Colloquia on the History of Origen's Reception

Origen’s Nachleben is as complex and as multifaceted as his thought itself. As the first disputes in his own lifetime and particularly the two great Origenist Controversies show, his audacious theological synthesis has not only been a source of theological breakthroughs, but also an apple of discord from the very beginning. Despite his ecclesiastical condemnation at the end of antiquity, his speculative genius influenced the first Christian systems of medieval metaphysics, and his bible hermeneutics shaped the whole paradigm of the multiple sense of scripture. In the struggle about a new notion of man that, turning away from theological and philosophical determinism, starts from the individual’s freedom and development, early modern thought discovered the Alexandrian as its ancient ally, whose ideas it frequently took up and developed further. Lastly, modern theology, as is evidenced especially by contemporary reformulations of the Origenian doctrine of universal salvation and his dynamic freedom anthropology, is indebted to him in several significant ways. The eventful history of the Origenian tradition of thought is at the centre of the “Colloquia on the History of Origen’s Reception”. It focuses upon representative texts which are first put into a larger historical perspective in a public talk and then interpreted in an interdisciplinary workshop. Thus, Origen’s reception from antiquity to the present day will be traced and his significance to the western history of ideas made apparent.