§ 133. THE OEIGENI8TI0 CONTKOVERSY IN PALESTINE. 699
possible, to the points of general interest, and omit the extremely insipid and humiliating details of personal invective and calumny.
It is the privilege of great pioneering minds to set a mass of other minds in motion, to awaken passionate sympathy and antipathy, and to act with stimulating and moulding power even upon after generations. Their very errors are often more useful than the merely traditional orthodoxy of unthinking men, because they come from an honest search after truth, and provoke new investigation. One of these minds was Origen, the most learned and able divine of the ante-Nicene period, the Plato or the Schleiermacher of the Greek church. During his life-time his peculiar, and for the most part Platonizing, views already aroused contradiction, and to the advanced orthodoxy of a later time they could not but appear as dangerous heresies. Methodius of Tyre (f 311) first attacked his doctrines of the creation and the resurrection ; while Pamphilus (t 309), from his prison, wrote an apology for Origen, which Eusebius afterwards completed. His name was drawn into the Arian controversies, and used and abused by both parties for their own ends. The question of the orthodoxy of the great departed became in this way a vital issue of the day, and rose in interest with the growing zeal for pure doctrine and the growing horror of all heresy.
Upon this question three parties arose: free, progi'essive disciples, blind adherents, and blind opponents.'
1. The true, independent followers of Origen drew from his writings much instruction and quickening, without committing themselves to his words, and, advancing with the demands of the time, attained a clearer knowledge of the specific doctrines of Christianity than Origen himself, without thereby losing esteem for his memory and his eminent services. Such men were Pamphilus, Eusebius of Csesarea, Didynius of Alexandria, and in a wider sense Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of I^yssa; and among the Latin fathers, Hilary, and at first Jerome, who
' Similar parties have arisen with reference to Luther, Schleiermacher, and othei great theologians and philosophers.
700 THIRD PERIOD. A.D, 311-590.
afterwards joined the opponents. Gregory of Njssa, and perhaps also Didymus, even adhered to Origen's doctrine of the final salvation of all created intelligences.
2. The blind and slavish followers, incapable of comprehending the free spirit of Origen, clave to the letter, held all his immature and erratic views, laid greater stress on them than Origen himself, and pressed them to extremes. Such mechanical fidelity to a master is always apostasy to his spirit, which tends towards continual growth in knowledge. To this class belonged the Egyptian monks in the Nitrian mountains; four in particular: Dioscurus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Enthymins, who are known by the name of the " tall brethren," ' and were very learned,
3. The opponents of Origen, some from ignorance, others from narrowness and want of discrimination, shunned his speculations as a source of the most dangerous heresies, and in him condemned at the same time all free theological discussion, without which no progress in knowledge is possible, and without which even the Nicene dogma would never have come into existence. To these belonged a class of Egyptian monks in the Scetic desert, with Pachomius at their head, who, in opposition to the mysticism and spiritualism of the Origenistic mo^ks of Nitria, urged grossly sensuous views of divine things, so as to receive the name of Anthropomorphites, The Roman church, in which Origen was scarcely known by name before the Arian disputes, shared in a general way the strong prejudice against him as an unsound and dangerous writer.
The leader in the crusade against the bones of Origen was the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis (Constantia) in Cyprus (t403), an honest, well-meaning, and by his contemporaries highly respected, but violent, coarse, contracted, and bigoted monastic saint and heresy hunter. He had inherited from the monks in the deserts of Egypt an ardent hatred of Origen as an arch-heretic, and for this hatred he gave documentary justification from the numerous writings of Origen in his Panarion, or chest of antidotes for eighty heresies, in which be
* 'Ad(\<t>ol /xaKpol, on account of Jheir bodily size.