“I reviewed the
ancient days, and I remembered the eonic years, and I took care” (Ps 76.16). One who
wants to be helped also considers the ancient days beginning from Adam. What
occurred to Adam? What befell Cain? What did Enoch accomplish? What worked out
right for Noah? And, so to speak, considering in detail all the days from the beginning,
he stretches his mind over all the matters recorded to have occurred in the
earliest days. “I reviewed,” then, “ancient days.” And then,
having reviewed ancient days, he still refers them higher to things of eonic
years. But, if one must say so, since things that are seen are temporary and
years among temporary things are temporary, the years before the cosmos are
“eonic” in a different sense, perhaps also those after the cosmos, which years
are encompassed in, “The law has the shadow of future good things” (Heb 10.1),
teaching about what one must do every seven years and what one must do every
fifty years (see Lev 25.10-12. Origen refers to the jubilee year, in which
debts are canceled and slaves are freed, and suggests that it is the shadow of an
eschatological reality. Origen makes this clear in Or. 28.14-16). (Psalm
76 Homily 1 in Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 [The
Fathers of the Church; trans. Joseph W. Trigg; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2020], 249-50)
On “eonic” in the phrase “eonic years” we have the following footnote from Trigg, the translator of the work:
Origen generally
construes the Greek word aiōnios to mean “lasting for an eon.” An eon is
a very long, but limited, time, the length of an entire world. This world is
often translated “eternal” or “everlasting,” but Origen understands it, as we
shall see, to refer to a fixed, temporal period. I have therefore coined the
term “eonic” as a translation, since “eternal” would imply a lack of
temporality altogether and “everlasting” would seem to imply an unlimited period
of time. (Ibid., 249 n. 67)
Elsewhere, on Origen’s use of Heb 10:1 we have this note:
Here Origen seems to
imply that aiōn and aiōnios can have a second meaning when
applied to the periods before the creation of the cosmos and after its end,
“eternal” in the sense of non-temporal. This is a distinction we first find in
Plato, who distinguishes between our world of becoming, characterized by change
and subject to time, and a transcendent reality of “being,” in which there is
neither change nor time. (Ibid., 250 n. 69)
