Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

COSMIC THEOLOGY 63
canvas much broader than the cosmos consisting of the earth and the
heavens: the elaborate myths of the gnostics told of a pre-cosmic,
heavenly drama, and the cosmos itself was, as often as not, an
abortive consequence of a heavenly fall. The cosmos was bracketed
between fall and redemption: it was essentially fallen, and
Redemption was escape from it. The Christian doctrine of creation out
of nothing was probably first formulated as part of the second-century
reaction against gnosticism: 6 as well as upholding the sovereignty of
the one God against the kind of fragmentation implicit in the gnostic
system of aeons, it affirmed the essential goodness of the cosmos. It
was in the good cosmos that God had made from nothing that the Fall
had taken place, and Redemption, as we have sketched above,
involved restoration of the cosmos.
ORIGENIST COSMOLOGY
But the idea of a cosmic fall, that is a fall from some other state
resulting in the cosmos, was tenacious, and is one of the points in
which the great third-century theologian Origen, who had himself
argued against many of the tenets of gnosticism, found himself in
fundamental agreement with the gnostics. For Origen, Christianity is
essentially a cosmic story. In the beginning all rational beings had
been created equal, and through the Word of God had gazed in
contemplation on the unique Godhead of the Father. The Fall was the
result of a lessening of their attention, and a consequent turning away
from contemplation of God (owing to satiety, Origen said: they had
had enough). Their ardour cooled (Origen derived soul, psyche, from
psychros, cold, or psychesthai, to cool) and they fell into a cosmos
consisting of bodies. 7 The cosmos was created by God to arrest the fall
of the rational beings, and was a carefully calibrated system, with
bodies of varying degrees of density, so that the fate of the fallen souls
exactly matched the extent of their turning away from God: those
whose lack of attention had been momentary became angels, those
whose turning from God was more settled became demons, and in
between there were human beings.
Such a cosmos was a demonstration of God’s providence and
judgment: his providence provided this carefully structured cosmos
and his judgment determined the exact position of each soul within it.
Each soul would find that its position in the cosmos answered its need,
so that the effort required to turn back to God was neither so
demanding as to lead to despair nor so slight as to make barely any
difference. Perhaps more than one cosmos (and thus more than one
lifetime) would be needed, but God’s providence and judgment were
not to be thwarted: finally all the rational beings would retain their