Against the theologies of Valentinus and Marcion, Origen insists that God the Father is the god of Israel: he is the Creator . . . the single source of the law, the prophets and the gospel ([On First Principles] 1. Paef. 4). Yet this deity also exhibits the characteristics of the high god of philosophical paideia. He is self-existing: everything else that is is contingent upon him. He is radically perfect, which means that he alone is completely changeless. And, again, he is absolutely without body of any sort; only God is asomaton. Logically, these principles have immediate implications for God’s creation. Everything that is not God has body of some sort, because only God is without body. Everything that is not God is contingent, dependent upon God for its own existence, because only God is self-existing. Everything that is not God is, ipso facto, subject to change, because only God is absolutely and perfectly without change. (Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012], 102)
Hulē qua formless matter functioned as the extreme notional counterpoint to ho theos, the transcendent high god of more Platonic forms of theology: in reality, matter was encountered only with form. The idea firewalls the high god’s radical stability and unchangingness. Positing hyle allowed ancients to posit as well the coeternal nature of the cosmos, which—since this substratum also always existed—was likewise necessary to protect God from change. This principle was one of the “common conceptions to which all men agree as soon as they are asked,” writes Sallustius, a fourth-century pagan Neoplationist, in his treatise On the Gods and the Cosmos: “For instance, that all God is good, free from passion, free form change” (I). As he notes later, regarding the universe, “The cosmos must of necessity be indestructible and uncreated . . . Since the cosmos exists by the goodness of God it follows that God must always be good and the cosmos always exist, just as light coexists with the Sun and with fire, and shadow coexists with body” (VII). Later Christian theologians would use the same language to describe how the Son was always coeternal with the Father.
Philosophically sophisticated biblical commentators easily saw such hyle in the opening of Genesis LXX, where the world “was without form and void.” Philo of Alexandria takes this language to imply preexistent matters—for example, in Life of Moses 2.267. Later Christian theologians went back and forth on the issue: did preexistent matter imply some limit on God? Why should he be necessarily dependent on anything? If God were all good, then was not hylē “bad,” in which case, why would God have organized it and pronounced the creation based upon it “good”?
Creation ex nihilo ultimately carried the day, to the point that Origen of Alexandria, in the third century, could muse, “Regarding this hylē, which is so great and wonderful as to be sufficient for all the bodies in the world, which God willed to exist . . . I cannot understand how so many distinguished men have supposed it to be uncreated” (On First Principles II. i, 4). (Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012], 165 n. 2)
