The

Three Hypostases of Plato, Origen and Plotinus

Carol A. Korak

Presented November 2015 at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
in fulfillment of Doctoral Comprehensive Exam One

Question:
Compare Origen’s understanding of God (On First Principles) to that of
Plotinus’ (Enneads) to show the divergent paths they took. Answer is to
include Plato’s metaphysics and Stoicism contribution to the development of
their thought, and brief comments regarding Justin Martyr and Irenaeus’
influence on Origen.


Introduction

The teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers lay the groundwork for Middle

Platonism upon which Origen and Plotinus develop their systems. So in in the effort

to accomplish the task laid out above, I will offer a brief introduction followed by a

survey of Plato’s metaphysics and development of his teachings on the three divine

hypotheses. Moving chronologically, I will briefly introduce how Apologists Justin

Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyon, the earliest to transparently integrate philosophical

concepts and terms in their defense of Christianity, and how their work influenced

Origen. Next, I will present Origen’s divine Triad in conversation with Plato’s

concepts found in his dialogues. Last, I will introduce the three hypostases of

Plotinus, as offered in his Enneads, and compare them to Origen’s divine Triad.

Foundational Information

According to Allen and Springsted in Philosophy for Understanding Theology,

Christian theology could not exist without the intellectual curiosity that was unique

1


to ancient Greece. The Greeks were persistent in asking the how and why questions

concerning the things around them, including themselves, that led to the idea of

Christianity to be thought by early Christians as the highest philosophy. Early

Christian Apologists, and later the Patristic Fathers, used philosophy as the

foundation to create and develop the discipline of theology.1 For them, the purpose

of theology was to pursue and understand God’s divine revelation.2

Some elements of these early Greek philosophers’ theories regarding

creation, the soul, and salvation are reflected in the development of early Christian

thought of Origen and that of Plotinus. The most influential philosophers for Origen

and Plotinus are Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Socrates, Ammonios

Saccas and Porphyry.

George Boys-Stone, in Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development

from the Stoics to Origen identifies the time span from c. 100 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. as the

period during which Greco-Roman philosophy begins to have substantial influence

in Jewish and Christian thought. This period of time, also known as the transition

period, or Middle Platonism in ancient philosophy, is when we find Origen. Middle

Platonism is a strongly religious syncretistic form of Platonism. It is unique in that

during this time most philosophers, to some degree, adopted ideas from

1 Diogenes Allen and Eric O. Springsted, Philosophy for Undertanding Theology, Second

ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), xvii. Restated from: Carol Korak,
The Influence of Philosophy on Early Christianity (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary,
2012), 1.
2 Donald K. McKim, Westminster Dictionasry of Theological Terms (Louisville:

Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 279-80.

2


philosophies outside of their own.3 Middle Platonism contained elements from

Pythagoras, Aristotle, Peripatetic, and Stoicism with the aim of creating a perfect

philosophy. It is this phase of Platonism that informed the Apologists including

Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Origen. According to Engberg-Pedersen, the Stoics were

more willing to show openness toward Platonism than Platonists who explicitly

wrote against Stoicism, while adopting Stoic ideas that enforced their own

philosophies. This process of identifying with a primary philosophy and adding

elements from others is referred to as absorption.4

Boyes-Stone claims Middle Stoicism is Christianity’s most dominant influence

in the first century, until the Neoplatonism of Plotinus replaces it by the middle of

the third century.5 Drobner, however appears to disagree. For him, Platonism is the

philosophical school that influenced Christianity the most. He claims Plato’s

philosophy was considered an authentic theology by many church fathers.6 Plato

(427-347 B.C.E.), the school’s founder, was a student of Socrates. At the center of

each of his dialogues is his insight into Reason, the Logos, as the source of all ideas

that direct all material things. This divine Logos is the sum of all the logoi, the

rational and spermatic principles that govern the universe. His philosophy taught

3 C.f. Robert M. Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition (Chicago:

Scholars Press, 1984).

4 Troels Engberg-Pedersen, "Setting the Scene: Stoicism and Platonism in the

Transitional Period in Ancient Philosophy," in Stoicism in Early Christianity, ed. Tuomas

Tasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic, 2010), 4-8.
5 George Boys-Stone, Post-Helenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development from the

Stoics to Origen (Oxford: Oxford Press, 2001), v. Restated from: Korak, "The Influence of
Philosophy on Early Christianity," 1.
6 Hubertus R. Drobner, "Christian Philosophy," in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian

Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 680. Restated from: Carol Korak, The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor
(Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2013), 6.

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that the world was pervaded by Reason, and that its beauty was the outward

manifest.7 Platonism’s second and third phases develop concurrently with

Christianity.8 Later Platonism had a lot of influence on the Alexandrian school’s

approach to practicing faith. The Alexandrians liked the Platonic idea of “philosophy

as training for the soul to ascend to the good,” and Origen used Platonic thought

extensively.9

A revival of Platonism takes place in the first century, by means of a new

interpretation of Plato’s Theaetetus by Eudorus of Alexandria, when he established

“likeness to God” as the telos of human life for all the Platonists who came after him.

Prior to this, the Stoic conformity to nature had prevailed in the Academy. 10

“That is why we should make all speed to take flight from this world to the other, and that
means becoming like the divine so far as we can, and that again is to become righteous with
the help of wisdom.”11

Eudorus’ contribution marks not only a return to Plato, but also redirects and

reframes Platonism by providing a spiritual lens that concerns itself with trying to

determine the nature of God, whom we are to resemble.12 Before one can look at the

divergent paths of Origen and Plotinus, one needs to look at Plato.

7 Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 6.
8 Ibid.
9 John Anthony McGukin, "Platonism," in Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology

(Louisville Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 277.

10 Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2006), 35.

11 Plato, "Theaetetus," in Plato: The Collected Works Including the Letters, ed. Edith

Hamilton and Hunting Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Preess, 2009), 176b.
12 Paragraph restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the

Confessor," 6.

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Plato’s Three Hypotheses

Unlike the Christian understanding of God, the God of Plato is a distant figure.

The primary works dealing with Plato’s cosmology and metaphysics can be found in

his dialogues: The Republic, Timeus, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Parmenides and

The Laws. Some of the terminology and concepts Plato develops in these works will

be redefined and remolded by both Origen and Plotinus and used in their respective

systems. At Plato’s pinnacle was “the One” as the source of all things. Briefly, there

are four levels in the Platonic scheme:

1. The One – (Realm of Infinite Potentiality) has the creative potential to create but has not
created anything yet.
2. The Divine Mind – (Realm of Divine Ideas) moves creative potential (ability to create X) to
thought (I will create X), even though the final finished form is abstract and not yet
determined.
3. The World Soul – (Realm of Specific Ideas) moves the abstract (what kind of) to the
particular or concrete (exactly what attributes it will have i.e. color, shape, size, form, etc.)
4. The World – (Realm of Specific Things) the realization of X as created.13

The first two principles in the Platonic scheme form a pair of opposed first

principles, the One and its being or Divine Mind, constituting an indefinite or

unlimited Dyad.14 The One (Parmenides), also called the Good in The Republic, is the

active principle that sets the limits on the opposite principle. The Divine Mind is the

unlimited otherness upon which the One acts. It is a duality, which is

simultaneously infinitely extensible or divisible, and according to Dillon, the

13 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 4 vols. (New York: Armstrong and Co.,

1872), 24-5.This schematic is restated from: Carol Korak, “Created or Uncreated: The
Influence of Philosophy and Cultural Normatives on the Development of Opposing
Interpretations of Christ as Logos up to Nicaea” (Masters, Garrett-Evangelical Theological
Seminary, 2010), 10.
14 J. M. Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth Press, 1996), 3.

5


influence of the Dyad can be seen in nature as continuous magnitudes of excess and

defect, and therefore needs to be continuously kept in check.15

By acting upon the Divine Mind, the active principle, the One, generates the

Ideas.16 These Ideas are posterior to God, just like cause and effect in nature, and it

is providence that applies these ideas to matter suggesting that the actual world

stands as the historical development of an eternal conception.17 In Timaeus, Plato

refers to the Divine Mind as the craftsmen, for it is the Mind, as the ruling power,

that “persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection.”18

Plato considered Ideas, immutable divine paradigms of order and value, and the

highest level of reality (i.e. divinity).

In Plato’s early work, The Republic, he calls this highest Form or principle the
Absolute Good.

“In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the
presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to
them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and
surpassing power.”19

The Good’s role as the “form of forms” and the “author of all things” is to be present

in all other forms and in all particulars. The Good in the Republic corresponds to the

first hypostasis in Parmenides, which offers a more developed insight of his earlier

concepts. Here, the concepts of divine simplicity, eternality, incoporeality,

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 71. Restated from: Korak, "Created or Uncreated: The

Influence of Philosophy and Cultural Normatives on the Development of Opposing

Interpretations of Christ as Logos up to Nicaea," 10.
18 Plato, "Timaeus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and

Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1961), 48.

19 Plato, "Republic," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, ed. Edith

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Seri4es Lxxi (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009), VI 509b.

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transcendence, immovability and impassibility are applied and clarified.20 These

concepts are later adopted by Origen and Plotinus and applied to the first person or

hypostases in each of their models, as the unbegotten source of all being. Plato even

goes on to explain how this first principle exists outside of time and is therefore ‘not

becoming.’21 This is important because in his reasoning ‘not becoming’ infers non-

being, and non-being means ‘it’ has nothing that can be spoken about, thus it cannot

be known by any creature.22 This revelation necessitates Plato’s second principle.

This second principle is somehow generated by the will of the first principle,

forming a Dyad through which the One can have being and become known.

“If a one is, it cannot be, and yet not have being. So there will also be the being which the one
has, and this is not the same as the one; otherwise that being would not be its being, nor
would it, the one, have that being, but to say ‘a one is would be tantamount to saying ‘a one
[is] one. But in fact, the supposition whose consequences we are to consider is not ‘if one [is]
one, but ‘if a one is.’ This implies that ‘is’ and ‘one’ stand for different things. Thus . . . ‘a one
is’ simply means that the one has been.”23

In this passage, Plato is not contradicting the statements he made regarding the first

hypothesis. Here he introduces his concept of the One-Many. Plato explains that

being and the One are two parts of the one being. In other words, the One remains

simplex because it’s being comes from being in unity with the Divine Mind, as part of

the whole. In this way, what is ‘one being’ can be unlimited in multitude as long as it

is in unity with the One.24 This becomes fundamental for Christians in maintaining

the oneness of God, their Trinitarian concept of God and for understanding the

20 Plato, "Parmenides," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, ed. Edith

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 137c-42a.
21 Ibid., 141.
22 Ibid., 141e.
23 Ibid., 142b-c. Italics are translator’s emphasis.
24 Ibid., 137c-42a. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the

Confessor," 8.

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incarnate Christ. Origen makes a similar argument pertaining to the Son (and Holy

Spirit) as the Wisdom and Word of the Father in is his model of the divine Triad.

Here, through this unity, Plato also concludes this “one-being” must be unlimited in

multitude since the diversity of Ideas and Forms are located in being, where the

movement from intelligible forms to sensible things can be initiated.25 He is careful

to clarify that the One itself, and its being, must be different things since the One is

non-being, but has through unity being since each part of the two parts, in its turn,

will possess both unity and being: “Therefore, a ‘one which is’ is both one and many,

whole and parts, limited as well as indefinitely numerous.”26 Plato concludes that a

pair that can be properly referred to as “both” must be two, and if a pair is two, each

of them must be “one” because he makes the unity of the “one-being” inseparable. 27

This thinking provides a premise for Origen’s understanding of the relationship

between the Father and the Son.

In Plato’s creation myth Timaeus, this second hypostasis is referred to as the

demiurge or the craftsman. The role of the craftsman is to make the visible universe

by using the world of Ideas as the blueprint:

“If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good it is manifest that he must have looked to
that which is eternal . . . for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes . . .
And having been created in this way, the world has been framed in the likeness of that which
is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if
this is admitted, be a copy of something. Now it is important that the beginning of
everything should be according to nature . . . they ought to be lasting and unalterable,
permanent and intelligible, as far as their natures allow. But when they express the copy or
likeness and not the eternal things themselves, the need only is like and analogous to the
former words. As being is to become, so is truth to belief.”28

25 Plato, "Parmenides," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, 143.
26 Ibid., 145.
27 Ibid., 142e-45.
28 Plato, "Timaeus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 29a-e.

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The craftsman is not the designer; the One is credited with that. While free to create,

the craftsman is not given the freedom to determine the character of his creation.

The craftsman only copies the blueprint provided to create the sensible world.

Therefore, the sensible world is only an image or reflection of universal Ideas. A

little more will be said about how Ideas are converted to Forms in “Plato’s

Metaphysics” below.

The Soul, Plato’s third hypostasis is a central feature of his system that plays

a mediating role. When Plato speaks of the Soul, he is usually referring to the cosmic

entity, the World Soul, as described in Timaeus 35 and The Laws 10.29 However in

this model, there is another level of souls known as the intelligent souls found in

human beings that he considers a microcosm of this larger entity. Intelligent souls

are also preexistent to the creation of their human bodies. The role of the Soul is to

be the mediator between the intelligible and sensible realms, and in order to do so it

has to reflect both what is “above” and what is “below” it.30

To bridge the gap between the world of Forms and the sensible world, the

craftsman (Divine Mind) fashions or creates a [World] Soul that fills the cosmos.31

“Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking of them in this
order, for when he put them together he would never have allowed that the elder should be
ruled by the younger . . . Whereas he made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and
older than the body to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be subject.”32

29 Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 6.
30 Ibid.
31 Plato, "Timaeus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 34b.
32 Ibid., 34b-c.

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The Soul is the source of motion and, as anima mundi, is an intelligent, living

creature, whose body is the visible world.33

“Now when the creator had framed the soul according to his will, he formed within her the
corporeal universe and brought the two together and united them center to center. The
Soul, interfused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also
she is the external envelopment, herself turning in herself, began a divine beginning of never
ceasing and rational life enduring throughout time. The body of heaven is visible, but the
soul is invisible and partakes in reason and harmony, and, being made by the best of
intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created . . . ”34

In Stoicism, the term world soul could be considered another designation for the

reality that could equally be termed God, Pneuma, Physis, Providence or active

principle. In Stoicism, the function of the soul is to promote unity and organic

harmony in the chain of organic beings by animating and sustaining unity, but not

by mediating being it.

In Phaedo, Plato begins to inform us of his anthropology, and describes the

whole of human nature as having two inseparable parts that parallel his first two

hypotheses, the nous or soul, and the body. The soul constitutes the inner man and

is invisible and invariable. In Phaedrus, Plato’s concept of a tripartite soul appears.

Because the human soul has its source in the World Soul, and ultimately the One, it is

immortal. The body represents the visible and is variable because of its relationship

with the sensible – it is always becoming. Although the soul is invariable, it is drawn

into the realm of the variable by the body and loses sight of its source.35 In

Phaedrus, Plato claims the soul becomes tripartite when it becomes incarnate in the

33 Allen and Springsted, Philosophy for Undertanding Theology, 6.
34 Plato, "Timaeus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 36d-37.
35 Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans., Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (Grand Rapids, MI:

Christian Classics Ethereal Library), 5.1.8. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of
Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 10.

10


body. According to Russell, this is the first time passion and desires are included

within the soul.36 To illustrate the struggle of the Intellect to bring passion and

desire for the sensible in line with the contemplation of the intellect within the soul,

Plato offers the metaphor of a charioteer, who is good, against two horses who are

of opposite stock. 37

The craftsman fashions human souls in the same ratio as the World Soul, so

that they each belong equally to the unchanging higher realm of necessary Forms

and the lower world of becoming.38 Another important function of both the World

and individual soul is to keep the creation directed towards the Good, the ultimate

source of its being.

“But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly
declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily achieved. And if anyone affirms
that in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very opposite
truth. When the father and creator saw the creature [Soul] which he had made moving and
living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make a
copy still more like the original, and this was an eternal living being, he sought to make the
universe eternal, so far as it might be.”39

Even though creation is constantly in a state of change, individual objects will

always resemble and seek the eternal form upon which they were based. For Plato,

the aim in life is “flight” from the world and likeness (homoiousios) to God, as far as

36 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, 37. Restated from:

Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 10.

37 Plato, "Phaedo," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters, ed. Edith

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series Lxxi (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 78b-79e. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the
Confessor," 10-1.
38 Allen and Springsted, Philosophy for Undertanding Theology, 6.
39 Plato, "Timaeus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 37c-d.

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nature makes it possible.40 To understand why, we have to take a brief look at

Plato’s metaphysics.

Plato’s Metaphysics

Some of what is known about Plato’s metaphysics arises from Aristotle.

Aristotle in Metaphysics (I.6 and XIII.6) claims that Plato, in addition to Ideas and

Forms, postulated in his later years the existence of “mathematicals” and that the

Soul, the place that receives the Ideas from the Divine Mind, transforms them into

mathematicals, or Forms, which are then projected upon matter by the Soul to form

the physical world.41 If that is indeed the case, it is highly probable he borrowed it

from Aristotle’s De Animas.42

Forms are not duplicates of each sensible thing, but there is a corresponding

Form for each general idea. Forms are graspable by mind and are used by a mind to

order matter, but they are independent of both mind and matter. The Soul moves

matter in an orderly way but these Forms are not part of the divine craftsman’s

mind or its own: the World of Forms is independent.43 Plato is the first to argue,

even before Aristotle, that the chaotic matter of the universe is ordered by the

presence of perennial structures in ephemeral phenomena, and that this order is

due to the participation of matter in particular universal Forms.44

40 Plato, "Theaetetus," in Plato: The Collected Works Including the Letters, 176b.
41 C.f. Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 6.
42 C.f. Aristotle, De Animas (Internet Classics Archive: Web Atomics, 1884-2000), III.4.
43 Allen and Springsted, Philosophy for Undertanding Theology, 10.
44 Adrian Pabst, Metaphysica: The Creation of Hierarchy, Interventions (Grand Rapids, MI:

William B Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012), 32. It is important to note here that for Plato,
matter is coeternal with the One and creation is not ex nihilo. C.f. Plato, "Timaeus," in The
Collected Dialogues of Plato, 32c.

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What is most important to this discussion is his primacy of relation. All

things in this system can trace their existence to the ecstatic outflow and relational

self-giving of the Good, in which all things participate in. Unlike Origen and Plotinus,

Plato’s theological and metaphysical epistemology does not advocate a turning away

from the sensible towards the eternal transcendent forms in the invisible world of

ideas. Neither is it the teleos of particulars to become like their universal Forms.45

This is because in his system particulars are diverse reflections of universal Forms

and not mirror images, and also because Plato locates the unity of particulars in the

particulars themselves, even though the ultimate source of this unity transcends

each particular. 46 According to Pabst, this is a conception Christian Neoplatonists

will later develop in the direction of divine ideas as God’s intellect, the Word.47 In

this monistic system, it is the unity between particular forms participating in their

respective universal forms that allow them to see the effect of the Good, such as

beauty, in the sensible world.48 It is the sensory experience of the physical world

that awakens intelligent souls to the presence of intelligible forms in sensible

things.49 Beauty, then, propels the mind to ascend from sensible particulars, via

45 Pabst, Metaphysica: The Creation of Hierarchy, 32.
46 For Plato, the link between an original and its reflections is not the same as the

relationship between a model and its copies or a whole and its parts. The being of a
reflection is wholly relation because it is dependent upon the being of the original. This
does not work for Christian Platonists because it would not allow Christ to be the visible
image of the invisible God. C.f. Ibid., 43.
47 Ibid., 38.
48 Plato, "Phaedrus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith

Hamilton and Hunting Cairns, Bollingen Seris Lxxi (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009), 250c-d.
49 Ibid., 249b-c. This scenario can be seen in Gregory of Nazianzus’ doctrine of

deification.

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knowledge of forms and concepts, towards cognition of the Good.50 This awakening

is more than just remembering, for it allows the intellect to mediate perceptions

that leads to the ability of the human soul to participate in the finite reasoning of the

infinite Logos – a “realist-idealist paradox” that allows an intellectual form to stretch

or transcend beyond its natural boundary.51 This concept is carried forward in both

Origen’s and Plotinus’ doctrines of participation in the Divine.

Summary

Plato’s dialogues offer a comprehensive scheme that seeks to offer answers

as to the creative source and power behind the creation of the cosmos, and both

how and why it was created. In these works, he devises a hierarchy of three

principles or hypostases; the first and highest of which defines divinity itself. This

hierarchy offered three levels of being: The One (nous), the demiurge (craftsman),

and the World Soul. Plato describes his first principle, the One, as transcendent,

simplex, eternal, incorporeal, immovable, impassible, unknowable and existing

outside of the temporality of time. The One is a non-being in the realm of infinite

potentiality, where it contemplates only itself and cannot be acted upon. These

concepts became accepted as fundamental truths for the first principles both in later

Platonism as well as Christianity.

Surrounding Plato’s second principle or hypostasis are several nascent

concepts that will also become very important to later Platonism as well as

Christianity. First, is the concept of eternal generation by means of the will that

50 Pabst, Metaphysica: The Creation of Hierarchy, 47-8. C.f. Plato, "Republic," in Plato: The

Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, VI. 510b, 11b-c.

51 Pabst, Metaphysica: The Creation of Hierarchy, 40.

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results in creation of an ontologically subordinate being. Second, this hypostasis

joins with the One to create an inseparable Dyad. Through the borrowing and

lending of idiomatic properties, this Dyad allows the One to be knowable through

the sharing of its being, thereby protecting the transcendence of the One. In return,

the One, by acting on the second (Divine Mind), enables it to share in the divinity of

the One that allows it to move the creative potential of the One to thought. It is

important to note here that the Divine Mind is not the agent through which creation

takes place - that action is reserved for the third principle, the Soul. This

communication of idiomatic properties takes place due to the concept of

participation - the ability of the second hypostasis to participate in the first, as the

source of its being, and share in its divinity. The idea of borrowing and lending of

idiomatic properties between the two opposing principles without resulting in

change in the divine nature of the first, anticipates the later relationship between

the divine and human natures found in the Incarnation.

It is to Plato’s third principle, the Soul that the roles of agent of creation and

mediator between the intelligible and sensible realms is given. As a living being, the

Soul supplies the eternal source of motion and power responsible for instilling order

to the chaotic preexistent matter, and whose own body makes visible the Ideas

found in the Divine Mind - creation is not ex nihilo. The craftsman creates the Soul

as a third intermediate form of being between the indivisible and the divisible, and

the immutable and the changeable.52 Just as the World Soul is meant to rule its body,

the cosmos, so the intelligent soul is meant to rule the human body.

52 Plato, "Timaeus," in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 35a.

15


In Plato’s scheme, the cosmos is framed by the Divine Mind and apprehended

by reason. The Divine Mind, the realm in which eternal things are conceived, does

not exist in the sensible world. But that which is seen by the senses in the visible

world is a reflection of those ideas. According to Plato, God creates out of goodness

and generosity and not out of necessity, nor as the result of internal compulsion to

enrich Himself with that which is not divine, another concept that will be embraced

by Origen and Plotinus.53 Therefore, then, Plato’s God is to be understood as an

absolutely immutable being formed by the Ideas and the Good: the Divine Mind, the

craftsmen, and the good Soul.54

Upon review of this scheme, one can see why Platonism had such a large

influence as any philosophy in the development of the Doctrine of the Trinity. It

helps to explain the Son’s relationship to the Father and vaguely with the Holy

Spirit. Just as thought is subordinate to potential in the scheme above, the Son is

subordinate to the Father.55 However, unlike Nicene theology, in Platonism

subordination of the Son to the Father also includes the Son being inferior to the

Father.

Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria

Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria offer us examples as to how the

Apologists, the Christian Platonists of the second century were able to begin to make

53 Korak, "The Influence of Philosophy on Early Christianity," 7-8.
54 C.f. Plato, "Laws," in Plato: The Collected Works Including the Letters, ed. Edith

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), X. especially
897-99.
55 Restated from: Korak, "Created or Uncreated: The Influence of Philosophy and

Cultural Normatives on the Development of Opposing Interpretations of Christ as Logos up

to Nicaea," 10.

16


the connection between the philosophical concepts and terminology of Plato and

others with revelation found in Scripture. After Paul’s New Testament writings, it

was first century apologist Justin Martyr (100-165 C.E.) in the Latin West who first

associated the Logos, or Divine Person of the Word with the ancient philosophy of

the Logos who along with Clement of Alexandria helps set the stage for Origen.56 In

several of his works, he credits Platonism with opening his mind’s eye towards divine

Wisdom. In Dialogue with Trypho, Clement shares his experiences with teachers of

the various philosophies that left him unsatisfied, but it was not until he studied

Platonism was, he overpowered. He claimed, its emphasis on the “contemplation of

ideas [that] furnished his mind with wings.”57

In his Second Apology Justin asserts that some of the ancients had partial

knowledge of the Word, but it was limited as to what they could glean from the

sensible World:

“Our doctrines appear to be greater than all human teaching; because Christ who appeared
for our sakes, became the whole rational being both body, and reason, and soul. For
whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and
contemplating some part of the Word. But because they did not know the Whole of the
Word, which is Christ, they often contradicted themselves. And those who by human birth
were more ancient than Christ, when they attempted to consider and prove things by reason,
were brought before the tribunals as impious persons and busybodies. And Socrates, who
was more zealous in this direction than all of them, was accused of the very same crimes as
ourselves.”58

56 Pabst, Metaphysica: The Creation of Hierarchy, 61.
57 Justin Martyr, "Dialogue with Trypho," in The Apostolic Fathers: Justin Martyr and

Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1996), II.
58 Justin Martyr, "Second Apology," in The Apostolic Fathers: Justin Martyr and Irenaeus,

ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.
B. Eerdsmans Publishin Co., 1996), X.

17


In his First Apology, Justin argued that what Plato taught concerning the immortality

of human soul, he learned from Moses who was taught directly by the Spirit of

Prophecy, the preexistent Word of Christ Himself and therefore was indebted to

divine revelation.59 Justin also affirms that the Stoics were able to establish their

ethics based on ‘just and universal principles’ because the logos spermatikos or seed

of the Logos is innate, in human nature, but at the same time also claimed that only

in Christ can the Word truly be known:

“And those of the Stoic school – since, so far as their moral teaching went, they were
admirable, as were also the poets in some particulars, on account of the seed of reason [the
Logos] implanted in every race of men – were, we know, hated and put to death . . . “60

According to Pabst, Justin’s theory of logos spermatikos appears to draw two distinct

but complementary philosophical traditions. First, from Platonism the concept of

forms able to participate in the Good and the natural desire of intellectual beings to

seek Truth, Beauty and unity with the ultimate source of its being which is not

radically different than what is taught by Christianity:

“For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic
word, seeing what was related to it . . .. For all the writers were able to see
realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them.61

Second, Justin borrows from Stoic theory that knowledge of truth is indispensable

for a just and virtuous life and that there is only one set of natural laws. According

to Pabst, Justin develops these two traditions in a distinctly Christian way by

arguing that is the Incarnate Christ - the Word made flesh - that acts in us and plants

59 Martyr, "Frist Aploogy," in The Apostolic Fathers: Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, XLIV -

XLV. Clement frequently links philosophy with theology.

60 Martyr, "Second Apology," in The Apostolic Fathers: Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, VIII.
61 Ibid., XIII.

18


the seeds of the divine Logos in our minds. 62 In other words, Justin does not believe

that that the human intellect is capable of apprehension of God based on what is

revealed by sensible objects, but that it is the Word of God within each intelligent

creature that enables one to know God through the revelation of the Word.

Justin’s knowledge of Platonic metaphysics of relationality and participation

informs his understanding regarding the generation and “otherness” of the

Incarnate Logos as his distinction from the Father. In Dialogue, he contends that

according to the Scriptures:

[T]hat God begat before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power
[proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now
the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos . . . He is called by
all those names, since he ministers to the Father’s will and since he was begotten of the
Father by an act of the will . . . The Word of Wisdom, who is Himself this God begotten of the
Father of all things, and Word and Wisdom and Power and the Glory of the Begetter, will
bear evidence to me . . . “63

Here we have the same mode of generation Plato uses for his second hypostasis:

generation through an act of the will of the Father as the source of all things. In this

chapter, Justin makes no mention of the Son as being coeternal with the Father, only

that he was begotten before he had “made the earth, and long before He made the

deeps . . . the earth, . . . before the springs of the water had been issued forth, [or]

before the mountains had been established.”64 Also, he conflates the titles of Holy

Spirit and Son, implying perhaps the title is interchangeable. It needs to be noted,

that Clement, as a Christian Platonist, affirms God creates ex nihilo according to

Genesis 1.

62 Pabst, Metaphysica: The Creation of Hierarchy, 61.
63 Martyr, "Dialogue with Trypho," in The Apostolic Fathers: Justin Martyr and Irenaeus,

LXI.
64 Ibid.

19


In the Greek East, Clement of Alexandria (153-220 C.E.) is amongst the

earliest to contemplate philosophy as “the handmaid of theology.” In Stromata V,

Clement credits philosophy as necessary for righteousness, before the Incarnation,

to “bring the ‘Hellenic mind’, as to the law, the Hebrews, ‘to Christ.’ Philosophy,

therefore was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.”65

Clement sees philosophy as helpful for the study and acquisition of wisdom because

“[P]hilosohpy is the study of wisdom, and wisdom is the knowledge of things divine

and human, and their causes.”66 Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History claims Clement

follows Justin in the synonymous use of Spirit and Son.67 Like Justin, Clement

credits philosophers with limited knowledge and wisdom when limited to what is

only observable. For Clement, faith is the foundation of wisdom and the means

through which one can be a partaker of truth.68

In the limited resources that I have located regarding Justin and Clement as

conversation partners with Plato, I have not located any indication that their

theology offered a defined third hypostasis. This would make sense if they were

attributing the tasks of creation, revelation and redemption to the Son alone thereby

thinking of God as primarily binitarian and the Spirit as simply a mode of activity of

the Son.

65 Clement, "The Stromata," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers of the Second Century, ed.

Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (New York: Cosimo, 2007), I.V.
66 Ibid.
67 Eusebius, "Fragments from the Hypotyposes," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers of the

Second Century, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (New York: Cosimo, 2007),
II.15. Fragment can be found on p. 579.
68 Clement, "The Stromata," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers of the Second Century, IV.

20


Perhaps one of Justin’s and Clements’s most important contributions is they

opened the door and began to build the bridge between philosophy and theology,

that allowed for the later use of terms and concepts that became invaluable to

Christianity’s developing doctrine of the Trinity.

Origen

Foundational Information

At this point in time, Middle Platonism leans towards monistic pantheism,

where God is transcendent and, as unmoved source of all reality, the stability and

order for all of creation. God as source has become identical with Plato’s concept of

the Good (Republic 6.509b) and the One, the first hypostasis in Parmenides: free,

ungenerate, incorrupt, pure simplex, and free from passions. The divine Logos is the

sum of all the logoi – rational and spermatic principles that govern the universe and

the source of all rational beings (logika). In the works of Plutarch (c. 45-120 CE), the

influence of Stoicism can be identified. In his philosophy, Plato’s Forms and the

demiurge coalesce to form a supreme intellective principle, the “really real,” whose

intellection is the divine Forms, and who becomes the paradigm for the world of

becoming as the object of striving for all Nature.69 The impact of Neopythagorean

dualism associated particularly with Numenius of Apamea, and taught by Ammonios

69 Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 199-202. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of

Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 7.

21


Saccas, becomes a primary influence for Origen, and for Plotinus who helps to move

Platonism into its third phase.70

Because of the prevalence of Middle Platonism in society during this time,

Mark Edwards asserts that many scholars accept as truth, rather than argue

otherwise, that Origen’s conception of the Godhead was Platonic. He also contends

that it is because they believed Plato was a theist, but protests that there is no real

evidence to believe that he was a monotheist or theist of any kind.71 There is

evidence, however, that Origen took what he deemed the best from a number of

philosophers and poets and presented all of it he determined as useful to his

students.72

The Three Hypostases of Origen

One of the fundamental distinctions of Origen’s theology is not so much his

biblical concern between Creator and creation, but for his concern between the

intelligible or spiritual world and visible or material world.73 According to Joseph

Trigg, Origen’s On First Principles is simultaneously both a “philosophical treatise on

the relation of God to the world”, as well as a “development of a coherent body of

doctrine from the logical elaboration of the implications of the rudimentary

70 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, 36. Restated from:

Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 7.

71 M. J. Edwards, Origen against Plato (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2002), 48.
72 Gregory Thaumaturgus, "In Origenem Oratio," in St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Life and

Works, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1998), p. 120.
73 Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999).

22


doctrines of the Christian faith.”74 In other words, he applies philosophic reasoning

to biblical exegesis, affirming that the nature of God can only be through God’s own

revelation. Origen interprets the Christian faith in terms of Platonic categories and

uses Platonic language such as incomprehensible, immeasurable and incomposite,

and uses the term simplex in contrast to the multiplicity of creation when referring

to God as Father. Origen claims God cannot be known by his essence (ousia), but

only by his power (dunamis) that he acts upon other beings.75 This power is

mediated by the second person in Origen’s divine Triad, who is the source of every

power that is exercised by all fallen creatures.76 It appears that the use of

philosophy and allegorical interpretation found in his commentaries on Genesis led

to criticism from the same anti-intellectual Christians about whom Cement had

complained. So, Origen wrote On First Principles as a way to explain and justify his

interpretive method.77

The works of Origen most helpful to this discussion are Against Celsus, On

First Principles and Commentary on John. In these two works, Origen often quotes or

refers to Apamea (c. 150 C.E. – late second century), whose work he respected, as a

74 Josseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philsophy in the Third-Century Church

(London: SCM Press Ltd., 1985), 93.

75 Origen, Origen on Prayer, trans. William A. Curtis (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics

Ethereal Library), XXIII.

76 Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Phillip Schaff (Grand

Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1819-1893), I.38. “But how could He ever be
the Paraclete, and the atonement, and the propitiation without the power of God, which
makes an end of our weakness, flows over the souls of believers, and is administered by
Jesus, who indeed is prior to it and Himself the power of God . . . “
77 Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 91.

23


Pythagorean who was influenced by Plato.78 Numenius proposed a godhead

consisting of a triad of gods. Nemenius refers to the three as the One, the demiurge

as the Intellective-Principle, and the demiurge as a Cosmogonic-Principle, but there is

no discontinuity in these three gods for they are simply modes of the same divine

being as the deity unfolds progressively down the scale of reality.79 The highest

intellect is at rest and free of all distraction: this is comparable to the One in Plato’s

scheme. Simultaneously, the lower intellect engages in ceaseless contemplation of

the higher, and as long as it continues to gaze upwards and contemplate the first, it

generates Ideas. However, when its vision looks down towards matter, it undergoes

a schism and becomes the reluctant Demiurge of the present world.80 This

demiurge resulting from schism is reminiscent of Plato’s World Soul, whose role is

to mediate between the intelligent and sensible realms.

Origen’s most complete treatise laying out his doctrine of God can be found in

On First Principles, which can be divided into four sections. In the first section

(Books I – II), Origen gives his overview of metaphysics by considering successively

God the Father, Christ, the Holy Spirit, rational creatures and creation, so he is said

to be the first Christian Middle Platonist to definitively define three hypostases in

the Godhead. In the rest of the treatise he addresses the use of allegorical and

typological literary methods, the providential continuity between the Hebrew

Scriptures and the New Testament, by identifying Scripture that prefigures or

78 C.f. Origen, "Against Celsus," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers 4: Father of the Third Century,

ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts, Sir James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Cox (New York:
Cosimo Classics, 2007), I.xv, IV.iv, V.lvii.
79 Plato, "Parmenides," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, 142b-c.
80 Edwards, Origen against Plato, 52.

24


foreshadows the Logos. Finally, he reveals his interpretation of creation’s return to

divine unity with its source, through the recapitulation of principle subjects, based

on his understanding of I Cor. 15:28 – “when God may be all in all.”81

His doctrine of God is developed within the midst of guarding against

Adoptionism, Gnosticism and Sabellianism. Book One of On First Principles reveals

the conceptions of God that Origen held in common with Middle Platonism as

filtered through his Christian lens: God has to be more than Creator; God has to also

be redeemer. Against Gnosticism, God has to be one. A primary concern was to

oppose Marcionite and gnostic doctrines that separated the creator God of the

Hebrew Scriptures from Jesus’ father:

“God is the one who created and set in order all things, who when nothing existed caused the
universe . . . God of all righteous men . . . Adam, Abel, Seth . . . This God sent the Lord Jesus
Christ . . . This just and good God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, himself gave the law,
the prophets and the gospels, and he is the God both of the apostles and the Old and New
Testaments.”82

In this quote, Origen directly connects the Father of Christ, the just and good God,

with the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, claiming them to be one and the same.

Origen’s first principle, God and Father, is the source of all being, and “when

nothing existed caused the universe to be ex nihilo.”83 Origen adopts the attributes

assigned by Plato to the One, but emphasizes the incoporeality of the Father, the

same incoporeality that he extends to both the pre-incarnate Son and the Holy

Spirit. 84 “Life without [the necessity of] a body is found in the Trinity alone.”85 This

81 Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 95.
82 Origen, On First Principles (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 2013), XXV.
83 Ibid., Preface.4. Origen, "Against Celsus," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers 4: Father of the

Third Century, 7.38.

84 Origen, Principles, I.1.6. See footnote 21, page 7.

25


doctrine of transcendence in Christian thought is also intertwined with

omnipotence. He professes God must be thought of as mind or mind itself,

reminiscent of Numenius, and states “mind does not need physical space in which to

move and operate.”86 Plato’s demiurge is also mind, but in his hierarchy it is not the

source of the Ideas or the highest principle, the One is. In Stoicism, God as Logos is

thought of as reason, and for Aristotle, his Prime Mover can be described more as

“thought of thoughts”.87

Origen’s first task after introducing God the Father is to define the Son’s

relationship to the Father. He has two problems he needs to solve. First, he has to

figure out, “How the Son could be a separate divine hypostasis (individual entity) if

the Son is the Wisdom of the Father?” and “As hypostasis, how can Wisdom have an

existence apart from the person or being that is wise?”88 Origen cannot identify the

Son as a different mode of existence (Numenius and Sabellius) because that would

not allow him to fulfill the role as mediator. But he also cannot allow him to be a

completely separate from the Father, because then there would be two Gods.89

Using Platonic categories forged by Plato, he arrives at this own formula of eternal

generation.

As in Plato’s hierarchy, Origen’s second principle, or Son, is generated or

begotten through an eternal act of the Father’s will. Because of the Father’s divine

freedom, Origen claims: (1) that divine procreation cannot be imaged after the

85 Ibid., II.2.2.
86 Ibid., I.1.6.
87 Edwards, Origen against Plato, 58.
88 Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 96.
89 Ibid.

26


pattern of human freedom; (2) the Father’s will alone is enough to make what the

Father wills to come to pass (i.e. no material conception); (3) the Son being born of

the will of the Father proceeds from his intelligence and is therefore of the same

invisible nature as the Father; and (4) Origen claims the Son’s (and the Spirit’s)

hypostasis is generated out of the Father’s goodness, and that generation is a free

and necessary act on the Father’s part because for God freedom and necessity

coincide.90 By embracing these concepts, Origen is able to reject Gnostic theories of

emanation on the grounds that they involve division of the divine nature.91 Eternal

generation by means of the will, then, makes the Son a dynamic expansion rather

than a division of the divine nature. The Son as the radiance has all the glory of God

and the only one who can fulfill God’s will. As radiance, the Father communicates to

him his own divinity at every instant by constantly feeding the Son.92 As second in

position to the Father, he can be called ‘first born of all creation’. Like Plato’s second

principle, the Son is meant to protect the Father’s transcendence and act as agent of

creation, but in Origen’s scheme the Son is also redeemer.

Crouzel reminds his readers that Ammonios would have taught both Origen

and Plotinus about equivalences based on the unity of nature, and this is why one

must not confuse the subordinationism of the Ante-Nicenes with that of the

Arians.93 Origen is before Nicaea so he cannot use hypostasis and ousia in the same

ontological way. Origen warns, in Commentary on John that the Father is not the

whole substance of the Trinity, and that the second person does not stand in

90 Origen, Principles, I.2.6.
91 Ibid., Preface.4.
92 Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, I.13.24, I 20.18.
93 Crouzel, Origen, 186-9.

27


accidental relationship to him because ousia and hypostasis are used with different

verbs, so they are not quite synonymous.94 For Origen, ousia is the generic nature

the three persons of the Godhead hold in common. Hypostasis is the peculiar more

specific determination or impression of that nature. In On Prayer he affirms that the

Son and Father are distinct in both substrate (hyperkeimoenon) and in nature or

essence, but he would not have supported the Son as monogenes, from the ousia of

the Father; the Son does not come out of the Father and become external to him: he

dwells in the Father and the Father in the Son, even in the Incarnation.95 For Origen,

generation infers that the Son (and Holy Spirit) share the same essential

characteristics as the Father because - like always begets like. Most essential for the

Son are the characteristics of Goodness, Truth, Life and Power.96 Origen’s imagery

expresses the dynamic equivalent to the ontological Nicene homoouisos.

In the opening verses of John 1, there are two divine subjects. In

Commentary on John, Origen maintained the superiority of the Father by referring to

him as autoagathon and the Son as autotheos, which he borrows from Numenius.97

In Platonic neologism, auto would have implied that God the Father is the paradigm

in which an indefinite host of gods participates. The Son is autotheos because he

depends on the Father for his existence. Plato differentiates between agenneton

(ingenerate and self-sufficient world of Ideas) and geneton (created).98 Origen does

not teach that the Son “participates” in the Father who created him, but he believes

94 Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, I.24.
95 Ibid., XX.18. Origen, On Prayer, XV. For Platonists, this is limited to corporeal things.
96 Origen, Principles, I.2.
97 Edwards, Origen against Plato, 52. Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene

Fathers, II.2.
98 Edwards, Origen against Plato, 61.

28


that the monad, which is ‘God himself’, is apprehended through the unique

theophany of Christ.99 Also in this commentary, Origen identifies the Father as Ho

Theos, and uses Theos as adjectival to denote the divinity the Son receives from the

Father.100

The Father is simplex, but the Son, one in his hypostasis, is multiple in his

epinoiai (titles ) and accounts for the diversity found in creation.101 Origen divides

his epinoiai into two groups. In the first group are those titles involved in creation

(Wisdom, Word, Life and Truth) as conceived in Plato’s Timaeus who created

according to a pattern.102 In the second group, are those epinoiai that involve

redemption such as the predicated “I am” statements in the Gospel of John, or the

Good Shepherd, but most importantly as first-born of all creation and first-born of

the dead.103 These epinoiai are the means of union by which creation can return to

the simplicity of the first hypostasis. Because of the diversity of creation, there

needs to be more epinoia forms in creation because there needs to be one for each

fallen state.104

Amongst the Son’s many titles, there are a few that Origen considered the

most important are: Wisdom and Word. Origen describes Wisdom as an effluence

99 Ibid., 72.
100 Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, II.2. C.f. Crouzel, Origen, 182-

3.
101 Implies conceptional distinction. Cf. Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 92.
102 Origen, Principles, I.2. C.f. Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 97.
103 C.f. Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, I.39.
104 Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 98.

29


that reveals the almighty glory of God.105 Naming the Son the as Wisdom of the

Father is also important for defending against third century Adoptionism.

“Wherefore we recognize that God was always the Father of his only-begotten Son, who was
born indeed of him and draws his being from him, but is yet without any beginning, not only
of that kind which can be distinguished by periods of time, but even of that kind which the
mind alone is wont to contemplate in itself and to perceive, if I may so say, with the bare
intellect and reason. Wisdom, therefore, must be believed to have been begotten beyond the
limits of any beginning that we can speak of or understand. And because in this very
subsistence of wisdom there was implicit every capacity and form of the creation that was to
be, both of those things that exist in a primary sense and of those which happen in
consequence of them, the whole being fashioned and arranged beforehand by the power of
foreknowledge, wisdom, speaking through Solomon, in regard to these very created things
that had been as it were outlined and prefigured in herself, says that she was created as a
‘beginning of the way’ of God, which means that she contains within herself both the
beginnings and causes and species of the whole of creation.”106

Origen makes the argument that there is never a time when the Father is without

His Wisdom, so the Son must have been begotten beyond the limits of any beginning

we can speak of or understand.107 The Son also has to be eternal to protect the

changeless simplicity of the Father as source. Plotinus when describing the

relationship between his first and second hypostases will also use this Platonic

reasoning.

The Logos, the eternal Wisdom and Word of God at the center of Origen’s

theology, is not the Christ of Christian worship or the creeds, and not yet the New

Testament Son of Man. As the second principle in the divine Triad, the Logos derives

his power as creator and redeemer from the Father, who employs him to protect his

transcendence. The Son assumes two of the roles distinguished by Plato in Timaeus.

As Wisdom, he contains the intelligible world of Ideas and Reasons. In other words,

105 Origen, Principles.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.

30


he is the model with which the world was created. As Word or Logos, he is the

immanent rationality that animates the Cosmos and is the basis of human

rationality.108 In Plato’s scheme, this is carried out by the Soul. The Word is styled

Logos because He is the ruler of the logikoi and logika that belong to the rational

order.

The Logos is the Father‘s instrument through which creation happens

because it is the Logos who expresses the Ideas and the Reasons that are in Wisdom

to make individual beings.109 All of creation is the work of both the Father and the

Son. This double role as model and agent is seen again in the creation of

humankind. First, in the Johannine sense, in his mediating role as savior, he is the

first-born of creation and first-born of the dead. Second, in the philosophical sense,

as Logos, he reveals to rational beings the mysteries contained in his Wisdom as Life,

Light, Resurrection, Truth, Power, and Justice.110 The prototype of immanent Logos

as creator and sustainer of all things visible can be found in Stoic cosmology.111

Christ as Logos or Word is found only in the prologue to John’s gospel. The object,

then, of John’s prologue is to show that the incarnation of the Word is no new tale

but a conclusion of the speech that commenced when God said, “Let there be

light.”112 The Christ of faith is both God and man, whose role is to mediate the

covenant between God and man by removing the wall between sinful humanity and

God’s righteousness.

108 Ibid., II.6.
109 Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, II.3.
110 Crouzel, Origen, 190.
111 C.f. Edwards, Origen against Plato, 65-6.
112 Ibid., 71. C.f. Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers, II.4.

31


Origen interprets the Incarnation as paradoxical: “When therefore, we see in

Him some things so human . . . and some things so divine . . .”113 According to Trigg,

the doctrine of the Incarnation owes nothing to Platonism. He believes Platonists

would view the Incarnation as absurd because it united the highest mode of

existence, God, with the very lowest mode of matter that would have been below the

dignity of the divine nature.114 Nestorius agreed with this view thereby rejecting

the hypostatic union between Christ’s two natures and opting instead for a moral

union of wills.

Although beyond the scope of this exam question, I need to talk briefly about

Origen’s doctrine of preexistent souls because it speaks to Christ’s role as mediator

and redeemer for humanity. There are really two creation stories in Origen’s

theology - the first being the creation of the spiritual realm, the second the physical

world. In Origen’s cosmology, creation of matter and the sensible world is the result

of the fall noetic beings that become insatiated with God the Father and fall from the

heavenly realm, where they are then ensouled in a body. In other words, creation

results from the need for these “souls” to have a place to “remember” God and

“desire” a return to the heavenly realm. He connects Adam and Eve’s fall from the

heavenly realm (Garden of Eden) with creation and the existence of the material

world. Origen interprets “garments of skins” in Genesis 3:20 to imply these noetic

beings as being ensouled in flesh and does not mean providing exterior clothing for

their human bodies. Yes, this contains strong elements of Gnosticism. According to

Origen, there is one noetic being that keeps its focus, and this becomes the soul of

113 Origen, Principles, II.6.
114 Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 99-100.

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Christ’s human nature.115 Because Origen’s cosmology included the idea of

preexistent souls, it was possible for him to postulate a preexistent union between

the single noetic being, who did not depart from God during the primeval fall that

gave rise to creation, and the Logos prior to conception by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s

womb. This soul in its union with the Logos acts, then, as medium between God and

the flesh.

“But whereas, by reason of the faculty of free will, variety and diversity had taken hold of
individual souls, so that one was attached to its author with a warmer and another with a
feebler and weaker love, that soul of which Jesus said, “No man taketh from me my soul” (Jn
10:18), clinging to God from the beginning of the creation and ever after in a union
inseparable and indissoluble, as being the soul of the wisdom and word of God and of the
truth and the true light and receiving him wholly, and itself entering into his light and
splendor, was made him in a pre-eminent degree one spirit just as the apostle promises to
them whose duty it is to imitate Jesus, that ”he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit” (I
Cor6:17). This soul, then, acting as a medium between God and the flesh (for it was not
possible for the nature of God to mingle with a boy apart from some medium), there is born,
as we said, the God-man, the medium being that existence to whose nature it was not
contrary to assume a body. Yet neither . . .was it contrary to nature for that soul, being as it
was a rational existence, to receive God, into whom, as we said above, it had already
completely entered by entering into the word and wisdom and truth.”116

Origen views this union as a reward for perfection of the soul’s love. This then

becomes the premise for our union with Christ during our baptism and our path to

perfect love (deification). In Christianity, resurrection includes union with some

sort of corporeal body, at the final resurrection, along with the ascent of the soul.

The soul’s goal in Platonism is the abandonment of materiality.

Just as Plato’s second hypostasis allows the One to be known, for Origen the

Incarnation provides the example by which humanity can begin to comprehend the

nature of God. Christ’s death and resurrection makes human beings worthy of the

115 C.f. Crouzel, Origen, 92-5.
116 Origen, Principles, II.6.3.

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knowledge of God, but more importantly, this allows humanity to progress from

knowledge of the incarnate Son to knowledge of the Son as Logos and ultimately to

knowledge of God as Father.117 As first-born from the dead, humanity can share in

the immortality of the risen Christ.

Origen’s third divine principle, the Holy Spirit, is subordinate to the Son in

terms of economy.118 This is based upon Origen’s claim that the Father created all

things through the Logos, not by the Logos.119 The source of creation is still the

Father. The Holy Spirit, as a product of the Word, has no essence of His own beyond

that of the Father and Son. The Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son

coeternally as Wisdom does. Origen maintains that according to the apostles, the

Holy Spirit is “united in honor and dignity with the Father and Son,” but he professes

that it is not yet clearly known whether he is to be thought of as “begotten or

unbegotten, or as being himself also a Son of God.”120

“We consider, therefore, that there are three hypostases, the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit: and at the same time, we believe nothing to be uncreated but the Father. We,
therefore, as the more pious and true course, admit that all things were made by the Logos,
and that the Holy Spirit is the most excellent and the first in order of all that was made by the
Father through Christ. And this, perhaps, is why the spirit is not said to be God’s own Son.
The only begotten is by nature from the beginning a Son, and the Holy Spirit seems to have
need of the Son to minister to Him His essence, so as to enable Him not only to exist, but be
wise and reasonable and just, and all that we must think of Him as being. All this He has by
participation of the character of Christ.”121

117 Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy, 101.
118 Ibid.
119 Origen, "Commentary on John," in Ante-Nicene Fathers.
120 Origen, Principles, Preface.2.
121 Ibid., II.1.6.

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The Spirit ministers to the Son, through whom the Spirit has his existence. Just as

the Son participates in and ministers to the Father as the source of his being, so also

the Spirit ministers to the Son through whom and by whom he has his being.

In this doctrine, the Holy Spirit has a very limited role. Unlike Plato’s World

Soul, it does not participate in creation; it does not animate the cosmos nor serve as

mediator between the One and the world. Later theologians (Cappadocians) will

give the Holy Spirit a role in creation, but Origen does not, based on his

interpretation of Gen 1:2, where he identifies the hovering Spirit as observer. The

Holy Spirit, according to Origen, is not the sanctifier of creation; he attributes that

too to the Logos. Like his doctrine on the Incarnation, his doctrine on Holy Spirit

owes nothing to Platonism. Origen includes the Holy Spirit in his divine Triad

because it is found in Scripture (Matt 28:19), but he seems to follow Justin Martyr

and Clement in assigning nearly all of God’s activities to the Father and the Son.

Origen limits the role of the Holy Spirit to only the inspiration of the prophets

and the inspiration and sanctification of believers:

“I see, however, that the special coming of the Holy Spirit to men is declared to have
happened after Christ’s ascension into heaven rather than before his coming into the world.
Before the time the gift of the Holy Spirit was bestowed on prophets only and on a few
others among the people who happened to have proved worth of it; but after the coming of
the Savior, it is written that “the saying was filled which was spoken by the prophet Joel,
namely, that “it shall come to pass in the last days, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh
and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:16-7; Joel 2:28).”122

The Holy Spirit helped the prophets unlock, beyond the literal, the deeper spiritual

meaning of the law and prophets. Prior to the Incarnation, the dwelling of the Holy

Spirit upon the prophets was limited and temporary, but the Incarnation makes the

122 Ibid., II.7.2. C.f. Acts 2:16-7; Joel 2:28.

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Spirit accessible to all believers after His ascension because the Spirit indwells those

who are baptized.123 He claims that it is through the grace of the Holy Spirit that the

authors of the Bible are given insight into the divine mysteries, and to others the gift

of inspired interpretation of Scripture and of the mysteries.124 The Holy Spirit, by

whom He provides comfort, opens and reveals a consciousness of spiritual

knowledge.125

Since both the Son and the Holy Spirit are generated as an eternal act of the

Father’s will, the divine hypostases comprising Origen’s Triad work together in each

of their acts. For the Holy Spirit it means: (1) the gifts of the Spirit originate in the

Father; (2) the Son, as minister to the Father, distributes them; (3) and the Spirit as

the “matter” of those gifts delivers them.126

Summary and Comparison

Both Origen and Plato believed in the ultimate goodness of the created world.

Platonism professed the eternality of matter and assumed that the existence of the

world was a necessary reality, and not a contingent one, because to think otherwise

would imply change in the eternally existing first principle.

Origen carries on the tradition of Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria in

developing his doctrine of God using Platonic categories, philosophical concepts and

reasoning. The role of Origen’s first principle, God and Father, is to give or produce

being from non-being. God the Father in Origen’s divine Triad is in all practicality

indistinguishable from Plato’s first principle in transcendence and knowability -

123 Ibid.
124 Ibid., II.7.4.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid., II.6.4.

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both first principles need a revealer. The relationship between Father (as source)

and Son (hypostasis) is one of extension; the Father does not create a separate being

as is found in Plato. For Origen, the Son as both Wisdom and Word is tasked with

revealing the Father through inspiration and theophany.

Like Plato’s second hypostases, the Son also has to be coeternal with the

Father in order to protect the changeless simplicity of the Father. The Father, as the

active principle, is the source of all charity and goodness which overflows from Him

onto the Son and onto the Sprit, and ergo onto humanity. Origen’s first principle

creates out of goodness and generosity and not out of necessity, just as the Good in

Plato’s Republic. Thus, it is through the Son, His minister, and through the Spirit that

the Father acts. The Father is the center of the unity of will that guides each of the

divine hypostases. The Father’s role is primordial because it is by the Father that

the generation of the Son, the procession of the Spirit, Providence and the

divinization of rational creatures all come about.

Origen’s perspective on Providence aligns with that of the Stoics and Platonists,

but differs from Aristotle and Celsus, a fellow Middle Platonist. Although both

Origen and Celsus extend divine providence to the whole of creation, Origen extends

it, as one would expect, particularly to humanity as individual personalities due to

their need for redemption.127 No redemption is needed for Plato because each

particular contains what it needs to recognize and desire its source.

For Origen, the soul’s return to God begins with faith and his argument for free

will. Because rational creatures have the privilege of self-motion, being able to

127 Origen, "Against Celsus," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers 4: Father of the Third Century,

IV.23 ff.

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move from within themselves in response to external situations, choosing to receive

the Gospel and seek fellowship with God is a function of the will. The soul’s ability to

move, along with the capacity for rational thought, assists the will in its ability to

resist temptations and choose between sensual passions and moral responsibility.

When united with the Logos through baptism, and assisted by the Holy Spirit, the

transformation of the human soul can begin its ascent back to the perfect love.

Therefore, the human soul also has the power to do good and shun evil. Origen

states that God’s work exceeds ours, but that the will of moral responsibility must

cooperate first.

Origen’s Wisdom (Sophia) is a corollary to Plato’s Divine Mind in that she is the

beginning in which the Logos (knowledge and reason) is found.128 Wisdom contains

the Intelligible World in which are found Ideas in the Platonic sense, and reason in

the Stoic. As Word, he shares the intellective property of God’s perfect Reason. In

other words, the role of the Son is to make being logikos. Plato’s first principle

creates through the Divine Mind (craftsman), but it is the World Soul, as anima

mundi that is the source of motion that brings the Ideas to realization as created

objects with eternal matter. For Origen, the Father creates ex nihilo through only

the power of the Word, who also acts as craftsman but converts divine Ideas to

sensible objects directly.

Origen’s conception of divine Wisdom as the World Soul is set apart from

Platonic models when viewed in Trinitarian Context. In this model, the “soul” is not

to be understood in the sense of a “middle being” that stands halfway between God

128 Proverbs 8:22; John 1:1

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and the sensible universe, because for Origen it is just another way of speaking

about the second person of the Trinity. In Plato’s hierarchy, the World Soul serves

as the mediator between the intelligible and sensible realms, and as giver of life. In

order to do so, the Soul has to reflect the nature of both what is “above” and “below”

it in order to bridge the gap. But in Origen’s hierarchy, it is the Logos, who as Word

empties himself of incoporeality to become Incarnate, and who acts as mediator

between the intelligible realm and creation. So, the communication of idiomatic

properties, which take place between the hypostases of Plato’s Dyad, are reserved

for the union between the divine and human natures of the Incarnation, so that the

Father’s providential plan for the recapitulation of creation and rational creatures

(logikoi) can progress.

Regarding the Holy Spirit, there is no comparable hypostases in Plato’s

model. However, the generation and subordination of the Holy Spirit to the Son is

the same in some ways as the subordination of the World Soul to the Divine Mind.

The World Soul proceeds by the power of the Demiurge, but its source is still the

One. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son as agent of creation,

but its source is the Father. The Holy Spirit is not involved in creation in Origen’s

scheme. The role of the Holy Spirit is to confer sanctity only to believers by

conveying the gifts of the Father to believers, whether they were the prophets of

Israel or baptized believers of Christ; Plato has no need for the conveyance of

sanctity.

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Plotinus

Foundational Information

In the early third century, Middle Platonism in Alexandria begins to develop

into Neoplatonism. Ammonios Saccas (c. 175- 242 CE) is generally credited as its

founder. Ammonios was a Christian and a teacher whose students included both

Plotinus and Origen. Although there are no known writings credited to Ammonios,

Plotinus’ Enneads are recognized as the cornerstone of this form of Platonism,

followed by the works of Porphyry (c. 234- 302/5 CE), Iamblichus (c. 240/50-325

CE), and Proclus (412 – 85 C.E.).129 The Christian Neoplatonist’s most influenced by

these philosophers’ include Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, and Dionysius the

Areopagite.130

Plotinus’ developing systematic and ontological interpretation of Plato’s

three hypotheses in Parmenides becomes the basis of his own metaphysical system.

Plotinus’ system offers three hierarchical levels of being called hypostases or real

existences. The three hypostases at the root of Plotinus’ philosophy are the three

principles or what Plotinus sometimes refers to as beginnings (archai): The One (or

the Good); Intellect (or being, together with all beings or intellects); and Soul (or All

Soul, from which at a lower level the World Soul and the individual souls derive).131

Although informed by Nemenius, Plotinus continues to make changes to his

proposal, which become informative for Christian thought. Like Origen, Plotinus

places the supreme First Principle, the One (or the Good), beyond being and beyond

129 Origen, Principles, Preface.2. Restated from: ibid., lxxi.
130 Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 7.
131 Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (West

Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 23.

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the activity of intellection, and instead conceives it as the infinite source of life, upon

which all sensible things are dependent upon for their existence. The One is simple

and formless, but whose presence, as the source of all things, is more

comprehensive.132 The One is more than monad; it is pleneos.133 The One is more

than intellect; it is infinite and possesses unlimited and unrestricted power.134 This

first principle creates freely and spontaneously from its own self-productive activity

and not by necessity or in accordance with any determinate plan. It does not create

based on reaction to opposite courses of action. There can be no arche principle

higher than the One because then the One would be a slave to something and could

not act freely.135

“We must provide for knowledge, and for truth; being must become knowable essentially
and not merely in that knowledge of quality which could give us a mere image or vestige of
the reality in lieu of possession, intimate association, absorption . . . the only way is to leave
nothing outside of the veritable Intellectual-Principle which thus has knowledge in the true
knowing [that of identification with the object] cannot forget, need not going wandering in
search . . . The veritable truth is not accordance with an external: it is self-accordance; it
affirms and is another other than itself and is nothing other; it is at once existence and self-
affirmation.”136

Plotinus explains in Enneads the necessity of the One to be simultaneously all

things and at the same time not one of them, the source of all things yet not all

things. Like Plato and Origen, he believes this because being must come from non-

being and the One’s function as “being generator” is the primal act of generation.137

132 Ibid., 26.
133 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," VI.9.6.
134 Ibid., V.5.10-1.
135 C.f. Ibid., VI.8.12, 17-20.
136 Plotinus, 5.5.2
137 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," V.2.1. C.f. Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek

Patristic Tradition, 366-72. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus
the Confessor," 9.

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Like Origen, Plotinus maintains an apophatic theology in that we cannot

speak or understand the One, but we can speak about the deity based on revelation.

The One makes himself known by an act of his free will:

“If willing comes from itself, it is necessary that its being is also from itself so that our
reasoning has discovered that he has made himself. For if his will (boulesis) is from himself
and is, so to speak, his own work, and this will is the same as his existence (hypostasis), then
he himself in this way, will have caused himself to exist, so that he is not what he chanced to
be, but what he himself willed to be.”138

Plotinus follows both Plato and Origen in affirming the generation of the second
hypostasis, as an eternal act of the divine will.

“This the first act of generation . . . the One, so to speak, overflows (hypererrue) and its
overfullness (to hyperpleres) has made another: and what has come to be turned back to it
and was filled in looking to it this came to be intellect. Its rest in relation to the One made
being (to on), but its vision in relation to it [either to the One or itself; auto is ambiguous]
made intellect. Since it stopped in relation to it [the One] so that it might see, it becomes at
once intellect and being. This, then, being like that [One], makes similar things pouring forth
a multiple power . . .. This activity springing from the substance (ek tes ousias) of intellect is
soul, which comes to this while intellect remains itself.”139

Just as in Plato’s Dyad, the One remains simplex because it’s being is in unity with

the One. According to Corrigan, the procession of “overfullness” represents an

unformed potentiality that must turn back to the One to be actualized as a distinct

entity. The procession of pure power from the One is also the first moment of a new

potentiality. This new potentiality, then, must turn back to see the One and to see

itself as other than the One, thereby becoming a self-thinker or distinct intellect.140

For Plotinus the second hypostasis, the Intellective-Principle, is also nous but

its intellection is extrinsic. It is directed upwards as it contemplates the First

138 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," VI.13.53. Quoted as found in: Corrigan, Reading Plotinus,

27.
139 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," V.2.1. Quoted as found in: Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 28.
140 Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 29.

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Principle, and downwards as it exercises its demiurgic function.141 This second

hypostasis emerges from the first as a “circumradiation” (uncreated energies) much

like the brilliant light that ceaselessly encircles the sun, without altering its

source.142

“Again, all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore, the eternally achieved engenders
eternally an eternal being. At the same time, the offspring is always minor: what then are we
to think of the All-Perfect but that it can produce nothing less than the very greatest that is
later than itself. The greatest, later than the divine unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it
must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The One on which alone it leans
while the First has no need whatever over it . . . The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can
be no other than the mind itself thus is the loftiest being in the universe.”143

Plotinus’ description of the generation of the second hypostases is worked out in the

fourth tractate of the Fifth Ennead. Here he answers several questions, including

why the Intellective-Principle is not the generating source, and why he considers it to

be a product of the Intellectual-Object, the One.144 In other words, the second

Intellective-Principle is caused by the Divine Mind (First-Principle), thereby having

its being in the source of the Good that transcends the Intellectual-Principle and

transcends being. Like Plato and Origen, Plotinus sets-up a hierarchical order of

generation. Plato begins with the intellectual First-Principle and the Good, and

proceeds to the second intellectual principle, the Intellect which is referred to as the

One-Many in Paramenides.145

141 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.5.1.
142 Ibid., 5.2.1. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the

Confessor," 9.
143 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.1.6.
144 Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 366-72. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of

Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 9-10.

145 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.1.6. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification

in Maximus the Confessor," 10.

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In order to protect the transcendence of the supreme intellectual being, as

understood by Plutarch, Plotinus demotes the demiurge from the First Principle or

nous, which he also refers to as the One (universal Logos). Plotinus believes the

activity of the One is self-intellection. Because knowledge is inherent in this

intellectual-principle, there is no distinction between spontaneous and other

knowledge. He describes this intellectual-principle as the totality of all Forms, or

the Divine Mind in which all of reality is simultaneously present and therefore

receives no spontaneous knowledge. 146 As a demiurge, it has to be self-thinking; it

must possess what it thinks from itself, but at the same time is dependent upon the

One, from whom it is generated. Plotinus conceives of intellect as an intelligible

living organism, one that is completely realized individual or primary substance

organized, along Aristotelian lines, both by itself immanently and by the power of

the One transcendentally.147

The Intellect is simultaneously Intellectual-Principle and being (Dyad), which

in turn through its retention of vision and resemblance of the One, repeats the act by

pouring forth a Form or Idea he calls the Principle-Soul, representing the Divine

Intellect as the Divine Intellect represented its own prior, the One.148 Plotinus

follows Plutarch here in identifying that all “real beings” are productive and give of

themselves without being diminished. Although physical things are not self-

146 Plato, "Parmenides," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, 142c-43d.

Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 8-9.
147 Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 35-7. C.f. Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 6.2.21, 24-5, 50-52.
148 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.4.1-2. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of

Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 10.

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sustaining, they act in a similar way.149 Plotinus believes that everything identified

as “real being” must include intellect and soul, and that Form and intellectual

determination are in some way is based upon the Good as the source of all being.

Here, Plotinus is developing Plato’s thought in Republic:

“And again, it is not apparent that while in the case of the just and the honorable many would
prefer the semblance without the reality in action, possession and opinion, yet when it
comes to the good nobody is content with the possession of the appearance but all men seek
the reality, and the semblance satisfies nobody here? . . . . That, then, which every soul
pursues and for its sake does all that it does, with an intuition of its reality, yet baffled and
unable to apprehend its nature adequately . . . “150

Plotinus contends that production is a double activity. It is an act of the generating

substance that produces an act from or out of its own substance. What is produced,

then, is an image of the generator, and it acts by virtue of the power given to it.

But, the power of the generator is still present to it, since it exists by virtue of its

intimacy to its generator.151

“The greatest later than the divine unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it must be the second
of all existence, for it is that which sees The One on which alone it leans while the First has
no need whatever of it. The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can be no other than the
Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the universe, all else following upon it – the soul,
for example, being an utterance and act of the Intellectual-Principle as this is an utterance
and act of The One. But in soul, the utterance is obscured, for the soul is an image and must
look to its own original: That Principle, on the contrary, looks to the First without mediation,
thus becoming what it is – and has that vision not as from a distance, but as the immediate
next with thing intervening, close to the One as Soul to it.152

The dynamic descending flow of emanation of the Nous from the One is at first an

empty and formless potentially, but it experiences its first ontological moment when

turning back towards its source, the One. It is by its contemplation of the One that it

149 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.1.6. C.f. Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 28-9.
150 Plato, "Republic," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, VI.505d-e.
151 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," V.1.6-7. C.f. Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 29.
152 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," V.1.6.

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bursts forth into producing the whole multiple world of ideas.153 This perspective

places the priority of mind, as ultimate spiritual agent, over all ideas because

existential acts must always be preceded by idea. In other words, ideas cannot be

outside the Intellectual Principle.154 Plotinus appears to show priority to the Nous

because:

“Knowledge in the reasoning soul is on the one side concerned with objects of sense . . . Being
true knowledge it actually is everything of which it takes cognizance: it carries as its own
content, the intellectual act and the intellectual object, since it carries the Intellectual-
Principle which actually is the primals and is always and is always present and is in its
nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek . . . for all such experience belongs to soul -
but always self-gathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern creating things
by the act of knowing them.”155

However, in a later passage Plotinus claims that if the Intellectual Principle were

conceived as preceding being, it would at once become a Principle whose

expression, its intellectual Act, achieves and engenders the being, this is a

significantly differently perspective.156

Like Plato’s World Soul, Plotinus’ third hypostasis, the Principle-Soul acts as

the intermediary between the intelligible and the sensible realms, not only as the

direct animator of the sensible world but is responsible for its maintenance and the

generation of individual souls. In Paramenides, Plato refers to his third hypostasis

as the One-and-Many.157 Against the Stoics, Plotinus argues that the soul is not a

153 W. Norris Clarke, "The Problem of the Reality and Multiplicity of Divine Ideas in

Christian Neoplatonism," in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O'Meara

(Norfolk, Virginia: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982), 111.
154 C.f. Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," V.9.7-8.
155 Ibid., V.9.7.
156 Clarke, "The Problem of the Reality and Multiplicity of Divine Ideas in Christian

Neoplatonism," in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, 112.

157 Plato, "Republic," in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, VI.505d-e.

Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 10.

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body, but rather it is the animating form of a body.158 Like Plato’s World Soul, the

Principle Soul is diverse as a “one and many” containing all differences within

herself.

The Principle-Soul or psyche is an inferior but still rational principle because

it emerges from the second as the second does from the first; it is less unified than

intellect. For Plotinus the psyche as the lowest level becomes Nature, the immanent

power of life and growth. In Plotinus’ model, the psyche not only continuously

contemplates its source, just as the Intellective-Principle does its source, but also

seeks to return to its source. Creation from and reconciliation of the sensible to its

source can be visualized as a breathing-out and re-gathering of logoi into its source,

the universal Logos. Plotinus’ philosophy lays the groundwork for the seeking and

ascent of the human soul to its ultimate source as found in the works of the Greek

Fathers, including Origen, the Cappadocians, and Maximus because in the later

tenants of Platonism, the nous (intellect) and psyche (nature) are replicated within

each human being.159

Both Plotinus and Origen embrace the idea of the (human) soul’s descent

from the Principle-Soul, but reject Numenius’ mythology that the soul descends

through the planets, where it acquires a number of capacities necessary for its

function in a body, such as different forms of thinking, as well as imagination,

passions, and linguistic capacity.160 According to Nemenius, these acquisitions

158 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 4.7.
159 Ibid., 5.2.1. Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, 37.

Paragraph restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 10.
160 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, 38. Restated from:

Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 10.

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cause the soul to acquire an opposing counterpart.161 For Plotinus, the soul’s

descent is out of metaphysical necessity as the animator of life and not mythology.

Origen, in Against Celsus, refutes Celsus’ path of the soul through the planets and

reflects Nemenius’ thought:

“The Scriptures, which are current in the Churches of God do not speak of “seven” heavens,
or of any definite number at all, but they do appear to teach the existence of ‘heavens,’
whether that means the ‘spheres’ of those bodies which the Greeks call ‘planets,’ or
something more mysterious. Celsus, too agreeably to the opinion of Plato, asserts that the
souls can make their way to and from the earth through the planets; while Moses . . . says
that a divine vision was present to the view of our prophet Jacob, a ladder stretching to
heaven, . . . obscurely pointing by this matter of the ladder, either to the same truths which
Plato had in view, or to something greater than these. On this subject, Philo has composed a
treatise which deserves the thoughtful and intelligent investigation of all lovers of truth.”162

In Plotinus’ model, the individual human soul does not acquire a second opposing

soul, but it does become diversified when ensouled in a body (the sensible). This

conclusion results from his looking to understand where emotions and affections

are seated. He narrows it to three choices: (1) the Soul alone; (2) the Soul as

employing the body; (3) or a coalescence resulting in an entity deriving from

both.163 For Plotinus, the soul usually has a twofold division, where Reason is

divided into Discursive-Reasoning and Sense-Knowledge (passions), but it is

sometimes threefold, when the highest and impassible part of the soul – Intellection

– has not descended into matter. 164 In order to locate the seat of Sense Perception,

Plotinus begins by considering the relationship between the (human) soul or

Reason-Principles and the Essential/Principle – Soul, as well as the relationship

161 Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor."
162 Ibid., 11.
163 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 1.1.1. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification

in Maximus the Confessor," 11.

164 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 1.1.7. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification

in Maximus the Confessor," 11.

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between the soul as animator and the body.165 The relationship between Reason-

Principles and the Essential-Soul is described as:

“These Beings [Reason-Principles] are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because,
they are by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the
Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the
Intellectual-Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul which they have their
being. 12. The souls of men . . . have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the
Supreme yet they are not cut off from their origin, from the Divine Intellect; it is not that they
have come bringing the Intellectual-Principle down in their fall; it is though they have
descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens.”166

Here, Plotinus affirms that at least the intellective part of the human soul is eternal

and divine, because its source is the Divine Intellect and thereby exists in the divine

realm prior to descending into the sensible realm. This passage also affirms that

this same part of the soul continues to contemplate the Intellective-Principle even

after being united with the body.167

“And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty
in the soul, which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The
Intellectual-Principle itself [Divine-Mind]. This also we possess as the summit of our being.
And we have It either as common to all or as our own immediate possession: or again we
may possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible- one, everywhere
and always Its entire self- and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the
First-Soul [i.e. in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the Soul].
Hence, we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and
separate; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one. And how do we possess the
Divinity? In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-
Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of
the supreme, the undivided Soul- we read- and that Soul which is divided among [living]
bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All, as being
present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to
each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the
fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by
giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught
by many mirrors.”168

165 C.f. R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism (London: Duckworth, 1972), 73-4. Restated from: Korak,

"The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 12.

166 Origen, "Against Celsus," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers 4: Father of the Third Century,

6.11.
167 Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 12.
168 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 1.1.8.

49


The fall of the soul is the result of satiety or forgetfulness of God ignorance of one’s

self, and the wish for self-ownership:

“What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and though members of
the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has
overtaken them has its source in self-will, the entry into the sphere of process, and the
primal differentiation with desire for self-ownership.”169

Plotinus connects the soul’s descent with the ego – the wish to belong only to

oneself and put as much distance as possible between the whole of being and what

one takes oneself to be. The fall of the soul is effectively the exclusion of being and

the embrace of non-being.170 A soul that loses its focus on its source becomes

darkened under the pure negative power located in matter that progressively

restricts the soul’s natural ability to turn back to her source, even to the point of

contentment. Therefore, for Plotinus, the source of evil is the non-being that springs

from ignorance.

In Plotinus’ model, the beginning of the soul’s return to its source in likeness

begins with a turning inward to remember the author and origin of life: “Let every

soul recall, then, at the outset of the truth that the Principle-Soul/psyche is the

author of all living things, that it has breathed life into them all . . .”171 The journey

inward leads to the realization of the higher self, and union with the One because of

an ontological kinship between the human soul and the divine world that in reality

partakes in an unbroken continuum. 172 According to Corrigan, for Plotinus, the

quiet presence of the Good is at the root of all giving and receiving, as well as at the

169 Ibid., 5.1.1.
170 Ibid., 1.8. C.f. Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 46-7.
171 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.3.14.
172 Ibid., 4.3.11-12. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the

Confessor," 12.

50


root of the return of “real beings,” like intellect and soul, to self-knowing in the

vision of the principles before them. He also points out that an important

consequence of his derivation theory is that reality is neither objective nor simply

subjective but has to “bend back” or return through itself to its source. Therefore,

all being has to be self-reflective.173 One thing that makes this different from Origen

is there is no need for a redeemer or the sacraments. Being in continuum means the

returning human soul is identical with its own deepest truth. The ascent of the soul

requires the lower soul (human) to be purified of its passions so that once again

Reason is aligned with the psyche or Principle-Soul, whose source is the Intellective-

Principal.174

“There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of Reason is enough: the lower
nature will stand in such awe of Reason that any slightest movement it has made it will
grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its
lord. In all this there is no sin, there is only matter of discipline, but our concern is not
merely to be sinless but to be God . . . As long as there is any such involuntary action, the
nature is twofold . . . when it is suppressed there is God unmingled, a Divine Being of those
who follow upon the First. For at this height, the man is the very being that came from the
Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the essential man is there entering this sphere . . .
he has associated himself with the reasoning phase of his nature and this will lead up to
likeness of his highest self . . .” 175

Moral virtue is seen as an outward sign of purification, as humanity humbles itself

through contemplation of the One. An individual can ascend from the sensible to the

intelligible world as the human soul moves towards assimilation through the

acquisition of nous and thereby attaining moral likeness.176 The idea of the soul’s

173 Corrigan, Reading Plotinus, 30.
174 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.1.1. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification

in Maximus the Confessor," 12.

175 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.1.2.
176 Ibid., 3.4.3. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of Deification in Maximus the

Confessor," 12. This is not unlike Plato’s goal in seeking the virtues found in the Good.

51


separation from the body and ascension is reminiscent of that found in Gnosticism.

Unification with the One, which is different from union with the Nous, is

accomplished when the soul reverts back to its prior condition, free of duality, and

becomes one with its ultimate source, but is not absorbed into it.177 Union is

described as vision, but is also perichoretic in nature.178 Missing from Plotinian

doctrine, however, is the concept of disobedience as sin, and moral virtue as civic in

nature.

The concept of participation in the divine is also found in Plotinus’

philosophy. The quest of the soul for union with the One can result in an ecstatic

experience when one is able to ascend to the highest part of one’s being, even if only

for a brief time. In order for the soul to “leap forward” and complete the final step of

its journey, it must revert back to its prior condition to be reunited with the One, and

this is only possible when the soul has been purified and the division within Reason

has been eliminated. Plotinus refers to this last step as “leaping forward” into the

realm of the intelligible; it is not a leap to anything foreign or outside us, but is

ascension to the highest principle within us.179 According to Porphyry, Plotinus

experienced, in his presence, this ecstasy on several occasions. Plotinus describes

his experience, in this way:

Moral likeness leads to happiness as one sheds the passions of the self through
contemplation.
177 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 6.9.3, 9, 11. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of

Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 13.

178 C.f. Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 1.2.5-6. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of

Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 13.

179 C.f. Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 2.9.9. Restated from: Korak, "The Doctrine of

Deification in Maximus the Confessor," 13.

52


“Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself, going out
from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then
most of all I belong to the better part: I have actually lived the best life and come to identity
with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above
all else in the realm of Intellect to discursive-reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down,
and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself,
even when it is the body.”180

The teleos for Plotinus means final unity with the One in ecstasy that is achieved

through contemplative virtues, the catharsis of all passions and total detachment of

the soul from the body leading to apatheia.181

Summary and Comparison

Platonism is a system of emanation, outward from the One to lower and lower

forms of reality, with matter defining the furthest boundary of divine activity. As a

Christian, Origen disagreed and taught the world came into being in time and owed

its entire existence to God. Origen, in a sense, understood biblical creation as

“coming down” or emanating from above, in keeping with Platonic imagery of

emanation, but he professes creation is ex nihilo. However, Origen reconciles

biblical truths with the platonic idea of preexisting noetic being by tying together

Adam and Eve’s disobedience and expulsion from the heavenly realm (Garden of

Eden) with creation and the existence of the material world.

In the Enneads, the First Principle, the One is beyond intellection but is

otherwise equivalent to the Good in Plato’s Republic and the Father in Origen’s

divine Triad, in that the One is the infinite source of life upon which all intellectual

180 Plotinus, "The Six Enneads," 5.4.4.
181 C.f. Drobner, "Christian Philosophy," in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian

Studies, 681.

53


and sensible things are dependent upon for their existence. The One is simplex and

transcendent, and absolute and good, and makes himself known by an act of free

will, just like we see in our first two systems. To be “beyond intellection” means the

One placed at the beginning of the series as the first of three hypostases, remains in

itself and separated from every relation with that which proceeds forth.182 This is

not found in Origen’s hierarchy.

Plotinus’ order of procession begins with the One from which proceeds the

Intellective-Principle, and from the latter proceeds the Intellective-Soul, which serves

as intermediary between intellect and matter. The Intellective-Principle contains the

ideas or pure forms, which are real beings that compose the intelligible world. The

Soul causes and contains within itself all the particular souls. In other words, it is by

virtue of contemplation that all beings, and things that exist, are united as a single

but all-pervasive reality. For Origen, it is the Logos, as mediator and sole agent of

creation that fulfills all of these functions.

Both Origen and Plotinus use similar language in describing the generation of

the second and third hypostases, as a “dynamic process” of the divine will, in which

the first “overflows” to bring about the second. However, to become actualized as a

distinct entity, and filled with its own intelligible objects, Plotinus’ hypostases have

to turn back to contemplate their source. The Intellective-Principle, along with its

being, unite to form a Dyad that is capable of creating (demiurge). This is different

from Plato’s Dyad in that in this scheme only the second hypostasis is involved

182 Cornelio Fabro, "The Overcoming of the Neoplatonic Triad of Being, Life and Intellect

by Thomas Acquinas," in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O'Meara

(Norfolk, VA: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982), 99.

54


because the One is beyond nous. Whereas Origen considers the Logos more an

extension of the Father, Plotinus’ second principal shares in the divine intellect of

the One but is simultaneously a created and fully realized as an individualized

intelligible living organism that can create. This process is repeated in structure and

form by the Intellectual-Principle as it pours forth the Principle–Soul that is then

actualized by its contemplation.

Plotinus’ systematic and ontological interpretation of Plato’s three hypotheses in

Parmenides has much in common with Origen’s divine Triad, but there are

significant differences too. Plotinus’ Monad is a contemplative force, the infinite

source of life upon which all sensible things depend, that is not conscious of its inner

life and not free in its external self-disclosure. In his system, Plotinus raises

intellectual contemplation to productive principle. This God does not enter into

personal relationships with human beings. It does not receive human prayer, and

providence is limited to a law-conforming connection with natural causes and

effects. Although Origen’s God is omnipotent and omnipresent, he is free and

conscious, and acts out of goodness and justice. And like Plotinus’ Monad, as

Creator, he communicates himself to all things. This God is relational in that His

love descends to the needs of suffering humans, as witnessed in the Incarnation, and

whose providence acts in the qualitative determinacy of the world.

Plotinus’ Principle-Soul, as an intellectual living being, has the duties of

Plato’s World Soul, including being responsible for the generation and maintenance

of individual souls that is carried out by the Logos in Origen’s scheme. This is very

different in function than that of the Holy Spirit, Origen’s third hypostasis. In

55


Plotinus’ monistic scheme, the individual soul is not completely separated from the

Intellective-Soul. The Intellective-Soul, by remaining in herself, however, is not

affected or reduced by what she makes, but unaffected does not mean “not to care

for.” Individual souls do, however, have different relationships to their bodies that

affect their power. In this model, the more materiality that has penetrated the soul,

the more corruptible the existence, but Plotinus’ overall view of the soul-body

relationship is a positive one. The soul does not forfeit its own nature.

Both Origen and Plotinus embrace the idea of the human soul’s descent from

the intelligible or heavenly realm as pre-existent noetic beings that descend out of

satiety, forgetfulness or the desire for self-ownership. A common teleos for both

Origen and Plotinus is the union or reunion of the highest part of the human soul

(intellect) with God. Fundamental to both of these models is the freedom of the

human will to seek knowledge of and union with its divine source.

The trajectory of the Plotinian self (soul) is to raise itself to the level of divine

intellect and to participate in the presence of the One or the Good. The latter is the

highest and most intense mystical experience, an experience Porphyry reports

Plotinus accomplished on several occasions in his presence, resulting in experiential

knowledge of the One. In his hierarchy of realities, the Monad occupies the top spot

and matter the lowest. The human soul occupies an intermediate spot because of its

union with matter. The two-fold division in the soul that results from this union

causes the higher, contemplative part of the soul, where discursive reasoning occurs,

to be distracted by bodily passions. The soul’s upward journey and return to

likeness begins when it turns inwards to remember and upwards to contemplate

56


what is above it, as it works to reduce sense-knowledge or bodily desires. His theory

of sense perception and knowledge is based on the priority he places on the mind as

the ultimate spiritual agent. When the higher part of the mind looks up, it finds the

Principle-Soul, the intellectual being that reminds it of its ontological kinship and

eternal beginning in the divine realm. Since the human soul is a microcosm of the

Principle-Soul, when one contemplates the deepest level of the self, they find

themselves in the spiritual realm. As the soul ascends, it becomes purified and

unified until it becomes aligned with the Principle-Soul whose own source is the

Intellective-Principle. The final step in this trajectory is the soul’s separation from

the body and reunification with the One, which is beyond nous, but it does so

without being absorbed. This is reminiscent of the relationship between the divine

and human natures found in the incarnate Logos.

The teleos of the soul in both Platonism and Christianity is to return to the

presence of God, the source of its being. For Origen, the return of the soul begins

with faith, a faith that provides a pathway to knowledge of God as Father through

union with Christ. In Plotinus’ scheme, union with the One is the ending goal of the

soul after she purifies herself of worldly passions and becomes unified; this is

accomplished through the will alone. In Origen’s Christian thought, Christ’s role as

mediator and redeemer is to remove the wall between sinful humanity and God’s

righteousness and begin the transformation to likeness through the imparting and

restoration of divine (virtues). This cannot be accomplished without first union

with Christ, the incarnate Logos, through faith and the sacraments. Recapitulation,

redemption, union and resurrection cannot be accomplished through the will alone,

57


in that it had to be initiated by God and take place through Christ as Lord, the agent

of creation and the basis of human rationality.

“Then comes the end when he hands over the kingdom to God and every authority and
power. For he must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet. The last enemy
to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” It is plain
that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all
things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all
things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.”183

183 I Corinthians 15:24-28 (NRSV). Italics my emphasis.

58


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