Adamantiana – serie

The articles of this volume shed new light on the reception of Origen's concepts of free will and universal salvation in 17th-century England and Europe. The Cambridge Platonists took up the Alexandrian's libertarian concept of freedom and discussed his core ideas within the new philosophical developments of their own time. In continental Europe, the Dutch Arminians, Jean Le Clerc and the Pietist couple Johanna Eleonora and Johann Wilhelm Petersen dealt with questions related to Origenism.

Jerome of Stridon has gone down in the history of Christianity as a fierce defender of what he considered to be orthodox teaching, and, in particular, as a convinced opponent of Origenism. However, this champion of orthodoxy often found himself suspected of relying on heretical writers, and a main purpose of his heresiological efforts was to defend himself against such accusations. The present study argues that this was the case with his production of anti-Origenist polemics in the context of the Origenist controversy. It aims at contributing to a nuanced description of Jerome’s way of relating to Origen’s thought, which implied acceptance as well as resistance. It is suggested that as a result of Jerome’s anti-Origenist rhetoric, important aspects of his reception of the Alexandrian writer have been overlooked by modern scholarship. Taking account of the rhetorical strategies that Jerome used both in his presentation of Origen and in his orthodox self-presentation, the great complexity of his reception of Origen is revealed._x000D_

At the outbreak of the Reformations, the need for stable and authoritative support was acutely felt on all sides, engaged as they were in a conflict of interpretations of the core of Christianity. Patristic anthologies were the perfect tool for the roles of polemical weapons and doctrinal handbooks, as they selected apt passages from the Fathers of the Church to prove, explain and promote the articles of the new confessions of faith and testify to antiquity. In a paradigm dominated by the figure of Augustine, whose exegesis of Scripture and understanding of the Gospel was very important for many Reformers, these anthologies tried to demonstrate the broad consensus of the majority of the ancient writers with the doctrines advocated by them._x000D_ This volume offers an original perspective on the reception of Origen of Alexandria, one of the most profound and influential philosophers and exegetes of Late Antiquity, in three patristic anthologies of the 16th century. It explores how the voice of Origen, who was recognized by Luther and Melanchthon as a staunch opponent of their doctrines, is harmonized with the theological stances of the anthologies. The anomaly represented by the proposed image of a “Protestant Origenö helps us to decipher larger trends of the European Reformations, in their relationship with authority and memory._x000D_