Origen is a writer who tries to build a system. He calculates each of his steps much ahead. Its main purpose is clear: to protect the Church and its Bible. But he prefers to build his defensive lines on the distant approaches to his shrine, that is, on the territory of the enemy, on the territory of paganism. He is inclined to take some judgments of pagan philosophy and unfold them so that they become his advanced defensive lines. In this way, Origen fights first of all with the opponent who most closely looked at the Church and most actively opposed it. The name of this vanguard of paganism in its opposition to Christianity is Gnosticism. And we remember that Origen from his youth treated Gnosticism without the slightest liking.

The fundamental belief of the Gnostics was that the God revealed in the Old Testament, the Creator God, is a God of evil, ignorance, and injustice. The Christian Origen, accordingly, was faced with the task of theodicy. It was necessary to justify the goodness of the Creator in the eyes of occulting intellectuals and thereby defend the spiritual authority of the entire Bible.

The Gnostics thought that it was shameful to be the Creator of a world like ours. Therefore, they tried to create a model of a Deity who would not be involved in our world at all. The creator god revealed in the Bible is a lower deity, but above him rises a multi-level hierarchy of higher spirits, in the name of one of whom Christ came. Biblical theology is carefully and consistently reversed here. If for the prophets and apostles the sign of false gods is precisely that they did not create the world of man, then for the Gnostics it is this calling card of Yahweh that serves as a bad recommendation: the true God would not humiliate himself by creating a material universe... For Origen, this is blasphemy: "Is it possible to think about God without thinking about Him as the Creator? Piety, in the eyes of Origen, allows only a negative answer to be given."295 If we think of God as a Creator, then it is all too easy to get lost in the Gnostic myth of a God who is not a creator, a God who has nothing to do with our world.

Origen stands up for the apostolic gospel: in Christ "He from Whom are all things, and to Whom are all things" has been revealed. The Son is always with the Father, and in a common creative act They created our world. Moreover, creativity is so inherent in God, so not alien to Him, that no matter how many worlds there are, they all have as their cause the biblical Father and the Gospel Son.

The Gospel thesis about the Trinity, "of Whom all things" Origen wants to defend philosophically. Some Gnostic schools were ready to recognize Christ as the Lord of the world. But other worlds have other Lords... The idea that the Absolute Source of all existence, the One from Whom all things began, could come to people and could sacrifice Himself "for us and ours for salvation" seemed absurd to them. Origen needs to prove that no matter how many worlds philosophical thought assumes, the Star of Bethlehem pointed to the Creator of them all.

Thus, Origen begins a polemic with the Gnostics. Naturally, he makes use of the set of theological arguments that were present in the Christian thought of his time. But the fact is that the church thought of Origen's time had not yet learned to pose the question of what the eternal relationship in the Trinity is. The habit of seeing in the Persons of the Godhead only various manifestations, functions of the One God was still too great. Therefore, the Logos was thought of not so much as the eternal Thought and Love of the Father, but as the instrument with the help of which the Father creates the world. Christian thought was occupied not so much with the elucidation of the mystery of intra-Trinitarian relations as with the clarification of what relation the Logos had to the non-divine world. In the course of the Arian discussions, it was still necessary to find an answer to the question of the relation of God's creative will to the existence of God Himself. But it had already been firmly assimilated that "all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made" (John 1:3) — through the Word, which was in the beginning.

The world could not have come into existence without the Logos. Logos is needed to create the world. These are the two theses from which Origen's thought proceeds. And to them polemical necessity adds a third: the Son is the eternal, beginningless God. But how can we prove the co-eternity of the Logos with the eternal Deity, if the Logos is only an instrument for the creation of our world? God is eternal, but is the world eternal? Origen answers about the world in an Orthodox way: our world is not eternal, it arose in history. But if the world is not eternal, then the Cause of its existence is also non-eternal, that is, the Logos is not eternal? After all, if the world is not eternal, then the Son was not always the Logos of the world. And, therefore, without the world, the existence of the Son has no explanation and justification. God does not do unnecessary things. If the world did not exist and the Son is the condition of the world's existence, then it is logical to conclude that the Son is not Eternal either. In such a case, an impassable abyss is placed between God the Father and the Son: the Son arises in time and is subject to time, the Son is only a creature, but not God. Then the Gnostics are right: it was not God who came to people, but a certain cosmic spirit... This conclusion does not suit Origen. But how to explain the opposite? If God does not perform unnecessary actions, and if the Logos is needed only for the creation of the world, but the Logos is still co-existent with the Father, then the Father has always had a need for creation. If the Logos has always existed, then God has always been the Creator.

Thus, it is impossible for Origen to conceive of God outside of creation, for "God had to remain idle then" (On the Elements. II,1,4). But if God is essentially the Creator, then He cannot be without peace. Not because He and the world are one, but because the essential property of God is to be the Creator and Almighty. But in order to be the Creator and Almighty, there must always be a space in the face of God to which His creative and ruling power could be directed. And if God has always been the Creator, and our world has not always existed, it means that before the creation of our world, the same Logos created other worlds, and after the end of our universe, He will have to create new universes again and again. "Usually we are objected to and asked: if the world began to exist from a certain time, then what did God do before the beginning of the world? For it is impious and at the same time absurd to call the nature of God idle or immovable... We will say that God did not first begin to act when He created this world, but we believe that just as after the destruction of this world there will be another world, so before the existence of this world there were other worlds" (On the Elements. III,5,3).

It is from the idea of God as Creator that Origen concludes to an infinite succession of worlds. Origen vividly feels God as the Creator and Provider, Divine love is revealed to him as love for the world - and he believes that this creative power and love cannot be limited.

Origen's answer is clearly hasty: from the correct thesis that the Logos is necessary for the creation of the world, he concludes that only for this purpose is He necessary for the Father. Origen's mistake is that his judgment contradicts the Gospel proclamation that God is Love. Love, on the other hand, cannot see in the one it loves only a tool. Parents do not give birth to children only as a means of receiving benefits or as a means of ensuring a peaceful old age. We do not know the mystery of God's Love. But to believe that the personal Being of the Father gave His divine nature to two more Persons, the Son and the Spirit, only for purely engineering reasons (in order to have someone to build the world on) is unworthy to think about God and about love. A more apophatic theology comes to the conclusion that God is not essentially the Creator, that He is love in the Trinity itself. He has someone to love outside of time and without creation. The love of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is self-sufficient. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that it was the need for love that moved God to create the world. Nor is there any reason to believe that the oneness of our world limits the Love of God.

For more consistent philosophical thinking, it is revealed that God does not and cannot have the necessary connection with the world. God does not have to create a relative world. He is not compelled by anything to the act of creation. There is no such necessity that would weigh down on the Absolute and dictate certain actions to it. Therefore, for St. According to St. Basil, one of the meanings of the biblical narrative that God created the heavens and the earth "in the beginning" is to indicate that God is the Creator only to an insignificant extent, only in an insignificant (for Him) way: "to show that the created is the smallest part of the Creator's power" (Discourses on the Six Days, 1). God would have remained God if He had not become the Creator. Origen's assumption that God, in order to be God, that is, Lord and Creator, must always have a creature under His creative and ruling hand, turns out to be a violation of the foundations of mystical-apophatic theology, since it is an attempt at a concretely positive definition of the Godhead.

So I cannot understand in any way what the well-known Soviet philosopher M. B. Turovsky, who for some reason began to write about patristicism, sees the deep logic of Origen's system. In his opinion, "Origen the dialectician thought consistently. He did not hesitate to admit that if God creates worlds out of nothing, such a creation is continuity. In other words, God's creation of the world is eternal, and there are an infinite number of worlds. The Church then rejected this logical thesis of Origen."296 There is not the slightest logic here. If the creation of the world by God out of nothing is a miracle, an act of the purest voluntarism, an unconditioned action of the will, then it follows that this will is not at all obliged to manifest itself in the creation of an endless string of worlds. God and the world do not have any necessary-obligatory relationship. The world is held together in existence by the miracle of God's decision. And this decision does not necessarily follow from the nature of the Godhead. The fact that the world was created from nothing also means that it was not created out of God's need for it. Perhaps it seems to Mark Borisovich that Origen's teaching is "logical" because the doctrine of the continuous creation of a string of worlds is in the medieval Jewish tradition. But the logic of Christian thought in no way requires that the miracle of the creation of the world be replicatedkkkkkkkkk.

However, from the false premise, Origen comes to the correct conclusion: the Son is co-existent with the Father. Thus the logical law is confirmed, which says that "anything follows from a lie" (that is, not only a false, but also a true result can be obtained from false premises). But in addition to the true theological conclusion, Origen also receives from his premises a number of quite poor conclusions.

From his assumption that God is obliged to always create, all those special opinions of Origen sprouted, which discredited his name in the Church's memory. The Christian thinker has "Epicurus' alternating worlds" (Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 1:6).