Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen's Commentary on Romans - Softcover

Scheck, Thomas P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268041539 ISBN 13: 9780268041533

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016

Synopsis

Standard accounts of the history of interpretation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans often begin with St. Augustine. As Thomas P. Scheck demonstrates, however, the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans by Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE) was a major work of Pauline exegesis which, by means of the Latin translation preserved in the West, had a significant influence on the Christian exegetical tradition.

Scheck begins by exploring Origen’s views on justification and on the intimate connection of faith and post-baptismal good works as essential to justification. He traces the enormous influence Origen’s Commentary on Romans had on later theologians in the Latin West, including the ways in which theologians often appropriated Origen’s exegesis in their own work. Scheck analyzes in particular the reception of Origen by Pelagius, Augustine, William of St. Thierry, Erasmus, Cornelius Jansen, the Anglican Bishop Richard Montagu, and the Catholic lay apologist John Heigham, as well as Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and other Protestant Reformers who harshly attacked Origen’s interpretation as fatally flawed. But as Scheck shows, theologians through the post-Reformation controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries studied and engaged Origen extensively, even if not always in agreement.

An important work in patristics, biblical interpretation, and historical theology, Origen and the History of Justification establishes the formative role played by Origen’s Pauline exegesis, while also contributing to our understanding of the theological issues surrounding justification in the western Christian tradition.

About this title

About the Authors

Thomas P. Scheck is associate professor of theology at Ave Maria University. He is the first English translator of Rufinus’s Latin edition of Origen’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Most recently he has published new translations of St. Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah and , Origen’s Homilies 1–9 on Isaiah, Erasmus’s writings on Origen and Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Fr. Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, a native of the Bronx, has been a member of the Society of Jesus since 1958. He was ordained a priest in 1971. After studies at several places in the United States, he received the degree of Dr. theology from the University of Freiburg in 1975, with a dissertation on Paulinus of Nola. In 1986 he completed the “Habilitation” at Freiburg with a work on Marcellus of Ancyra. From 1975 until 1990 he taught at Marquette University in Milwaukee; since 1990 he has been at Fordham University. He has also held chairs or visiting appointments at John Carroll University, Boston College, St. Joseph’s Seminary Dunwoodie, the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 2015, he published the volume St. Augustine: Writings on the Old Testament.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Origen’s CRm was originally written in Greek between 244 and 246.6 Origen himself refers to it in his Commentary on Matthew 17.32 and Cels 5.47 and 8.65. The Greek text was known to St. Jerome (cf. Eps 36, 121), St. Basil (De Spiritu Sancto 29.73), and the church historian Socrates (HE 7.32.17). Fragments of the Greek original are preserved in the Philocalia, the Catena, and the Tura papyri. Didymus the Blind (313–98) drew on Origen’s Greek exegesis of Romans in his work Contra Manichaeos. The anonymous commentator on Paul, writing around the year 400, also used the Greek text of Origen, as did Pamphilus of Caesarea in his Apology for Origen. Apart from these references, to my knowledge the Greek version of Origen’s CRm had little direct influence. However, Rufinus’s Latin translation of Origen’s CRm (406) had an extremely significant Nachleben, far more significant than has hitherto been imagined. It appears to me that Heither’s statement that Origen’s interpretation of Paul was without subsequent influence in the Church is seriously mistaken. The context suggests that what she means is that Origen’s central interpretation of Paul’s message, as she understands it, was lost to later view, but even so the statement cannot stand. This topic will be the subject of the second half of this book (chapters 2–7). For it was the Latin Origen’s Pauline exegesis that was transmitted to the West.

My primary focus in this study is on “Rufinus’s Origen” and the legacy of Rufinus’s Origen. I will not endeavor to determine the original Greek wording of Origen’s expressions, or whether a given statement of the Latin Origen may in fact be a gloss of Rufinus. Such a task would require a separate study of the Greek fragments of Origen’s commentary, together with an examination of the entire corpus of Origen’s writings. In any case, T. Heither has done that task in large measure on texts that are relevant to this study.18 My aim instead is to move the discussion forward into the Latin theological tradition and to analyze its engagement with the Latin Origen. This is the aspect of Origen scholarship that has been seriously neglected. This will be more an investigation into Rezeptionsgeschichte than Geschichte. The question of determining the historical authenticity of the views expressed in Rufinus’s translation is an important and indeed complex one, but it is not mine.

On the other hand, I would still like to make a few brief remarks concerning the reliability of Rufinus’s translation with respect to Origen’s discussions of justification. In the past some theologians have entirely denied the authenticity of the discussions of justification in Origen’s commentary. In 1930 Völker declared confidently: “Origen never speaks of justification from faith, for the discussions in the CRm are hardly authentic.”Even apart from any other evidence, the suggestion that Origen would “never speak” of a biblical theme like justification by faith strikes me as doubtful. Völker’s particular assertion has been proved false by the archaeological discovery of the Tura papyri in 1941. These papyri contain long Greek excerpts from the original commentary, including extensive discussions of justification by faith. Even texts where Origen speaks of “justification by faith alone” have been preserved.

Prior to Völker, many German scholars were interested solely in recovering the alleged verba ipsissima of Origen and were deeply suspicious of Rufinus’s translations. Only the Greek fragments, or very little of Rufinus’s translations, were used as sources for Origen’s thought. It is true that Völker used Rufinus’s translations more freely than did his predecessors. He encouraged scholars to study Origen’s homilies that have been preserved in Latin translations by Jerome and Rufinus, an exhortation that fell on deaf ears, according to Lubac.But Völker was still quite distrustful of Rufinus, as the above citation proves. In some cases Protestants were hostile to those who mined Rufinus’s Latin translations for information about Origen and denounced the efforts of Roman Catholic scholars to form a “dogmatically correct” picture of Origen’s doctrine of justification based on Rufinus’s version. Völker criticized Wörter on this issue, and Molland reproached Verfaillie for the same reason.

In large measure this minimalist approach to the use of Rufinus’s translations as a source of Origen’s thought has been challenged and substantially overcome in recent years through the efforts of such scholars as Balthasar, Chadwick, Cocchini, Crouzel, Danièlou, Hammond Bammel, Heither, Lubac, Roukema, and Schelkle. None of these scholars denies that Rufinus’s translations contain post-Nicene Rufinian glosses, especially on Christological and Trinitarian passages, nor do I deny this. But they insist that Rufinus should still be extensively used as a source for Origen’s thought. In the specific case of Origen’s CRm, the Tura find was of such decisive significance that Völker’s and Molland’s dismissive approach to Rufinus’s version had to be completely abandoned. Roukema, for example, prefaced his recent study of Origen’s CRm with the words “The opinions which were held before the publication of the Tura papyrus will be left out of consideration, since this text has thrown a new light on Rufinus’ version.”It seems probable to me that most of the Origenian explanations that are discussed in this book are traceable to Origen himself, albeit in a new form of language and theological context.Of the theologians who are investigated in chapters 2–7, only Erasmus had hesitations about the reliability of Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s CRm, and his scruples did not touch the majority of passages that are examined here. In any case, since my focus is on the Latin Origen and his legacy, the reader, and in particular the patristic scholar, is welcome to supply “Rufinus’s Origen” wherever I speak of “Origen.”

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268041539
• ISBN 13: 9780268041533
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310