Articles

Word and Wisdom in Origen: Is the God of the Bible Incorporeal?

John C. Cavadini

Abstract

John C. Cavadini examines Origen’s claim that the Bible teaches God is asomatos (incorporeal). Far from being a mere philosophical import, Origen’s doctrine of incorporeality is redefined through biblical revelation as a radical, personal freedom to love and suffer. By analyzing the "soul of God" and the Son’s self-emptying, Cavadini argues that Origen presents a "soulful" Trinity whose transcendent freedom is uniquely expressed in creation and the incarnation.

Citations

John C. Cavadini, “The Church as the Sacrament of Creation in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs,” Communio 42 (2015): 89–118, esp. 114.

De principiis 1.3.1. Text at Behr, 66.14–16, same as the text (Tome I, 144.18–21) on which Crouzel and Simonetti comment as follows: “Cette phrase décourage tous les essais de voir dans le Saint Esprit un parallel à la troisième hypostase de la Triade platonicienne, l’Âme du Monde” (Tome II, 57n4).

Fernández (213n4)

Origen, De principiis 2.8.5.

Mark Therrien, Cross and Creation: A Theological Introduction to Origen of Alexandria (The Catholic University of America Press, 2022)

Peter Martens, “Embodiment, Heresy, and the Hellenization of Christianity: The Descent of the Soul in Plato and Origen,” Harvard Theological Review 108 (2015): 594–620.

De principiis 1.P.9.

Dei Verbum §4

John Behr, ed. and trans., On First Principles (Oxford University Press, 2017), 20.

G.W. Butterworth, ed., On First Principles (Ave Maria Press, 2013).

De principiis 1.1.3. Text at Behr, 26.49–50; translation adjusted following the suggestion of Fernández’s Spanish translation, p. 145, as well as that of Crouzel and Simonetti, Tome I, 95.

De principiis 1.2.1.

Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John Books 1–10, translated by Ronald E. Heine, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 80 (The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 1.231.

Catechism of the Catholic Church (§66)

Joseph T. Lienhard, “Historical Theology in the Curriculum,” chapter 21 of Theological Education in the Catholic Tradition, ed. Patrick W. Carey and Earl C. Muller (Crossroad, 1997), 266–79.

De principiis 1.P.8. This is Butterworth’s translation of a Greek fragment preserved by Antipater of Bostra in John of Damascus’s Sacra Parallela (PG 96:501c).

Behr, 44.70

De principiis 1.2.4

Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (Doubleday, 1987), 14.

De principiis 1.3.1.

De principiis 1.2.6, p. 14, text at Behr, 48.128–34; cf. also De principiis 4.4.1

Behr, Princ. 1.2, expressive of his divine nature, was not a treatment of the ‘pre-Incarnate’ Word, who subsequently, at a certain point in the economy, becomes ‘incarnate’” (Behr, lxvi).

“The ‘Pre-existence’ and Incarnation of Christ,” in Behr, lxxvii–lxxx.

Jerome, Epistle 124.2.2.

Crouzel and Simonetti, Tome II, 46n48

De principiis 1.3.6.

Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Esther J. Hamori, When Gods Were Men: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature, Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Fur Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 384 (De Gruyter, 2008).

Peter Martens, “Responding to His Critics: A New Account of Origen’s Peri Archon,” Journal of Late Antiquity 17 (2024): 70–93.

Gedaliahu Stroumsa, “The Incorporeality of God: Context and Implications of Origen’s Position,” in Religion 13 (1983): 345–58, at 345.

John Whittaker, “Parisinus Graecus 1962 and the Writings of Albinus,” Phoenix 28 (1974): 320–54, 450–56.

De principiis 2.6.2. Text at Behr, 2:204-06.55–63.

De principiis 2.6.7, text at Behr, 2:214.172.

Mark Edwards, “Origen in Paradise: A Response to Peter Martens,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 23 (2019): 163–85.

Therrien, Cross and Creation, 89–114, 139–43.

Origen, De principiis 1.2.10.

Homilies on Ezekiel 6.6.

Mark Therrien, Cross and Creation, 209.

Orígenes, Sobre Los Principios: Introducción, texto crítico, traducción y notas de Samuel Fernández (Ciudad Nueva, 2015), 139nn2–3.

Origène, Traité des Principes, Tome II, Commentaire et Fragments, ed. and trans. Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti, Sources Chrétiennes 253 (Cerf, 1978), 21nn1–3.

Crouzel and Simonetti, Origène, Traité des Principes, Tome I, Introduction, Texte Critique de la Version de Rufin, Traduction, Sources Chrétiennes 252 (Cerf, 1978).