HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Dates: c. 248 (Against Celsus; the Homilies on Genesis preached at Caesarea
c. 240; d. c. 253) · Wikipedia
Summary: Origen — the most thoroughgoing allegorist of the early Church, and the name the
"allegorist = denier of history" charge most readily reaches for — is on the Flood the standing counter-example to
it. Answering the pagan Celsus, who jeered at the deluge and the "monstrous ark" as a botched copy of the Greek
Deucalion myth, Origen defends the ark as a real structure of stated dimensions, large enough by careful reckoning
to do its work, and the Flood as a real, providentially ordered event; he grounds the deluge in moral history — a
judgment on "the extensive prevalence of wickedness" — and expressly refuses to dissolve it into the Greek fiction
of world-cycles recurring by planetary periods. In the Homilies on Genesis he builds his famous
many-leveled allegory of the ark (its decks as the soul's ascent, Noah as a type of Christ, the ark as the Church)
atop that affirmed history, not in its place.
After this he continues as follows: "They speak, in the next place, of a deluge, and of a monstrous ark, having within it all things, and of a dove and a crow as messengers, falsifying and recklessly altering the story of Deucalion; not expecting, I suppose, that these things would come to light, but imagining that they were inventing stories merely for young children." Now in these remarks observe the hostility—so unbecoming a philosopher—displayed by this man towards this very ancient Jewish narrative. For, not being able to say anything against the history of the deluge, and not perceiving what he might have urged against the ark and its dimensions,—viz., that, according to the general opinion, which accepted the statements that it was three hundred cubits in length, and fifty in breadth, and thirty in height, it was impossible to maintain that it contained (all) the animals that were upon the earth, fourteen specimens of every clean and four of every unclean beast,—he merely termed it "monstrous, containing all things within it." Now wherein was its "monstrous" character, seeing it is related to have been a hundred years in building, and to have had the three hundred cubits of its length and the fifty of its breadth contracted, until the thirty cubits of its height terminated in a top one cubit long and one cubit broad? Why should we not rather admire a structure which resembled an extensive city, if its measurements be taken to mean what they are capable of meaning, so that it was nine myriads of cubits long in the base, and two thousand five hundred in breadth? And why should we not admire the design evinced in having it so compactly built, and rendered capable of sustaining a tempest which caused a deluge? For it was not daubed with pitch, or any material of that kind, but was securely coated with bitumen. And is it not a subject of admiration, that by the providential arrangement of God, the elements of all the races were brought into it, that the earth might receive again the seeds of all living things, while God made use of a most righteous man to be the progenitor of those who were to be born after the deluge?
— Against Celsus (Contra Celsum) 4.41 (c. 248), trans. Frederick Crombie, ANF 4, newadvent.org / Wikisource. This is the decisive datum: the period's heaviest allegorist, faced with a sneer at the Flood, does not retreat into "it is only a figure" but plants his feet on the history. He treats the dimensions as the real measurements of a real vessel and resolves the capacity objection by reading the cubits geometrically (so the ark "resembled an extensive city," "nine myriads of cubits long in the base"); he notes the hundred-year build, the bitumen coating, the pyramidal taper to a one-cubit top, and the providential gathering of "the elements of all the races" so that "the earth might receive again the seeds of all living things." The whole reply presupposes that "the history of the deluge" is exactly that — history — against which, Origen observes, even Celsus "could say nothing."
But we do not refer either the deluge or the conflagration to cycles and planetary periods; but the cause of them we declare to be the extensive prevalence of wickedness, and its (consequent) removal by a deluge or a conflagration.
— Against Celsus 4.12, trans. Crombie, ANF 4, newadvent.org / Wikisource. Celsus had charged that Christians, "from a misunderstanding of the accounts of these occurrences," held that after "lengthened cycles of time, and the returns and conjunctions of planets, conflagrations and floods are wont to happen." Origen rejects the cyclical cosmology outright: the deluge was not an astronomically scheduled recurrence but a singular act with a moral cause — the spread of wickedness — and a moral purpose. He turns the antiquity argument back on Celsus: Moses and the prophets are "men of very great antiquity," and it is the Greeks who, "misunderstanding them," "invented the fiction of the same events recurring at certain intervals." The Flood is thus kept inside real, once-for-all history, not absorbed into myth.
In order to show that he had read the book of Genesis, Celsus rejects the story of the dove, although unable to adduce any reason which might prove it to be a fiction. In the next place, as his habit is, in order to put the narrative in a more ridiculous light, he converts the "raven" into a "crow," and imagines that Moses so wrote, having recklessly altered the accounts related of the Grecian Deucalion… But how should they, who gave their Scriptures to the whole nation, not expect that they would come to light, and who predicted, moreover, that this religion should be proclaimed to all nations?… If, then, they peruse the Theogonies of the Greeks, and the stories about the twelve gods, they impart to them an air of dignity, by investing them with an allegorical signification; but when they wish to throw contempt upon our biblical narratives, they assert that they are fables, clumsily invented for infant children!
— Against Celsus 4.42, trans. Crombie, ANF 4, newadvent.org / Wikisource. Origen defends the Genesis account as Moses's own true narrative — the dove and the raven included — and turns the tables on the double standard: the Greeks allegorize their theogonies to dignify them but call the Mosaic flood a fable "clumsily invented for infant children." The point cuts squarely against the modern conflation: Origen, who allegorizes the Flood as freely as anyone, here insists that to read a narrative figuratively is not to deny that it happened, and faults Celsus for pretending otherwise.
… since Scripture related nothing about the places which we said were set apart for the excrement of the animals… because it could less worthily be fitted to a spiritual meaning, rightly, therefore, Scripture, which rather fits its narratives to allegorical meanings, was silent about this.
— Homilies on Genesis, Homily 2 (on Noah's ark; preached at Caesarea c. 240), trans. Ronald E. Heine, Fathers of the Church 71 (CUA Press, 1982), Internet Archive. Here Origen gives the ark his most elaborate spiritual reading — its decks and its three hundred, fifty, and thirty cubits become a figure of the ordered ascent of the soul, the few saved in it the few who reach spiritual maturity, Noah a type of "the true Noah," Christ, and the ark the Church in which alone the world is rescued — and yet he reaches that allegory only by working through the literal construction in detail, down to the practical housing of the animals (he reasons about where their waste was kept, and infers from Scripture's silence on it not that the voyage was unreal but that the detail "could less worthily be fitted to a spiritual meaning"). The figure is laid on a narrative he treats as real history — the same both/and that Ambrose and Augustine would later set down as a rule. (On the homily's literal-foundation-then-spiritual structure, cf. the survey at copticchurch.net.)