Advent with Origen
Week 1: Sr Angela Marie OP introduces her series of reflections on Origen, one of the Church's greatest thinkers and lover of the Divine Word.
“When all things were in quiet silence, and that night was in the midst of her swift course, your almighty Word, O Lord, leapt down out of your royal throne. Alleluia.” This Christmas antiphon, based on Wisdom 18:14-15, inspired me to pursue the theological roots of God’s Logos, his almighty Word, that breaks into the world in a special way at Christmas time. The flowering of the Church’s “Logos theology” blossomed in the second and third centuries, and here I discovered Origen of Alexandria, the pioneer and foremost theologian of the Word of God.[1]
As saintly biographers of his time attest, Origen’s relationship to God centred around God’s Word, the Logos.[2] The scholar Jean Daniélou concludes from the accounts that “Origen may be said to have given his heart to the θεῖον λόγον [divine word] when he was a child. As a child, he deliberately made choice of the Word, and knowledge and love of the Word were always what counted most for him, whether the λόγον (logos) stood for God’s subsistent Word [Jesus Incarnate] or for his word in Scripture.”[3] This devotion overflowed into his theological work so that insights into the Logos fill his prolific writings. For Origen, “Logos” was a multifaceted meditation on God. As Robert Daly explains, when Origen speaks of the Word, “At least four interconnected levels of meaning are at play. First, the pre-existent, eternal, divine Logos . . . Second, this same divine Logos who took flesh of the Virgin Mary . . . Third, the same Word has also become incarnate in the words of Scripture. Fourth, this same Word . . . also dwells and is at work within us, espoused to our souls, calling us to make progress toward perfection.”[4]
In this Advent season we delight in God’s plan to send his eternal Word into time and history at the Incarnation. For Origen, this marvellous aspect of the divine Logos is even more glorious when we consider these four levels of the Logos’ significance together. During this reflection, we will meditate on how Daly’s first two significations of Logos augment our typical Christmas picture, and in the subsequent weeks of Advent, we will dive into how the Logos works within the soul in this fourth signification, Christian mysticism.
Pious reflections about Christmas focus on Jesus coming as an innocent babe. But the Father sent his Son in the Incarnation to fully reveal himself to the world. Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Therefore, to fully understand the Father, we must expand our Christmas imagination to let the full light of the Logos’ Incarnation illumine our understanding. Two of Origen’s unique images of the Logos’ coming into the world can paint his Incarnation in new hues—the image of two statues and the warrior Word from the Book of Revelation.
Imagining two statues, Origen explains how Christ is the perfect image of the Father: “The Logos comes down to the level of him who is unable to look upon the radiance and brilliance of the Deity.”[5] By becoming flesh, this Word lifts man up to look on God’s “absolute form.” Origen muses, “Let us suppose that there existed a statue of so great a size as to fill the whole world, but which on account of its immensity was imperceptible to anyone.”[6] Then he imagines a second statue, made in exact detail, but smaller. He concludes, “It is by some such likeness as this that the Son, in emptying himself of his equality with the Father (cf. Phil. 2:7) . . . becomes an ‘express image’ of God’s substance (cf. Heb. 1:3); so that . . . we may find a way of beholding the divine light through looking at the brightness.”[7] This analogy reveals how the Logos shows Himself to humans. Before the Incarnation, the Logos always reflected the glory of God and bore the stamp of His nature, and He continues to aid rational minds in recognizing God’s order, goodness, and nature. Then with the Incarnation, like a window “which illumines the house and through which we see light,” the Word makes the Father truly perceptible.[8] And yet, the whole splendour of God’s divinity does not shine through the Incarnation; therefore, the window image holds true. Christ “illumines the house . . . not wholly but enough” for us to truly see and know the Father.[9] The Incarnation gives enough light for vision, but faithful souls must continue to pursue the Logos to understand the Father more perfectly.
After Jesus’ Incarnation and birth, every moment of his life reveals the Father to us in new and unique ways. We think of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, his teaching and miracles and Transfiguration. This continues up unto his Passion and death, where, in the opinion of Origen, the Logos reveals the Father most clearly. The Alexandrian remembers the Word in the Book of Revelation, who rides a white horse, symbolizing the radiant clarity of the truth that He communicates (Rev. 19:11,13).[10] But this rider is “sprinkled with blood,” for this is the Word who was made flesh and died.[11] Paradoxically, Origen says that gazing upon this bloodstained Logos is the “highest and supreme contemplation of the Logos.”[12] Here Christ images the Father even more than in the Son’s glory, for through His humble obedience, He makes the love and goodness of God more manifest. Origen proclaims that “the goodness of Christ appears in a greater and more divine light, and more according to the image of the Father” because God is not afraid of anything, even servitude.[13] Throughout His Incarnation, but particularly in His Passion and death, the Word makes the image of the Father accessible for all rational minds to know and love God himself.
As we prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming this Christmas, let us expand our meditation beyond the moment of Christ in the cradle. The divine Logos leapt down from heaven like a mighty warrior. And his coming is multifaceted: in the missions of the Trinity, in the womb of Mary, in Scripture, and in our souls. He is the perfect image of the Father, sharing his nature, yet in his condescension he has made himself accessible to us and so made the Father accessible.
Sr Angela Marie OP
Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia, Elgin.