Mihai Vlad Niculescu: ORIGEN OTHERWISE THAN ORIGEN: An Alternative Approach to Origen's Incarnational View of the Bible and of Biblical Exegesis

In a provocative and insightful study of the Pauline corpus, Daniel Boyarin has identified spiritual alegoresis as a source of Christianity’s universalist politics, while pointing out the assimilationist and supersessionist downsides of this exegetically authorized universalism. French post-structuralism, on which Boyarin relies to no small extent, has labeled such spiritualist universalisms as “logocentric.” This paper attempts to test the applicability of the recent critique of logocentrism to the views of a paradigmatic Logos-committed theologian and allegorical exegete such as Origen of Alexandria. I shall start from a tentative reading of Lc 24.27 (Jesus’ self-identification as the Messiah of the Hebrew Scripture on the road to Emmaus) in light of Origen’s construal of the Bible as a textual incarnation of the Logos. If, as Origen recommends, the words of the Bible are the textual body of the Word, Jesus’ post-resurrectional exegesis of “Moses and the prophets” represents Logos’ ultimate self-interpretation in the Bible as the Bible or the Word’s exegesis of the Bible as an eschatological self-exegesis. While agreeing that an interpretation of the self-exegesing Jesus of Lc 24.27 as a metaphysical “first principle” of the creation and of the Bible leads to the universalist exegetic politics that Boyarin describes, I shall offer an alternative, non-metaphysical reading of the Origenian Logos, which would entail an alternative, less assimilatory, exegetic politics. More precisely, I shall take Origen’s construal of Logos’ coming in the world and in the text (the historical and the textual incarnation) as messianic events, rather than as metaphysical acts of world- and text- foundation. I shall argue that, in spite of the all too obvious use of metaphysical terminology, the eventmental-messianic line of thought continues to be present in Origen’s extant works. Ultimately, the contrast between a speculative-metaphysical and a messianic-eventmental reading of Origen’s exegesis of Lc 24.27 will configure a possible criticism of Boyarin’s reading of early Christian logocentrism as too exclusively reliant on a metaphysical interpretation of the Logos and of the Logos-authorized exegetic politics.