Since the time I mailed out copies of my book, The Virtue of Virtues, to Catholic parishes
within the USA, as well as to numerous home schools and Catholic schools for students in grades five through eight, COVID-19 making its sick and deadly appearance has necessarily taken first precedence in the minds, hearts and actions of all of us worldwide. I am here at home, obeying the strict guidelines for public and my safety as I hope you all are. To help us all pass this time in a more meaningful way, I am sharing a meditation on Psalm 85, with a responsorial with the words of Origen, one of the most prolific and inspirational writers ever to grace the written word.
Notice the many God-given virtues mentioned in Psalm 85. This meditation you all might enjoy either by yourself or with your family while you also are home bound. Following the meditation, I am including the history of Origen, in case you are unfamiliar with him. The history I have chosen to use is from Wikipedia, so that it can be easily referred to from your own website connections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen
Responsorial after each dash:
God blessed the land when our Savior came to earth. (Origen).
PSALM 85
“O Lord, you once favored your land
and revived the fortunes of Jacob,
you forgave the guilt of your people
and covered all their sins.
You averted all your rage,
you calmed the heart of your anger. –
God blessed the land when our Savior came to earth.
“Revive us now, God, our helper!
Put an end to your grievance against us.
Will you be angry with us for ever,
will your anger never cease? –
God blessed the land when our Savior came to earth.
Will you not restore again our life
that your people may rejoice in you?
Let us see, O Lord, your mercy
and give us your saving help. –
God blessed the land when our Savior came to earth.
I will hear what the Lord has to say,
a voice that speaks of peace,
peace for his people and his friends
and those who turn to him in their hearts.
His help is near to those who fear him
and his glory will dwell in our land. –
God blessed the land when our Savior came to earth.
Mercy and faithfulness have met;
justice and peace have embraced.
Faithfulness shall spring from the earth
and justice shall look down from heaven. –
God blessed the land when our Savior came from heaven.
The Lord will make us prosper
and our earth shall yield its fruit.
Justice shall march before him
and peace shall follow his steps. –
God blessed the land when our Savior came from heaven.
As part of personal or family considerations, discuss or meditate on:
1. each of the virtues you discover in Psalm 85 and how they can be applied to your life (lives)
2. God’s promises to his faithful followers
3. what does it mean to be a faithful follower of the Savior
4. the mercy of God
5. the love of the Savior
6. why God’s justice is just
7. the peace promised us in this Psalm
8. are there any changes I (we) can make to share more peace in my life
9. are there any changes I (we) can make to share more mercy in my life
10. how I (we) can be more faithful to our Savior and to God
ORIGEN
“Origen of Alexandria (c. 184 – c. 253), also known as Origen Adamantius, was an early Christian scholar, ascetic, and theologian who was born and spent the first half of his career in Alexandria. He was a prolific writer who wrote roughly 2,000 treatises in multiple branches of theology, including textual criticism, biblical exegesis and biblical hermeneutics, homiletics, and spirituality. He was one of the most influential figures in early Christian theology, apologetics, and asceticism. He has been described as “the greatest genius the early church ever produced”.
“Origen sought martyrdom with his father at a young age, but was prevented from turning himself in to the authorities by his mother. When he was eighteen years old, Origen became a catechist at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. He devoted himself to his studies and adopted an ascetic lifestyle as both a vegetarian and teetotaler. He came into conflict with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, in 231 after he was ordained as a presbyter by his friend, the bishop of Caesarea, while on a journey to Athens through Palestine. Demetrius condemned Origen for insubordination and accused him of having castrated himself and of having taught that even Satan would eventually attain salvation, an accusation which Origen himself vehemently denied. Origen founded the Christian School of Caesarea, where he taught logic, cosmology, natural history, and theology, and became regarded by the churches of Palestine and Arabia as the ultimate authority on all matters of theology. He was tortured for his faith during the Decian persecution in 250 and died three to four years later from his injuries.
“Origen was able to produce a massive quantity of writings due to the patronage of his close friend Ambrose, who provided him with a team of secretaries to copy his works, making him one of the most prolific writers in all of antiquity. His treatise On the First Principles systematically laid out the principles of Christian theology and became the foundation for later theological writings. He also authored Contra Celsum, the most influential work of early Christian apologetics, in which he defended Christianity against the pagan philosopher Celsus, one of its foremost early critics. Origen produced the Hexapla, the first critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, which contained the original Hebrew text as well as five different Greek translations of it, all written in columns, side-by-side. He wrote hundreds of homilies covering almost the entire Bible, interpreting many passages as allegorical. Origen taught that, before the creation of the material universe, God had created the souls of all the intelligent beings. These souls, at first fully devoted to God, fell away from him and were given physical bodies. Origen was the first to propose the ransom theory of atonement in its fully developed form and, though he was probably a Subordinationist, he also significantly contributed to the development of the concept of the Trinity. Origen hoped that all people might eventually attain salvation, but was always careful to maintain that this was only speculation. He defended free will and advocated Christian pacifism.
“Origen is a Church Father and is widely regarded as one of the most important Christian theologians of all time. His teachings were especially influential in the east, with Athanasius of Alexandria and the three Cappadocian Fathers being among his most devoted followers. Argument over the orthodoxy of Origen’s teachings spawned the First Origenist Crisis in the late fourth century AD, in which he was attacked by Epiphanius of Salamis and Jerome, but defended by Tyrannius Rufinus and John of Jerusalem. In 543, the emperor Justinian I condemned him as a heretic and ordered all his writings to be burned. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 may have anathemized Origen, or it may have only condemned certain heretical teachings which claimed to be derived from Origen. His teachings on the pre-existence of souls were rejected by the Church.
“Origen was born in either 185 or 186 AD in Alexandria. According to Eusebius, Origen’s father was Leonides of Alexandria, a respected professor of literature and also a devout Christian who practiced his religion openly. Joseph Wilson Trigg deems the details of this report unreliable, but states that Origen’s father was certainly “a prosperous and thoroughly Hellenized bourgeois.” According to John Anthony McGuckin*, Origen’s mother, whose name is unknown, may have been a member of the lower class who did not have the right of citizenship. It is likely that, on account of his mother’s status, Origen himself was not a Roman citizen. Origen’s father taught him about literature and philosophy and also about the Bible and Christian doctrine. Eusebius states that Origen’s father made him memorize passages of scripture daily. Trigg accepts this tradition as possibly genuine, given Origen’s ability as an adult to recite extended passages of scripture at will. Eusebius also reports that Origen became so learned about the holy scriptures at an early age that his father was unable to answer his questions.
- John Anthony McGuckin, born June 21, 1952 in Wallsend, UK, studied at Durham University, University of London and Heythrop College. Some of his edited works include The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and much more.
“In 202, when Origen was “not yet seventeen”, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus ordered Roman citizens who openly practiced Christianity to be executed. Origen’s father Leonides was arrested and thrown in prison. Eusebius reports that Origen wanted to turn himself in to the authorities so they would execute him as well, but his mother hid all his clothes and he was unable to go to the authorities since he refused to leave the house naked. According to McGuckin, even if Origen had turned himself in, it is unlikely that he would have been punished, since the emperor was only intent on executing Roman citizens. Origen’s father was beheaded and the state confiscated the family’s entire property, leaving them broken and impoverished. Origen was the eldest of nine children and, as his father’s heir, it became his responsibility to provide for the whole family.
“When he was eighteen years old, Origen was appointed as a catechist at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. Many scholars have assumed that Origen became the head of the school, but, according to McGuckin, this is highly improbable and it is more likely that he was simply given a paid teaching position, perhaps as a “relief effort” for his destitute family. While employed at the school, he adopted the ascetic lifestyle of the Greek Sophists. He spent the whole day teaching and would stay up late at night writing treatises and commentaries. He went barefoot and only owned one cloak. He was a teetotaler and a vegetarian and he often fasted for long periods of time. Although Eusebius goes to great lengths to portray Origen as one of the Christian monastics of his own era, this portrayal is now generally recognized as anachronistic.
“Sometime when he was in his early twenties, Origen sold the small library of Greek literary works which he had inherited from his father for a sum which netted him a daily income of four obols. He used this money to continue his study of the Bible and philosophy. Origen studied at numerous schools throughout Alexandria, including the Platonic Academy of Alexandria, where he was a student of Ammonius Saccas. Eusebius claims that Origen studied under Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215, but, according to McGuckin, this is almost certainly a retrospective assumption based on the similarity of their teachings. Origen himself rarely mentions Clement in his own writings and, when he does, it is usually to correct him.
“Origen repeatedly asked Demetrius to ordain him as a priest, but Demetrius continually refused. In around 231, Demetrius sent Origen on a mission to Athens. Along the way, Origen stopped in Caesarea, where he was warmly greeted by the bishops Theoctistus and Alexander of Jerusalem, who had become his close friends during his previous stay. While he was visiting Caesarea, Origen asked Theoctistus to ordain him as a priest. Theoctistus gladly complied. Upon learning of Origen’s ordination, Demetrius was outraged and issued a condemnation declaring that Origen’s ordination by a foreign bishop was an act of insubordination.
“Demetrius raised a storm of protests against the bishops of Palestine and the church synod in Rome itself. According to Eusebius, Demetrius published the allegation that Origen had secretly castrated himself, a capital offense under Roman law at the time and one which would have made Origen’s ordination invalid, since eunuchs were forbidden from becoming priests. Demetrius also alleged that Origen had taught an extreme form of apokatastasis, which held that all beings, including even Satan himself, would eventually attain salvation. This allegation probably arose from a misunderstanding of Origen’s argument during a debate with the Valentinian Gnostic teacher Candidus. Candidus had argued in favor of predestination by declaring that the Devil was beyond salvation. Origen had responded by arguing that, if the Devil is destined for eternal damnation, it was on account of his actions, which were the result of his own free will. Therefore, Origen had declared that Satan was only morally reprobate, not absolutely reprobate.
“Demetrius died in 232, within less than a year after Origen’s departure from Alexandria. The accusations against Origen faded with the death of Demetrius, but they did not disappear entirely and they continued to haunt him for the rest of his career. Origen defended himself in his Letter to Friends in Alexandria, in which he vehemently denied that he had ever taught that the Devil would attain salvation and insisted that the very notion of the Devil attaining salvation was simply ludicrous.
“WORK AND TEACHING IN CAESAREA
“During his early years in Caesarea, Origen’s primary task was the establishment of a Christian School; Caesarea had long been seen as a center of learning for Jews and Hellenistic philosophers, but, until Origen’s arrival, it had lacked a Christian center of higher education. According to Eusebius, the school Origen founded was primarily targeted towards young pagans who had expressed interest in Christianity, but were not yet ready to ask for baptism. The school therefore sought to explain Christian teachings through Middle Platonism. Origen started his curriculum by teaching his students classical Socratic reasoning. After they had mastered this, he taught them cosmology and natural history. Finally, once they had mastered all of these subjects, he taught them theology, which was the highest of all philosophies, the accumulation of everything they had learning previously.
“During his early years in Caesarea, Origen’s primary task was the establishment of a Christian School; Caesarea had long been seen as a center of learning for Jews and Hellenistic philosophers, but, until Origen’s arrival, it had lacked a Christian center of higher education. According to Eusebius, the school Origen founded was primarily targeted towards young pagans who had expressed interest in Christianity, but were not yet ready to ask for baptism. The school therefore sought to explain Christian teachings through Middle Platonism. Origen started his curriculum by teaching his students classical Socratic reasoning. After they had mastered this, he taught them cosmology and natural history. Finally, once they had mastered all of these subjects, he taught them theology, which was the highest of all philosophies, the accumulation of everything they had learning previously.
“With the establishment of the Caesarean school, Origen’s reputation as a scholar and theologian reached its zenith and he became known throughout the Mediterranean world as a brilliant intellectual. The hierarchs of the Palestinian and Arabian church synods regarded Origen as the ultimate expert on all matters dealing with theology. While teaching in Caesarea, Origen resumed work on his Commentary on John, composing at least books six through ten. In the first of these books, Origen compares himself to “an Israelite who has escaped the perverse persecution of the Egyptians.” Origen also wrote the treatise On Prayer at the request of his friend Ambrose and his “sister” Tatiana, in which he analyzes the different types of prayers described in the Bible and offers a detailed exegesis on the Lord’s Prayer.
“AGAINST CELSUS
“Against Celsus, preserved entirely in Greek, was Origen’s last treatise, written about 248. It is an apologetic work defending orthodox Christianity against the attacks of the pagan philosopher Celsus, who was seen in the ancient world as early Christianity’s foremost opponent. In 178, Celsus had written a polemic entitled On the True Word, in which he had made numerous arguments against Christianity. The church had responded by ignoring Celsus’s attacks, but Origen’s patron Ambrose brought the matter to his attention. Origen initially wanted to ignore Celsus and let his attacks fade, but one of Celsus’s major claims, which held that no self-respecting philosopher of the Platonic tradition would ever be so stupid as to become a Christian, provoked him to write a rebuttal.
“In the book, Origen systematically refutes each of Celsus’s arguments point-by-point and argues for a rational basis of Christian faith. Origen draws heavily on the teachings of Plato and argues that Christianity and Greek philosophy are not incompatible, and that philosophy contains much that is true and admirable, but that the Bible contains far greater wisdom than anything Greek philosophers could ever grasp. Origen responds to Celsus’s accusation that Jesus had performed his miracles using magic rather than divine powers by asserting that, unlike magicians, Jesus had not performed his miracles for show, but rather to reform his audiences. Contra Celsum became the most influential of all early Christian apologetics works; before it was written, Christianity was seen by many as merely a folk religion for the illiterate and uneducated, but Origen raised it to a level of academic respectability. Eusebius admired Against Celsus so much that, in his Against Hierocles I, he declared that Against Celsus provided an adequate rebuttal to all criticisms the church would ever face.
“AFTER THE ANATHAMAS
“The most prominent advocate of Origen during the Renaissance was the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), who regarded Origen as the greatest of all Christian authors and wrote in a letter to John Eck that he learned more about Christian philosophy from a single page of Origen than from ten pages of Augustine. Erasmus especially admired Origen for his lack of rhetorical flourishes, which were so common in the writings of other Patristic authors. Erasmus also borrowed heavily from Origen’s defense of free will in On First Principles in his 1524 treatise On Free Will, now considered his most important theological work. In 1527, Erasmus translated and published the portion of Origen’s Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that survived only in Greek and, in 1536, he published the most complete edition of Origen’s writings that had ever been published at that time. While Origen’s emphasis on the human effort in attaining salvation appealed to the Renaissance humanists, it made him far less appealing to the proponents of the Reformation. Martin Luther (1483–1546) deplored Origen’s understanding of salvation as irredeemably defective and declared “in all of Origen there is not one word about Christ.” Consequently, he ordered for Origen’s writings to be banned. Nonetheless, the earlier Czech reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415) had taken inspiration from Origen for his view that the church is a spiritual reality rather than an official hierarchy and Luther’s contemporary, the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), took inspiration from Origen for his interpretation of the eucharist as symbolic.”
This is not the complete article on Origen in Wikipedia. For the complete work, including footnotes and attributes, go to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen
God Bless