“The author presents Origen’s thought as a completely original contribution to ancient philosophy and Christian theology at the same time. He shows convincingly that the classification of Origen as ‘Christian Platonist’ obscures rather that clarifies, since Origen took a critical stance towards several aspects of Platonism. In doing so, the author is able to free Origen’s intellectual profile, on the one hand, from distortion of Eusebius of Caesarea, and, on the other hand, from the clichés of the anti-Origenist polemics in late antiquity, especially in the fifth ecumenical council.
With the liberation of Origen from the prison of his often ill-informed theological reception, the author makes an outstanding contribution to research, which in any case should be listened to not only in the field of theology, but also in the field of the history of ancient philosophy.”
—Martin Illert, Prof. Dr. University of Halle, Germany
“No-one acquainted with current scholarship on Origen will fail to recognise the author of this book, not only on account of its length and the vigour of its style, but because Tzamalikos has no rival in erudition or in the fecundity of his ideas. None of his critics (least of all those who accuse him of disparaging Greek philosophy) will be able to produce the range of quotations from two millennia of Greek literature that Tzamalikos can marshal in support of every one of his conclusions, and few of them will be able to match his conceptual subtlety or his tenacity in exegesis.
Since he is the one indispensable author writing in English on Origen at the moment, this volume will be especially useful to scholars because, while it introduces a lot of new material, it also recapitulates the arguments of Tzamalikos’ earlier studies, which, famous as they are, do not seem always to have been read in their entirety by his critics.”
—Mark Edwards, Professor of Early Christian Studies, University of Oxford
Origen and Hellenism
The Interplay between Greek and Christian Ideas in Late Antiquity
Since 1986, Professor Panayiotis Tzamalikos has argued that Origen was an anti-Platonist in many respects, and all of the clauses in Origen’s official anathematisation in AD 553 were based on nefarious adulteration by unschooled and fanatical drumbeaters. The author’s pertinent books heretofore have uprootedall of those charges and demonstrated that they had nothing to do with Origen’s real thought.
Therefore, Tzamalikos’ work constitutes a peripeteia in the Aristotelian sense of the term, referring to tragedian plays of classical Athens, which points to the moment when the hero learns that everything he knew was wrong.
This book (like the author’s previous ones) brings to light and critically discusses Origen’s Greek philosophical background, which he puts to full use upon composing his Christian works. Consequently, the author insists on the need for engaging in the onerous task of ascertaining Origen’s endowments and feat: whereas he was a Greek ‘apostate’ who forsook his ancestral religion and converted to Christianity when he was well on in years, nevertheless, he implicitly made ample use of his patrimonial lore upon composing his ground-breaking work which paved the way to Nicaea.
The author’s thesis is that, in the quest for discovering the real Origen, scrutinised perusal of this illuminating background is inexorable. For in the history of philosophy, Origen ipso facto is an uncategorised author, whose thought constitutes an unexampled chapter of its own, revealing a perfect match between Christian exegesis and Greek philosophy, which imparted the later episcopal ‘orthodoxy’ the gravamen of its anti-Arian doctrine.
