paris, 1991. 98. Pietras Henryk. By nie milczec o Bogi. – Krakow, 1991. 99. Kania Wojciech. Swiadkowie tradycii. 1998. 100. Kelly J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. – San Francisco, 1978. 101. Canpenhausen Hans von. Griechische Kirchenvaeter. – Stuttgart, 1994. 102. Lexikon der antiken christlichen Literatur. – Freiburg: “Herder”, 1988 A.F. Losev. Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology. – M.: “Mysl”, 1993, p. 367. T. Kuhn. The structure of scientific revolutions. – M.: “ACT”, 2001, p. 243. Sokolov V.V. Medieval philosophy. – M: “Higher School”, 1979, 43. Karsavin L.P. Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church. – M., 1994, p. 56 Minin P. The significance of Origen in the history of ancient church mysticism // Mystical theology - Kyiv, 1991, p. 321. “It is more reasonable to believe that Origen is saved than that he is condemned” The title of his doctoral dissertation. "Of the interpreters of divine Scripture, choose most of all those who depart furthest from the letter. After Paul, this kind is first of all Origen... Erasmus of Rotterdam, Weapon of the Christian warrior. He valued Origen primarily as an exegete and an expert in the method of allegorical interpretations, Accepts his trichotomy of the soul. In the same place about the three parts of man. Trinitarian dynamism in the deification of rational beings according to Origen. Roma, 1970. Excerpt translated from German from Handbuch der dogmengeschichte B. Ill Faszikel Ia c. 50. Cm. Journal of Theological Studies, t. 9. 1907–1908, t.10. 1908, Jenkins. In the collected works of Gregory the Wonderworker. F. C. Copleston. History of medieval philosophy. – M.: “Enigma”, 1997, 35. Real. J., Atiseri D. History of Western Philosophy. – St. Petersburg: “Petropolis”, 1997. Matthew 28,19. Against Celsus 2.30. Sokolov V.V. The philosophical work of Erasmus from Rotterdam // Erasmus of Rotterdam. Essays. – M., 1987, p. 24. Eduard Huber. Religion and politics in Christian traditions. – Novosibirsk: NSU, p. 19 One of the critics of Christianity of the last century. Cardinal Newman. Catholic completeness. – M., 1989. Mohler. Nouvelles recherches sur le Symbolique. – Paris, 1987. According to Porphyry, the Neoplatonist philosopher, Origen was born into a pagan family, but there is no longer any reason to distrust the testimony of Eusebius, who clearly asserts the Christian origin of Origen. What he meant by it, he himself will write in the introduction to On Principles. Gregory the Wonderworker, Methodius of Patarsky. Creations. – M., 1997, 135. Church history of Eusebius of Caesarea 6, 25, 11. This understanding of the soul comes from Aristotle, but Origen apparently became aware of it through Philo. Gregory the Wonderworker, Methodius of Patarsky. Creations. – M., 1997, 117. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus // Diogenes Laertius, On the life, teachings and sayings of famous philosophers. M.79 Mayorov G.G., Formation of medieval philosophy. M. 79 Archbishop Filaret (Gumilevsky), Historical teaching about the Fathers of the Church. Holy Trinity Sergius Lavra, 1996, volume 1. Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History. 6.19. Alexey Maksyutin. Life and works of Origen of Alexandria. Origen “On Elements”, Samara, 1993. Pierre Hadot. Plotinus or simplicity of view. – M., 1991, p.12. Ecclesiastical history of Eusebius of Caesarea VI, 19, 8. Men A. History of religion, vol. 6 p. 104 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus // Diogenes Laertius. – M., 1978, p. 469 Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or simplicity of view, p. 12 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus // Diogenes Laertius p. 463 Reale J. Antiseri D. Western philosophy from its origins to the present day. T. 1. – St. Petersburg: “Petropolis”, 1997, p. 173. In the New Testament era it began to mean creation, but etymologically I throw it down, casting down. John 17:24: You loved me before the foundation of the world. Commentary on the Gospel of John 1.7. Posnov M.E. Gnosticism of the 2nd century and the victory of the Christian church over it. – Brussels: “Life with God”, 1991. p. 237. Barr Robert. Main currents in early Christian thought. NY., 1966, p. 401. Origen. About prayer 6. – Samara, 1992, p. 36. Posnov M.E. History of the Christian Church. – Brussels, 1964, p. 189. Irenaeus of Lyon. Against heresies // Creations - M., 1996, p. 342. It is not at all necessary to understand the word gnosis as a deliberate borrowing from the Gnostics. It should be understood, rather, as a translation into Greek of the Old Testament concept of knowledge, denoting deep unity with God through love. It is associated with Christian mysticism, not intellectual knowledge. Origen. About the beginnings. – Novosibirsk, 1993. Introduction. Proverbs 8, 22. O Κύριος ἔκτισε με ἀρχήν ό δῶν ἀυτο ῡ (The Lord created me to be the beginning of his ways). This teaching is similar to Plotinus’s view of the origin of the mind from the One, although it was expressed much earlier and the source of this thought most likely is not Ammonius Saccos, but the method of working with the Bible of Origen himself: all the words of Scripture have meaning and each concept corresponds to ontological reality, truly expresses the activity of the Father, i.e. any concept is defined within the framework of antinomy, as the antithesis of the concept dependent on it. Bolotov V.V., Lectures on the history of the ancient Church. Volume 2. page 323 Bolotov V.V., uk. Op. p.224 Origen, On John της προσκύνησις τριάδος, On Matthew ἡ ἀρχική τρίας. Commentary on the Gospel of John, 13, 7. Homily on Song of Songs, 2, 4. Homilia 10 on Numbers 34, 2. Homilia 18 on Jeremiah 21, 4. Homilia 6 on the Book of Judges, 17, 5. Homilia 1 on Leviticus 23:5. Commentary on Matthew 12.4. Commentary on Song of Songs 13:4. Commentary on Matthew 10:23. D. 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