Origen of Alexandria

Transcript (PDF)

Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 53 of 54

Origen of Alexandria
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 10, 1985

Transcript:

This tape was made on December the 10th, 1985 at the Whirling Rainbow School of a lecture by Roger Weir on the subject of Origen of Alexandria.

Origin of Alexandria. The third century. Is a problem. And our our focus tonight is a man who dominated the early half of the third century. His name is Oregon. Oregon. The original name is origins. And it's a derived from the pronunciation of the Egyptian god Horus without the h. Horus origin, and his second name was Adamantius, like Adamantite, uh, strong, indefatigable. And he was born in Alexandria about 185 AD. The third century is really a problem, and we see it in the third century that the movement of the mind has led itself into an impasse. What had been the person of Jesus in the first century had become the Jesus Christ, Savior of the second century. Now in the third century becomes more transcendental, more removed, and Jesus becomes the cosmic mediator, the word as a mediator, as a mediator between God, who by now is so indescribably distant, and man who is so unbelievably, demonically corrupt that there is no possibility of any direct contact whatsoever. The third century reveals to us the progressive, neurotic decay of the spirit of the classical world, and in the third century we find the lofty grandeur of Rome beginning to drip like some mud statue into a hovel. By the end of the third century, there will be nothing left of the ancient world. At the end of the second century, Rome had become monolithic, as if it were like the mountain ranges or the sea beds.

It's called the age of the Antonines, and from the strong general Trajan to the cosmopolitan adopted son of his Hadrian, to the beautifully state dedicated Antoninus Pius to the great stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, Rome seemed in the second century as if it would last forever. But when Marcus Aurelius died in 180 A.D., it was an instant plummet. His adopted son, Commodus, was cruel, but he was just an appetizer for openers. And after, uh, after Commodus came Caracalla, so named because of the cape with a high hood that he always wore mean, nasty, vicious. And he succeeded by Eagle Balbus even more vicious Roman. The third century became poisoned, and the mind of man controlled by the power of Rome became poisoned. And our friend tonight origin is the first great powerful Christian apologist, the first really tough minded, dedicated, lifelong song scholar, teacher, professor, priest. He's the first tough Irish priest like figure to go into the toughest regions of the ancient world and and stick it out. And origin becomes the fount and the foundation of two traditions that were together in him and after he died, split apart and almost never came back together again. One of them was Christian mysticism, the other was Christian scholarship, and in origin the two were together. His was a mysticism of the word, and the word was in the texts, the scriptures. So one was a scholar. To get to the scriptures, get to the text in the best possible way so that the detailing of the magnificent transformation could occur to you.

Only somebody who had dedicated their life to this could have held it together. It's like the Bhagavad Gita has been characterized at one time as fire and iron brought together, and as long as it's molten, it'll stay together. But when it cools off, they're completely disparate. They're polarized. Origin is that way. He's like the molten iron that still has the fire in it. He is volcanic, and it's only his lifelong discipline that holds it in. And it's only someone like this who was torrentially strong, who could have survived the first half of the third century AD, anywhere that you would have traveled at that time in the Roman Empire. There were wars. There were rebellions. There was corruption. When origin was a little boy, his father named Leonidas, who was a very famous Christian in Alexandria. He used to stand over the bed of his sleeping son and pull the blankets back and say prayers over the heart of his little boy, plant a kiss of benediction upon the the little chest, because it was an extraordinary child. He was, in fact, what we would call a prodigy, a tremendous memory. And his father was Greek, but his mother was Jewish, and so little origin learned Hebrew as well as Greek as well as Latin in the home. And so he was very capable even as a adolescent, as a teenager.

And when Clement of Alexandria was forced to flee Alexandria through a Christian persecution under Septimius Severus in 202. Origin at the age of 19 became the head of the school, the Catechetical School in Alexandria. He was just 19 years old. Now the Catechetical School, if you remember, was a very poignant and peculiar Christian institution. It's the first Christian school. There's a seat over here. First Christian School, and the purpose of the Catechetical School was to take people off the street, off the pagan habit, and bring them in, and slowly acclimate themselves to the fact that what Christianity offered was not just another blind ritual or another syncretistic version of rehashing the old world, but that this was a completely new message, and that the message was one that could be not only understood, but could be felt, it could be palpably experienced. So that instead of having a fog of anxieties out here impinging upon an ego which is fighting that, that there was a transformation, that the ego became permeable so that one could see that the anxieties out here are not impinging upon you from without in, but that they are occurring inside and being projected out, and only as long as you were being obtuse. And providing some kind of a screen whereby these inner projections could occur on the outside. Were you in trouble that when you could see that the trick was not to fight the phantoms out there, but to turn off the projector in here so they don't occur? Then life became quite a different situation.

And when that occurred, without the obfuscation, the distraction of these demonic phantasmal projections out here and with a measure of inner quiet within that slowly became refined and transparent, so that one could see that one had a cosmos within a whole universe of dimension within, and that this was rational. This was intelligible, that it wasn't confused, it wasn't ambiguous, and that the key to it all, the key to the rationality of the inner universe, was Jesus. That's why he was the mediator between God and man. He was not the mediator out here between the heavens up there and man down here. Not that mediator at all. He was an inner mediator between that divine cosmos that one could experience inside. Yes. This is in me. And in the Christian community, they could understand that all of them were experiencing that. We're experiencing that together. And so the Christian church was a community of spiritual recognition. Origin tells us in some of his voluminous works about some of the persecutions. Almost never did any Christians renounce Jesus. They were tortured horribly. Worse than you can imagine. By the hundreds, by the thousands. And not for a day or a year or ten years, but for the whole of the third century.

It became a way of life. They throve. They developed almost geometrically in numbers and in strength of their community and face of this adversity. And this increasingly posed a problem for Roman authority, because they could not be broken, they could not be intimidated. And towards the end of his life, at age 65, they even finally grabbed Harijan. They put him on the rack. They broke his body. They popped the sinews from the attachments, from the bones. When your frame is broken like that, there's not much more you can do. He lived a few years beyond that. Almost none of them ever renounced, because it wasn't a belief that they held psychologically. It was a poignant experience that they knew was real. They couldn't renounce it. That was the reality. And it was this kind of certainty that was the most difficult thing for pagans to understand, because they were used to worshipping externally. Let's burn some incense. Let's make sure that all the attributes are together. Let's go through the ceremonies. Does it require blood of bats or whatever it requires? None of that was efficacious. All of that, at best, at its best, was euphoric. Cathartic. Habit forming and you had to do it again next time you had some anxiety attack, next time you had a problem going for the fix. More euphoria, more catharsis. All it did was adjust you to the need to keep it up. A real habit forming thing.

The pagan gods were addictive in just that way, but Christianity was a cure of souls. It wasn't adjusting you to any situation. It was curing. As in no more, no more anxiety. They may torture you and kill you, but it's only this body that's going to go and that's the least of it. Origin is the figure who made Christianity intellectually respectable. He's the first one to challenge the idea that only the simpletons are Christians, only the the simple people, only those who can't understand the complicated genealogies of the gods, only those who are not into to the world of power and authority origin. Change the Catechetical School from simply bringing people into the Church of Alexandria. To putting the school into his writings and his writings, which numbered over a thousand titles in the ancient world, diffused throughout the Roman Empire in the first half of the third century, and completely changed the whole character of Christianity. He didn't write. He dictated. He had 14 stenographers, seven women and seven men. And he constantly talked constantly, and origins writings have that kind of extemporaneous flair. It's not the scholar sitting down. It's not the literature correcting and making sure it's a man working incessantly. He says, occasionally off the cuff of it, as it were. Let's have a working supper. Let's give up a few hours of sleep. Let's keep at this. Let's keep going and let's keep working at this.

When he was in his early 20s, in order to ensure that he was not going to backslide. And it sounds gross to us now, but in a time of peril like that, he wanted to make sure that he's not going to backslide. He offered himself up in sacrifice and had himself castrated. It's not just a symbol of the toughness of the man, the dedication. It's an insight into the character of origin. And if he has a fault, if he has a flaw, it's that he doesn't give up. He's like a John Wayne of the early church. He's always the tough guy. He's always there and that kind of a character. Finally had its way in this torrential unraveling of human morality, which the third century was. Everywhere you looked, people were worse and worse. And so he took the Catechetical School, which had been like a Sunday school from Clement, and he turned it into an amplified teaching instrument that taught the Roman Empire Christianity, so that the end of the third century, Christianity was the religion of the Roman Empire, not just one among many. It was the religion of the Roman Empire. This is the man. This is the guy who took that little school in Alexandria and made it into a megaphone through his writings, and put the message out empire wide. It is not the apostles that made Christianity triumphant is a figure like origin. He was able intellectually to bring some of the stoic pillars of character and bring them into the Christian and Platonic ideas, the Christian aspirations, and the platonic ideas of character, so that the best of the classical world, the best character building, the stoic acceptance of travail and suffering because one could see that this was a part of a cosmic scheme of wholeness.

He brought that out of the pagan world and put it into the Christian camp, so that by the end of the third century, anybody who became educated in the classical pagan mode would begin to recognize that he was more Christian than Mithraic or worshiping, uh, Jupiter Capitolinus or any of the other gods or goddesses. He took the stoic arguments against anthropomorphic immoral gods. The Stoics had said, we, we are. We are cosmopolitan people. We can no longer believe in these these kinds of immoral gods of old and these anthropomorphic, uh, illusions that are trying to be passed upon us. They used to use examples like there's a tomb of Zeus in Crete. If there's a tomb of Zeus, how can he be an immortal god, etc., etc.. Origin took the stoic character, building qualities away from the pagan world and put them into Christianity and Christianity, then began to have an emphasis that one developed character first, that the ethical life was the first stage, that you you brought yourself into a shape that could survive, and then the interior of that shape would become illumined.

And in that illumination, then men would understand. What would he understand? He would understand that there was a rational progress towards his salvation, that there were actual stages that one went through towards your salvation. If there were stages. Then one had a path to follow. And the world then exists. For rational man. That immanent in this cosmos is a rationality which is the fulcrum of it all. And Jesus the Christ became the fount of the rationality of the world. He became the word, the word in the sense that it makes sense at last. It makes sense in terms of the rational ordering that the word brings. The word is the the turning on of the illumination of the light, of understanding. It is no longer a person. It is no longer a character. It is not the character of Jesus, as we saw in the first century that was so utterly transforming is no longer the character of Jesus, and it is not a mystical Jesus of the second century, based on pistis, on faith into gnosis, upon knowledge. It's not that any longer, but there are stages along the way and origin emphasizes. The Greek word is apokatastasis, which means the salvation of all, that everyone is going to be saved, that the good news, the messages is that everyone is going to be saved. No one is going to be left out of the kingdom, that it may take longer for others than some, because of their nature, because of their background, but that eventually all will be saved.

This, of course, the later councils of the church had to weed out in origin after around 500 AD was progressively left out of Christianity because a lot of his major focuses and ideas were embarrassing. One of them is this the salvation of all, not just an elite, not just a chosen, but all. When origin was in his early 60s, an event happened in the middle of the third century. Wouldn't you know, it was in the middle of the third century. 248 A.D.. 248 A.D. was the thousandth year of Rome. It was the millennium of the Roman Empire, of the Roman people and all of the millennial aspirations and dreams, all the millennial fears and tensions came to the surface around 248 A.D. in origin, having his toughness and his mind and his dedication always upon a taking from the pagan world and adding to the Christian world, wrote his most famous book in 248 A.D. it was called Contra Celsus. Celsus had been a physician, a man, uh, who was called an Epicurean, and his philosophy, uh, someone who is a middle Platonist, really, in his in his writings, Celsus had criticized the Christian church, saying that its essential nature is that of a secret society, that they're subversives, that we really don't know what they're doing.

It's really illegal that it's not open worship. They don't have the statues out here, they don't have the rights out here. That as you get to know more and more about Christianity, its secret. And in fact origin had introduced into Alexandria into the Alexandrian Church a double mass. The first mass was a mass for everybody. Anybody could come to it, the mass of the catechumens. Anybody was welcome to come in. There was a sermon. There were some hymns that were sung. There was, um, a few light rituals, but only those who had been baptized, only those who had become a member spiritually of the Christian community could come to the mass of the faithful, which was held later in the day, and which was held in secret, and this became a prototype in the third century throughout spreading out from Alexandria throughout the Roman world. So one of Celsus's main arguments was that Christianity is really subversive. Look at these people. They're not joining into the life that we're leading. What are they doing? Are they ashamed or are they plotting to overthrow? He also criticized Christianity as corrupting tradition, that ancient tradition had built up a tremendous understanding, a tremendous background, and Christianity was distorting. It was changing everything, reinterpreting that it had perverted the true doctrine, that there had been an ancient doctrine, and it was perverted by Christianity. He also criticized Christianity as saying that it had all of these weird elements that seem to flourish in places like Alexandria, Gnosticism, Egyptian law, Hellenistic Judaism.

All of these weird elements were in it that it wasn't a healthy, bloody pagan sacrifice at all, but had all of these strange elements in it. So origin on the millennial celebration of the Roman Empire, wrote a great book, Taking Celsus to task and not just Celsus, but using this as an example, because it was the most poignant criticism of the day. And in it origin develops a tremendous sense that the rationality of the cosmos. Has within it an archetypal we could use that word now has within it an archetypal stage by stage liberation of man. And one of the documents. In contrast Celsius, there's very esoteric that was extremely influential in the hermetic circles of the fourth century A.D. and went underground so deep that it didn't surface for a thousand years until Ficino brought it back in the Italian Renaissance in Florence. Was the idea that the spheres, the heavenly spheres, the planets were actually musical notes, and that there was a harmony of having ascended through all seven spheres, that in fact, these seven gates are the ladder of seven gates, the seven planets, the seven spheres constituted a musical structure of reality, and that the names of these planets being like gods was the ascent of man through the angelic powers that had once been gods. But as man passes them by, they become lesser than he until, when he has ascended them all through the seventh sphere, he is freed forever from their influence, but origin went farther than that.

Origin linked this up, saying that these seven spheres, these seven planets, these seven musical notes, are also the seven days of the week, the seven days of the week, which also have God like names. So that time going on a Sabbath cycle every seventh day has a musical correlation, and that space in its ascending order has the same key, and that time and space together can be understood by a single key. And the key is to understand that all of the notes together, all of the days together, that the cosmos, in its hebdomad order together constitutes a unity. And it's the unity which is the eighth, which is the Holy Ogdoad. And that this is this is the mysticism. It's not a mysticism of ambiguity within, but of certainty within, because it is rational, it is understandable to the nth degree that one can. Let's use our terms today compute experience in terms of time by Sabbaths and by ascent by levels, and free ourselves from the constraints that time and space no longer going to have any constraints upon us whatsoever. That this is not a psychological recognition, but is a spiritual veracity which one can can live in this ordering. Origin brought in a tremendous understanding of the Trinity, which had not been mooted before, had not been stated before, and which after origin was squelched as much as could be, but always has been around since then.

The basic idea was this that the Trinity is not a redundancy, that God the Father gives freely of his power, of his benevolence to all existent creatures, all existent things, that whatever is existent has that ensured by the beneficence, the omnipotent beneficence of God the Father, that coming in closer towards refinement, what the son guarantees is the rationality of existence. That everything is going to make sense. And that of course, in this rationality, man becomes the focus because he becomes self conscious that he understands the rationality. Yes, it is thus and so and so the father guarantees existence, the son guarantees rationality, and the Holy Spirit refines it even more. And what the Holy Spirit guarantees is holiness. Holiness is like a target coming closer in, and the bull's eye is holiness, and that while all creatures or all extant objects, substances in the universe are guaranteed by God. Man in his rationality is guaranteed by Christ the word. But only the refined saints within mankind are guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, and that it's only in this refinement of man's inner holiness that one comes into contact with the Holy Spirit. That Sophia is an inner core, radiant quality. The bullseye of the target, and that as one's refinement allows one's holiness to come into manifestation within, one comes into contact with the Holy Spirit and this mystical reunion.

And through the mystical reunion of one's inner holiness with the Holy Spirit, one is able then to begin moving outward again and from the Holy Spirit to contact Jesus, who guarantees the rationality of it all, so that one's sense of holiness also develops into a rationality of understanding at all. And as one understands it all, one's spiritual maturity comes into contact with God, and one understands the existence of the unity of the universe as actual experience. Actual case. This is how it is. For origin. The angels. All of the angels are fallen, some just more than others. All of the angelic orders are fallen away from the Godhead in this sense. And that they were all progressively being weighted down by the lowest level of the fall, which was the devil. The Satan was slowly pulling all of the angelic orders further and further away from existence. Into a confused irrationality. That the angelic orders of the universe had become increasingly irrational and chaotic. And this is why the son came to reorder the rationality of the angelic orders, because in its chaos, the rungs of the ladder were so distorted that no one could climb out. No one could understand how to get out. No one could demagnetize themselves from the chaos of the world to deal with the chaos inside. Because the chaos inside was archetypal and was not human.

It didn't really have anything to do with a person's capacities. It didn't matter how intelligent you were, how clever you were, how good an education you had, how devoted you were. The angelic hierarchies were messed up. No one could get out. It was like a landslide. And the pass was blocked. And so the word incarnated to reorder the angelic powers. And that they are not so much helpers of man or even superiors of man, but they are stages along the way through which we have to carry ourselves back out. And the lighting of the pilot, light of that inner certainty that that can be done, is refining oneself enough in one's holiness, inner personal holiness, to contact the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost. Sophia, wisdom. And having made that contact, having annealed one's sense of personal holiness to the Holy Spirit, one could then begin to move back up through the cosmos, back up the ladder of the gates, back up through the spheres, back up through the musical notes, until one had enough experience to realize that this was the Harmonia. This was the way to do it. This is the way of freedom. In his. I'm trying to stay away from the text because it gets complicated in his book On First Principles, First Principles. When origin talks about Christ, he sometimes talks about Christ as a man and sometimes talks about Christ as a woman.

He talks about Christ as Sophia because in the inner experience of holiness, of contacting Sophia, of contacting the Holy Spirit, that Holy Spirit moves effortlessly into the realm of the word, into the realm of the son. And it's as if there were almost no distinction mystically then, or if one's going to make a distinction. The distinction is that the Holy Spirit is the flame, and the son is the lamp, which the flame allows to glow. And because the lamp is structured rationally to make sense out of the cosmos, the whole cosmos becomes progressively understandable. And one can go by this lamp and by the light of this flame, and by the annealing of one's inner holiness. With this, and climb back out of the chaos, back into the realm of the divine. We're told that Christ is a mediator. We can now understand what they're telling us. It's not a sophomoric thing, like you've got to fork over your dignity and he's going to do it for you. It's nothing like that at all. It has nothing to do with that. That's, like, worse than childish to have those kinds of thoughts. That has nothing to do with anything but the understanding of what really what really has to do with it has been buried. So proper question to ask, and we're going to ask it probably in another two weeks. How come all of the details that make sense of this were buried? Why did they throw it out? Who threw it out? What reasons did they have? And why is it that it took so long for the recovery of all this? Why is that so? Those are very good questions, and some of the answers to those questions are going to make you a little uncomfortable.

You're not going to feel so confident that the world has been running right. And it's not a question of an administration. It's not the question of a country. It's the question of the civilization being paranoid and passing its nightmare on for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. It makes you really uncomfortable when you find out that what's brittle is the civilization, not the bad guys somewhere, or the bad countries somewhere, or the bad ages somewhere. All of that is just child's play. It's that the whole civilization is crazy. That's what we colloquially call it. Crazy. The legal terms is insane. We're trying to be human. Not even spiritual, just human in an impossibility. The only way to even be human, much less sacred, is to wake up from the nightmare. And we're going to have to face that and talk about that a little bit more. It'll take us all next year to face that in origins work, and you're beginning to have a little bit of a sense now of how tremendously important and tough this individual was. And you're beginning also to get a sense that, um, individuals count.

It isn't always a question of committees or of tradition. Sometimes it's a single individual or a couple of individuals in a row, one of whom will be the catalyst and the transformer. It's like in Athens it went from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle to Alexander the Great for individuals, for generations. It went from one little ugly man in the, uh, Athenian Forum to the world conqueror for men. So from Penn Tynus starting the Catechetical School and Clement of Alexandria and then origin. And the fourth figure will be Plotinus. The curious thing is that Plotinus in origin, had the same teacher in Alexandria, one of the most mysterious figures in world history. His name was. Ammonius. They called him Ammonius Saccas or Ammonius the sock bearer. Ammonius, curiously enough, had been raised in Christian families, but had developed an aversion to the institutionalized form of Christianity, and when he went deeper into it, he found that the core was a transformational, mystical experience, that that was the basic core of what was being presented. And so Ammonius, in his esoteric Alexandrian circle, taught the yoga of mystical transformation. And one of his students was Origen, another was Plotinus, another was the classical writer Longinus. They were all students of Ammonius in Alexandria. In his first principles, origin tells us about the holy and blessed life. He says this, then, is the testimony we bear to the unity of the father, son, and Holy Spirit.

Let us now return to the original plan of our discussion. God the Father bestows on all the gift of existence and a participation in Christ in virtue of his being. The word or reason makes them rational. From this it follows that they are worthy of praise or blame, because they are capable alike of virtue and of wickedness. Accordingly, there is also available the grace of the Holy Spirit, that those beings who are not holy in essence, may be made holy by participating in this grace. When therefore they obtain first of all their existence from God the Father, and secondly their rational nature from the word, and thirdly, their holiness from the Holy Spirit, they become capable of receiving Christ afresh in his character of the righteousness of God. Those that is, who have been previously sanctified through the Holy Spirit. Now religion is not naive at all, and he makes the point again and again, 100 times through dozens and dozens of surviving manuscripts, that contacting the Holy Spirit with one's holiness is the beginning of a struggle. It's the beginning of a struggle. All that one has in the annealing of one's discovery, that one has a holiness within, and that it contacts a divine spirit of wisdom which is universal and somehow also can be contacted from within that. That's the beginning of a tremendous struggle, because in the rational ordering of the cosmos, good and evil have to be balanced.

The delightful and the repulsive have to be balanced. That the coming out through the hierarchies, the coming out through the various spheres and levels is only harmonious in retrospect. But while one is going through it, often there are discordances. In fact, one has to expect that there are discordances. And so Origen takes from his actual experience takes from Ammonius Saccas, takes from Plato, takes from the early Alexandrian Christian transformative esoteric school like in the Gospel of Secret Gospel of Mark, that once one has the capacity to transform, then the struggle begins. And you know that it begins because the first thing that happens is that all of the revulsion that comes up is real. It's no longer just imaginary. It's no longer just projected out. It's no longer them that are bad. It's no longer those conditions which are despicable. It is oneself. I'm my problem. I'm. What's wrong with me? Not all of me, but some aspects of me are. What is. What's wrong? It's me. Because the purification, the coming up through those spheres, is a horrendous journey, and the only way that anyone would ever make it is to have the contact with the Holy Spirit of wisdom from one's deepest inside and the. Guarantee of the mediator that it will all make sense. That none of it is chaotic anymore. That none of it is going to be thrown away.

That all of this suffering, all of this travail that you are going to go through, has a purpose and a meaning, and that you will know, and your suffering is not in vain. That's what Christ guarantees. He guarantees that. That it will make sense and will deliver you through. And only with that that, um, coordination of the most deep inner sense of conviction that this is really me and that all of this really will make sense. It's only the coordination of those two aspects together that give us any kind of a chance to make it through it all. Because until one has made it through those spheres, each one is more difficult than the next. Each chaotic wave becomes more torrentially chaotic. This is why the emphasis in Christianity is upon having very simple guidelines. If you have more than one commandment, you're going to lose your way. You can only keep track of one. Love your neighbor as yourself. They're not the ones. They're not the scapegoats. Whatever is happening, however bad they look, they're not it. You're it. And only by keeping that focused in oneself can one transform, because it's only through forgiveness of others that you can keep on going. You can't get to the next sphere until all of what's been experienced in this sphere can be forgiven. And you can say, well, they look bad, but I know that it's me.

They've done all this, but I know that it was me. And so the insurance of progress, uh, origin uses the word ascent in a lot of Christian councils. Said he's just we've got to get rid of this ascent. Because by ascent, origin means leaving behind these ladders, these gates, these rungs. Keep going up. Don't stay at that level. And when you've satisfied that move up, take the next struggle. When you've become acclimated and you've forgiven and you've got a certain area cleared out, go on to the next struggle. Don't get intimidated that it's getting worse. It's even harder. You thought it was hard ten years ago. Now you realize what the kind of energy you have. It's really bad. What's it going to be like ten years from now? Those are the temptations. Those are the thoughts that tempt us to stay where we are or to acclimate ourselves at a comfortable level. Peter. Principle. We got this far and it seems okay and we've done all this. Let's stay here. You can't stay there because there's constantly that force of pulling down, away from the Godhead, all of those orders. And if you're not in the ascent, then that recursive demonic element is going to pull you down. That's the dark side. You think you're treading water. The whole ocean is draining out. It's like that. So the courage, the spiritual courage of the ascent is the contact with wisdom, with the Holy Spirit and the guarantee that it is a rational, all progressive ascent towards salvation by Jesus.

And that's all anyone has to go on. There's no other kind of a sense. So you can see that origin in delivering this message in the midst of the third century AD, when everything was falling apart. It was just it was a monumental mess. The Christian community exploded in population where there were a couple thousand. There were now 100,000. They would kill off 5 or 10,000. In a persecution. They would go through the streets of Alexandria, break into the homes, pulling the dignified elderly women of the community out and, uh, dragging them across the the streets. Terrible things, terrible things. And next year there would be more Christians because it was the only way out. It was finally understandable that this was the only way out, and it was because of the courage and the excellence of someone like origin who managed to get it out before everybody. Okay, you don't want to believe it. You don't want to understand it. Maybe next year when you've had enough, then maybe you'll look at it. Or maybe ten years from now, maybe you'll look at it. Maybe your children will look at it. But here it is. Here's the story. It makes sense this way. And a lot of us have gone this way and we're out. So it's like somebody leaving the telephone number and saying, when you're really in trouble, call it origins.

Works were like that. As I said before, there were over a thousand titles before he died. He worked day and night and kept 14 stenographers busy all the time. He left Alexandria during a persecution and went to Caesarea on the coast of um um, what is now Lebanon. When he died, his body was buried in tyre, and the tomb of origin was a very famous monument. And even during the Middle Ages there were fishermen stories that the bones of origin were found from time to time in the surf around tyre. The emphasis in Alexandrian Christianity was that the rational fulcrum of the universe was understandable to man. Only when two halves of a whole were brought into proximity, one half of the whole was the divine God, the other was man. Become holy because only. Someone who has discovered their own inner holiness within, yearns enough to come back to the divine, and recognizes that there must be a process of transformation which will allow this to happen. Called the word called the mediator called Jesus the Christ. Next week we're going to talk about his classmate Plotinus, who characterized it as the flight of the alone to the alone, not loneliness, to loneliness, but the unity of the universe. Back to the unity of the universe. And that that's an all. And we'll talk about Plotinus next week. I'm sorry I didn't get to the texts. I got all this stuff here. You can look at it.

END OF RECORDING