SOURCE: "Origen's Theology of the Spiritual Life," in Origen, Sheed & Ward, 1955, pp. 293-309.

[In this essay, Daniélou examines Origen's contribution to the theology of the spiritual life or mystical theology that had an extensive influence in Western and Eastern monasticism, particularly through Origen's allegorical expositions of the Scriptures in which he traced the soul's pilgrimage back to union with God.]

Origen occupies a conspicuous position in the history of exegesis and was the most eminent theologian in the early Church. The part he played in working out the theology of the spiritual life is historically no less important. This side of him was for long neglected by students, but it has recently been made the subject of a considerable number of monographs.¹ This is a consequence of the interest now taken in the study of spirituality: the subject has shown how important Origen is. Gregory of Nyssa² and Evagrius Ponticus, the two great theorists who wrote on mystical theology in the fourth century, were both disciples of his, and if Gregory went further than Origen in stressing the part played in the mystical union by love without light, he still was closely dependent on him. The line of thought started by Origen was carried on in the spirituality of the east by the Pseudo-Dionysius, who was a disciple of Gregory of Nyssa. Maximus the Confessor depends on him, either directly or through Evagrius and the Pseudo-Dionysius, as Fr. von Balthasar has shown.³ In addition, his spiritual teaching was transmitted to the west through Evagrius Ponticus, who handed it on to Cassian.⁴ The influence Cassian exerted on Western monachism from his monastery at Marseilles is a matter of common knowledge. And although it is not always possible to say whether the influence was direct, it is nevertheless to Origen that we must ascribe at least the remote beginnings of St. John of the Cross's spirituality of the desert, St. Bernard's analogy between mysticism and marriage, St. Bonaventure's devotion to the humanity of Christ and Tauler's devotion to the eternal Word.

So extensive an influence would be inexplicable if Origen himself had not lived the spiritual life to an eminent degree. What exactly, then, was the part he played? He was not the first of the great mystics; there had been others before him. St. ignatius of Antioch and St. Irenaeus had been far advanced in the spiritual life; so too had the martyrs, visited as they were by the Lord in the midst of their torments. There is evidence of deep spiritual experience in these men, but you do not find them giving a systematic account of their experience. The introduction of systematic description was mainly the work of Origen. On that point there is general agreement. In order to achieve this result, Origen made use of some of the concepts found in the Platonist mystical writings in circulation at the time, just as Clement of Alexandria had done before him. That is the side of the question which is usually stressed. But it is not the only side. If it were, his influence would be hard to account for.

If his theology of the spiritual life struck a chord in the hearts of so many Christians, the reason is that it was first and foremost a product of the Bible. In Origen's opinion there was no book to equal Scripture. All dogmatic theology was contained in it, all mystical theology was too—the one coming to light when Scripture was interpreted of the Church, the other when it was applied to the individual. Thus, from that point of view, the whole of Scripture had a bearing on the life of the soul and its relations with Christ. As we have seen, Philo too thought that the spiritual meaning of Scripture was the chief one. It was not the same in Origen's case: he realized that there was a dogmatic meaning as well. Yet he did think that the spiritual meaning was just as essential as the dogmatic. The man who regarded things in a purely natural light—the Israelite—did not look beyond the surface of Scripture; but the spiritually-minded man, the man with a taste for spiritual things, had the veil removed from his eyes by the Holy Spirit and then, beneath the letter of Scripture, he could find food for his soul. This idea that Scripture speaks in symbolical terms of the spiritual life was to play a very prominent part in the mystical writings of later ages. It struck root in Tradition when Origen took it up. He describes the main stages in the soul's journey to God in function of it.

The first stage is that in which a man returns to himself or is converted. A concept much to the fore in the theology of the spiritual life, the idea of the image, comes up in this connection. It originated in the meeting of two great doctrines, the biblical one … and the Platonist one that man's perfection depends on his likeness to God. Fr. Festugière has given an illuminating account of the way in which the two themes converged.⁵ The concept is first found in Philo.⁶ It next occurs in Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria. Origen develops it to the full. It gives the theology of the spiritual life a dogmatic basis. God created man in his own image. Man's real being is therefore his inner being, his spiritual being, which in a sense partakes of the nature of God. But man is also involved in the life of the senses, which is foreign to his essence. He loses God's image in so far as he moulds himself to the pattern of the animal life. The spiritual life will therefore consist of the process by which he returns to his true nature—his efforts first to realize what he is and then to try and recover his real nature by destroying the power of his corrupt animal life. To the extent to which he succeeds, he will recover the image of God that once was in him and in it will see God.

We meet with this theme in the homilies on Genesis:⁷ "The man who was made in God' image is the inner man, the incorporeal, incorruptible, immortal one." To be more precise, man was made not just in God's image but in the image of the Logos. "What was the image of God that man was modelled on? It could only have been our Saviour. He is the firstborn of every creature [Col. i. 15]. He said of himself: 'To see me is to see him who sent me' [John xii. 45]: 'Whoever has seen me has seen the Father' [John xiv. 9]. If you see a picture of someone, you see the person the picture represents. Thus, when we see the Word of God, who is God's picture, we see God himself." Man lost his likeness to God when he sinned. "Sin made him like the devil, because he went against his nature and looked at the devil's image. When our Saviour saw that man, who had been modelled on him, had shaken off his likeness to him and acquired a resemblance to the devil, he was filled with pity and made himself like man and came down to man." Ever since then, it has been possible for men to recover their likeness to the Word if they will but consent to turn to him. "All who come to him and strive to be like him are inwardly renewed, day by day, according to the progress they make, in the image of him who made them."⁸

Thus, the spiritual life begins when the soul realizes the dignity that belongs to it as God's image and understands that the real world is the world inside it. Here again a biblical theme—"If thou knowest not thyself, O fairest among women, go forth and follow after the steps of the flocks" (Cant. i. 7)—converges with a Platonist one. … Origen links the two quite explicitly.⁹ Applying the text: "If thou knowest not thyself, O fairest among women" to the soul, he says: "And perhaps you may not know, either, why you are beautiful, may not realize that because you were made in God's image there is great beauty in you by nature. If you are not aware of this and if you do not know what you were originally, then my orders to you are that you should go out after the flocks" (whose way of life you share, as you live like an animal yourself). We have seen that the idea of the image is found in Philo; so too is the application of the maxim "know thyself to the spiritual life. After Origen, it occurs in Gregory of Nyssa,¹⁰ Ambrose¹¹ and William of St. Thierry.¹² After that, the idea of the image is found in mystical theology chiefly in the school of William of St. Thierry and St. Bernard. St. Bernard was also influenced by Gregory of Nyssa, whom he knew through William of St. Thierry's translation, as Dom Déchanet has so ably shown. We next meet with it in the Rhineland, in Tauler's mystical teaching. It is one of the leading themes in the theology of the spiritual life.

In the form it takes in Origen it possesses the same sort of ambiguity as the one mentioned in connection with his theology of grace. The Platonists held that when the soul entered into itself, it discovered its true essence, which was divine.¹³ Origen never quite managed to rid his mind of that belief. It was not until the fourth century that the radical transcendence of the Trinity was strongly emphasized and the image of God in the soul was seen to be a product of grace and not a natural property, a personal gift from God and not the soul's own true nature, which it could recover by ridding itself of all foreign elements. In Origen, the soul's kinship with the divine is still represented as a natural property.

The second stage in the spiritual life is reached when the soul embarks on its passage through the period of purgation. This stage, with its trials and its occasional flashes of light, is figuratively represented by the exodus. Here again Origen's spiritual teaching stands at the confluence of two streams of thought. On the one hand, the traditional view held by all Christians was that the departure of the Israelites from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea typified man's deliverance from the tyranny of the devil and his release by Baptism. On the other hand, although we do not find Philo systematically fitting the account of the exodus to the stages of the soul's return to God, as was the case with the lives of the patriarchs, he does at least take certain details of the story, such as the darkness on Mount Sinai, and interpret them of the spiritual life. By uniting these two streams, Origen evolved a whole theory about the route followed in the mystical life from the departure from Egypt to the arrival in the Promised Land. Two things need pointing out in this connection. In the first place, the symbolism does not refer to the sacraments: crossing the Red Sea does not stand for entering the catechumenate, crossing the Jordan does not mean being baptized. In this case, it is Baptism that is the crossing of the Red Sea and the beginning of the soul's journey through the mystical life. Secondly, on Origen's map of the soul's route, the term is not the summit of Mount Sinai but the Promised Land. Sinai does not come in at all. Yet it had played an important part in Philo's theory and in Clement's too, and with Gregory of Nyssa it became important once again. The fact is that Origen's theology of the spiritual life takes no account of the part played by darkness in the life of the soul; it deals only with light. That, perhaps, is where its limitations lie. It is a speculative theory of the way the mind is illumined by the gnosis rather than a description of mystical experience, an account of the way the presence of the hidden God is felt in the darkness by the soul as it reaches out and touches him. It is important to get this point clear.

Origen deals with the theme of the soul's journey in his homilies on Exodus and Numbers. The most important of these is the twenty-seventh homily on Numbers, which gives a summary enumeration of all the stages the soul has to pass through. "The children of Israel were in Egypt, toiling with straw and clay in Pharao's service, until the Lord sent them his Word, through Moses, to lead them out of Egypt. We too were in Egypt—we were in the darkness of ignorance and error, working for the devil and sunk in the lusts of the flesh—but the Lord was sorry to see us in that sad plight and he sent us his Word to set us free.•¹⁴ This gives us the starting-point—the soul sunk in sin. With the Bible, Origen regards the soul in that condition as being under the tyranny of the devil; with Plato he thinks of it as sunk in the mire.¹⁵ The spiritual journey begins with the advances made by the Word, the Deliverer. The soul's response is her conversion: she sets out after him as the Hebrews in Egypt did after the pillar of cloud, which was a figure of the Word or of the Holy Ghost. Origen then goes on to describe the successive stages in the journey, the various places where the soul stops and rests. "When we have made the decision and left Egypt, our first resting-place is the one where we stop worshipping idols and honouring evil spirits, the one where we come to believe that Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit and that he came into this world in the flesh."¹⁶ The basis of the spiritual life is faith. The point is of the utmost importance and it shows at the outset that the kind of asceticism Origen has in mind is not at all what Plato envisaged. The liturgical equivalent of this initial step is the abjuration of Satan, i.e., of idolatry, and the acceptance of Christ which precede the ceremony of Baptism. This is the first step. "After that, we must strive to go further and pass through the various grades of faith and virtue one after another."¹⁷

The great event in the three days' journey from Egypt to the Red Sea was the pursuit of the Israelites by Pharao and the Egyptians. Origen comments on it in another of his works. "The Egyptians pursue you," he says, "and try to bring you back into their service. By Egyptians I mean the rulers of this world and the evil spirits you used to serve."¹⁸ Such are the temptations that begin to attack the soul when once she has set out on the road to perfection and strive to make her change her purpose and return to the world. But if she perseveres, the Egyptians will be swallowed up in the Red Sea and the soul will "go from one to another of those resting-places of which, we are told, there are so many in our Father's house [John xiv. 2]. In each one she will acquire a fresh degree of light and little by little will become used to the sight of the true Light, who enlightens every soul born into the world [John i. 9]. She will gradually learn to endure the brightness of his wonderful majesty."¹⁹ What is happening is that the soul is beginning to cross the desert. In the course of the crossing, she is "trained in the keeping of the Lord's commandments and her faith is tested by temptation. … What are called resting-places are the stages of her progress through the various temptations against virtue and faith. The words: 'They shall go from virtue to virtue' [Ps. lxxxiii. 8] apply to them. Such souls will indeed go from virtue to virtue until they come to the highest degree of virtue and cross God's river and receive the inheritance promised them."²⁰

This trek across the desert corresponds to the gradual stripping-away of the merely natural life which takes place when the soul awakes to the importance of the spiritual life. Origen begins by pointing out that the people were led by Moses and Aaron. That means that if the soul is to make progress, she will need both action, which is what Moses stands for, and contemplation, which is what is signified by Aaron. "When we leave Egypt, we must have some knowledge of the Law and the faith and we must also bear fruit in the shape of works pleasing to God [cf. Col. i. 10]."²¹ That, too, comes from Philo. The stripping-process will begin with renunciation of sin, which is prefigured by the vengeance God took on the gods of Egypt. The next halt is called Ramesses (Exod. xii. 37), which according to Origen, means "violent disturbance". "The first progress the soul makes is that she withdraws from the bustle of earthly things and realizes that like a traveller, she must live in tents: she must be free and unattached and so in a position to face her enemies."²² After the struggle against sin comes the struggle against the passions, πάθη, and the acquisition of απάθεια, spiritual freedom, which comes with the practice of detachment and makes recollection possible. The vocabulary here is Hellenistic, Stoic in fact, but diverted into a Christian context.

Two more stages follow. The special characteristic of the first is the practice of penance to a moderate extent, for "excess and lack of measure in abstinence are dangerous to beginners". The second is called Beelsephon (Exod. xiv. 2), which is translated as ascensio speculae and means that the soul is beginning to get a dim idea of the good things in store for her and to see that she is making progress. The idea of the specula is found in Plotinus as well and it plays a prominent part in Gregory of Nyssa's theology, where it signifies that earthly things recede into the background as God's good gifts come closer to the soul. In the next stage, Mara (Exod. xv. 23), spiritual trials are to the fore: the spiritual life is distasteful to nature, which hankers after the flesh-pots of Egypt. But the soul begins to receive spiritual consolation. This is signified by the springs of water and the palm-trees at Elim (Exod. xv. 27). "You could not have reached the palm-groves unless you had passed through the harsh region of temptation; you could not have come to the fresh water of the springs without first going through rough, unpleasant country. Not that this is the end; this is not the height of perfection. But as God is the soul's guide in this journey, he has arranged refrigeria for her in the midst of her exertions, oases where she can repair her strength and so be able to return with greater fervour to the labours still awaiting her."²³

The soul then comes to the desert of Sin (Exod. xvi.1). The word means both "vision" and "temptation". And there are in fact, Origen says, "visions which are also temptations, for sometimes the wicked angel 'transformeth himself into an angel of light' [2 Cor. xi. 14]".²⁴ It is the time when illusion comes into the spiritual life. Origen analyses it with great insight. "That is why one must be on the alert and try to identify accurately the class to which the vision belongs. The soul that has reached the point where she begins to identify the class to which her visions belong will prove that she is really spiritual when she is able to classify them all. It is for this reason, too, that the gift of the discerning of spirits [1 Cor. xii. 10] is included with the other spiritual gifts among the gifts of the Holy Ghost."²⁵ The doctrine of the discerning of spirits is worked out at length in the De Pricipiis.. It is one of the chief elements Origen studied in the spiritual life. The Fathers of the Desert inherited the doctrine from him. It came to play a considerable part in the spiritual teaching of Evagrius. It has a prominent place assigned to it in the Life of St. Antony.

The next stages are taken as relating to the soul's recovery of health and the destruction of concupiscence. Now that she is cured and her strength restored, she begins to enter the specifically mystical region. It will be noticed that Sinai is passed over without mention. The soul arrives at Aseroth, which means "perfect courts" or "blessedness". "Everyone travelling by this road, whoever he may be, should carefully consider the order the various stages come in. First you kill the impulses of corrupt nature and bury them; then you come to the spacious courts, you come to a state of blessedness—for the soul is blessed when she is no longer a prey to the desires of corrupt nature. From Aseroth she goes to Rathma, which means 'perfect vision'. The significance of that must be that the soul grows so strong when she ceases to be disturbed by natural desires that she is granted perfect vision, perfect understanding of things, fuller and deeper knowledge of the reasons why the Word became incarnate and planned things the way he did."²⁶ That brings us to the gnosis, the object of which is the knowledge of the things of God. In another of his works, Origen defines it as consisting of the "knowledge of divine things and human things and their causes".²⁷ It bears particularly on created spirits and their various dwelling-places.²⁸ It also bears on the origin of man and on his end and present lot. Knowledge of the things of God detaches the soul from the fleeting things of earth and admits her to the intelligible world. This is the operation which is carried out at the next resting-place. The gnosis is essentially a kind of knowledge that transforms the soul and brings her into the heart of the things she knows by means of it.

Yet the fact that the soul has reached these heights does not mean that she escapes temptation. "Temptations are given her to guard her and keep her safe."²⁹ Several of the resting-places stand for these temptations. They try the soul's patience. At the same time, now that she has so many virtues to serve her as armour, she must of necessity go out and fight with the princedoms, dominions and cosmocratores. The battle will take place in the realm of the spirit, but it will also be a matter of doing the work of preaching and teaching. In Origen's view, the end which the man leading a spiritual life must aim at is not mere contemplation. If God fills him with his own light and strength, it is to enable him to undertake the hard battles of the apostolate for his sake. Völker is right in dwelling on this side of the question.³⁰ "He has made us ministers of the New Testament," Origen says, quoting St. Paul (2 Cor. iii. 6). The battle against the powers of evil is also a means of sharing in the Redemption, whether it be fought by martyrs or by ascetics.

All that now remains is for the soul to pass through the final stages of the contemplative life. "From there we come to Thara, the Greek for which is … a word used when the mind is so astonished at something as to be stunned by it. [It], then, occurs when in knowing things great and wonderful the mind is suspended in astonishment."³¹ These few lines have given rise to quite a controversy. Völker regards them as a declaration on Origen's part that he had experienced ecstasy himself. He compares the passage, which unfortunately survives only in the Latin translation by Rufinus, with another passage, in which Origen talks about "withdrawing from the things of men, being possessed by God and getting drunk, not in the usual senseless way but divinely."³² H. C. Puech discusses this interpretation at length in his article on Völker's book.³³ He shows that according to Philo,³⁴ [it] may mean either excessive astonishment at unexpected events or the annexation of the mind by the divine πνεύμα and the expulsion of the νοϋζ ΐδιοζ. The second of these meanings is the one that eventually came to be denoted by the term "ecstasy" in the technical sense. But in the Commentary on St. John, the word is obviously used by Origen in the first sense. And the passage where it occurs speaks of passing from the things of men to the things of God and not of that "withdrawal from the self" which is the essence of ecstasy. Fr. Rahner,³⁵ Fr. Viller³⁶ and Fr. Hausherr³⁷ are of the same opinion and do not consider that there is any allusion at all in Origen to ecstasy properly so-called.

These observations seem justified. It is undeniable that at the beginning of the third century ecstatic phenomena of a doubtful nature were regarded with distrust, because of the excesses committed by the Montanists. It is also undeniable that the trend of Origen's mystical theology is more towards intellectual contemplation than towards the experimental awareness of the presence of God and the transformation of the soul by love, such as Gregory of Nyssa was afterwards to describe them. He was always the didaskalos, and as his mystical theory was in keeping with this fact, he considered that the highest point attainable in mysticism was the contemplation of the mysteries of Christianity. It was left for Gregory of Nyssa to lay the foundations of mystical theology properly so-called by describing how the soul goes out into the dark and there experiences God's presence, not with the aid of concepts, which she leaves behind her, but by love. Origen stays in the sphere of the gnosis, whereas Gregory goes beyond it. Or at any rate, Origen's description of the mystical life stops short at the gnosis.

Such is Origen's spiritual interpretation of the exodus. It contains a wealth of admirable teaching on the spiritual life. The central theme is the idea of the desert—the journey through the night of the senses, with the taste for the things of God growing as the taste for feeding on the things of earth is mortified. Origen describes the stages of this journey. But there was another thing, to his mind, even more characteristic of the spiritual life. This was an idea he bequeathed to Gregory of Nyssa, the idea that the spiritual life is an affair of continual progress. Thus, the second theme is the one centring round the tabernacle, the desert tent, which is never more than a provisional dwelling-place. "Here we have no abiding city." "If you want to know the difference between houses and tents, this is the distinction. A house has fixed foundations, is made to last and stands on a particular site. Tents are where people live when they are travelling and have not reached their journey's end.… Those who devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom have no end to their labours. How could there be an end, a limit, where the wisdom of God is concerned? The nearer a man comes to that wisdom, the deeper he finds it to be, and the more he probes into its depths, the more he sees that he will never be able to understand it or express it in words. Travellers, then, on the road to God's wisdom have no houses, because they have not reached their goal. They have tents, which they carry with them on their perpetual journeys, their never-ending travels; and the further they go, the more the road before them opens out, until it stretches to infinity. Everyone who has made any progress in knowledge or had any experience of it knows that when the soul attains to clear sight or knowledge of spiritual mysteries, she uses it like a tent and stays in it. When another of her discoveries comes up for inspection and she proceeds to consider this other thing, she picks up her tent and goes with it to a higher spot and, leaving her senses at peace, dwells there in spirit. Thus, she finds fresh spiritual experiences accessible to her in consequence of her previous ones. So it is that pressing forward the whole time, she seems to be always on the road and under canvas."³⁸ The last words of the passage introduce what was to be the central theme in Gregory of Nyssa's mystical theology—the idea of epectasis. The essence of the spiritual life is that non-proprietary attitude towards things which makes the soul refuse to rest in what she has already acquired and keeps her in a state of readiness to receive further gifts. It will be noticed that this brings us back to Origen's idea of the created spirit as a being perpetually advancing towards the good. On this point, his theology of the spiritual life is the practical application of his anthropology.

We now come to the zenith of the spiritual life, the perfect union foreshadowed by the Song of Songs. We possess two homilies by Origen on this book and also a commentary. It is the commentary which is important for his teaching on the spiritual life. Origen's was not the first commentary on the Song of Songs. There had been one by Hippolytus of Rome, but it had treated of the union of the Word with the Church. Origen was the first to regard the Song of Songs as celebrating the union of the soul with the Word. Or rather, he saw it as both these things together: the Word's marriage was at once a union with the whole Church and a union with the individual soul. The Commentary on the Song of Songs is the most important of Origen's works, as far as getting to know his ideas on the spiritual life is concerned. It is also the one that had the greatest influence on other writers; through Gregory of Nyssa and St. Bernard, it introduced a new method of symbolizing the mystical life.

In it, Origen works out a theory about the three stages of the spiritual life. He took the idea from Philo and Philo in turn had taken it from the Greek philosophers. It was destined to have a very far-reaching influence. Origen begins by reminding his readers that the Greeks reduced the abstract sciences (as distinct from the elementary curriculum) to the three subjects of ethics, physics and "theory". He calls them by the names of morals, physics and contemplation. He then goes on to say that "to distinguish between these three sciences, Solomon treated of them in three separate books, each in keeping with the degree of knowledge it was concerned with. First, in the book of Proverbs, he taught morals and set out the rules for living a good life. Then he put the whole of physics into Ecclesiastes. The aim of physics is to bring out the causes of things and show what things really are, and thus to make it clear that men should forsake all this emptiness and hasten on to what is lasting and eternal. It teaches that everything we see is frail and fleeting. When anyone in pursuit of Wisdom comes to realize that, he will have nothing but scorn and disdain for those things. He will, so to say, renounce the whole world and turn to those invisible, eternal things the Song of Songs teaches us about in figurative terms, with images taken from love-making. Thus, when the soul has been purified morally and has attained some proficiency in searching into the things of nature, she is fit to pass on to the things that form the object of contemplation and mysticism; her love is pure and spiritual and will raise her to the contemplation of the God-head."³⁹

The passage is of the greatest importance for the history of the theology of the spiritual life. What it amounts to is, in fact, an account of the three ways, the purgative, the illuminative and the unitive. We may take special note of what Origen says about the second of these, as it is particularly interesting. The essential operation of the illuminative way is the formation of a true estimate of things: the soul must come to realize the nothingness of temporal things and learn to understand that the spiritual world alone is real. What she has to do, then, is to rid herself of her illusions about the world and get a firm grasp of reality. Once this conviction is securely established in her, the way is open for her to enter on the contemplation of the things of God. We may also take particular note of the parallelism between the three ways and the three sapiential books. Basing himself on Philo, Origen also links the three ways with the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham represents obedience to the commandments, Isaac is natural philosophy, and Jacob, because of his name Israel,⁴⁰ stands for contemplation. In Philo, Jacob had represented the soul on the way to perfection and Isaac was the soul that had already reached perfection. The three classes are symbolized in Numbers by the Israelites, the levites and the priests (this again comes from Philo) and in the Song of Songs by the concubines, the bridesmaids and the Bride. They correspond to beginners, those busy acquiring perfection, and the perfect.⁴¹

The Song of Songs corresponds to the third way. The subject of the poem is spiritual love. Origen reminds his readers in passing that Plato too speaks of spiritual love in the Symposium.⁴² There are two kinds of love. "There is a kind of love that is physical; the poets also call it desire. There is a spiritual kind of love as well, engendered in spirit by the inner man when he loves. To put it more plainly, anyone who still has the image of the earthly in the outer man goes where earthly desire and eros lead him. But one who has the image of the heavenly in the inner man will go where the desire and love of the things of heaven take him. The soul is actuated by this love when she sees how beautiful God's Word is and loves his splendour: he shoots an arrow at her and wounds her with his love."⁴³ "Children cannot know what the passion of love is. If you are a child where the inner life is concerned, you cannot understand these things."⁴⁴ The Hebrews showed their wisdom when they refused to allow everyone indiscriminately to read the book.

The subject of the Song of Songs is the soul whose "one desire is to be made one with God's Word: to go to her heavenly Bridegroom's room—to the mysteries, that is, of his wisdom and knowledge—on her wedding-night."⁴⁵ If she is to do that, she must receive the light she needs from the Word himself, as her natural resources, her reason and freewill, are not equal to the task. "The Bridegroom's kiss [Cant. i. 1] is the working of God in the mind, the operation by means of which, with a word of affection, he shows the mind the light and makes plain what had been obscure and unknown to it before; provided, at any rate, that the mind deserves to have God working in it. … Every time we turn over in our minds some question about dogma and find out the answer without help from a the master, the Word, we may conclude, has kissed us.•⁴⁶ This shows unmistakably how the unitive way differs from the earlier ones. In the earlier ones, God acts on the soul through masters outside her; in this case there is a master inside the soul, teaching her from within.

Thus, the mystical life appears as a kind of experimental knowledge of the things of God. Origen gives expression to this belief in the doctrine of the spiritual senses, a theory of the utmost importance and one that he was the first to propound. It is hinted at in Scripture, e.g., in the "How gracious the Lord is! Taste and prove it" of Psalm xxxiii. 9. The chief texts relating to it are grouped together at the beginning of Ziegler's Dulcedo Dei. Where Origen showed his originality was in interpreting these texts in conjunction with one another and evolving a coherent doctrine out of them. His method has been studied by Fr. Rahner.⁴⁷ The spiritual senses are aspects of the life of grace which, as it grows, enables the soul to taste, touch and contemplate the things of God. Fr. Stolz⁴⁸ regards them as a restoration of the unsullied sense-activity exercised by man in paradise. In my Platonisme et théologie mystique, I argue against this thesis and show that nothing more is involved than a set of metaphors denoting spiritual experience.

Origen expounds the doctrine in the Contra Celsum. "If you examine the question more closely," he writes, "you will see that there is, as Scripture says, a common sense for perceiving the divine. Only the blessed will be able to discover it: 'You will discover a sense that can perceive the divine,' the Bible says [cf. Prov. ii. 5]." It is a sense that comprises several subordinate species. There is a sense of sight for seeing noncorporeal things, as is obvious in the case of the cherubim and seraphim; a sense of hearing capable of catching voices that make no sound in the air; a sense of taste with which to taste the living bread that came down from heaven to give life to the world [John vi. 51 et seq.]; a delicate sense of smell—which is what led Paul to say that he was the "good odour of Christ" (2 Cor. ii. 15); a sense of touch such as John used when he handled the "Word of life" (1 John i. 1). We have senses of two different kinds in us, as Solomon knew: one set is mortal, corruptible and human, the other immortal, spiritual and divine.⁴⁹ The idea is developed in the Commentary on the Song of Songs. The soul is attracted by the fragrance of the Word's perfumes and is drawn along after him. "What will she do when God's Word comes to occupy her hearing, sight, touch and taste as well? … If the eye can see his glory, glory such as belongs to the Father's only-begotten Son [John i. 14], it will not want to look at anything else. If the ears can hear the saving, lifegiving Word, they will want nothing but that to listen to. The Word is life. When a man's hands have touched him, he will never again touch anything that can corrupt or perish. And when his taste has tasted the good Word of God [Heb. vi. 5], tasted life, tasted his flesh, the bread that comes down from heaven, he will be unable after that to bear the taste of anything else. In comparison with the satisfaction that that flavour gives him, all else will seem unappetizing. … If a man becomes fit to be with Christ, he will taste the Lord and see how pleasant he is." The pleasure he obtains through his sense of taste will not be his only joy; all his senses will delight in the Word who is life. "I urge my readers, therefore, to mortify their bodily senses and instead of giving admittance to the impressions that come from them, to use the 'inward man's' senses [Rom. vii. 22], the senses that perceive the divine, and to try and understand this by means of them. That is what Solomon was referring to when he said [cf. Prov. ii. 5]: 'You will discover a sense that can perceive the divine'."⁵⁰

That gives us all the factors comprised in the doctrine of the spiritual senses. The spiritual senses are put into operation in the soul by the Word. They are the unfolding of the inner life. They correspond to various spiritual experiences, all concerned with the Word present in the soul. They are thus bound up with the perfection of the spiritual life. "Those who reach the summit of perfection and the height of bliss will find their delight in God's Word." They are bound up with the mortifying of the life of the body: as the outward man declines, the inward man grows strong. In the end, they bewitch the soul and tear her away from herself. Those who taste the things of God find that the things of the body lose their appeal.⁵¹

From the spiritual point of view, the doctrine was one of the most fruitful of any Origen taught. Gregory of Nyssa worked out its implications at length.⁵² His special contribution consisted of grading the different senses in accordance with their bearing on the successive stages of the mystic's ascent to God. He lays considerable stress on the incompatibility of the bodily senses with the spiritual. The spiritual life seems uninviting at first, because the bodily senses are frustrated and the spiritual ones are not yet at work. But if the soul consents to cross this desert, the taste for God will gradually grow in her. St. Augustine owes to the doctrine what is perhaps the finest chapter in his Confessions.⁵³ St. Bernard makes much of it. Fr. Rahner has shown the use St. Bonaventure makes of it. And the part played by the spiritual sense of touch in St. Teresa's writings is a matter of common knowledge.⁵⁴

Notes

1. The study of Origen's theology of the spiritual life really began with Walter Völker's book, Das Volkomenheitsideal des Origenes, Tübingen, 1931, which regards him as a great mystic and describes the stages of the soul's journey to God as it is mapped out in his works. F. Bornemann had previously studied his influence on the beginnings of monasticism in his In Inuestiganda Monachatus Origene Quitus de Causis Ratio Habenda Sit Origenis, Göttingen, 1885. Fr. Jules Lebreton had also written on "Les degrés de la connaissance religieuse" in R.S.R., 1922, p. 265. Völker's book was reviewed by H. C. Puech in an important article, "Un livre récent sur la mystique d'Origène", in the Rev. Hist. Phil. Rel., 1933, pp. 508 et seq. Puech questioned what Völker had said about ecstasy in Origen but otherwise was basically in agreement with him. The chief work written in consequence of Völker's book was Fr. Aloysius Lieske's Die Logosmystik bei Origenes, which accused Völker of failing to see that Origen's mystical theology was rooted in dogma and the Church. Those were the main attempts to examine the question. In the way of general studies, M. Bardy's article, "La spiritualité d'Origène", Vie Spir., 1932, [80] - [106], and Nicole Duval's "La vie spirituelle d'après Origène", Cahiers de Neuilly, 8, pp. 39 et seq., deserve special mention. Fr. Viller, also, studies Origen's theology of the spiritual life in his book, La spiritualité des premiers siècles chrétiens, Paris, 1930, pp. 45 et seq. It has been translated into German and issued with additional matter and a bibliography (Viller-Rahner: Aszese und Mystik in der Väterzeit, Freiburg im Breisgrau, 1939, pp. 72 et seq.). A certain number of important monographs on particular points should also be noted—K. Rahner, "La doctrine des sens spirituels chez Origène", Rev. Asc. Myst., 1932, pp. 113 et seq.; Karl Rahner, "Coeur de Jésus chez Origène", Rev. Asc. Myst., 1934, pp. 171 et seq.; Hugo Rahner, "Taufe und geistliches Leben bei Origenes", Z.A.M., 1932, pp. 105, et seq.; Hugo Rahner, "Die Gottesgeburt", ibid., 1935, pp. 351 et seq.; H. Lewy, Sobria Ebrietas, Giessen, 1929, p. 119; J. Ziegler, Dulcedo Dei, Münster, 1937, pp. 185 et seq.; I. Hausherr, "L'origine de la doctrine occidentale des huit péchés capitaux", Or. Christ. An., xxx, 3, p. 164; "Les grands courants de la spiritualité orientale", Or. Christ. Per., 1935, pp. 114 et seq.; "Penthos: La doctrine de la componction dans 1'Orient chrétien", Or. Christ. An., 132, pp. 28 et seq.; Seston, "Remarques sur l'influence d'Origéne sur les origines du monachisme", Rev. Hist. Rel., Sept., 1933, pp. 197 et seq.; Dom E. Bettencourt, Doctrina Ascetica Origenis, Rome, 1947.
2. See my Platonisme et théologie mystique. Essai sur la doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse, Paris, 1943.
3. H. Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1941.
4. D. Marsili, Giovanni Cassiano e Evagrio Pontico, Rome, 1936.
5. "Divinisation du chrétien", Vie Spir., 1939, May, pp. 97 et seq.
6. Willms, Eίκών, Münster, 1935.
7. Hom. Gen., 1, 13. See also Hom. Gen., 13, 3; Hom. Lev., 4, 3; 4, 7.
8. Hom. Gen., 1, 15.
9. Comm. Cant., 2, 8 (P.G., 12, 123b).
10. In Cant. (P.G., 44, 806).
11. Hom. Hex., 6, 6, 39.
12. Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 180.
13. Plotinus, Enn., 1, 6, 5.
14. Hom. Num., 27, 1.
15. Phaed., 69c.
16. Hom. Num., 27, 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Hom. Ex., 5, 5.
19. Hom. Num., 27, 5.
20. Loc. cit.
21. Op. cit., 27, 6. See also Comm. Jo., 1, 91; 6, 103; 28, 37; Hom. Num., 22, 1.
22. Hom. Num., 27, 9.
23. Op. cit., 27, 11.
24. Loc. cit.
25. Loc. cit.
26. Op. cit., 27, 12.
27. Comm. Matt., 12, 5.
28. De Princ., 2, 11, 15.
29. Hom. Num., 27, 12.
30. Volkommenheitsideal, pp. 68 et seq.
31. Hom. Num., 27, 12.
32. Comm. Jo., 1, 30.
33. pp. 529-33.
34. Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres?, 249-56.
35. R.A.M., 1932, p. 135.
36. Op. cit., 1930, p. 255.
37. Or. Christ. Per., 1936, p. 129.
38. Hom. Num., 17, 5.
39. Comm. Cant., 78.
40. "Israel" is often interpreted by the fathers as meaning "one who sees God". See, e.g., De Princ., 4, 12 (Tr.).
41. See K. Rahner, R.A.M., 1932, pp. 125 et seq.
42. Prologue (Baehrens, p. 63).
43. Comm. Cant., 67.
44. Op. cit., 62.
45. Ibid., 91.
46. Ibid., 92.
47. "Les débuts d'une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origéne", R.A.M., 1932, pp. 113 et seq.
48. Théologie de la mystique, p. 231.
49. Cels., 1, 48.
50. Comm. Cant., 1 (Baehrens, pp. 103 et seq.).
51. See also De Princ., 1, 1, 7 and 9; Cels., 1, 48; 7, 34; Hom. Lev., 31, 7; Hom. Ez., 11, 1; Comm. Cant., 2, Baehrens, p. 167).
52. See Platonisme et théologie mystique, pp. 235 et seq.
53. 10, 27.
54. Now that we have come to the end of our study of Origen's spiritual teaching, we see that it is related to his theory that all logikoi share in the life of the Logos (see above, ch. 4, s. 1, where the idea is expounded in full). Spiritual progress is the soul's recovery of her likeness to the Word who dwells within her and enables her to become one with him by seeing and loving him. This is very well brought out by Fr. Lieske in his book, Die Theologie der Logosmystik bei Origenes, pp. 120 et seq. But it is also true that Origen's mystical teaching is not a merely speculative thing; it is a consequence of deep spiritual experience. Völker was right in stressing that side of the question. Origen's experience has an independent value of its own and gives him considerable importance in the spiritual sphere properly so-called.