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).

Further, this thesis of Origen is superimposed by a prejudice inherited by him from the ancient philosophical tradition. The idea of a boundless world is profoundly alien to ancient thinking. Space is good because it is limited. After all, the cosmos is ordered, decorated. And it is possible to establish some tolerable order only in a small polis. This means that in order to be manageable, predictable, and harmonious, the world must be limited. Origen inherits the traditional conviction of ancient philosophy in the incomprehensibility of infinite being. But the limitation of the cosmos for him turns out to be a sign of the limitation of those intelligent principles that govern him and protect him from Chaos. No consciousness can embrace infinity, so if we want to live in a world that is obedient to the will of the gods, we must recognize both the divine mind and the world that is governed by it as finite.

Several more generations must pass before Christianity, which powerfully supported the desire to see the Infinite in the Godhead, which had already manifested itself in Platonism, would retrain the school Mediterranean thought and teach people to admire the Infinite and to entrust themselves without fear to the Infinite and Unknowable God. Origen, on the other hand, proceeds from the ancient premise: If the world is infinite, then God cannot know the world: God cannot direct the destinies of the world, which stretch into the infinite distances of time: "Where there is no end, there is no knowledge... God could not contain the created or control it, because the infinite by nature is unknowable" (On the Elements, 2:10, 1).

Ориген, всегда боровшийся с антропоморфизмом, здесь сам в него и впал. Ибо за этим его аргументом стоит обычный антропоморфизм: мышление Бога уподобляется мышлению человеческому. И, соответственно, вопреки предупреждению Писания – «Мои Мысли - не ваши мысли, ни ваши пути -- Пути Мои, говорит Господь, о как Небо - выше Земли, так Пути Мои - выше путей ваших, и Мысли Мои - выше мыслей ваших» (Ис. 55,8-9) - недостатки нашего мышления Ориген перенес на Абсолютный разум…

Далее Ориген логичен: Бог не может не знать тот мир, который Он Сам создал и которым Он управляет. Значит, Бог знает весь мир, и следовательно, мир конечен (см. О началах. 5,3,2).

Итак, каждый мир ограничен. И, соответственно число существ, живущих в этом мире, тоже конечно. Но если есть много следующих друг за другом миров — логично предположить, что в историю каждого из них Бог вселяет одних и тех же персонажей. Зачем создавать новые души, если прежние еще не вполне исполнили свой долг?

Здесь действительно появляются предпосылки для теории реинкарнаций (хотя, как мы помним, в более поздних своих Толкованиях на Евангелие от Матфея, Ориген именно, отталкиваясь от тезиса о конечности мира, будет строить свое уже отрицание перевоплощений души: если мир конечен, значит не может быть бесконечного странствия душ (Толкование на Матфея. 13,1)).

И все же запомним, что на этот путь Ориген вступает не под влиянием гностиков, но в полемике с ними. Как остроумно подметил П. Милославский, "мысль о душепереселении у Оригена является в его рассуждении таким результатом, которого он, по-видимому, не ожидал и сам, а был принужден допускать его только по требованию логической последовательности своей системы"297.