Origen of Alexandria on the Mystery of the Pre-existent Church

This article examines Origen’s ecclesiology, one of the keys to his system of thought. Visualising the Church as the pre-existent core of all creation, the heart of all theology of salvation, his conception is universal in scope and life-affirming. The intellectual background of Origen’s ground-breaking attempt at systematic correlation of Christian doctrine with its biblical heritage is reviewed alongside his immediate environment, another active context of thought. Origen emerges as par excellence a theologian of resistance in a persecuted church, wrestling with the fundamental question of the One and the Many, searching in the fragmentation of world order for the providential touch of God upon history. He was an exponent of an understanding of mysticism as the ‘depth meaning ’ of texts and life and of a soteriology that influenced all patristic tradition after him, though his ideas of pre-existent lapsed souls were not widely accepted. In conclusion, the article focuses on Origen’s ecclesiology as an important alternative to the rather more anxious and rigid ecclesiology of North Africa and suggests some possible lines of ‘interpretation ’ and ‘translation’, for the modern reader