La dissertation sur Origène de Jean Pic de La Mirandole dans l'Apologia.--La dissertation sur Origène de Pierre Garcia dans les Déterminations magistrales.

When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading “in the spirit,” they are therefore condemned to remain “Israel in the flesh.” Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language (...) and discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about language has been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul’s usage of “in the flesh” and “in the spirit” respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans 7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: “For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter.” In fact, the exact same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes that his interest is in “the hidden and inward meaning which appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than bodily forms.”2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology. 1. See Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall , pp. 107-12.2. Philo, On Abraham, sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo, trans. and ed. F. H. Colson , p. 75. It is very important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston, “Philo and the Contemplative Life,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green , pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211. Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the department of Near-Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash , as well as the forthcoming Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, from which the present essay is drawn. He is currently engaged in a project entitled The Politics of the Spirit: Paul as a Jewish Cultural Critic. (shrink)

As the church historian Henri Crouzel observed, questions about the nature of human autonomy were central to the thought of the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria. On this question, his influence on later generations, though complicated, would be difficult to overstate. Yet, what exactly Origen thought autonomy required has been a subject of debate. On one widespread reading, he has been taken to argue that autonomy requires that human beings have the capacity to act otherwise than they do in (...) fact act; that is, that alternative possibilities of action are causally available to them. As Susanne Bobzien has argued, however, there is good reason to think that the view that such alternative possibilities are required for the ascription of autonomy did not explicitly emerge until Alexander of Aphrodisias, a rough contemporary of Origen's of whose thought he was likely unaware. In revisiting Origen on the notion of ‘free will’, Michael Frede, against the ‘alternative possibilities’ reading, argued that his theory of the will was largely attributable to Stoicism, and in particular to Epictetus’ theory of will as προαίρεσις. George Boys-Stones, for his part, has claimed that, while Origen's theory of the descent of the pre-existent minds is aimed at providing an account of how human beings are entirely responsible for their characters, in the embodied state we find no evidence that he understood human choice subsequent to the fall to depend upon the existence of alternative possibilities in order to be autonomous. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is a great deal to blame for the wrongheaded views that got about in the ancient world concerning this gifted Alexandrian thinker; and in the whole business there is more than a hint of clash between Eastern and Western temperament. When, in dealing with modern critics of Origen, he roundly castigates the scholarly ghettoism that goes on, one is in complete sympathy. Kerr for instance (...) gets scolded for not quoting De Lubac. Lutheran scholars and Catholic, Germans perhaps and French, will tend to approach Origen with preformed conclusions. They have too often written within an exceedingly limited scholarly tradition. Fair enough. People have not any excuse for ignoring one another's contributions. Evidences of this sort of thing, with conspicuous faults on both sides (Lutheran and Catholic, that is) are not far to seek, God knows. One is not so happy however when the faint suggestion is made, particularly in the appendix, that it is only to students with the proper dispositions that Origen will yield up his message. That one must believe with Origen, so to speak. It may be the enthusiasm of the moment, or the undue influence of Origen's own attitude to holy writ; but this could be a disastrous line of argument. It comes perilously near to the reasons Julian the Apostate gave for excluding Christians from the Hellenist schools. And it smacks too much of Hellenistic ideas about doctrine for the multitude and for the initiate. Incidentally Crouzel argues that Origen, contrary to the accepted beliefs about him, was singularly free of this sort of thing. Some of his supposedly esoteric doctrines are found in the most popular of his compositions, and vice versa. In all it is a book calculated to set students of Origen thinking, and searching. DENIS MEEIIAN Valyermo Priory Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection. Edited and translated by Allan Wolter, O.F.M. (The Nelson Philosophical Texts; Edinburgh: Nelson, 1962. Pp. xxiii + 198. Latin text and translation, 162 parallel pages. SOs., $6.50.) Minor, sometimes indirect, causes have kept the name of John Duns Scotus in the minds of many philosophers of the twentieth century. The dependence of Gerard Manly Hopkins' notion of inscape on Duns Scotus' doctrine on intuitive cognition and individuation is a case in point. Another and more direct instance is that of the concurrence of some modern theories on free will with the exposition of Scotus. Those whose interest in Duns Scotus has been piqued by some allusion invariably ask the question, where can one get something in English by the man? The answer still is, the man has had quite a few expositors but not many translators. The latest of such expositions is Duns Scotus: The Basic Principles of His Philosophy, B. Bonansea's translation of an Italian work by E. Bettoni. The only complete work of Duns Scotus in English translation is his small opus presenting a demonstration of the existence of God: The De Primo Principio of John Duns Scotus, (St. Bonaventure, N. Y.: 1949), translated by Evan Roche, O.F.M. Allan Wolter is presently engaged in producing a new translation with more extensive notes, since the original translation is out of print. A small selection from Scotus' Oxford Commentary is contained in Richard McKeon's Selections from Medieval Philosophers, Vol. II. The reason for the scarcity of translations has been the lack of a definitive edition of BOOK REVIEWS 93 Scotus's works. No one wanted to undertake an extensive translation from insufficiently edited texts, especially when a definitive text was thought to be imminent. A commission was appointed thirty-six years ago to do for John Duns Scotus what had been done so magnificently for his Franciscan predecessor, St. Bonaventure. The first definitive edition of the opera ornnia of a Scholastic in the period of Scholastic revival was published by Franciscan scholars at Quaracchi near Florence: the Opera Ornnia Sancti Bonaventurae (1882-1901) in nine volumes. The same scholars, under the leadership of E. Longpr~, O.F.M., turned their attention to the works of Scotus. The problems facing the commission were admittedly much greater. Manuscripts had to be gathered, authenticated, compared. Work went slowly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 89 To fill the gap between the two worlds seems to have been one of the most important of their problems. Philo filled it with angels and powers, the Gnostics, whatever their individual differences, filled it with other supernatural creatures begotten by their chief god. Origen filled it with Intelligences, created and corporeal spirits who rose or fell according to their sinfulness (p. 437). The discrepancy between (...) the two worlds remains to be bridged by the later Greek philosophers not by reason but by the appeal to myth, imagination and authority. Only in Plotinus, among the late Greek philosophers, does Boas find a significant remainder of rationalism. Plotinus's problem is similar, to be sure, to that of the other late thinkers: to bridge the metaphysical gap. Appeals to myth and to the authority of earlier Greek thinkers are quite as irrational here as in the earlier thinkers. And the resort to powerful metaphors is as pronounced in Plotinus as in any other philosopher one can name. All this is brought out very well. Yet Boas finds it important to try to expound Plotinus's philosophy as "... a sample of rationalism with axioms and inferences, with dialectical distinctions, with the Law of Contradiction utilized to produce consistency" (p. 455). He doesn't claim to have succeeded in doing this; on the contrary, his account gives little ground on which to justify the attempt, and one wonders why it was undertaken. This is not to deny that Plotinus uses rational arguments and logical inferences, but rather to say that the semblance of a "rational structure" depends instead on poetical and metaphorical elements. Nevertheless, the discussion of Plotinus's thought as a "sample of rationalism" is of interest because it serve to bring out an element in the conception of rationalism which emerges only too rarely in the book? Boas pays special attention to Plotinus's "full fledged hierarchy of being," and his attempt to derive (or "deduce"?) the degrees of being from the One. This rests on the "principle of plenitude," or on the notion that all possible being must be exemplified in existence. This in turn is suggested by one or more powerful metaphors. Plotinus's speculative imagination, in other words, was still unfettered to a considerable degree by authority, revelation, or other restrictions. Kegardless of how adequate one might judge Plotinus's system to be in terms of axioms, definitions and consistency (and surely it is very inadequate), Boas's interest in him as a "sample of rationalism" derives from this freedom in speculation and in choice of "assumptions." This does not mean that logical criteria are not the proper tools of the critic nor that they can be disregarded by the speculative philosopher. It means only that Greek rationalism rested on considerably more; a magnificently free and speculative strain of mind. This is one matter that Boas's discussion makes amply clear. JOHN D. GOHEEN Stanford University Origbne et la Philosophie. By Henri Crouzel. (l~tudes Publi6es sous la Direction de la Facult6 de Th6ologie SJ de Lyon-Fourvi~re; Aubier, 1962. Pp. 238.) This is a painstaking and important essay set between fairly narrow limits. It deliberately stays short of becoming a study of Origenism rather than Origen, and thus avoids the mistake made by so many books about Origen. The field is quite difficult of course. We are still a long way from proper evaluation of the Christian-Hellenist synthesis in 4 However, explicitly stated on pp. 355-356. 90 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the thinking of many Christian figures from the second century to the fourth. Could not the same be said perhaps, rnutatis mutandis, of some Hellenist writers, Celsus, Porphyry, Plotinus? Origen, as well as being more important, is considerably more complicated than most. Is he the first great Christian sumrnator, ~ la Aquinas? Is he a Platonist masquerading as a Christian? Or a Christian masquerading as a Hellenist? In the rough phrase that used to be applied in the schools of theology, auctores scinduntur, sometimes with extreme acrimony. He has been receiving a good deal of attention over the past fifty years, from Bohringer, De Faye, Koch--the list is awfully long-right... (shrink)

Pour cette collection d' «Initiations aux Pères de l'Église» où ont déjà pris place un volume sur Maxime le Confesseur et un sur la Règle de saint Augustin, ainsi que des études thématiques, Ph. Henné a choisi de faire autant de place aux textes même d'Origène (O.) qu'à la présentation de sa théologie. Les travaux d'Henri Crouzel, en particulier l'ouvrage paru en 1984 (Origène, Lethielleux, Paris) et ses bibliographies origéniennes, consti­tuent les références permanentes del'A. mais la clart..