There was a time, not so long ago, when to speak of Origen as a Platonist seemed less venturesome than to speak of him as a Christian. Anatomists of his thought cut away his scriptural exegesis as so much blubber; his strictures on Plato in the Contra Celsum were construed as vain attempts to conceal the birthmarks of his own thought; Plato himself was dubiously credited with the Deuteronomic shibboleth ‘our God is one’ and the Pauline tripartition of human nature into body, soul and spirit. As scholars lost faith in the theological adequacy of historico-critical methods in exegesis, Origen's commentaries were perused without the chronological snobbery that had impaired the vision of earlier commentators and it was admitted that he did indeed derive from the Scriptures the truths that he claimed to find there. The imputation of Platonism, however, was not so much rebutted as repressed, and it was frequently still assumed that this philosophy governed his speculative writings. In this book an author whose credentials as a reader of Origen cannot be questioned tells us that ‘the claim of Platonism in Origen appears so baffling that argument would be needed to establish not its incoherence but its coherence’ (p. 17). On p. 374 he says the same of the widespread notion that the meaning of the text is systematically perverted in Origen's commentaries by his use of allegorical methods borrowed from the Greeks. According to Tzamalikos, there is no greater libel on Origen than to imagine that he lost the particular in the universal, that he attached no importance to history, and that his metaphysical scheme precluded a Christian eschatology. On the contrary, his teaching on the nature and destiny of the human soul can be understood only in the light of a universal teleology: the soul is sent to earth not to suffer perpetual vicissitude or to recover a lost perfection, but to undergo a progressive transfiguration, both in this life and in the aeon which succeeds it. The body is neither an obstacle nor an adjunct to this progress, but an indispensable coefficient, until the consummation in which God is all in all. The argument is based, so far as our sources permit, on Greek texts which have survived in their integrity; those scholars who have looked for the marrow of Origen's thinking in the De principiis are reminded that the Latin translation is often free, while the Greek interpolations in the edition of Koetschau are often precipitates of malicious abridgment when they are not mere paraphrases or inventions. It is true that no single proposition here is entirely new, and that the lean bibliography (populated mainly by authorities whom Tzamalikos intends to refute) suggests that these positions have been reached with little knowledge of scholarly writing on Origen in the last two decades. But it is also true that no recent study of Origen in English shows such through and minute familiarity with the whole corpus of his writings, or so often improves upon the standard lexica in its marshalling of evidence from other texts to illuminate his usage of Greek terms.

Too few scholars have wondered, for example, whether enoptike is a Greek word before they donated it to Origen as his term for the contemplative or intuitive stage of wisdom; Tzamalikos shows that, since it was not employed in any genre that Origen cultivated, one of two variants in the manuscripts must be preferred (p. 359). Those who have searched in vain for the logikoi, or rational intellects, who are supposed to have populated the eternal universe governed by the Logos, will be relieved to find that Tzamalikos too has no evidence of logikoi, but only of eternal verities or logika (p. 44 n. 8). Against those who maintain that Origen countenanced no survival of the body after physical death, Tzamalikos marshals not only a handful of gnomic and controverted statements in the De principiis, but a host of texts from other works by Origen, some of which survive in Greek. At the time it is not his intention to force the whole body of Origen's writings into an orthodox corset, and he argues that translation into the aeon after death is not so much a deliverance of soul from space and time as the deliverance of space and time themselves from the Euclidean separation that curtails our experience in the present world. From this manifold – which Tzamalikos fancifully compares to the space-time of Einsteinian physics – there can be no second fall, as Jerome supposed. Nor, on the other hand, is even this sublimated embodiment perpetual, for all corporeality will be extinguished at the consummation, when God is all in all. Here I must confess that I am not yet willing to follow him: the passage adduced from Ad martyres 3 (p. 312) seems to me to describe the rapture of the embodied soul, while the strongest proofs are drawn from the Selecta in psalmos, a text perhaps more subject to redaction than any other Greek survival from Origen's corpus. To predict the final extinction of the body is to be hyper-Platonic rather than anti-Platonic, for, then as now, it was generally held that Plato equates beatitude with incorporeality. In fact, it is not clear that any of his successors in late antiquity believed that any permanent separation of soul from body is conceivable, and it might be possible to extract or develop a strain of this versatile philosophy which would run all fours with Origen's teaching rather than counter to it. Tzamalikos is not to be blamed, however, if, in explicating Origen's thought, he adopts the schematic view of Platonism that Origen presupposes throughout the Contra Celsum; the present book, a successor to his Origen: cosmology and ontology of time (2006), has surely established him as the most important scholar writing today on this seminal but enigmatic figure.