This session includes three presentations focusing on early Christian thinkers who moved away from Origen’s exegetical influence, either not consulting him or actively disagreeing with him. Volker Drecoll demonstrates, against prior assumptions of Basil as an Origenist, that Basil relied very little on Origen in his homilies on the Psalms and Hexaemeron and his works on Genesis, and rejected “allegorism.” Austin Foley Holmes treats the extant fragments of Marcellus’ Contra Asterium to show that, first, Marcellus viewed many other early thinkers to be negatively influenced by Origen, and, secondly, he objected to specific theological views of Origen, all emphasizing a strongly negative reception of Origen just after Nicaea. Finally, Andrew Nichols closely analyzes the language of Maximus the Confessor to highlight how he, building upon the tradition of Origen, clarifies with great specificity how God will “become ‘all in all’” according to the “movement from flesh to body.”
Basil is considered an Origenist by many scholars. In exegetical works, a strong influence on his Homilies on Psalms and even on his Homilies on Hexaemeron was assumed in previous scholarship. This paper will reconsider these claims. The evidence for a direct use of Origen’s works on Genesis is surprisingly weak. The influence of Origen on Basil’s exegetical techniques in the Homilies on Psalms is limited to only some homilies within this collection. The paper argues that Basil’s rejection of allegorism reacts already to the first steps of the Origenist controversy in the 70ies and can be contextualized into the exegesis of Gen. 1 in the fourth century. However, the influence of Origen on Basil as exegete seems to be limited.
This paper provides a thorough study of the surviving fragments of Marcellus’s *Contra Asterium* where Origen’s own writings and doctrine are explicitly or implicitly under examination. Marcellus regarded Origen (and in particular Origen’s *Peri Archôn*) as the principal corrupting influence on Paulinus of Tyre, Eusebius of Nicomedia, Narcissus of Neronias, Asterius of Cappadocia (‘the Sophist’), and Eusebius of Caesarea. Marcellus’s expectation that the connection between Origen and this *ad hoc* alliance of fourth-century bishops will produce an effective critique indicates the controversial status of Origen’s theological legacy during the decade that followed the Council of Nicaea. I will argue that Marcellus’s primary objections to Origen’s theology are (1) its “learning from philosophy” and (2) its particular conception of divine unity as a communicable reality (in which creatures are able to share through deification).
Scholars translating Maximus the Confessor have frequently conflated σάρκωσω and ενσωματώνω into the same word, leaving the reader to believe Maximus means the same thing by these two different words. In this paper, I will highlight the distinction between σαρκόω and ἐνσωμάτίζω in Maximus within the tradition of Origen’s concept of God becoming “all in all.” I will argue that once properly disambiguated, Maximus the Confessor argues for a progression from God becoming flesh to all of creation becoming embodied. That the logos became flesh so that He could become embodied. To move creation from flesh to body God became flesh. Since Christ is the essence of all virtues the enfleshing of Christ gave all human flesh the ability to remain flesh but become embodied. The movement from flesh to the body—the energy of God in the virtues—is the process by which God becomes “all in all.”