Was Origen's first condemnation disciplinary rather than doctrinal?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — every surviving report of the Alexandrian synods of c. 231–232 gives the same ground for the sentence: Origen had been ordained presbyter in another bishop's province without his own bishop's consent, and the one personal charge added to it was a youthful self-mutilation. Not one report attaches a named doctrinal proposition to the sentence, and the terms of the sentence itself — residence, licence to teach, priestly rank — are terms of standing. What does not hold is the strong form of the claim, that doctrine played no part in the quarrel at all: the encyclical Demetrius circulated is lost, doctrinal accusations against Origen were in the air at Alexandria at that very moment, and Origen was still writing to bishops about his orthodoxy a decade later. First stated by Jerome, Eusebius of Caesarea and Pamphilus; standard in modern scholarship.

The claim

— Jerome, Letter 33.4, to Paula (c. 384), link.¹ The claim under weight is the sober core of this: that the sentence of c. 231–232 was passed on Origen's ecclesiastical standing and conduct, not on his theology — so that the first condemnation of Origen is not a datum for how early his teaching was judged heretical.

Who advances it

The reading is as old as the surviving evidence, because the surviving evidence is entirely the work of Origen's defenders. Eusebius of Caesarea supplies the narrative in the Church History; Pamphilus, in the lost second book of the Apology for Origen, supplied the account of the synods that Photius later summarized; Jerome, in his admiring phase, put it at its bluntest in the letter quoted above — and did not retract that part of it after 393, when he turned against Origen on every other front. Modern scholarship reaches the same conclusion by weighing those reports: Henri Crouzel's Origène takes the principal ground of the measures to have been, on the testimony of Eusebius and Photius, the ordination by a bishop not his own, with the castration Demetrius publicized playing a supporting role.²

The evidence for

The occasion is an ordination. Eusebius reports that Origen, travelling to Greece on church business, “went through Palestine, and was ordained as presbyter in Caesarea by the bishops of that country”, and that this — not anything he had written — is what “was agitated concerning him.”³ Behind it lay a running jurisdictional dispute of some fifteen years' standing. On an earlier stay in Palestine Origen had preached, as a layman, at the invitation of the local bishops; Demetrius protested “that such a thing was never heard of before… that laymen should preach in the presence of bishops”, and Alexander of Jerusalem and Theoctistus of Caesarea answered him with a list of precedents from Laranda, Iconium and Synada.⁴ The quarrel was about who might teach, by whose authority, and where — and the ordination of 231 resolved that question over Demetrius's head.

The sentence is framed in terms of standing. Photius's summary of Pamphilus preserves the only account of the proceedings, and it describes two sittings: the ordination was “contrary to the rule of the Church”; “a synod of bishops and some presbyters was summoned to condemn Origen. According to Pamphilus, it was decided that he must not remain in Alexandria or teach there, but that he should be allowed to retain his priesthood. But Demetrius and some Egyptian bishops, with the assent of those who had formerly supported him, also deprived him of his sacred office.”⁵ Residence, licence to teach, and priestly rank are all questions of status; a synod that had found him a heretic had a different vocabulary available and did not use it.

The one named charge is not doctrinal. Eusebius reports that Demetrius, who had originally “admired greatly the daring nature” of Origen's self-castration and urged him on in his teaching, later “wrote of his deed as most foolish to the bishops throughout the world”, and adds that he had “nothing else that he could say against him, save this deed of his boyhood.”⁶ Jerome's De viris illustribus, written in the same years, likewise names no doctrine: Origen “offended Demetrius, who was so wildly enraged at him that he wrote everywhere to injure his reputation.”⁷

The sentence was not received where Origen was known. The bishops who had ordained him kept him at work for the remaining twenty years of his life, “as their only teacher”, expounding Scripture and discharging the other duties of the presbyterate; Firmilian of Cappadocia summoned him into his own province “for the benefit of the churches.”⁸ Bishops of four provinces, on Jerome's count, declined the verdict. A judgement that a presbyter had transgressed his bishop's authority is exactly the sort of sentence a neighbouring province can decline as none of its business; a finding of heresy is not, and was not treated as one.

A hostile transmitter repeats it uncorrected. Photius is no friend to Origen: in the preceding notice he calls his writings abominable and remarks that showing a man “not altogether impious… is no reason why he should escape punishment for obvious blasphemies.” He nonetheless reports the jurisdictional account of the synods without amendment and without producing a doctrinal charge from 231 that he would plainly have been glad to have.⁹

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The formal act. Every independent line of report — Eusebius's narrative, Pamphilus's account of the proceedings, Jerome's two notices — converges on the ordination as the occasion and on standing as the substance, and the terms of the sentence corroborate them. No text of any date attaches a named proposition of Origen's to the synods of 231–232. The first inventory of the doctrinal charge-sheet comes from Pamphilus, about seventy-five years later, and the first formal listing of Origen as a heresiarch from Epiphanius, a century and a half after that. Anyone citing Demetrius as the moment the Church first judged Origen's teaching heretical is citing the wrong event.

Where the reading has to be qualified. The convergence of the sources is less impressive than it looks, because they are not independent of one another and none is neutral. Eusebius wrote a six-book defence of Origen; Pamphilus wrote five of those books; Photius is transmitting Pamphilus, not checking him; and Jerome is drawing on Eusebius. At the decisive point Eusebius refuses to narrate at all — the decisions of the bishops “demand a separate treatise” — and the treatise is lost. Reticence in the friendliest witness precisely where a doctrinal charge would stand is not evidence that there was none.

Doctrinal accusation was in the air at the time. Origen's own Letter to Friends at Alexandria, quoted by Jerome, was written to attack Demetrius and “to inveigh against the bishops throughout the world, and to tell them that their excommunication of him is invalid”; in the same letter he answers those who “ascribe to us and our teaching the blasphemy… that the father of wickedness and perdition of those who shall be cast out of the kingdom of God, that is, the devil, will be saved; a thing which not even a madman can say.” Jerome traces that slander to Origen's public debate with the Valentinian Candidus.¹⁰ So at the very moment of the rupture Origen was defending himself in one document against both his bishop's sentence and a doctrinal charge. That does not show the charge was in the sentence — he distinguishes them — but it rules out the picture of a purely canonical quarrel conducted in a theologically quiet room.

And it did not stop with the sentence. Eusebius records that Origen “wrote also to Fabianus, bishop of Rome, and to many other rulers of the churches concerning his orthodoxy” — that is, in the 240s, more than a decade after leaving Egypt.¹¹ Jerome, who had seen the letter, adds that in it Origen “expresses penitence for having made erroneous statements, and charges Ambrose with over haste in making public what was meant only for private circulation.”¹² Jerome is by then hostile and the letter is lost, so the confession of error should be held loosely; the fact that Origen thought his orthodoxy needed defending to a circle of bishops should not.

Two smaller cautions. Jerome's Roman “senate” convened to censure Origen is attested in no other source and is probably his rhetorical enlargement of Rome's assent to a circulated letter. And the word canonical flatters the proceedings: no surviving canon forbidding ordination outside one's own province is earlier than the councils of the fourth century, so what Demetrius asserted was a bishop's customary authority over his own clergy rather than a written rule.¹³ That does not make the ground doctrinal; it makes it disciplinary in a looser sense than the later vocabulary suggests.

Assessment

sound. On the question actually at issue — what the sentence of c. 231–232 was passed for — the disciplinary reading is the only one the evidence supports, and it is the standing scholarly position. The occasion was an irregular ordination; the terms of both sittings concern residence, teaching licence and priestly rank; the sole additional charge named anywhere is the castration; and the neighbouring provinces treated the sentence as a matter of Egyptian jurisdiction and ignored it. Two limits should be kept in view rather than argued away. The record is entirely the work of Origen's partisans and its central document, Demetrius's encyclical, is lost, so whether it also alleged heterodoxy cannot be settled either way — Crouzel thinks it likely and says the evidence will not bear a firm conclusion. And doctrinal accusation was demonstrably circulating around Origen at Alexandria in those same years and followed him for the rest of his life. The claim that survives is therefore the moderate one: the first condemnation of Origen was not a judgement about his theology. The stronger version sometimes built on it — that no one had yet faulted his doctrine, or that the later charge-sheet was invented from nothing — is conjecture beyond the evidence, and Jerome's version, which converts the whole affair into professional envy of Origen's eloquence, is advocacy rather than report.

Sources