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

were reunited with him. Unlike Augustine, who was to teach that man was so
heavily weighted with sin that he could never regain the grace of God through
his own efforts, Origen believed that the soul had powers of reason and free will
that it could harness to move towards God. In this he was drawing on Plato’s
concept of an ascent through reasoned thought to a fuller understanding of the
Forms and ‘the Good’.
Origen believed that Jesus had existed from the beginning of time but that the
Son was distinct from the Father and was used by him to mediate between the
Father and the inferior material world. Thus Jesus was subordinate to the Father,
who placed him within a human body for his mission. The Holy Ghost too was
subordinate and placed by Origen at the head of the created order.
Over a century later, after the parameters of theological debate had been
narrowed by Theodosius’ decree, many Christian thinkers were still prepared to
accept Origen’s greatness and the depth of his theological insights while
ignoring his subordinationism. But in his hunt for heresies, Epiphanius could not
let the legacy of Origen lie intact. In his Panarion he attacked Origen over his
subordinationism, his belief in the pre-existence of souls and his denial of the
resurrection of the body. To Epiphanius, Origen was the arch-heretic who had
inspired Arius.
Epiphanius had been born in Palestine, and in 393, now an old man, he
returned home to extirpate the Origenist heretics he believed flourished there.
His chief target was the worldly and confident Bishop of Jerusalem, John, who
was reputed to have subordinationist sympathies, but he started his campaign by
sending a band of monks to confront two of the most important intellectual
figures of the region. The scholar Jerome lived in a monastery in Bethlehem,
where he practised a rigid asceticism and worked on his Latin translation of the
Bible; Rufinus, less ascetic and more measured in his scholarship, was settled in
a monastery on the Mount of Olives. The two men had been friends since
childhood and both were known for their support of Origen. Jerome’s use of
Origen’s commentaries on the Bible was such that scholars have been able to
reconstruct lost works of Origen from Jerome’s plagiarism. 8 Rufinus was more
of an independent scholar, and had studied the master for six years under
Didymus the Blind, the famous scholar of Alexandria, who also admired Origen.
When Epiphanius’ monks arrived, Rufinus barred the gates of the monastery
to them and told them that they would be driven off with cudgels if they
persisted in trying to enter. The welcome the rebuffed monks received from
Jerome was very different. An isolated and often embittered man, Jerome had