Origen v. Plato

The title of Mark Edwards’s Origen Against Plato bluntly gives the gist of the book. Contrary to the popular wisdom, Origen was not a Platonist, denying all of the premises of the Platonism of his time – that objects are defined because they participate in forms that dwell in an incorporeal timeless realm; that the universe is the result of the world of a Demiurge who is divine only by participation in the Good; that the souls’ goal is to contemplate the form so as to be freed from corporeality; that the Homeric myths contains truths that the philosopher can unveil by allegory (159-60).

Origen “roundly declares the Ideas or Forms of Plato to be chimerical”; he claims that God has made himself known through revelation; that the purpose of corporeal life is “not punishment but exercise in virtue, so that the image of God, imparted in creation, may be completed by the likeness, which was purposely withheld”; he denies the transmigration of souls; and he insisted that the literal sense of scripture is never discarded even as one seeks a deeper significance (160-1).

Edwards concludes that “Origen’s is an autonomous philosophy, designed to answer, not to flatter, the teaching of the schools . . . . Often it is those who are most conversant with the fashions of the age who are least enslaved to them, and if Platonism was such an epidemic in Alexandria as scholars have supposed, the surest vaccine was to read Plato. If we may be permitted to sustain the medical simile . . . we may say that, far from exhibiting the symptoms of contagion, Origen’s work contains the antibodies to Platonism as proof that he has suffered and resisted its attacks” (161).