Adolf Harnack · 24 of 25
II. Doctrine of the Fall and its consequences.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE FALL AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. All created spirits must develop. When they have done so, they attain perfection and make way for new dispensations and worlds. In the exercise of their freedom, however, disobedience, laxity, laziness, and failure make their appearance among them in an endless multiplicity of ways. The disciplining and purifying of these spirits was the purpose for which the material world was created by God. It is therefore a place of purification, ruled and harmoniously arranged by God’s wisdom. Each member of the world of spirits has received a different kind of material nature in proportion to his degree of removal from the Creator. The highest spirits, who have virtually held fast by that which is good, though they too stand in need of restitution, guide the world, are servants of God (ἄγγελοι), and have bodies of an exceedingly subtle kind in the form of a globe (stars). The spirits that have fallen very deeply (the spirits of men) are banished into material bodies. Those that have altogether turned against God have received very dark bodies, indescribably ugly, though not visible. Men therefore are placed between the angels and demons, both of whom try to influence them. The moral struggle that man has to undergo within himself is made harder by the demons, but lightened by the angels, for these spiritual powers are at all times and places acting both upon the physical and the spiritual world. But everything is subject to the permission of the divine goodness and finally also to the guidance of divine , though the latter has created for itself a limit in freedom. Evil, however, and it is in this idea that Origen’s great optimism consists, cannot conquer in the end. As it is nothing eternal, so also it is at bottom nothing real; it is “nonexistent” (οὐκ ὄν) and “unreal” (ἀνυπόστατον). For this very reason the estrangement of the spirits from God must finally cease; even the devil, who, as far as his being is concerned, resulted from God’s will, cannot always remain a devil. The spirits must return to God, and this moment is also the end of the material world, which is merely an intermediate phase.
According to this conception the doctrine of man, who in Origen’s view is no longer the sole aim of creation to the same extent as he is with the other Fathers, assumes the following form: The essence of man is formed by the reasonable soul, which has fallen from the world above. This is united with the body by means of the animal soul. Origen thus believes in a threefold nature of man. He does so in the first place, because Plato holds this theory, and Origen always embraced the most complicated view in matters of tradition, and secondly, because the rational soul can never in itself be the principle of action opposed to God, and yet something relatively spiritual must be cited as the cause of this action. It is true that we also find in Origen the view that the spirit in man has itself been cooled down into a soul, has been, as it were, transformed into a soul; but there is necessarily an ambiguity here, because on the one hand the spirit of man is said to have chosen a course opposed to God, and, on the other, that which is rational and free in man must be shown to be something remaining intact. Man’s struggle consists in the endeavour of the two factors forming his constitution to gain control of his sphere of action. If man conquers in this struggle he attains likeness to God; the image of God he bears beyond danger of loss in his indestructible, rational, and therefore immortal spirit. Victory, however, denotes nothing else than the subjugation of the instincts and passions. No doubt God affords help in the struggle, for nothing good is without God, but in such a way as not to interfere with freedom. According to this conception sin is a matter of necessity in the case of fallen spirits; all men are met with as sinners and are so, for they were already sinners. Sin is rooted in the whole earthly condition of men; it is the weakness and error of the spirit parted from its origin. The idea of freedom, indeed, is supposed to be a feature which always preserves the guilty character of sin; but in truth it becomes a mere appearance it does not avail against the constitution of man and the sinful habit propagated in human society. All must be sinners at first, for that is as much their destiny as is the doom of death which is a necessary consequence of man’s material nature.
