Essays in Idleness

Christ came to save us, in more ways than we can possibly imagine. One of those ways is through the working out of the “fact” of Jesus in the history of ideas. The finest minds of early Christendom were Greek minds, very impressive in themselves. Much that was Greek, especially much that was Platonic, was imported into Christianity in the first centuries; but even more impressive was what was turned out. The whole ancient idea of God was turned inside out, and through the many centuries since, we have been invisibly benefiting from this mental exercise. Let me try to explain.

Origen is one of the Fathers of the Church, who lived c.185 to c.254; a man from Alexandria who also preached itinerantly in the Holy Land. He is among the more controversial figures, I think less for what he thought and wrote himself, than for what many of his followers and admirers thought and wrote in his wake, taking his more speculative thoughts too far, or misunderstanding them. He was condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, and there has been some stigma associated with his name ever since.

Yet the greatest of Church thinkers keep returning to Origen, and have been thrilled by him, for there is no greater mind at work in the early centuries after Christ — not even Augustine in the West, or Chrysostom in the East. And the thinking of Origen can never be contained, for he was a light in the minds of Jerome, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose. He was the intellectual source of so much that became orthodoxy.

And he is coming back again, partly through the happy chance of the discovery of lost works in the Egyptian desert, and partly through the re-discovery of him by modern thinkers, such as one of my own heroes, Hans Urs von Balthasar. There were large advances in our understanding of Origen through the latter half of the XXth century, and I think more may follow in this XXIst.

But the book I shall refer to now, Contra Celsum, has been around all along. It is Origen’s defence of Christianity against a philosophical attack by Celsus, a learned and decent Greek-speaking pagan. Much of what Celsus has to say would pass as perfectly modern and “liberal” — Celsus likes the high standard of Christian morality, and he is attracted to the idea of the Logos. But he doesn’t believe Christ is “the Son of the Father,” he is put off by all the miracles he finds in the Gospels, and by much of the tone. He thinks the Christians themselves are small-minded and intolerant. He fears them in the same way a modern “liberal” fears those “born again” — people who refuse to fit in to the progressive secular society around them.

We’ve heard all that before, what is more interesting in Celsus’s objection to the Incarnation and Resurrection, for it is not the modern one. (Curiously enough, it closely resembles the Muslim critique of claims for Jesus — for the Muslims remain very close to the ancient Greeks in their theology.) Celsus is scandalized by the whole idea of “God the Son,” in principle. For to his Greek mind, the most obvious attribute of God is his self-sufficiency. He can’t fathom the idea of a God who would intentionally make himself vulnerable.

If God came down to earth as Christ, for whatever purpose — prophet, spy, saviour, you name it — then fine, Celsus could handle that. But if Christ is God, he must act like God, he must act the way “everyone knows” God acts — Omnipotently. He might be hiding out for a while, for sport, pretending to be a flesh-and-blood man and travelling incognito. Fair enough.

But no, this God exposes himself in a manger. He makes a show of his powerlessness, which ends in getting himself crucified. This can’t make any sense; God could not possibly have got himself into a fix like that, for if someone threatened to crucify God, “we all know,” God would be angry! And being God, he could surely blow away Pontius Pilate, and the whole Roman army for that matter. The real God humiliates his enemies, he doesn’t get humiliated.

It’s worse than that, for this “Christ” has not come for the sake of the righteous, but for the sinners. He even admits it! The real God would have come to help those who are prudent and pure, who have clean hands, who are free of evil. Celsus actually reads the Gospel parables and finds them sick, sick, sick. He screams: “You are trying to tell me it is an evil thing not to have sinned? What kind of crackpot are you?”

Now, Origen responds. He understands exactly where Celsus is coming from. He knows “how this all looks” to the traditional Greek mind, for after all Origen had one himself, and had gone to great pains to twist free of it. He knows there is nothing insincere in Celsus, that his opponent is expressing a genuine revulsion for what he considers to be perverse.

At the most dramatic moment (in Book IV) Origen makes his stand. He tells Celsus that he cannot understand Christ because he can only understand a love that seeks its own “eudaemonia,” its own well-being and self-sufficiency. But Christ’s love is revealed in his very humiliation, in his very dependency. It is a moment when Origen throws off the shackles of Platonism, and invites the other pagans to do it, too. But many won’t, can’t, because they are trapped in the ancient worldview.

This is what is so profound in the Christian message; not Christ’s strength but his weakness. It is the root of the sympathy we are invited to feel for people who are sinners, and for people who are not like us. It shatters the ancient morality of “us versus them.” It is the very source of what we mean by “enlightened,” even those of us who are post-Christian.

It arrives with the Christ child, upsetting all received ideas about God. It is the significence of the babe in the crèche at Bethlehem. It is what the angels are announcing to the shepherds as they bide their flocks. Through this extraordinary act of self-humiliation, we are suddenly in the presence of the Glory of God.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I wrote this piece for Christmas, many years ago, and a dear reader now sends it to me as an old newspaper clipping. Good exercise, re-typing. Surely it is out of copyright by now.