Act 1: Angelic Participation and Moral Cosmogony in Origen

Christian discourse on angelic participation begins with Origen in the context of his polemic against those we used to call “Gnostics.” Before turning to Origen's discussion of angels and participation in the cosmology of On First Principles (Princ.) 1.6, however, I want to highlight what that polemical context looks like in order then to appreciate how his angelology makes sense within that context. In Princ. 2.9.5, Origen identifies those who would raise objections to his Christian cosmology as “coming from the schools of Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides.”Footnote ¹⁰ This trio represents Origen's archetypal triumvirate of heresy. They appear repeatedly throughout his corpus as examples of dangerous theological errors that distort what he takes for the core truth of Christian teaching as represented in the rule of faith and the apostolic tradition.Footnote ¹¹

Origen consistently depicts the legacies of Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides—whether listed all together or in paired permutations—as threatening two key Christian commitments: 1) the goodness, justice, and perfection of God the Creator and 2) moral freedom and responsibility. In summarizing their views, Origen connects these two concerns to conflicts over cosmology and creation:

In short, Origen sees Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides, despite whatever diversity may exist between their schools,Footnote ¹³ as all highlighting the theodical problem of diversity. The wide variety of conditions into which humans are born—not to mention the relative positions assigned to ranks of angels and hordes of demons—seems to render moot any meaningful moral accountability. Either the God who creates these beings and places them in their conditions is capricious, unjust, impotent, and even downright evil, or the moral quality of individuals, be they angels, humans, or demons, is intrinsic to their very nature, and irrevocable determinism replaces any meaningful moral freedom. Origen understands his trio to promote the latter view as a way to preserve some semblance of moral order in the cosmos, even at the expense, as Origen sees it, of self-determination.Footnote ¹⁴

For our purposes, the questions of whether or not Origen accurately represents the teachings of Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides, as well as whether he is right to group them together, are irrelevant. Though he knew the Valentinian teacher Heracleon's work on the Gospel of John, Origen probably had little extensive exposure to actual texts from these schools.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, given the repeated focus he gives to them, these competing traditions had a significant impact on his own thinking.Footnote ¹⁶ What Origen and others would have known of these “heretics” is less a consistent theological system or discrete writings, than different mythoi expounded by self-appointed teachers in “study sessions” outside of—but viewed by many Christians as consistent with—the Sunday worship experience presided over by “official” priests and bishops.Footnote ¹⁷ At the very least, what Origen knew of such mythoi included the general schema of cascading intermediate beings (aeons, emanations, etc.) between the supreme God and the ignorant, wicked, or defective creator “god” responsible for this material creation, as well as explanations for the relative condition of humans and other rational beings within a multi-layered cosmos. Given the porous and pluriform nature of Christian intellectual discourse in early third-century Alexandria, we may follow David Brakke in seeing Origen as offering an alternative, ostensibly orthodox cosmogonic myth that addresses the issue of diversity in such a way that defends the goodness, power, and justice of God in creation and safeguards moral freedom and accountability.Footnote ¹⁸

Origen's anti-“Gnostic” mythos of the origin and fate of the cosmos focuses on the condition of created rational beings.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, we come finally to his discussion of angelic participation in God. According to Origen's cosmogony, the different degrees of angels, humans, and demons were all originally ontologically identical as created minds. The circumstances in which a particular angel, human, or demon finds itself presently are a result of that particular mind's own failure to participate perfectly in God. Origen describes this process in the following way:

With respect to theodicy and moral freedom, Origen's cosmology preserves both the goodness of God and the self-determination of rational agents by diagnosing embodied diversity to be the just consequence of each individual mind's own free failure to participate in God in its particular degree.

Because of his larger polemical context, Origen's discussion of participation is about more than angels; it is about created rational beings in general, and angels represent simply one class of (slightly) fallen minds. As the doctrinal and polemical context shifts in the following centuries, however, Origen's legacy, including his language of angelic participation, is appropriated in new ways. Therefore, I want to highlight three particular themes of Origen's understanding of angelic participation at Princ. 1.6.2 that will either change or be amplified in future discussions of the topic.

First, we see Origen's own theological concern: to safeguard the good providence of God by making created rational beings morally responsible for their own higher or lower conditions. Second, as he does elsewhere, Origen emphasizes that the angels, like every created rational being, lack intrinsic goodness in their natures and can obtain it only through participation in the essential goodness of God.Footnote ²¹ Finally, because they are not essentially good, created rational beings are inherently mutable, able to fall, and, Origen will later clarify, rise through changes in their degree of participation. While in our next context, that of the fourth-century trinitarian disputes, the first feature drops out of the discussion as the latter two themes are emphasized, when we come to Augustine, we will see the issue of moral responsibility and freedom again take center stage, ironically this time in the context of the Origenist controversy.

Act 2: Angelic Participation and the Holy Spirit in Athanasius and Didymus

For Origen, the status of angels derives from the inherent instability of created minds who all have the freedom to rise or fall in their participation of God. This allows him to counter the moral determinism of competing Christianities, most explicitly those associated with Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion. Angelic instability next arises as a key theological theme in a polemical context that owes much to the ambiguous legacy of Origen: the fourth-century trinitarian conflicts.Footnote ²² Here, Athanasius and Didymus both deploy language of angelic participation with its attendant feature of instability to defend the full divinity of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ²³ Whereas Origen was concerned to establish a general account of creation that explained the diversity of rational beings alongside a just and providential God, Athanasius and Didymus use the language of angelic participation to draw a line between the created, mutable, and participating life of the angels on the one side and the uncreated, immutable, and participated-in life of the Holy Spirit on the other. As with Origen, however, I turn first to the polemical context before examining what Athanasius and Didymus have to say about angels.

In 358, Serapion, bishop of Thumis in the eastern Nile delta, sent a letter to Athanasius, recently of Alexandria, who, in one of his numerous exiles, had to receive it “in the desert.”Footnote ²⁴ Although this letter does not survive, we know from Athanasius's first response that Serapion was distressed that “certain ones have gone away from the Arians because of their blasphemy against the Son of God, yet they set their minds against the Holy Spirit, saying not only that he is a creature but also that he is one of ‘the ministering spirits’ (Heb 1:14) and differs from angels only in degree.”Footnote ²⁵ Serapion thus notifies Athanasius of a new polemical front in the post-Nicene conflict. A new group, which Athanasius later terms tropokoi or pneumatomachi, accept the Nicene language of homoousios for the divinity of the Son but refuse to apply such language to the Spirit. Instead, they assert, the Spirit ought to be understood as either the highest of the angels or at least more similar to angels than to the fully divine Father and Son.

Famously, the original creed of Nicaea (325) offers no elaboration on the nature of the Holy Spirit, simply listing him as also believed in. It is not until 381 that the Council of Constantinople extends the pneumatological article to affirm that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father” and is worshipped along with Father and Son. Thus the “angelic” or “angelomorphic”Footnote ²⁶ pneumatology of the tropokoi represents an attempt to negotiate what proper appropriation of Nicaea should look like. That is, the polemical context of Serapion's letter and Athanasius's response addresses not only the debate over the correctness of Nicaea but, more importantly, the correct way of interpreting and glossing it.

This angelic language of the tropokoi is not a new phenomenon in Christian pneumatology; rather, it has deep roots as far back as second-temple Judaism.Footnote ²⁷ Bogdan Bucur has recently argued that angelomorphic pneumatology “constitutes a relatively widespread phenomenon in early Christianity,”Footnote ²⁸ a claim he supports with passages from Justin Martyr, the Shepherd of Hermas, Clement of Alexandria, and others. Bucur's argument focuses on early Jewish and Christian exegesis of texts like Zech 4:10 and Isa 11:2–3 in relation to the seven primordial spirits/angels known as the πρωτόκτιστοι. This tradition provides a fertile interpretive field for early Christians making sense of who or what the Holy Spirit is. In addition, surrounding the specific tradition that Bucur traces, we see the broader cosmological context in which a number of intermediary beings, including a Spirit or spirits, operate as, or appear quite similar to, angels. We find this exemplified in the pseudipegriphal Christian text Ascension of Isaiah, which repeatedly refers to the “angel of the Holy Spirit” who is worshipped alongside the Father and the Lord.Footnote ²⁹

Given this polemical context—both the immediate claims of the tropokoi and the larger tradition from which they draw—it is not surprising that part of Athanasius's argument against the tropokoi distinguishes between the uncreated divinity of the Spirit and the created nature of angels. He wants to draw a clear line of demarcation between the divine and the angelic, the Creator and the created. Here, he deploys Origen's language of angelic participation to demonstrate that ontological divide:Footnote ³⁰

As with Origen, Athanasius connects this language of angelic participation to the mutability of the angelic nature, not only in this quoted passage but also in the sections that precede it.Footnote ³² For Athanasius, though, angelic participation is connected to the argument of the Holy Spirit as the undiminished giver. Lewis Ayres has traced the history and legacy of this argument in pro-Nicene accounts of the Spirit,Footnote ³³ but for my part I want to note how Athanasius adapts Origen's language of angelic participation within a new polemical context. Instead of explaining something about created rational beings in themselves, Athanasius uses angelic mutability and participation to point away from them and toward the immutable divinity of the Spirit in whom they participate.

Writing a few years later,Footnote ³⁴ Didymus the Blind makes a similar argument:

Didymus here deploys angelic participation language for the same purposes as Athanasius, but he follows Origen a bit more closely.Footnote ³⁶ Like Origen, Didymus emphasizes that the qualities the angels obtain through participation have to be so acquired because they are not intrinsic to the essence or nature of the angels.

Athanasius and Didymus use two of Origen's key points about angelic participation—the essential mutability of the angelic nature and their acquisition of certain qualities through participation in God—to undercut angelomorphic pneumatologies and establish a strict distinction between the participated-in Spirit and the participating angels. Yet it is worth noting that Origen's original understanding of the Trinity and participation did not always draw such a hard line. On the one hand, Athanasius's and Didymus's depiction of the Spirit as participated in but not himself participating fits well with Origen's declaration in Contra Celsum that “[God] does not participate but rather is participated in, and he is participated in by those who have the Spirit of God.”Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, Origen claims that “those who are not holy essentially (substantialiter) may be made holy by participation in this [grace of the Holy Spirit].”Footnote ³⁸ On the other hand, Origen also describes the Son as “less than the Father (ἐλαττόνως δὲ παρὰ τὸν πατέρα)” and “prior to rational creatures alone (φθάνων ἐπὶ μόνα τὰ λογικά),” while “the Holy Spirit is still less (ἔτι δὲ ἡττόνως τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον) [than the Son] . . . so that the power of the Father is greater than that of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and that of the Son is more than that of the Holy Spirit.”Footnote ³⁹ Likewise, in his Commentary on John, Origen declares that “the Holy Spirit is the most honored and the first in order of all that was made by the Father through Christ,” going so far as to say that the Spirit receives his essence “by participation in the epinoia of Christ.”Footnote ⁴⁰

While Origen's descriptions of the Spirit participating in the Son and the Son in the Father make sense in his original anti-monarchian context,Footnote ⁴¹ they would not work for Athanasius's and Didymus's polemical purposes in the post-Nicene context. Thus the two heirs of Origen establish participation as that which distinguishes angels from the divine persons, highlighting their mutability and second-hand holiness. Turning now to the West, we will see how such ambiguities in Origen's legacy also influence Augustine's discourse on angels, in which participation entails a new level of stability.

Act 3: Augustine, Angelic Stability, and the Origenist Controversy

In Athanasius and Didymus we see a redeployment of Origen's angelic participation language within a new polemical context. Further, all three emphasize the mutability of the angelic nature. A necessary correlative of angelic participation in God is the possibility that the angels could, as Athanasius says, “fall away” from the one in whom they participate. When we come to Augustine, however, we find a new emphasis on the stability that the angels enjoy through their participation in God.

This stability lies at the heart of Muehlberger's depiction of Augustine's angelic discourse. In my reading of Augustine that follows, I offer two important corrections to Muehlberger's assessment: First, although Augustine's angels do experience a new level of stability through participation in God, such stability is not, as Muehlberger claims, “natural to them.”Footnote ⁴² Rather, it is a gift added to those angels who did not turn from God. As to their natures, Augustine's angels are as mutable as any other created being. Second, Augustine's emphasis on angelic stability ought to be read not primarily in light of his general role as a Christian bishop shoring up a totalizing discourse against the competing political and social claims of “pagan” and “heretical” Christian worldviews but as his engagement with the same ambiguous theological legacy we see Origen bequeath to Athanasius and Didymus.Footnote ⁴³ In particular, Augustine's primary polemical context for his understanding of angelic participation and stability is the Origenist controversy, in which the bishop of Hippo works to refute the supposed heresies of the very theologian who first articulated a vision of angelic participation.

Unlike previous sections, I turn first to what Augustine has to say about angelic participation and stability before discussing the polemical context. Augustine discusses angelic participation in two major works, first in the Literal Commentary on Genesis (Gen. litt.),Footnote ⁴⁴ which was begun sometime between 399–404 but not published until 415–416,Footnote ⁴⁵ and then in City of God (Civ.). His earliest use of angelic participation language, at Gen. litt. 4, points toward stability but suggests an underlying potential for change in the angelic condition: “If the angelic nature were turning (conuerteretur) to itself and delighting (delectaretur) more in itself than in the one by participation in whom it is made blessed (cuius participatione beata est), then, swollen with pride, it would be falling (caderet) just like the devil.”Footnote ⁴⁶ My cumbersome translation reflects the present contrary-to-fact conditional construction of the imperfect subjunctive verbs. The theological significance of this phrasing is a bit ambiguous. While the angels are not turning toward themselves in the present, this conditional suggests that in the past such a turning was an actual possibility, as evidenced by the fate of the devil. Further it is unclear whether such narcissistic conversion remains a future possibility for those angels who, at the moment, participate in the beatitude of God. In any case, we see some continuity with Origen, Athanasius, and Didymus: in and of themselves the angels are mutable and their blessedness depends upon participation in God.

But does this understanding of angelic participation represent instability or stability? While the logic of the conditional points to the angels’ underlying mutability as created beings, by the time he gets to book 8 of his commentary, Augustine points more toward stability. Now, describing how the angels operate as ministers of God's providence, he says,

Augustine says the angels participate in God's eternity, which suggests a limitation to their mutability or, rather, that they transcend their mutability through participation in the stability of God. Yet Augustine's purpose here is not to speculate on the condition of the angels but to explain how they function as mediating ministers of God's providence. His emphasis is that their participation in God's eternity does not preclude their activity within the temporal, bodily world. Angels, as they usually do, have a liminal status. For Augustine, their participation in God, exemplified by the contemplation of God's eternity, allows them to enact the eternal will and providence of God in the world of space and time.

Even here, though, Augustine does not yet emphasize the stability of the angelic nature explicitly and unambiguously. He will do so when he comes to Gen. litt. 11 and his interpretation of humanity's fall. Speaking of the death that came upon Adam and Eve as a result of their disobedience, Augustine explains,

Here, the stability that the angels receive from their participation represents the very thing that humans would have enjoyed but forsook in the fall. Mutability, or at least the most pernicious consequences of it, is exactly what the angels escape through their participation in God.

These passages from Augustine's Literal Commentary on Genesis, all of which discuss angelic participation, evince a developing emphasis on the stability that comes from that participation. This is a shift in focus from what we have seen in previous authors who emphasize the mutability of the angels in order either to distinguish them from the divine persons or to account for the morally diverse conditions of created rational beings. As created beings, Augustine's angels are still ontologically mutable,Footnote ⁴⁹ but this mutability is rendered moot through participation in God's eternity, which establishes a new level of stability.

A true appreciation of Augustine's use of angelic participation, however, requires turning to his most significant engagement with the idea, in Civ. 11. Here, Augustine puzzles over the relationship between the creation of the angels and the fall of some of them. He begins by speculating that the creation of the angels corresponds to the creation of light on the first day. To elucidate this, he explains,

Many of the same elements from earlier depictions of angelic participation appear here. Augustine emphasizes the immutability of God in contrast to the changeable created nature of the angels.Footnote ⁵¹ The angels therefore are only “light” through participation and not in themselves. And of course, such mutability raises the possibility that the participant might turn away from the one in whom he participates, as the “unclean spirits” have done. So far, Augustine's version of angelic participation follows the same lines as Origen, Athanasius, and Didymus, as well as the earliest examples from Augustine's own Gen. litt.

But the idea of some angels falling away from their participation in God raises a problem for Augustine. In the light of God, the angels see all truth, even about themselves. So does this mean that they shared in wisdom to such an extent as to know that they would fall or persevere in that condition? For Augustine the highest enjoyment of a thing means not only possessing it but being assured of continued possession. Therefore, if the angels who would fall knew that they would fall then they could not have experienced the fullness of joy even in their divine participation. Only those angels who knew that they would never fall would be able to participate in God with complete joy. This creates a vicious circle, because the angels who are going to fall are more prone to fall because they know they are going to fall.Footnote ⁵²

Augustine solves this problem by postulating that there was a moment, immediately after their creation, when the angels, by the mysterious dint of their own wills, either clung to their original participation or turned away from God. Because of this,

Here, we see the real change that Augustine introduces to the motif of angelic participation. Although according to their nature angels are still essentially mutable and liable to change, their participation in God now entails the assurance of eternal perseverance in that state. For the angels, the drama of the fall is a “one and done” event isolated to the moment immediately following their creation. With respect to their continued moral or ontological status, this perseverance renders moot their mutability and establishes a level of stability that has heretofore been absent from discussions of angelic participation.

With Origen, Athanasius, and Didymus, we saw how their polemical contexts shaped their depiction of angels and instability. What, therefore, accounts for Augustine's shift in emphasis toward stability? In answering this, we should note first that Augustine's version of angelic participation establishes stability not only among the angels but in the wider moral cosmos as well. As Muehlberger has suggested, the stability of the angels strengthens the hope of Christians to share in that same eternal bliss.Footnote ⁵⁴ But it also presents a radically different cosmology than Origen's, with which we began. This, I argue, is no accident. Rather, Augustine's transformation of the motif of angelic participation emphasizes stability over mutability precisely because he is responding to issues raised by the Origenist controversy. As before, a new polemical context shapes a new, and significantly changed, appropriation of Origen's legacy. This time the context is explicitly about that legacy itself.

However, this theory requires some support and qualification, given the lack of clarity that still exists about Augustine's knowledge of Origen and engagement with the Origenist controversy.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, some conjecture in this area is unavoidable, and, as with much historical argument, I am investigating what seems likely or probable given the evidence we have as well as what interpretation provides the most fruitful insight into the texts at hand. Therefore, while it is not definitive, I do believe we can and should read Augustine's discussion of angelic participation in the context of the Origenist controversy for the following reasons.

First, the texts from Gen. litt. and Civ. fit within the timeline of Augustine's growing awareness of Origen's work and of the controversy surrounding him. Augustine would have known of Origen through the influence of Ambrose, but direct engagement with his texts would have likely come later and through the translations of Rufinus (c. 345–410) and Jerome (c. 347–420). We know that in 397 Augustine was still pleading ignorance regarding Origen's supposed doctrinal crimes and imploring Jerome to clarify what the alleged errors entailed.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 398, Rufinus rendered both Origen's Princ. and Pamphilus's Apology for Origen into Latin while in Rome. Augustine may have had access to this soon after, along with Rufinus's Apology against Jerome, composed in 401, and Jerome's Against Rufinus, composed partly in 401 and partly in 402.Footnote ⁵⁷ By 404, we find Augustine writing to Jerome in an active attempt to heal the rift between him and Rufinus.Footnote ⁵⁸ Therefore, in the period of 399–404, representing the range of dates proposed for the beginning of Gen. litt., we witness Augustine's increasing knowledge of and engagement with Origen and the Origenist controversy, though he still appears as an outsider to the conflict. However, by 415—when he had recently begun Civ. and was finishing Gen. litt.—Augustine is actively arguing against “the error of Origen” in a work addressed to Orosius,Footnote ⁵⁹ and he will continue to do so up until his death, as evidenced by the inclusion of Origen in the incomplete Heresies. This new focus arises in part from the influx of Pelagian refugees into Africa following the sack of Rome in 410 and Augustine's subsequent resurgent interest in the origin of the soul.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whatever the reason, we can be confident that by the time he was finishing up Gen. litt. and writing Civ., Augustine was actively engaged in anti-Origenist polemic.

Second, Augustine's understanding of Origen's “errors” focuses on his theories of the origins of rational beings, both humans and angels—the very topic within which Origen himself first developed the language of angelic participation. For instance, in his previously mentioned Heresies, Augustine condemns Origen's supposed claim

Whether or not this accurately depicts Origen's own thought, these concerns about the supposed transmigration of souls within an eternal cycle reflect what Augustine would have learned about Origen from Jerome's vitriolic caricatures.Footnote ⁶² Although Augustine does not explicitly discuss Origen's language of angelic participation, it is likely he was aware of it given his familiarity with the theological conversation within which it occurs.

Finally, both of the works that contain Augustine's discussion of angelic participation also include references to these same Origenist “errors.”Footnote ⁶³ In Gen. litt. 6, Augustine rejects “the opinion some people hold, according to which souls sinned, some more some less, and were thrust down into different kinds of bodies, depending on the different degrees of their guilt.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This fits with what Augustine would have known to be Origen's understanding of the pre-existent minds who fall into various conditions. Thus, when we see Augustine's account of the stability of the angels in the later sections of his commentary, we may assume that he has developed a greater familiarity with controversial aspects of Origen's cosmology and now wants to leave no ambiguity as to the fixed condition of the angels, ontologically mutable though they remain.

As circumstantial and veiled as the reference to Origen in Gen. litt. may be, we are fortunate that Civ. provides a more explicit and textually proximate connection to Origen. In book 11, the very same book in which he examines the nature of angelic participation and stability, Augustine dedicates an entire chapter to refuting Origen by name. He particularly ridicules the idea that “souls . . . sinned by withdrawing from their Creator . . . and merited diverse bodies like prisons according to the diversity of their sins.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Reading book 11 as a whole while taking into consideration the place of angelic participation in Origen's discussions of the fall and rise of created rational beings along with Augustine's wider concern with this aspect of Origen's legacy, it is difficult to separate Augustine's discussion of angelic participation from his engagement with the Origenist controversy.Footnote ⁶⁶

Therefore, we should read Augustine's version of stable angelic participation within the context of this anti-Origenist polemic. Augustine avoids the alleged Origenist errors by solidifying the status of the good angels and wicked demons as eternally and irrevocably established following that brief moment of volitional ambiguity immediately after their initial creation. In Augustine's cosmology, there will be no ascending or descending up the moral or ontological ladder for these spiritual creatures and therefore no transmigration of souls. Augustine's angels, though still ontologically mutable and possessing holiness only by way of participation in God, are able to rest in their participation, safe in the knowledge of their stability.