Philosophy: Handmaid to Christianity
by Origen
Synaxis of the Holy Powder which Emitted from the Tomb of St John the Theologian
Anno Domini 2020, May 8
Fresco of St. Paul the Philosopher on Wall of His Grotto in Ephesus
Greetings in God, my most devoted and venerable son Gregory, from Origen.
¶1. As you know, the pursuit of understanding, since it calls for asceticism, can involve exertion, which leads as much as possible (if I may put it that way) toward the goal of that for which a person wishes to train. Thus your pursuit can have made you an expert Roman lawyer and a Greek philosopher of those schools which are deemed significant. But I would wish you to employ the full power of your pursuit ultimately for Christianity; therefore as a means I would beseech you to extract from the philosophy of the Greeks all those general lessons and instruction which can serve Christianity, and whatever form geometry and astronomy will be useful for interpreting the holy Scriptures. Thus, what the children of the philosophers say about geometry and music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy, as handmaids to philosophy, w also may say concerning philosophy itself in relation to Christianity.
¶2. And precisely this point is hinted at by the passage in Exodus written from the person of God, when the children of Israel are told to ask their neighbors and acquaintances for gold and silver vessels and for clothing, so that having despoiled Egyptians they might find material to fashion from what they acquired for the worship of God (Ex. 11:2). For from the goods of which they despoiled the Egyptians, the children of Israel fashioned the contents of the Holy of Holies, the Ark with the covering, and the Cherubim, and the mercy-seat, and the golden jar in which was put the manna, the bread of angels. These were probably made from the finest gold of the Egyptians; from the next best to that were made the lampstand of solid gold by the inner veil, and the lamps on it, and the golden table on which the showbread rested, and between the two the golden incense-pot. If there were gold of third and fourth quality, from it was made the sacred vessels. And other things were made of the silver of Egypt, for when they dwelt in Egypt the children of Israel gained this from their stay there, to make good use of such precious material for the worship of God. From the clothing of the Egyptians would have come what needed the work of embroiderers, as Scripture calls them, since the embroiderers stitch together one kind of fabric to another with the wisdom of God, so that there might be the veils and the hangings without and within.
¶3. And what should I fashion with this untimely digression, on how the things they got from the Egyptians were so useful to the children of Israel, on what the Egyptians were unable to make proper use of, but the Hebrews through the wisdom of God could employ for pious purposes? Holy Scripture knew that some would take the descent into Egypt from their own land by the children of Israel badly; indicating in mysterious fashion that dwelling among the Egyptians, that is, the lessons of the world, would be bad for some, after they had been brought up on the law of God and the Israelite service to Him. Hadad the Edomite did not fashion idols (1 Kings 11:14-22), as long as he stayed in the land of Israel, since he did not eat the food of the Egyptians; but when he left Solomon the wise and went down to Egypt, he left the wisdom of God and became a member of Pharaoh’s family, marrying his sister-in-law and having a child who was raised among the children of Pharaoh. Therefore, even if he went back up to the land of Israel he went back to divide the people of God, and to make them say to the golden calf, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” So I, having learned by experience, would say to you that it is a rare person who takes what is useful from Egypt and when he has left there makes things for the worship of God; Hadad the Edomite has many brethren. They are the people who after “living Greek” produce heretical ideas, and as it were fashion golden calves in Bethel, which means “house of God” (Gen. 28:17-19). It also seems to me that in this way the Logos is mysteriously indicating that they have installed their own fabrications for the holy Scriptures in which the Word of God lives and which are figuratively “Bethel.” The Logos says that the other statue was installed at Dan, and the boundaries of Dan are the outermost, close to the boundaries of the Gentiles, as is clear from what was written in the book of Joshua (cf. Joshua 19:40-48). So too some of the fabrications constructed by those I have termed “brothers of Hadad” are close to the boundaries of the Gentiles.
¶4. You therefore, my true son, devote yourself first and foremost to reading the holy Scriptures; but devote yourself. For when we read holy things we need much attentiveness, lest we say or think something hasty about them. And when you are devoting yourself to reading the sacred texts with faith and an attitude pleasing to God, knock on its closed doors, and it will be opened to you by the gatekeeper of whom Jesus spoke: “The gatekeeper opens to him” (Jn. 10:3). And when you devote yourself to the divine reading, uprightly and with a faith fixed firmly on God seek the meaning of the divine words which is hidden from most people. Do not stop at knocking and seeking, for the most necessary element is praying to understand the divine words. Calling us to this, the Savior not only said, “Knock and it will be opened to you,” and, “Seek and you shall find,” but also, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” These have been ventured from my paternal love toward you. Whether what I have dared seems good or not, God knows and His Christ and the One who shares the spirit of God and the spirit of Christ. Would that you may share it, and always increase your participation, so that you may say not only, “We have become sharers of Christ” (Heb. 3:14), but also, “We have become sharers of God.”
*Letter of Origen to St Gregory Thaumaturgas in The Fathers of the Church Vol. 98, St Gregory Thaumaturgus, Life and Works, translated by Michael Slusser (Catholic University of America Press, 1998), pp. 190-192.
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
In Memory of Warren Farha, 1955-2026
An Ode to St. Brendan the Voyager
