The well-known ecological theologian H. Paul Santmire points out that divine caring for nature we can see in early christian Fathers such as Irenaeus is totally missing in Origen’s anthropocentric view of nature. Origen, according to Santmire, shaped the biblical belief in the resurrection of the body to fit into the hierarchical, spiritualizing conceptuality. Then the material world will presumably fall back into nothingness, from whence it came, at the very end. Santmire concludes that the otherworldly view of salvation and the radical depreciation of the world of nature started from Origen, and this is due to the Platonic and Stoic influence upon him. Origen indeed employed Platonic and Stoic languages and speculations on human being and the created world. However, the fundamental sources and inspirations came from the scriptures and the tradition of the church.
Origen, like other early christian Fathers, expressed the unity of creation by describing the functioning of different parts of creation as though they were limbs of a single body. It is difficult to pin Origen down to a specific statement that there will be restoration of the non-rational elements of the universe. He writes that if the heavens are to be changed like a vestment, then they are not to be destroyed, and if the fashion of the world passes away, it is by no means an annihilation or destruction of their material substance, but a kind of change of quality and transformation of appearance. It is primarily of physical human bodies that he is writing, but it is hard to exclude other material bodies from his meaning.
Origen’s conception of ‘apokatastasis’, that is, the ‘restoration of all things’ could refer not only to humans but also to their physical environment, a restoration of Paradise. During the series of restorations through which more and more rational beings will have returned to God, successive restorations also of the physical universe will be necessary. When all have returned, at the point when God is all in all, the whole creation will also have returned to a permanent state of aethereal purity. Origen never shut his eyes to the beauty of the world created by God. We should now reevaluate Origen’s view of nature and change the negative thought on him.

• 정용석(이화여자대학교) | Chung, Yong Seok