Sunday, February 21, 2021

Origen on αιων/αιωνος denoting a very long time, but not "eternal" in the modern understanding

  

“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)

 

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Resources for "We Agree with Moroni 8:18" day (18 August)