All Our Yesterdays
"To the last
syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays. . ." (Macbeth V.v.)
A series of brief articles
dealing with Human Pre-existence
by Arthur & Rosalind Eedle.
21. Ancient Christian Beliefs
(1)
Our first
contender for pre-existence must surely be Origen, (c.185 - c.254 A.D.) that
much-maligned defender of the faith, who held a significant teaching position
in the Church at Alexandria, and was considered to be the greatest theologian
of the early Christian Church. The reason why he is castigated so much today,
is based upon the Roman Catholic Church's censure of his teaching on
Universalism and Pre-existence. This came about by a Provincial Council of
Constantinople in 543 A.D.. In the same year these teachings were condemned by
Justinian. The old adage, "give a dog a bad name" has much truth in
it. History has shown the degree to which the teachings of Origen have been
side-lined, attacked, or eliminated from the Church. This is a shame. Anyone
who has familiarised himself with Origen's works will be amazed at his
godliness, sincerity, and deep learning.
First of
all I should like to quote a particular sequence from his writings relating to
an ancient work entitled "The Prayer of Joseph",
which unfortunately is no longer extant, but was certainly known to
Origen. It is found in his "Commentary on John chapter 2, verse 31."
(He is speaking of
John the Baptist,) “It will not be out of place to add a notion of our own
about him. When we read the prophecy of him, ‘Behold, I send my angel before
thy face,’ etc., we reflected if by chance one of the holy angels being upon
service were not sent down as a forerunner of our Saviour. It would not,
indeed, be surprising if, when the Firstborn of all Creation became incarnate,
for love of man, some should have become emulators and imitators of Christ, and
embraced the opportunity of ministering to His kindness to men by means of a
like body. Now if anyone accepts among the Apocrypha current among the Hebrews,
what is entitled The Prayer of Joseph, he will derive from it
exactly this teaching, expressed in plain terms: that those who from the
beginning possessed some special excellence beyond men, and were greatly
superior to all other souls, have descended from the estate of angels into
human nature. Jacob, at any rate, says: ‘For I Jacob that speak unto you, I am
also
And he continues: ‘And I, when I was
coming from Mesopotamia of Syria, Uriel the Angel of God came forth and said
that I had come down (came) to earth and tabernacled among men, and that I was
called by name Jacob. He envied me and fought with me, and wrestled with me,
saying that his name should have precedence of my name and of the Angel that is
before all (or that his name and the name of the Angel that is before all
should have precedence of my name). [All is singular, and should perhaps be
rendered 'before every (angel).'] And I told him his name, and in what order
he is among the sons of God, saying: Art not thou Uriel the eighth from me, and
I am
(The second fragment is in the Philocalia,
cap. xxiii. 15, taken from the Commentary on Genesis iii. It is partly
to be found in Eusebius' Praep. Evang., VI. II, and Procopius on Genesis
quotes from it too. The topic is astrology.) For, as we showed before that the
fact that God knows what every man will do is no obstacle to freewill, so neither
do the signs which God has appointed for the giving of information impede
freewill: but, like a book containing future events in prophecy, the whole
heaven - the book of God, as it is - may contain the future. Wherefore in the
Prayer of Joseph this word of Jacob may be thus understood: ‘For I have
read in the tablets of heaven all that shall befall you and your sons.' But if
Jacob says he has read in the tablets of heaven what is to befall his sons, and
upon this point some one objects to us that the opposite of what we have said
is shown by the Scripture (for we were saying that man has no apprehension of
the signs, whereas Jacob says he has read in the tablets of heaven), we shall
say in defence that our wise men, aided by a spirit excelling human nature, are
taught secret things not humanly but divinely, as Paul, who says, ‘I heard
unspeakable words,’ etc. ...And, besides, Jacob was greater than man, he who
supplanted his brother, and who declares in that same book from which we
quoted, ‘I read in the tablets of heaven’ that he was a captain of captains of
thousands of the power (host) of the Lord, and had of old the name of Israel:
which fact he recognises while doing service in a body, being reminded of it by
the archangel Uriel.