Origen’s Theology of Fire and the Early Monks of Egypt

Origen’s Peri archôn includes a description of the soul of Christ as an iron in God’s fire. Christ’s mind, “becoming wholly fire” ( et tota ignis effecta ) is the origin and the destiny of all minds, all those minds who “cooled” ( psychesthai ) into souls ( psychai ) and eventually became angels, humans, and demons. The iron in the fire of God is the defining figure for the divinized mind, an illustration of what all minds were in the beginning and will be again in the end. God’s fire, however, is not only divinizing, but also purifying, and perhaps also punishing. These three aspects are braided together in Origen’s surviving works into a distinctive theology of fire. This essay attempts to explain Origen’s theology of fire, and then to ask what becomes of it. We find evidence of it among the early monks of Egypt, including in Antony the Great. We find further evidence of it in the sayings collections of early Egyptian monasticism—the so‐called Apophthegmata patrum . Throughout the collections, but especially in the Alphabetical collection, we find monks bursting into flames: a worthy disciple of Arsenius sees him “as though he were all fire”; Joseph stretches his hands to heaven and his ten fingers become “like ten lamps of fire” —he enjoins another monk to “become altogether like fire,” insisting that it is a monk’s only proper pursuit. These stories come into sharper relief when we see them against the backdrop of Origen’s theology of fire

Heaven · Sermon · Soul · Theology · Byzantine Studies and History · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy

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