Chapter 9

Origen—Anti-Gnostic Theologian, Not Gnostic Disciple

A. McClymond’s Argument

If Michael McClymond’s The Devil’s Redemption has a villain, it is Origen of Alexandria. Across dozens of pages in volume one, McClymond paints Origen as the man who took the raw material of second-century gnostic mythology and dressed it up in biblical language. In McClymond’s telling, Origen’s doctrine of universal restoration—apokatastasis, the teaching that God will eventually restore all things and all people to Himself—was not a faithful reading of Scripture. It was a smuggled import. A Trojan horse. Gnosticism in a Christian suit.

McClymond’s central claim is blunt: Origen’s universalism was “an adaptation and transformation of second-century gnosis into a sanitized and more biblicized form.”¹ He argues that the cosmic narrative found in gnostic texts—especially the Valentinian writings discovered at Nag Hammadi—provides the real template for Origen’s grand system in On First Principles (Peri Archon). The story goes like this: spiritual beings originally existed in unity with God, then fell away through some kind of cosmic catastrophe, then were scattered into material bodies, and will finally be gathered back into the original divine unity. McClymond sees this pattern in both Valentinian cosmology and Origen’s theology, and he draws a straight line between them.²

McClymond points to several specific connections. He emphasizes Origen’s teaching on preexistent souls—the idea that rational creatures existed before their embodiment in physical bodies—and argues this is fundamentally a gnostic concept.³ He highlights the “fall-and-restoration-of-souls” pattern that he finds in both Valentinian texts and Origen’s system.⁴ He appeals to the work of Holger Strutwolf, whose 1993 study Gnosis als System argues for continuities between Origen and second-century gnosticism.⁵ And he claims that Einar Thomassen’s analysis of Valentinianism shows just how close the Valentinian narrative is to Origen’s system, noting parallels in the eternal generation of the Son, the movement from unity to plurality and back, and the emphasis on providence and education in the salvation process.⁶

McClymond also takes aim at Ilaria Ramelli, whose massive scholarly work The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis presents Origen as thoroughly anti-gnostic. McClymond accuses Ramelli of reducing gnosticism to “soteriological elitism and determinism,” which allows her to label Origen as anti-gnostic simply because he affirmed free will and universal salvation. He argues this definition is too narrow and out of step with more recent scholarship, particularly Michael Williams’s Rethinking “Gnosticism”.⁷ In McClymond’s view, Ramelli’s approach “leaves us with a decontextualized Origen”—an Origen ripped from his second-century Alexandrian milieu and the gnostic currents that flowed through it.⁸

McClymond further draws on Thomassen’s analysis of Valentinianism to tighten the parallel. In Thomassen’s summary, the core Valentinian narrative moves from a single divine source to a plurality of divine beings (the Pleroma), then through a crisis that produces matter and separation, and finally back to “the restoration” (apokatastasis)—the reunification of all that was scattered back into harmonious unity with the divine. McClymond states bluntly that “every element in this Valentinian narrative is paralleled in Origen’s Peri Archon.”⁶¹ The argument from the eternal generation of the Son, the movement from unity to plurality and back, the emphasis on providence and education, the idea that the end will be like the beginning—all of it, McClymond claims, shows that Origen’s system is fundamentally a Christianized version of a Valentinian template.

McClymond also uses Ramelli’s own massive work against her. He characterizes her Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis as “Origen-centric” theological history and implies that Ramelli’s project is more advocacy than scholarship. He writes that “one must take with a grain of salt her claim” to disavow the categories of orthodoxy and heresy, since she appeals to contemporary pro-universalist voices—from Pentecostal bishops to Roman Catholic archbishops—to bolster her case.⁶² The implication is that both Ramelli and Origen are engaged in the same project: making heterodox ideas look orthodox. McClymond’s verdict on Origen is part of his verdict on the entire universalist tradition: it is an alien intrusion into Christianity, dressed up to look biblical but built on borrowed foundations.

To summarize McClymond’s core claim in a single sentence: Origen borrowed the basic architecture of his theology—the fall of rational creatures from a primal unity with God and their eventual restoration to that unity—from gnostic sources, and his universalism is the natural fruit of that borrowed architecture.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses

McClymond’s argument is bold. It is also deeply flawed. And it is flawed not because of minor problems at the edges but because of fundamental errors at its center. The problems cluster around five main areas.

1. Gnostics Were Not Universalists

The first and most devastating problem is this: McClymond wants to trace Origen’s universalism to gnostic sources, but the gnostics were not universalists. Most gnostic systems taught the exact opposite of universal salvation. They divided humanity into fixed classes—the pneumatikoi (spiritual people), the psychikoi (soulish people), and the sarkikoi (fleshly or material people). Only the spiritual class was guaranteed salvation. The soulish might have a chance, depending on the system. The fleshly? They were doomed.⁹

Think about what this means. McClymond’s central thesis is that Origen’s universalism—his teaching that God will save all people without exception—was borrowed from a tradition that taught salvation for one class of people and excluded the rest. That is not a minor tension. That is a contradiction at the heart of the argument.

Ramelli’s analysis of the specific gnostic texts McClymond cites makes this point with devastating precision. The Tripartite Tractate, for example, promises restoration for the body of the church, but explicitly excludes an entire class of humans—the “carnal” (sarkikoi)—who “will perish.” Part of the psychikoi are excluded too. Matter itself is declared to perish entirely.¹⁰ The Apocryphon of John, which McClymond also discusses, teaches both the transmigration of souls (metensomatosis) and eternal punishment for at least apostates and blasphemers—two doctrines Origen explicitly rejected.¹¹ The On the Origin of the World says that the imperfect “will never enter the kingless realm” and that different classes of people “had different beginnings and will have different ends.”¹²

Even the Wisdom of Jesus Christ, another text from the Nag Hammadi library, teaches that some know the Father perfectly, others defectively, and each will experience rest appropriate to their group—meaning different ends for different people, with some perhaps receiving no rest at all. The Carpocratians are sometimes cited as an exception—a gnostic group that actually taught universal salvation. But even they taught metensomatosis, the transmigration of souls through multiple bodies, which Origen rejected. And one possible exception out of dozens of gnostic groups does not establish a pattern of gnostic universalism; it establishes the opposite.⁶⁸

McClymond himself seems to sense the weakness here. He acknowledges that the strictly elitist and deterministic view of gnostic salvation may need rethinking, citing Michael Williams’s work. He points to the Apocryphon of John as coming “right up to the verge of teaching universalism,” where individuals have “multiple opportunities for salvation.” But “right up to the verge” is not the same as actually teaching it. And even in this most generous reading of a single gnostic text, those who repeatedly reject salvation or later fall away are “finally excluded.” That is precisely the opposite of what Origen taught. Origen’s whole point was that nobody is finally excluded. God’s patience outlasts every refusal. That is what makes Origen’s universalism universal—and that is what separates it from anything the gnostics taught.

This is not what universalism looks like. Not even close.

2. Gnostic “Universalism” Excluded Bodily Resurrection

Even in the rare cases where a gnostic text approaches something like universal salvation, there is a critical difference: gnostic restoration typically excluded the resurrection of the body. Matter was the problem, not the solution. The body was a prison, not a gift. Salvation meant escape from the body, not its transformation and glorification.

Origen and the patristic universalists who followed him—especially Gregory of Nyssa—taught the opposite. They emphatically affirmed the resurrection of the body.¹³ Yes, there were ancient debates about what Origen meant by the “resurrection body,” and yes, some of his critics accused him of denying bodily resurrection. But as Ramelli has argued at length, the claim that Origen denied the resurrection of the body is a misconstruction that cannot survive careful investigation of his actual writings.¹⁴ Origen’s view of resurrection stressed discontinuity—the glorified body would be radically different from the present body—but he never taught that the body would be discarded. That was the gnostic position, not his.

3. Origen Spent His Entire Career Fighting Gnosticism

Here is the most straightforward problem with McClymond’s thesis: the man he calls a gnostic disciple spent virtually every working day of his life refuting gnostic ideas. This is not a minor detail. It is the central fact of Origen’s intellectual career.

As Ramelli documents extensively, Origen’s anti-gnostic polemics are woven through all of his surviving works, from his earliest writings to his last—including Against Celsus and the recently discovered Munich homilies on the Psalms.¹⁵ What exactly did Origen spend his life opposing? The list is striking in its comprehensiveness: predestinationism (the idea that people’s destinies are fixed in advance), the division of humans into different natures (some saved, some damned, by the kind of being they are), the idea of an evil demiurge separate from the good God, the severing of divine justice from divine goodness, docetism (the denial that Christ had a real physical body), the elaborate mythology of divine aeons, and the refusal to interpret the Old Testament spiritually.¹⁶

Every one of those positions is a core gnostic teaching. And Origen opposed every single one.

4. McClymond Relies on Discredited Readings of Origen

McClymond leans heavily on the traditional portrait of Origen as a speculative philosopher who taught the preexistence of disembodied souls that fell from heaven into material bodies as a punishment for sin. This portrait goes back to ancient critics—especially Jerome and Epiphanius—and it has been repeated so often that many people assume it is accurate.

But modern Origen scholarship has increasingly recognized that this portrait is distorted. The claim that Origen taught the preexistence of disembodied souls—bare minds floating around without any kind of body before their fall—is precisely what Ramelli and other scholars have challenged. Origen spoke of “rational natures” (logikē physikē) that existed in some relationship with God before their present embodied state, but the question of whether these rational natures were entirely without bodies is far more complex than McClymond acknowledges.¹⁷

Even Gregory of Nyssa, who rejected the preexistence of disembodied souls, was not rejecting Origen when he did so—because Origen himself did not teach it, at least not in the crude form attributed to him by Jerome. When Gregory argued against those who wrote on “principles” (peri archon) and taught preexistent bodiless souls, he was more likely targeting pagan Neoplatonists like Porphyry, who also wrote a work entitled On First Principles.¹⁸ Ramelli offers several reasons for this identification: Gregory’s target taught both the preexistence of disembodied souls and metensomatosis (the transmigration of souls between bodies), which Origen explicitly rejected. Gregory referred to “those before us”—a formula he regularly used for non-Christians, not fellow believers. And Gregory’s entire theology of freedom, restoration, and the eventual triumph of good over evil depends directly on Origen.¹⁹

5. Shared Patterns Do Not Prove Dependence

McClymond’s argument ultimately rests on pattern matching. He sees a “fall-and-restoration-of-souls” pattern in gnostic texts, and he sees a similar pattern in Origen, and he concludes that one must have come from the other. But this is a logical error. As Ramelli rightly observes, the pattern of fall and restoration is “common not only to Origen and the ‘gnostics,’ as McClymond suggests, but to all patristic Platonists, including the anti-Manichaean Augustine” and, more broadly, to all Christians.²⁰

The biblical narrative itself is a story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. God creates. Humanity falls. God redeems. God restores. That is the storyline from Genesis to Revelation. The fact that gnostic texts also tell a version of this story does not mean that anyone who tells the Christian version is borrowing from them. McClymond’s logic, applied consistently, would make every Christian theologian who teaches creation, fall, and redemption a “gnostic disciple.”

C. The Universalist Response: Origen the Anti-Gnostic Champion

Having identified the weaknesses in McClymond’s argument, we now turn to the positive case. Who was Origen, really? What actually drove his theology? Where did his universalism come from? The answers to these questions matter enormously—not just for understanding one ancient theologian, but for understanding the roots of the Christian hope for universal restoration.

The Real Origen

Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–253 AD) was one of the most brilliant minds the church has ever produced. He was a philosopher, a biblical scholar, a preacher, and a systematic theologian—arguably the first systematic theologian in the history of Christianity.²¹ His output was staggering. By some ancient estimates he wrote thousands of works, though only a fraction survive. His Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) remains one of the greatest works of Christian apologetics ever written. His On First Principles was the first attempt by a Christian thinker to present a comprehensive, systematic account of the faith. His commentaries on the books of the Bible—on John, on Romans, on Matthew, on the Psalms, on Jeremiah, and many others—set the standard for all subsequent Christian biblical scholarship.²²

Eusebius records that Origen “became celebrated as a great philosopher even among the Greeks themselves.”²³ His student Gregory Thaumaturgus (Gregory the Wonderworker) described Origen’s teaching method: he told his students to study all the writings of the ancient philosophers and poets, rejecting nothing except the works of atheists who denied divine providence.²⁴ Origen was an intellectually fearless Christian who believed that all truth is God’s truth, and he engaged with the best pagan thought of his day without fear and without compromise.

But here is what is most important for our purposes: Origen’s fearless engagement with pagan philosophy was always in the service of the Christian faith. He did not adopt Plato wholesale. He constructed what Ramelli calls an “orthodox Christian Platonism”—deliberately and explicitly opposed not only to non-Platonic philosophical schools, and not only to pagan Platonism, but above all to what he regarded as the “unorthodox Christian Platonism of gnosticism.”²⁵ Origen saw the gnostics as people who had taken some genuinely good philosophical ideas and twisted them into a monstrous distortion of the Christian faith. His life’s work was, in large measure, to set the record straight.

Origen Against the Gnostics: Point by Point

To appreciate just how anti-gnostic Origen was, we need to look at the specific gnostic teachings he opposed and see how his own theology was constructed as a direct refutation of each one.

Against gnostic predestinationism: The gnostics taught that people are saved or damned by nature. The pneumatikoi (spiritual people) are saved because they are spiritual—it is built into what they are. The sarkikoi (fleshly people) are damned because they are fleshly. There is nothing anyone can do about it. Your nature determines your destiny.

Origen could not have rejected this more forcefully. For him, free will was a non-negotiable axiom. He insisted that it was “laid down in the Church’s teaching, that every rational soul is possessed of free will and choice” and that “we are not subject to necessity, so as to be compelled by every means, even against our will, to do either good or evil.”²⁶ Every rational creature chooses its own path. Nobody is saved by the accident of having the right nature. Nobody is damned by the accident of having the wrong one. Origen’s insistence on free will was, in large measure, an anti-gnostic move.

Think about what this means for the question of universalism’s origins. The gnostics said: some are saved, some are not, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Origen said: every creature can be saved, because every creature has the capacity to choose God. The gnostic position leads logically to exclusivism—a limited salvation for a limited group. Origen’s position leads logically to universalism—if every creature can choose God, and if God is infinitely patient and resourceful in drawing creatures to Himself, then there is no in-principle obstacle to the salvation of all. Origen’s universalism is not gnostic. It is the direct opposite of gnostic exclusivism. It arose precisely from his insistence on the principles the gnostics denied.

Against the division of humans into fixed classes: Related to predestinationism, the gnostics divided humanity into distinct classes with distinct destinies. Origen rejected this completely. In his view, all rational creatures share the same nature. The differences between angels, humans, and demons are not the result of different natures but of different choices. A demon is a rational creature that has chosen evil; a human is a rational creature in the middle of its journey; an angel is a rational creature that has chosen good. The difference is moral, not ontological.²⁷ This is the exact opposite of gnostic teaching, and it is absolutely foundational to Origen’s universalism: because all rational creatures share the same nature, all can be restored.

Against the evil demiurge: Many gnostic systems taught that the material world was created by an inferior or evil deity—a demiurge who was either ignorant of the true God or actively opposed to him. The God of the Old Testament, in many gnostic systems, was this demiurge. The true God was hidden, unknowable, and had nothing to do with material creation.

Origen rejected this with his whole being. For Origen, the God who created the world is the same God who redeems it. The God of Genesis is the God and Father of Jesus Christ. Divine justice and divine goodness are not two separate things from two separate gods—they are one and the same, expressions of one divine character.²⁸ McClymond actually agrees that Origen opposed the separation of justice from goodness, but he does not seem to appreciate how deeply anti-gnostic this commitment was.

Against metensomatosis: McClymond repeatedly associates Origen with metensomatosis—the transmigration of souls from one body to another (what we might loosely call “reincarnation”). This is an important claim because metensomatosis was indeed a feature of some gnostic systems and certain strands of Platonism. But Origen explicitly and repeatedly rejected it.²⁹ In his Contra Celsum and Commentary on Matthew, Origen argued against the idea that human souls could be embodied in animal bodies, which was a standard element of the transmigration doctrine.³⁰ Gregory of Nyssa likewise rejected metensomatosis. The fact that McClymond continues to associate Origen with this teaching, despite Origen’s own explicit rejections of it, is telling.

Against pantheistic deification: Another gnostic tendency that McClymond associates with Origen is the idea that creatures will be absorbed back into God’s substance at the end—that the distinction between Creator and creature will be erased. But as Ramelli has shown, Origen’s understanding of theosis (deification) was not pantheistic. It was primarily a union of wills, not a dissolution of identities. The wills of all rational creatures would be oriented toward God, and they would live the divine life—but they would remain distinct creatures in loving communion with their Creator, not absorbed droplets in an impersonal divine ocean.⁷⁰ This distinction between Origen’s understanding of the final state and the pantheistic dissolution sometimes attributed to him is crucial. McClymond blurs it. The evidence demands clarity.

The Actual Sources of Origen’s Universalism

If Origen’s universalism did not come from gnosticism, where did it come from? The answer is clear when we look at what Origen himself actually appealed to.

Scripture first and foremost. Origen was, above everything else, a man of the Bible. His commentaries and homilies cover nearly the entire biblical canon. When he argued for universal restoration, he argued from texts like Acts 3:21 (the “restoration of all things”), 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 (God will be “all in all”), Romans 5:12–21 (the parallelism between Adam’s condemnation of all and Christ’s justification of all), Philippians 2:10–11 (every knee will bow and every tongue confess), and many others.³² He appealed to 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 for the preaching of the gospel to the dead. He used Isaiah 47:14–15 on the ardent coals for the Chaldeans—coals that bring help, not eternal destruction—to argue that God’s fire is purifying, not merely punishing.³³

It is worth pausing here to appreciate how remarkable this is. McClymond’s narrative would have us believe that Origen’s universalism was essentially a philosophical or mythological construction borrowed from gnostic sources and then propped up with a few scriptural proof-texts. But when you actually read Origen’s works, you find a man who is drowning in Scripture. His homilies and commentaries constitute the vast majority of his surviving output. His exegesis is painstaking, detailed, and deeply attentive to the nuances of the biblical text. He does not arrive at universalism and then go looking for biblical support. He immerses himself in the Bible and finds that the texts themselves are pushing him toward a universal hope. The movement is from Scripture to theology, not from mythology to Scripture.

Consider, for example, how Origen handled 1 Corinthians 15:24–28. This passage became the single most important text in the entire patristic universalist tradition, and it was Origen who established its significance. Paul writes that Christ must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet, the last enemy being death, and that when all things are subjected to Christ, then the Son Himself will be subjected to the Father, so that God may be “all in all.” Origen read this passage and asked a simple question: What does it mean for God to be “all in all”? If God is truly all in all, then there is no place where God is not. There is no creature that is outside God’s loving presence. There is no evil left, because evil is the absence of the Good, and if God is all in all, there can be no such absence. This is not gnostic mythology. This is close, careful exegesis of Paul.⁶³

This exegesis did not die with Origen. Gregory of Nyssa picked it up and developed it further in his treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28. Marcellus of Ancyra adopted the same reading, identifying the submission of all humanity to God as salvific. Evagrius of Pontus continued it. The entire universalist tradition flowed from this Pauline text as read by Origen. And none of these later thinkers understood themselves to be continuing a gnostic project. They understood themselves to be reading Paul.

Origen’s method was to begin with what was “laid down in the Church’s teaching”—the apostolic rule of faith—and then to investigate the open questions by careful reasoning from Scripture.³⁴ Where the rule of faith was clear, Origen followed it. Where questions remained open, he explored them. His On First Principles is far more tentative and exploratory (what scholars call “zetetic” or investigative) than McClymond’s characterization suggests. Origen was not dogmatizing. He was thinking out loud, on paper, in conversation with Scripture and the Christian tradition.³⁵

This is an important point that gets lost in McClymond’s presentation. McClymond treats Origen’s universalism as a settled dogmatic system that Origen imposed on the biblical text from outside. But Origen himself repeatedly signaled that he was exploring, proposing, testing ideas. He offered many of his most controversial positions as suggestions, not as settled doctrine. He used phrases like “it seems to me” and “let us consider whether” and “I leave this for the reader to decide.” He explicitly acknowledged that the church had not yet settled many of the questions he was investigating. This zetetic spirit is the opposite of the gnostic claim to secret, certain knowledge. The gnostics claimed to know. Origen was content to search.

And where did his search lead him? Not to Valentinian mythology, but to the Bible. Again and again, as you read Origen’s surviving works, you find a man who is wrestling with actual biblical texts—not importing alien ideas and looking for verses to attach them to, but genuinely trying to understand what Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul were saying, and what it meant for the ultimate destiny of God’s creation.

Jewish-Christian literature and the Petrine tradition. Origen drew on earlier Christian materials, including the Petrine tradition of Christ’s preaching to the dead and the wider Jewish-Christian hope for God’s eventual restoration of all things. As we saw in Chapter 8, the hope for universal restoration did not begin with Origen. It was present in Bardaisan of Edessa, who taught that in the end “peace will be perfect, after the years of the providential economy.”³⁶ It was present in Clement of Alexandria, Origen’s predecessor in the Alexandrian catechetical school, who spoke of purifying punishments and the eventual restoration of the wicked.³⁷ Origen inherited these ideas from a living Christian tradition, not from gnostic myth.

A Christian Platonism constructed against gnostic Platonism. Yes, Origen engaged with Plato. He was, as Porphyry famously reported, “always reading Plato.”³⁸ But the key philosophical idea that Origen took from Platonic thought and used in his universalism was not some esoteric gnostic concept. It was the ontological non-subsistence of evil—the idea that evil has no real existence of its own but is simply the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light.³⁹

This is a profoundly important point. If evil has no real substance—if it is not a thing God created but a privation, a turning away from the Good who is God—then evil is by its very nature temporary. It cannot sustain itself. It is parasitic on the good. And if evil is ultimately insubstantial, then there is no reason in principle why it cannot be completely eradicated. As Evagrius of Pontus, one of Origen’s greatest followers, later summarized: “Evil is not a substance that actually exists: it is the absence of Good, just as darkness is a lack of light. There was a time when evil did not exist, and there will come a time when evil will no longer exist.”⁴⁰

Origen grounded this philosophical insight in Scripture: the Good and Being are identified with God, and evil and non-being are their opposites. As Origen stated in his Commentary on John: “The One who is Good, therefore, coincides with the One who Is. On the contrary, evil and meanness are opposed to the Good and non-being to Being. As a consequence, meanness and evil are non-being.”⁴¹ If one adheres to God, one remains in being; if one rejects God, one drifts toward non-being. But no rational creature’s substance can ever be completely destroyed, because God created it and what God creates is good.

This is where Origen’s universalism and his opposition to annihilationism come together. A soul that chooses evil drifts toward non-being—it experiences spiritual death, what Origen calls “the real death.” But this spiritual death is not ontological annihilation. The creature still exists. Its substance, created by God, remains. And therefore restoration is always possible. God’s therapeutic punishment—His purifying fire—works on the creature until the choice of evil is abandoned and the creature freely returns to the Good.⁴²

Origen’s Theodicy: The Engine of His Universalism

If we want to understand what really drove Origen’s universalism, we need to understand his theodicy—his attempt to vindicate the justice and goodness of God in a world filled with suffering and evil. Mark Scott has rightly made this the focus of his study of Origen, calling Origen’s entire theological project a “journey back to God.”⁴³

Origen looked at the world and asked: Why are some people born into wealth and others into poverty? Why do some people have every advantage while others suffer from the moment they draw breath? The gnostics had an answer: different classes of people have different natures, and that’s just the way things are. But Origen found this answer morally monstrous. A God who creates different classes of beings with different destinies built in from the start is not a just God. Origen was driven by the conviction that God is both perfectly just and perfectly good, and that any theology that compromises either of those attributes is false.

His answer was free will. All rational creatures began in a relationship with God. Their present circumstances—angel, human, or demon—reflect the choices they have made. And their future is open, because God’s providence never stops working for their restoration. As Ramelli explains, “Origen’s concept of the cosmos, taking its distance from the necessarianism of Stoic cyclical cosmology, emphasizes the logika’s self-determination; on this point, which was both anti-Stoic and anti-‘Gnostic,’ Origen builds up his theodicy, which also encompasses his apokatastasis theory.”⁴⁴

Notice how different this is from gnosticism. In gnostic systems, the material world is a disaster—a cosmic mistake or a malicious act by an inferior deity. In Origen’s theology, the material world is part of God’s providential response to the fall of rational creatures. God did not create material bodies as prisons; He created them as opportunities. The physical world is a school, a hospital, a place where creatures who have wandered from God can begin their journey home. Suffering exists not because a bumbling demiurge made a flawed world, but because free creatures made bad choices, and God is in the process of bringing them back.

This is why annihilationism was just as unacceptable to Origen as eternal torment. If God created rational beings in order for them to exist, then their ontological destruction would represent a failure of God’s creative purpose. As Origen put it, “the beings that God created in order for them to exist and endure cannot undergo a destruction in their very substance.”⁶⁴ A creature can drift into spiritual death through the choice of evil, but this moral death is always reversible, because the creature’s substance—created by God and therefore good—remains intact. Jesus came to find and save the lost, and Scripture everywhere proclaims the resurrection of those who have died. Moral death is not the end of the story. It is a chapter in a story that ends in restoration.

This is not gnosticism dressed up in biblical language. This is a serious Christian thinker grappling with the deepest questions of the faith—Why does evil exist? How can God be just? What is the ultimate destiny of creation?—and arriving at answers that are rooted in Scripture, in the apostolic tradition, and in the best philosophical reasoning available to him.

Origen and the Rufinus Problem

One of the complicating factors in understanding Origen is that many of his works survive only in Latin translation by Rufinus of Aquileia, who was sympathetic to Origen and who may have softened some of Origen’s more controversial positions. McClymond suggests that Rufinus “tampered with the textual evidence” and gave later generations “a skewed, inaccurate Latin rendering of Peri Archon.”⁴⁵

There is some truth to the concern about Rufinus, but recent scholarship has moved toward a more positive assessment of his work as a translator. Sidonius Apollinaris, writing in the fifth century, praised the quality of Rufinus’s translations, saying that Rufinus grasped “both the letter and the sense” of Origen’s work, and translated Origen even better than Apuleius translated Plato or Cicero translated Demosthenes.⁴⁶ More importantly, scholars are increasingly recognizing that Rufinus’s understanding of Origen’s core theological aims—especially his concern for theodicy—was fundamentally sound. Rufinus abridged and simplified Origen’s texts, but the accusation that he systematically falsified them has been significantly challenged.⁴⁷

There is also the opposite problem—one McClymond does not adequately address. Origen himself complained during his lifetime that his writings were being falsified by opponents. In a letter preserved in Rufinus’s translation, Origen described an incident in Ephesus where an adversary fabricated a debate and attributed false positions to Origen, then circulated this forgery in Rome and Antioch. Origen publicly confronted the man, challenged him to produce the document so that others could recognize it was not in Origen’s style, and the forger was exposed.⁴⁸ If Origen’s works were being tampered with during his own lifetime, how much more might they have been distorted in the centuries after his death, when the “Origenist controversies” made him a lightning rod for theological debate?

The point is not that we cannot know what Origen taught. It is that we should be cautious about accepting the portrait painted by his ancient opponents—a portrait McClymond too often takes at face value.

The Continuity with Gregory of Nyssa

McClymond tries to drive a wedge between Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, arguing that Gregory “deviated from Origen in basic ways” and “offered a teaching on apokatastasis no longer consonant with Origen’s.”⁴⁹ This strategy serves McClymond’s narrative: if Gregory can be separated from Origen, then the uncomfortable fact that one of the three Cappadocian Fathers—a pillar of Trinitarian orthodoxy—was an unambiguous universalist becomes less damaging to McClymond’s case.

I want the reader to feel the weight of this point, because it matters enormously. Gregory of Nyssa was not some marginal figure on the edges of the early church. He was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers—along with his brother Basil of Caesarea and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus—who shaped the doctrine of the Trinity as we know it today. When you recite the Nicene Creed on Sunday morning, you are reciting a confession that was deeply influenced by Cappadocian theology. Gregory is honored as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Anglican churches. His orthodoxy is beyond question. And he was an unambiguous, explicit, enthusiastic universalist.

This creates a massive problem for McClymond’s thesis. If universalism is a gnostic import, how do we explain the fact that one of the architects of Nicene orthodoxy held it? McClymond’s answer is to separate Gregory from Origen: Gregory rejected Origen’s preexistent souls, therefore Gregory’s universalism was fundamentally different from Origen’s, therefore we cannot use Gregory to validate the Origenian universalist tradition.

But the evidence does not support this separation. Ramelli has demonstrated through extensive research that Gregory’s theology of freedom, restoration, and the triumph of good over evil depends directly on Origen. Gregory borrowed Origen’s arguments and even his scriptural quotations in support of apokatastasis.⁵⁰ His short treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28, In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius, “depends entirely on Origen’s exegesis” and links the anti-subordinationist argument about the Son to the argument for universal restoration through the identification of the submission of all humanity—the body of Christ—to God as its salvation.⁵¹

Gregory’s ethics, too, reflect Origen’s influence. Both embraced what scholars call ethical intellectualism—the view that evil results from ignorance and deception, and that a fully informed will, seeing clearly, will always choose the good. Both taught that free and deliberate choice by individuals is not in contradiction with corporate salvation but integrated into it. Both held that purifying fire may last a long time (“pros holon aiona”) but is measured against the future age before the final restoration, not as a description of the restored state itself.⁵²

McClymond is right that Gregory rejected the preexistence of souls. But as we have already seen, so did Origen—at least in the crude form McClymond attributes to him. Both Gregory’s protology and his eschatology are in deep continuity with Origen’s. McClymond’s attempt to separate them is an attempt to deny what the historical evidence clearly shows: that there was a unified, coherent, deeply orthodox patristic universalist tradition running from Origen through the Cappadocians, through Evagrius, and through Maximus the Confessor.

The Plotinus Parallel

There is one more piece of evidence that undermines McClymond’s gnostic-origins thesis. Origen was not the only thinker in third-century Alexandria who was fighting gnosticism. His contemporary Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, was doing the same thing. Plotinus wrote an entire treatise “Against the Gnostics” (Enneads II.9), attacking gnostics who attended his own philosophical school. As Ramelli points out, Origen’s criticism of gnostic ideas coincided in many respects with Plotinus’s criticism.⁵³

Why does this matter? Because if both Origen and Plotinus were fighting gnosticism in the same intellectual environment, it becomes clear that the philosophical and theological currents in third-century Alexandria cannot be reduced to “gnostic” and “non-gnostic.” There were multiple traditions at work—pagan Platonism, Christian Platonism, various forms of gnosticism, Stoicism, and more. Origen was operating within this complex environment, drawing on the best elements of Platonic thought while explicitly rejecting gnostic distortions. To collapse all of this into “Origen borrowed from gnosticism” is a gross oversimplification.

It is also worth noting that Origen’s approach to Platonism was itself distinctly Christian. He did not adopt Platonic philosophy wholesale. He carefully selected those elements that he believed were compatible with the biblical witness and rejected those that were not. He rejected the transmigration of souls, which Plato himself had taught (at least in mythical form). He rejected the Stoic version of cosmic restoration (apokatastasis), which was based on an impersonal cyclical determinism rather than on the free and loving action of a personal God. His engagement with philosophy was always governed by Scripture and the rule of faith. In this sense, Origen was no different from any number of later Christian thinkers—from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to the Protestant Reformers—who used philosophical categories to express and clarify biblical truth. The fact that he used Platonic language does not make him a pagan, any more than Aquinas’s use of Aristotelian language makes Aquinas a pagan.⁶⁹

What Origen’s Universalism Actually Looked Like

I want to close this section by painting a brief portrait of what Origen’s universalism actually looked like when stripped of McClymond’s gnostic overlay. It is a vision that is, I believe, deeply biblical, deeply pastoral, and deeply hopeful.

Origen believed that God created all rational beings out of love and for the purpose of eternal communion with Himself. He believed that these rational beings, endowed with genuine free will, turned away from God—not because of some cosmic catastrophe or mythological drama, but because of the mystery of creaturely freedom. He believed that this turning away resulted in suffering, darkness, and distance from God. And he believed that God, being both perfectly just and perfectly loving, would not abandon His creatures to that darkness forever.

God’s response, in Origen’s vision, is providential, educational, and ultimately restorative. God meets each creature where it is. He disciplines, corrects, purifies. His punishments are not random acts of vengeance; they are precisely calibrated to the needs of each soul. As Origen argued from Psalm 77, God sometimes “killed people in order to save them.” As he argued from Isaiah, God’s burning coals bring help, not destruction. As he argued from 1 Peter, Christ preaches even to the dead—because God’s love does not stop at the grave.⁵⁴

Origen’s vision of divine punishment was deeply connected to his reading of Scripture. He did not minimize the reality of God’s judgment. He took every warning text seriously. But he understood those judgments as purposeful, not pointless. A parent who disciplines a child is not torturing the child—the parent is shaping the child, correcting the child, drawing the child back toward the path that leads to life. Origen saw God’s eschatological fire in exactly the same way. It burns. It hurts. It purifies. And it works. Every rational creature, given enough time and enough grace, will eventually come to see the truth about God and the truth about itself, and will freely choose the Good.

This is not the vision of a soft-hearted liberal who cannot stomach the idea of divine judgment. Origen was anything but soft. He endured imprisonment and torture during the Decian persecution, and his health was broken by the experience. He died as a result of what he suffered. This was a man who knew that faithfulness to God comes at a cost. His universalism was not a comfortable escape from the hard realities of the faith. It was, if anything, an intensification of those realities—because in Origen’s vision, every single person who has ever lived will eventually face the purifying fire of God’s love, and that fire will not release them until every bit of resistance has been burned away.

And at the end—not after a single lifetime, and not after a few centuries, but after as long as it takes—God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Origen took this Pauline phrase with absolute seriousness. For God to be “all in all” means that there is no corner of reality where God is not. It means that every rational creature is finally united with God. It means that evil, having no substance of its own, has completely disappeared. It means that God’s creation has achieved the purpose for which it was made.⁵⁵

This is not gnosticism. There are no aeons. There is no evil demiurge. There are no fixed classes of humans with predetermined destinies. There is no escape from the body. There is only God—the one God, Creator and Redeemer—and His creatures, whom He loves with a love that never quits.

D. Counter-Objections

“Even if Origen refuted some gnostic tenets, his cosmology still mirrors gnostic patterns.”

This is the strongest version of McClymond’s argument, and it deserves a careful answer. The claim is that even if Origen opposed gnosticism on specific points, the overall shape of his theology—the grand narrative of preexistent beings who fall from divine unity and are eventually restored to it—is fundamentally gnostic in its architecture.

The answer has already been given, but it bears repeating: shared patterns do not prove dependence. The pattern of creation, fall, and restoration is not uniquely gnostic. It is the biblical narrative. It is shared by every Christian who affirms that God created the world good, that humanity fell into sin, and that God is in the process of redeeming and restoring His creation. If this pattern is “gnostic,” then all of Christianity is gnostic.

Furthermore, the specific differences between Origen’s version of this pattern and the gnostic version are not minor variations on a shared theme. They are fundamental disagreements about the nature of God, the nature of creation, the nature of the human person, and the nature of salvation. Origen affirmed one God who is both just and good. The gnostics split the divine into multiple beings. Origen affirmed bodily resurrection. The gnostics despised matter. Origen affirmed free will as the basis of each creature’s destiny. The gnostics taught fixed natures. Origen affirmed universal salvation. The gnostics taught salvation for a select class. To call these differences “minor” while emphasizing a shared narrative pattern as “decisive” is to get things exactly backward.⁵⁶

“Ramelli’s definition of gnosticism is too narrow.”

McClymond argues that Ramelli defines gnosticism solely in terms of soteriological elitism and determinism, which allows her to label Origen as anti-gnostic too easily. He points to Michael Williams’s Rethinking “Gnosticism” as evidence that the category is more complex.

This is a fair point as far as it goes. The category of “gnosticism” is indeed more complex and contested than any single definition can capture. But here is the irony: if the category of “gnosticism” is so fluid and contested that we cannot clearly define what it is, then how can McClymond claim with confidence that Origen’s theology was derived from it? You cannot simultaneously argue that gnosticism is hard to define and that Origen clearly borrowed from it. The fluidity of the category cuts both ways.⁵⁸

Moreover, even if we adopt a broader definition of gnosticism, the core problem with McClymond’s thesis remains: the specific features of Origen’s theology that McClymond identifies as “gnostic”—the fall-and-restoration pattern, the emphasis on divine unity, the idea of purifying punishment—are all amply attested in sources that have nothing to do with gnosticism. The fall-and-restoration pattern is biblical. The emphasis on divine unity is Pauline (1 Cor. 15:28). The idea of purifying punishment is found throughout the Old Testament prophets and is affirmed by a wide range of patristic authors who have no gnostic connections whatsoever, including Gregory of Nazianzus, who “cannot be labelled as influenced by Gnosticism, and yet has a penchant for apokatastasis.”⁵⁹

“Origen’s later followers show the gnostic trajectory of his thought.”

A final objection might be that even if Origen himself was anti-gnostic, some of his later followers drifted in gnostic directions—particularly Evagrius of Pontus and Stephen bar Sudaili—which shows that the “trajectory” of Origen’s thought tends toward gnosticism.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the fact that some later thinkers misused or distorted Origen’s ideas does not tell us what Origen himself taught. Augustine’s ideas were distorted by some of his followers, too—including, one might argue, into double predestination and the idea of God damning infants to hell. We do not judge Augustine by his worst interpreters. The same courtesy should be extended to Origen.

Second, the most important of Origen’s universalist successors did not drift in gnostic directions. Gregory of Nyssa, the greatest of them all, was a pillar of Nicene orthodoxy. Maximus the Confessor, deeply influenced by the Origenist tradition, was one of the most important defenders of Chalcedonian Christology in the history of the church. The mainstream of the Origenist universalist tradition was orthodox, Trinitarian, creedal, and biblical. The gnostic offshoots were just that—offshoots, departures from the main line, not its inevitable conclusion.⁶⁰

And here we should mention something McClymond himself acknowledges but does not adequately reckon with: the sheer influence of Origen on all subsequent Christian theology, not just universalist theology. Andrew Louth has observed that from the third century onward, “there were very few who were immune to his influence, at least at second hand.”⁶⁵ Athanasius, the great champion of Nicene orthodoxy, drew on Origen. Basil of Caesarea drew on Origen. The Cappadocian Fathers as a group were deeply shaped by Origen’s thought. Gregory Thaumaturgus brought Origen’s theology to Cappadocia, and from there it influenced the very people who wrote the Nicene Creed. If Origen was fundamentally a gnostic thinker, then the gnostic contamination runs through the entire history of Christian theology—which is absurd.

“What about Origen’s speculative excesses? Doesn’t that suggest heterodox influences?”

Someone might grant all of the above and still say: “Fine, Origen was anti-gnostic in his intentions. But he still ended up in some strange places—preexistent souls, the potential fall of the saints, the eventual restoration of the devil. These ideas are bizarre enough that they must have come from somewhere outside the mainstream Christian tradition.”

This objection deserves a careful answer, because there is a kernel of truth in it. Origen did speculate, and some of his speculations were later judged to go too far. But we need to be precise about what was being condemned. The specific propositions that were anathematized in connection with the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553 AD)—which we will discuss in detail in Chapter 12—were speculative metaphysical ideas like the preexistence of souls and the potential restoration of demons. They were not the core doctrine of universal human restoration. And crucially, Gregory of Nyssa, who held the same universalist theology as Origen on the question of human salvation, was never condemned. He was honored as a pillar of orthodoxy.⁶⁶

The fact that Origen speculated does not mean his speculations came from gnosticism. Philosophers speculate. Theologians speculate. Origen lived in a world where the boundaries of Christian doctrine were still being worked out, and he was doing the hard intellectual labor of thinking through the implications of the faith. Sometimes he got things wrong. But getting things wrong through honest speculation is not the same as borrowing from a rival religious tradition. Origen was wrong about some things the way a brilliant scientist can be wrong about a hypothesis—not because the scientist is secretly working for a competing laboratory, but because the cutting edge of knowledge is always a place where mistakes happen.

McClymond’s move here is a version of the genetic fallacy we discussed in Chapter 3. Instead of evaluating Origen’s speculations on their merits—asking whether they are true, whether they follow from Scripture, whether they are theologically coherent—he evaluates them by their alleged pedigree. “This sounds like gnosticism, therefore it must be gnosticism.” But the resemblance, as we have shown, is superficial. The actual content of Origen’s theology is fundamentally different from gnostic thought at every crucial point. If McClymond had engaged with Origen’s actual arguments—his exegesis of Paul, his theodicy, his doctrine of free will, his understanding of evil as non-being—instead of trying to pin a gnostic label on him, the debate would look very different. It would look like a genuine theological argument instead of a guilt-by-association campaign. And that is ultimately what this book is calling McClymond to do: stop arguing about where ideas come from and start arguing about whether they are true.

Conclusion

McClymond’s attempt to paint Origen as a gnostic disciple does not hold up under scrutiny. The gnostics were not universalists. Origen spent his career fighting gnosticism. His universalism was rooted in Scripture, in the Christian tradition, and in a Christian Platonism deliberately constructed against gnostic Platonism. The shared patterns McClymond identifies are shared by all Christians, not just by Origen and the gnostics. And the specific features of Origen’s theology—his insistence on free will, his affirmation of bodily resurrection, his rejection of fixed human natures, his identification of the Creator God with the Redeemer God—are all directly opposed to gnostic teaching.

Origen was not perfect. He speculated. He explored. He sometimes went further than the evidence warranted. But he was doing something deeply Christian: he was trying to make sense of the faith in light of the best available knowledge, and he was driven by the conviction that God is both just and loving and that His love will ultimately triumph.

There is something deeply ironic about McClymond’s portrait of Origen. McClymond presents himself as the defender of orthodoxy against a gnostic intruder. But Origen was the one who fought gnosticism for a living. He was the one who insisted that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New. He was the one who affirmed free will against gnostic determinism, bodily resurrection against gnostic contempt for the body, and universal salvation against gnostic elitism. If there is a defender of orthodoxy in this story, it is Origen—not the man who misreads him.

Elizabeth Clark, in her study The Origenist Controversy, offered a poignant reflection on what was lost when Origen’s influence was suppressed: “With the condemnation of both Origenism and Pelagianism, the last chances for a fruitful unification of Eastern and Western Christianity met with defeat. Their condemnation made effective in the West the flourishing of a Christian theology whose central concerns were human sinfulness, not human potentiality; divine determination, not human freedom and responsibility; God’s mystery, not God’s justice.”⁶⁷ Christendom, Clark suggests, was poorer for Origen’s suppression. Whether or not one agrees with every detail of that assessment, it points to something important: Origen was not a threat to Christianity. He was one of its greatest champions.

If McClymond wants to defeat universalism, he will have to do it on its merits—by engaging the biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments. Calling Origen a gnostic is not an argument. It is an evasion. And the evidence shows that it is an evasion that does not even work on its own terms.

In our next chapter, we will turn to Gregory of Nyssa and examine McClymond’s misreadings of this towering figure of patristic orthodoxy. Gregory will show us what happens when a fully orthodox, creedal, Trinitarian theologian takes Origen’s best insights and builds them into a vision of universal restoration that the church has never been able to dismiss.