A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

Gothic, inventing an alphabet for the purpose. At the time, subordinationism, as
later reflected in the Homoian creed of 360, was the dominant belief in the
empire, and it was passed on by Ulfilas, himself a convinced subordinationist, to
the Goths, remaining a symbol of their identity after it was rejected by the rest of
the empire in 381. Thus Ulfilas could never be accorded sainthood because his
beliefs had now become heretical. Sainthood was now the reward for correct
belief as such, not saintliness in the conventional sense of the word.
A more serious case was that of the third-century theologian Origen (c. 184-
254). Born in Alexandria of Christian parents, Origen committed himself to a
life of pastoral care and study after the traumatic experience of seeing his father
martyred. Although he himself believed in the ideal of celibacy, he accepted sex
as a gift of God - not as an instrument of demonic possession, as some of his
contemporaries did - so long as it was confined to the needs of procreation. He
also believed that couples should be able to remarry after divorce on the grounds
that confining their sexuality to a new marriage was a lesser evil than the
alternatives. For Origen, the power of God was tempered by his readiness to
forgive, and he startled his followers by arguing that Satan was not evil by nature
but only because he willed himself to be evil; this will could be overcome by the
forgiveness of God. While Origen believed in hell, it was only as a temporary
corrective measure before the sinner was reunited with God. It made no sense,
he said, to talk of a powerful and forgiving God who could be so easily thwarted
by humans that he had to respond with their permanent rejection. 2
Origen towered above his contemporaries for the range and originality of his
thinking and his optimistic outlook on life. To many he was an intellectual hero:
Gregory of Nazianzus believed that he was the greatest mind in Christian
history. 3 Eusebius of Caesarea, the biographer of Constantine, gave him a
central place in his history of the Church, and Jerome described him in his work
Famous Men as ‘an immortal genius’. 4 His output was prodigious and his
extensive library remained in Caesarea (in Palestine), where he lived for the last
twelve years of his life, for his admirers such as Gregory of Nazianzus to exploit.
Origen was the first major exegetist, or interpreter, of the Bible. In one of the
finest intellectual achievements of the third century, he began by putting together
the different Greek versions of the Old Testament so that discrepancies could be
ironed out. (He always believed that the Hebrew text was superior to the
Septuagint, its Greek translation; he was one of the very few Christians with the
learning to read it.) In his comments on the biblical texts, Origen championed