HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Rome in 400–401 condemn Origen's books only, and not the man?

Type: historical argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak as stated — Anastasius I's own letter condemns the writings “and their author” together. What survives of the claim is narrower and does hold: Rome pronounced no canonical anathema on the person, and the pope who pronounced sentence said in writing that he neither knew nor wished to know who Origen was.

Related arguments: the verdict on the man, not the doctrine — see also was Origen himself anathematized by an ecumenical council? · is it more reasonable to believe Origen saved than damned? This page tests the same books-versus-man distinction at the Roman synod of 400–401 that the council question tests at 553.

The claim

Anastasius, while declaring that Origen was entirely unknown to him, condemned the propositions extracted from his books.¹

— the standard handbook statement of what Rome did in 400–401. The assertion is that the Roman sentence, like the Egyptian and Cypriot synods of the same year, fell on a body of writing and not on the person of a presbyter a century and a half dead: propositions were rejected, reading was forbidden, and Origen himself was left where the fourth century had left him.

Who advances it

The reading is the received one in the reference literature, and it is not invented. It rests on a real and well-documented distinction drawn in the East in exactly these months. Socrates Scholasticus, describing the Alexandrian synodical decree that Epiphanius carried to Constantinople in 403, says of it that “they did not excommunicate Origen himself but condemned his books”² — and Theophilus of Alexandria's private request to Epiphanius, that a synodical letter go round so “that by universal consent Origen himself may be expressly condemned”, shows that the distinction was live and that he had asked for more than he got.³ Since Anastasius acted at Theophilus's prompting and in the same campaign, it is natural to read the Roman sentence in the same terms. The question here is whether the Roman documents will bear it.

The evidence for

Three things support it. First, the occasion. What lay in front of Anastasius was a book: Rufinus's Latin version of Peri Archōn, brought to Rome by Eusebius of Cremona with the offending chapters marked. The pope says so — “he has shown to me some blasphemous chapters which made me shudder as I passed judgement on them” — and the operative language of his letter to Simplicianus of Milan is a reading-prohibition: he writes “to the end that no man may contrary to the commandment read these books which we have mentioned”, and rejects “everything written in days gone by Origen that is contrary to our faith.”⁴ The object of every verb is a text.

Second, the enforcement that followed was of the same kind. Anastasius reports with satisfaction the imperial rescript “by which every one who serves God is warned against the reading of Origen, and all who are convicted of reading his impious works are condemned by the imperial judgment” — a censorship measure, not a sentence on a person.⁵

Third, and most striking, Anastasius disclaims any judgement on Origen as a man because he disclaims any knowledge of him at all. Writing to John of Jerusalem in 401:

As for Origen, whose writings he has translated into our language, I have neither formerly known, nor do I now seek to know either who he was or what expression he may have given to his thought.⁶

The nineteenth-century editors of Rufinus took this at face value as a statement about the state of Latin learning: Origen's works “had been neglected in the West for a century and to such an extent that the Pope Anastasius says… that he neither knows who he was nor what he wrote.”⁷ A judge who does not know the defendant's identity has not tried the defendant.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Three parts of the claim are secure. Rome issued no anathema in canonical form against the person of Origen; nothing in either letter excommunicates him, degrades him, or strikes his name from the diptychs, and no such act is recorded anywhere before the sixth century. The instrument used was a prohibition on reading, reinforced by an imperial rescript against possession. And the pope's disclaimer of knowledge is genuine and consequential: he had read excerpts marked for him by a partisan of one side and nothing else, and he says so. Whatever Rome did in 400 was not the outcome of an examination of Origen's theology.

Where it fails. The claim as usually stated — books, not the man — runs into one sentence, in the same letter that supplies its best support. Having described the marked chapters, Anastasius adds:

If Origen has put forth any other writings, you are to know that they and their author are alike condemned by me.⁸

That is the author condemned along with the writings, in the pope's own voice, and it is not a slip: the letter to John a year later says that Origen's “object was to disintegrate our faith, which is that of the Apostles… by leading us into tortuous paths” — an imputation of intent, which is a judgement on a man and not on a text.⁹ The contrast that makes the Eastern distinction visible is missing here. Socrates could report of the Alexandrian decree that it did not excommunicate Origen himself because he had the document and could see what it said; nothing comparable exists for Rome, and the Roman document we do have says the opposite of what the claim requires.

A second difficulty: the two condemnations are not the same act. The claim borrows the Egyptian synods' precision and applies it to a papal letter, but a synodical decree and a letter of censure are different instruments with different drafting conventions. The Alexandrian decree was a formal finding of a council, framed to be circulated and subscribed, and its wording was scrutinized accordingly; Anastasius was writing privately to a fellow bishop and to a patriarch, in the loose and vehement register such letters use. Reading his “they and their author are alike condemned by me” as a canonical anathema would overstate it in the other direction. The honest description is that Rome expressed a personal condemnation without ever performing a juridical one — which is why the sixth century still had something left to do, and why Theophilus was still asking for the step that was not taken.

What the disclaimer costs the condemnation, and what it does not. That Anastasius had not read Origen weakens the sentence considerably as a theological judgement, and it is the strongest thing on this page. But it does not convert the sentence into a book-prohibition: an ignorant condemnation of a man is still a condemnation of a man. The two points are separate and both are true — Rome condemned the author, and Rome did not know who the author was.

Assessment

weak as stated. The books-not-the-man reading is true of the Alexandrian and Cypriot synods of 400 and false of the Roman letters of 400–401, and the handbooks arrive at it by assimilating the one to the other. Anastasius condemned “they and their author” alike, and imputed to Origen a purpose to dismantle the apostolic faith. Two narrower claims in the neighbourhood do hold, and are worth keeping: that no canonical anathema on the person of Origen issued from Rome in these years, the instrument being a prohibition on reading backed by imperial law; and that the pope who condemned him had, on his own statement, never read him and did not care to learn who he was. The frequent inference from the second to the first — he cannot have condemned the man, since he did not know the man — does not follow.

See also: the parallel question about the same pope and the translator, did Anastasius summon and personally condemn Rufinus?, where the books-not-the-man distinction does hold — Rufinus was left, in the pope's words, to his own conscience.

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