Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority. Heidi Marx-Wolf
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are messengers of the gods in the Platonic sense.12 We do not hear about other supralunary beings, for example, angels or the fixed stars, in this context. However, we can turn to other works by Origen to fill in these cosmic gaps. Furthermore, in Origen’s time there was still a great deal of flexibility and ambiguity regarding terminology with reference to spiritual taxa.13
The argument that these views stem from Origen raises a number of rather obvious difficulties for those who affirm a single Origen. The most pressing of these difficulties is that we must figure out how Origen’s ideas in Concerning Daemons relate to his taxonomic discourses in other works, in particular in his On First Principles, where daemons are classed as more or less evil and obstructive, those beings that fell farthest from their initial unity with their Creator. The other difficulty is that Origen seems to have, at some point, interpreted Platonic texts, such as the Timaeus, without fundamentally challenging their polytheistic framework. The fact that, at some point, he entertained the idea that not all daemons were evil, that some were, in fact, divine messengers, calls for further reflection. This requires us to think further about Origen’s teaching activities and his philosophical interactions with Porphyry (and Longinus, who was another student). If, as Elizabeth Depalma Digeser argues, Porphyry went to study philosophy with Origen, as did a number of other non-Christians, it is likely that Origen was presenting himself as a teacher of philosophy, giving lectures on core texts in the ancient philosophical canon, commenting on them, interpreting them, and so forth.
The best place to look when searching for a text that brings the two Origens together, Origen the teacher of philosophy and Origen the Christian theologian and scriptural commentator, is in Origen’s Contra Celsum, a work written to a Middle Platonic non-Christian polytheist. As Ramelli points out, it is in this work that Origen refers to Homer more than thirty times, many of his references being entirely positive.14 Furthermore, given the fact that even within Plato, terminology regarding intermediate spirits is sometimes ambiguous, it should come as no surprise that across Origen’s works we encounter imprecision and context-specific usage of names and terms referring to spirits that aid or obstruct humans in their quest to achieve salvation. If Porphyry is using Origen’s Concerning Daemons in his own Commentary on the Timaeus, it may well be that Plato’s use of the term “daemon,” for instance, in the Symposium, is at the basis of Origen’s treatise. Porphyry himself uses terminology for intermediate spirits in very context-specific, inconsistent ways.15 In other words, the fact that Origen may have propounded views on daemons that appear to differ from what he says elsewhere about them does not necessarily involve him in self-contradiction. Rather, he was likely commenting on the various meanings of the term in Plato’s works, an activity one could reasonably expect from a teacher of philosophy, Christian or otherwise.16
Spiritual Taxonomy in Origen’s On First Principles
Origen makes his most explicit statements concerning cosmic order in On First Principles.17 Likely written sometime between 218 and 225, when Origen was still in Alexandria, On First Principles was an experimental work, one of the first sustained attempts at a systematic Christian theology, and one that addressed issues of cosmology and cosmogony, soteriology, Christology, theodicy, and, of course, what I have been calling spiritual taxonomy.18 Origen himself describes his purpose in On First Principles as an attempt to construct a “single body of doctrine,” discovering the truth about particular points that Christ and the apostles left obscure or unexplained and doing so using “clear and cogent arguments.”19 One of the main questions left unelaborated in scripture concerned intermediate spiritual beings, good and evil angels, as well as the devil himself. Origen notes, “the Church teaching lays it down that these beings exist, but what they are or how they exist it has not explained very clearly.”20 Origen makes the claim that the apostles left certain doctrines unelaborated in order to “supply the more diligent of those who came after them such as should prove to be lovers of wisdom, with an exercise on which to display the fruit of their ability.”21 Origen obviously considered himself to be one of those who were uniquely qualified to participate in this exegetical project, one of those “who train themselves to become worthy and capable of receiving wisdom.”22 Part of what initially incited Origen to address these particular questions was the emergence of “conflicting opinions” among those professing belief in Christ, “not only on small and trivial questions, but also on some that are great and important.”23 Given his view that much of Christian doctrine remained unelaborated in scripture, it is not surprising that such conflicts developed.
One of these conflicts emerged around the views of a group of early Christian thinkers who, like Origen, came to be labeled “heretics,” writers such as Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides.24 According to Origen, these thinkers held the view that human souls were “in their natures diverse” and hence had different origins and different opportunities for salvation.25 Origen developed his taxonomic framework, in part, in response to this view, a view that, for our purposes, bears relevant similarities to that of Porphyry on the question of universal salvation.26 Furthermore, the debate between Origen and these other Christians bears interesting similarities to the debate between Porphyry and Iamblichus on the soteriological potential of ritual. On Origen’s interpretation of Marcion, Valentinus and Basilides, these different orders of human souls were the direct result of distinct creative agents in the universe—one good, the other deceptive and defective. The main problem that Origen had to address in response to his doctrinal opponents was “how it was consistent with the righteousness of God who made the world” that he should make some souls of higher rank and others of “second and third and many still lower and less worthy degrees,” a problem that, for them, was solved by positing multiple creative agents in the cosmos.27 Origen countered this particular conception of a hierarchy of souls with what some have called his “universalism” or the idea of apokatastasis, the idea that all created intelligences, even those that have fallen the furthest away from God, will someday be restored to their original created nature.28 We find his spiritual taxonomy embedded in Origen’s answer to the proponents of the view that there are different spiritual species of human beings.29 And although this takes up most of Chapters 8–10 of Book 2, Origen cautions his reader that he “must not be supposed to put these [ideas] forward as settled doctrines, but as subjects for inquiry and discussion.”30
One of Origen’s main concerns in these three chapters was to explain why some rational souls happen to be angels, others evil daemons, and still others humans. Furthermore, within these general categories, he also notes many finer-grained distinctions. He is also concerned about why some humans have better lives than others, and why nonhuman spirits are ranked according to different orders. He is responding to those who ask “how it is consistent with the righteousness of God who made the world that on some he should bestow a habitation in the heavens, and not only give them a better habitation, but also confer on them a higher and more conspicuous rank, favoring some with a ‘principality,’ others with ‘powers,’ to others again allotting ‘dominions,’ to others presenting the most magnificent seats in the heavenly courts, while others shine with golden light and gleam with starry brilliance.”31 On his view, human beings could not hold God responsible for these differences, because that would imply that God either created deficient beings or participated in the fall of good ones.32 In order to resolve this problem of theodicy, Origen asserted that all rational souls were created equal and each made a primordial choice with regard to its Creator that subsequently situated it in the cosmic order.
In Chapter 9 of Book 2, Origen states that in the beginning, “God made as large a number of rational and intelligent beings” as “he saw would be sufficient.”33 In Chapter 8, Origen called these “minds” and distinguished them from “souls.”34 He claimed that before these creatures were souls, including the souls of angels, celestial bodies, and humans, they were minds. He uses the designation “soul” to indicate what these intelligences or minds became after they fell from their primordial state. Unfortunately, in all cases but one, namely Christ’s, these intelligences, using their God-given capacity for free and voluntary movement, “began the process of withdrawal from the good,” on account of their “sloth