The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  What was the secret of the Jews’ strength and virtue? Origen offered the answer. First of all, their Scripture with its power to transform multitudes, “making the coward the hero, and the wicked good.” Then there was their faith: a faith more powerful than human reason alone, because it was based on still higher wisdom, the wisdom of God.

  And what the Jews had done, Origen affirmed, Christians could do. They could spearhead an assault on the moral turpitude of the age and bring forth the inner voice in every believer. Justin Martyr had already pointed out how conversion to Christianity could bring about a moral transformation:

  We who heretofore conversed with loose women, now strictly contain within the bounds of chastity; we who devoted ourselves to magic arts, now consecrate ourselves entire to the one unbegotten God.… We who were consumed with mutual hatred and destruction, now live and eat together [in peace], and pray for our enemies.30

  Origen saw the need for this kind of transformation of society as more urgent than ever. It is the message underlying his polemical masterpiece, his Against Celsus. It was a devastating rebuttal of the era’s most erudite anti-Christian critic, and reflected Origen’s new confident, even defiant, stance. Christianity no longer just summed up ancient civilization’s highest aims, as Justin and Clement had argued. It now had the power to save that civilization, Origen proclaimed, by bringing the highest moral principles down to earth right here.

  Origen saw this as both necessary and natural. The one great lesson Origen learned from his Neoplatonist teachers was that every human being was made in the image of God, in the same way Plato described all material objects as made in the image of the Forms.31 Of course, the most perfect of God’s images was Jesus Christ himself, His only begotten son. However, everyone of every race, sex, age, or creed, from the lowest slave to the emperor himself, carried that same reflection of perfection.

  It was what made God knowable to man: “Only like can know like” was a basic Platonic principle (as, for example, the soul’s knowledge of the Forms).32 The more man developed his own reflection of that perfection, by living his life in conformity with God’s will, the more ready he would be to receive the grace of true knowledge and wisdom. And to deny or sully that perfection by behaving like a beast was a direct insult to God and the goodness of His creation.

  In short, Origen saw us all like the slave boy in Plato’s Meno. We are souls equipped by our nature to follow the path to the truth, once someone points us along the way.‡ The role of the Christian Church in Origen’s eyes was to provide that guidance, to uphold that reflection of perfection into every aspect of life, for every Christian.

  This was a new way of casting the relationship between the church and the faithful. Churches at the time still saw themselves largely as centers of worship rather than moral instruction. Christians like Origen’s father had gathered to receive the Eucharist (already a firmly established religious ritual by the second century), pray, and perform baptisms.33 Origen’s passion was to turn these churches into centers of moral rearmament, starting with his own in Caesarea in Palestine, where he moved when he was forty-eight. Caesarea became his religious laboratory, where he instructed the faithful through his homiletic writings and his public sermons.34

  More than any other Church Father, Origen established the sermon as a principal focus of Christian service and the Bible as the central subject for discussion. He was also one of the first Christian thinkers to treat the New and the Old Testaments as forming a single work. He taught his students to read the Bible allegorically, in order to see how every event in the Old Testament foreshadows later events in the New, like the Jews’ exodus from Egypt foreshadowing the flight of the Holy Family, and Joseph’s run-in with Potiphar foreshadowing Christ before Pilate. This would then lead them to read the events and images symbolically, as reflecting the highest spiritual truths or “mysteries” of Christianity, and morally, meaning its connection with the inner life of the believer.35

  Because Plato had taught him that the visible is always the reflected image of the invisible, even the visible written word, Origen transformed the Bible into a new kind of spiritual treasure trove, including the Old Testament. Beyond the actual words of God, and underneath the literal narrative of law, history, and even geography, Origen could discern timeless truths waiting to be pointed out and explained. This way of reading the Bible, called exegesis, would become standard during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Middle Ages came to interpret just about everything morally, symbolically, or allegorically and sometimes all three.§36 It was a direct legacy from Origen. But it sprang ultimately from Plato’s insight that symbols and allegories can sometimes lead men to the highest truths more powerfully than reason—including to a knowledge of God.

  Plato, it seems, watches constantly from the wings of Origen’s great treatises. Christianity, Origen sometimes implies, is nothing less than Platonism for the masses.37 However, the figure at the center of his sermons and his pastoral work was Jesus. Origen devoted more of his attention to Jesus as a person than any previous Christian thinker. He saw him not only as the son of God and the Messiah (the principal theme of Saint Paul’s epistles), but as a role model and inspiration for the individual Christian. Jesus served as a walking, talking example of how anyone could live in conformity with the highest moral principles: in short, as the consummate Socratic philosopher.38

  By his example, “[Christ] rescues us from all irrationality,” Origen wrote. Jesus reveals how, by dedicating even activities like eating and drinking to the glory of God, we are raised up and illuminated and “become rational beings in a divinely inspired manner.” For “Christ is all Wisdom.”39

  This is what later figures like Thomas à Kempis or Erasmus of Rotterdam, a keen admirer of Origen, will mean when they speak of living a life in Christ: “ ‘He that followeth Me, walketh not in darkness,’ saith the Lord. These are the words of Christ, by which we are taught to imitate His life and manners, if we would be truly enlightened, and be delivered from blindness of heart.”40 Today, when ministers or even politicians feel it necessary to quote from the Sermon on the Mount to inspire or admonish us, it is Origen’s distant example they are following.

  In the end, Origen’s Platonized Christianity added up to more than a cleverly argued theology. It signaled a cultural revolution. Its overt moral absolutism smashed all the cherished myths and institutions of mainstream ancient culture, from its temples and gods, including the emperor worship that underpinned the Roman Empire, to its games and spectacles and sacrifices—all in the name of Greek wisdom and reason. It triggered a systematic process of deconstruction, both literal and symbolic, that would reach its climax in Saint Augustine’s The City of God. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would survive Origen’s withering blast—not even Celsus’s brilliant anti-Christian polemic of a century before.

  In Against Celsus, Origen overturned Celsus’s claims that Christianity rested on strange and bizarre religious rites (such as eating bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ), irrational superstitions, and unverifiable and unscientific miracles like raising Lazarus from the dead. Pagans had no business casting stones. What could be more improbable than the story of Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus? What could be more contemptible than the sexual promiscuity associated with certain pagan sects? What could be more absurd than the mystery cult of Cybele, which demanded that adherents castrate themselves, or more barbarous than a religion that not only demanded the shedding of innocent blood to consecrate religious festivals, but condoned it in the arena to gratify the sadism of the masses?

  The claim that paganism somehow embodied the best and Christianity the worst of Greco-Roman civilization was an obvious lie to Origen. He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen’s Christianity finished.

  In the end, however, Origen’s p
rincipal argument for the validity of his faith was its own success. Christianity’s spread, he implied, was a kind of democratic referendum on the elitist institutions of the ancients. The philosophy of the ancients and the Stoics had reserved final wisdom for a chosen few. Christianity delivered those same truths, and the moral virtues that went with them, to the many, right down to slaves and the homeless. Plato was like a chef at a five-star restaurant, Origen said, who only knew recipes that appealed to his handful of wealthy diners. Jesus, by contrast, Origen says, “cooks for the multitudes”—and the multitudes have responded.41

  As Origen’s biographer Joseph Trigg concludes, in the end Origen’s most compelling argument for the truth of Christianity was not its logical consistency, but the fact that it worked.42 By 250, Christianity had spread from Palestine across the Roman empire. Was this purely an accident, Origen asked, or was it in fact a sign of divine providence? The impact of Christian faith was palpable in the lives of ordinary men and women, who had embraced sexual continence, willingly set their slaves free, and in martyrdom displayed the highest form of courage. Again, was this coincidence, or was it a sign that man’s divine nature had finally truly been awakened?

  Now the task of Christian churches was to ensure that this process of moral reformation deepened and spread. Origin vigorously opposed Rome’s blood sports. A century later, Saint Ambrose (another Origen admirer) argued for removing the pagan altar of Victory from the Roman Senate partly on the grounds that it was soaked in the blood of generations of innocent animals sacrificed to gratify the bloodlust of the pagans and their gods. Other Christian bishops would fight to ban gladiatorial games and wage an ultimately unwinnable war against the institution of slavery.

  Origen’s Platonized theology marks the birth of the Christian humanitarian conscience. It will bear its final fruit not only in the Catholic antiabortion movement, but in the Quaker Society of Friends, in the Mennonites, and in a secularized form in groups like PETA and Greenpeace. It ultimately stems from Origen’s conviction that every aspect of our lives and our interactions with others must reflect a set of moral convictions that we may not be able to prove, but to which we must be unshakably loyal. It also reflects Plato’s moral absolutism: the insistence that the human soul has an eternal destiny and that the rational order of the universe set up by God must be reflected in our present character and conduct.

  Unlike Platonism, however, Christianity bases its moral absolutism less on abstract reason than on an inner faith. It rests more on Socrates’s inner voice, that spiritual conviction that cannot be denied without giving up the most essential part of our identity, than on any set of rational arguments.

  For Origen, this included sex. No aspect of the early Church has been more systematically, and at times deliberately, misrepresented than its attitude toward women and sexuality.‖ Of course, the early Christians were rigidly puritan by modern standards. But then so were all the great schools of ancient thought, starting with Socrates and Plato. Apart from Epicurus, it is hard to find a single serious thinker who did not regard the human body with regret, as the tomb of the soul or a pointless encumbrance to the soul’s purity. It’s also hard to find a philosopher who did not regard sexual desire as “dirty,” the disgusting epitome of the body’s gross impure materiality—precisely what the soul had to overcome on its forward march to enlightenment.43

  As the great scholar E. R. Dodds once pointed out, Christian and Neoplatonist ethics on this point were almost indistinguishable.44 Like his Neoplatonist rival Plotinus (who wondered aloud why something as pure as the soul had to inhabit the body in the first place) and like Socrates, Origen saw freeing his body from the pangs of sexual desire as a primary form of liberation for the soul. As a young teacher in Alexandria, surrounded by female coeds from well-to-do Christian families, that challenge to his resolve became such a distraction that when he read a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, “There are some eunuchs … who made themselves so for love of the kingdom of heaven,” he took matters into his own hands, as it were, in order to free himself from his libidinal energies.45

  Ever since, Origen’s ordeal of self-castration has marked him as a religious fanatic of the worst sort. All the evidence, however, suggests Origen came to regret his rash decision, and to see that Holy Scripture interpreted in an overliteral manner can be as dangerous and misleading as no Scripture at all. Instead, Origen wanted chastity and virginity (he seems to have been the first theologian to teach the perpetual virginity of Jesus’s mother, Mary) to be voluntary acts of giving oneself to God, a sacrifice like martyrdom itself. Origen saw marriage, too, as a sacrifice, a voluntary giving of oneself to another that, like the vow of celibacy, raised men and women above gross carnality to a state of divine grace and love.46

  In the end, however, all these relationships had to endure the flame test of Christian conscience. Conscience in Origen’s view, sears away our desire for sin as our soul moves toward assimilation with God. “If you are a good Catholic,” the conscience says, “you will do certain things and avoid doing others for the good of your soul.” It is that flame which the Church has to labor to keep alive and burning, Origen believed—a mission the Catholic Church has tried to maintain ever since, almost notoriously so.

  Today we live under the shadow of the Enlightenment. As we will see, we operate under very different, more Aristotelian, assumptions about individual behavior and the choices we make.

  Still, the forerunners of the stereotypical nuns with steel rulers are Plato’s Guardians in the Republic. They serve the same Platonic principle Origen extolled, that the Church, like the ideal polis, exists for the betterment of man.47 The Church’s job was to train our inner voice to answer to our faith, not as an alternative to our reason, but as its highest expression. It is that conviction that will give the Christian the courage to speak truth to power, whether we are speaking of Origen or Martin Luther King.

  Origen lived his life under the ax edge of power and persecution. In 250, the rounding up of Christians started again. Origen was caught in the dragnet. Every morning, jailers dragged him from his cell and beat him with whips and chains. Eusebius, church historian and Origen’s admirer, describes how for months Origen was chained to the rack by his tormentors, suffering tortures that left him permanently crippled, and how he still refused to recant his faith. What kept him sane, Origen later wrote, were memories of his martyred father, who had after all endured worse, and a saying from his old rival Plotinus, that when bodily pain seems beyond endurance, it can lead to a spiritual cleansing, “that it obliterates the face of time until whole eons fall away like dead leaves from a tree.”48

  When the emperor Decius died, Origen was released. After months of recuperation, he was able to walk again with the help of a cane, one hundred yards at a time. Origen died in Tyre around 253–54, at age seventy. He left behind a letter from Christians in Alexandria, clamoring for him to come back to take them under his pastoral care.

  No figure since Saint Paul left a greater stamp on his Church and his faith. Origen left behind more than six hundred written treatises (most now lost), hundreds of letters, plus sermons and homilies. “Who,” asked Saint Jerome, another admirer, “can ever read all that Origen wrote?”49 For the first time in history, through Origen, Christian theology had been elevated to the level of philosophy. After his death, some of his Neoplatonic notions (for example, the preexistence of souls as emanations from the Divine Intellect) would land him and his followers in trouble. To this day, he is denied sainthood in the Catholic Church.

  Still, no other thinker brought about a more thoroughgoing synthesis between Christian revelation and ancient reason, between Plato and Jesus, than Origen. He challenged the Catholic Church to be like Plato’s Republic: a community dedicated to the perfection of wisdom as well as salvation. In one way or another over centuries, it has tried to remain faithful to Origen’s vision.

  When Origen died, that vision seemed only a dream. Yet in just fifty years, events wou
ld give it a new, astonishing reality.

  * * *

  * With momentous consequences for one of them, Dionysius the Areopagite. See chapter 13.

  † Romans even had a special verb, first used in poetry by Catullus, to describe the fluttering movement of the passive partner’s buttocks in sodomy. The verb had two forms: one for males and one for females.

  ‡ See chapter 2.

  § Take this classic example from a letter by the poet Dante Alighieri on the passage “When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.” The literal meaning is the exodus of the Jews from Egypt; the allegorical meaning is man’s redemption by Christ. The moral sense is the conversion of the soul from sin to a state of divine grace; and the anagogical meaning is the journey of man’s soul from the corruption of this world to the liberty of eternal glory.

  ‖ Made worse by the huge popularity of The Da Vinci Code, which suggests that early Christianity was essentially matriarchal in nature until the emperor Constantine let the mysogynists take over. For a corrective, see chapter 11.

  “In this sign you will conquer.” The labarum that Constantine and his soldiers wore to victory at the Milvian Bridge, 312 CE.

  Eleven

  TOWARD THE HEAVENLY CITY

  Cicero and Plato said many wise things. But I never heard them say, “Come unto me.”

  —Saint Augustine

  He was an unlikely Christian hero. Hard and muscular, he had answered since childhood to the nickname “Bullneck.” He had been born in dark, fog-bound Britain, far from the Mediterranean world that nurtured early Church Fathers like Origen. When the emperor Diocletian retired in 305, however, Constantine son of Constantius Chlorus rushed his legions down from Britain to join in the struggle for power.