Results found: 2

Search results

Search:
in the keywords: moc Boga

Sort By:

Limit search:

Nieskończoność Boga u Orygenesa: przyczyna wielkiego nieporozumienia

100%

Mrugalski D.

Vox Patrum

2017

vol. 67

437-475

Many historians of ideas – philosophers and theologians – believe that the first thinker to introduce the concept of a positive understanding of the infiniteness of God was Plotinus. In Greek philosophy, however, something infinite was understood as “unfinished” and therefore “imperfect”. All the same, according to many scholars, Christianity took the concept of the infiniteness of God precisely from the founder of neo-Platonism. One of the reasons for which researchers of the doctrines of the ancient world persist in this thesis even today is the fact that, in the writings of Origen – who lived at the time of Plotinus – we find the expressions which might give readers the impression that God’s power is finite, since God brought into existence a finite number of created beings. This article argues that this widely-held interpretation is wrong. Philo and Clement, a Jewish and a Christian thinker, both of Alexandria – from whose doctrines Origen borrowed abundantly – wrote of an infinite God before Origen did. In the surviving works of Origen, moreover, he nowhere states explicitly that God’s power is finite, although it is true that, according to him, God created a finite number of creatures. The controversial thesis of a finite God is found only in fragments written by ancient critics of Origen’s teaching. A detailed analysis of Origen’s own original pronouncements on the nature, power and knowledge of God leads one to the conclusion that the fragments that have led many historians of ideas into confusion, either do not represent the views of Origen himself or present Origen’s teachings inaccurately. Moreover, in Origen’s surviving Greek writings, we find the term ¥peiron used in reference to God. This is precisely the term used by Greek philosophers to designate infinity. We may posit, then, that the concept of the infiniteness of God, positively understood, was born of the encounter of Greek philosophy with the Bible – that is, with the Jewish and Christian doctrines of the first centuries of the common era. Origen, who came slightly later, continued the thought of his predecessors and does not contradict them anywhere in his surviving works. What remains to be examined is the question of whether Plotinus himself made use of the work of Jewish and Christian thinkers in forming his doctrine of an infinite God, rather than those thinkers leaning on Plotinus, as is usually assumed.

Potentia dei absoluta et potentia dei ordinata u Orygenesa? Nowa próba wyjaśnienia kontrowersyjnych fragmentów "De principiis"

100%

Mrugalski D.

Vox Patrum

2018

vol. 69

493-526

The medieval dispute over the absolute and the ordered, power of God (potentia Dei absoluta et potentia Dei ordinata) began with a tract by Peter Damian entitled De divina omnipotentia. One of the questions posed in this work was whether God could indeed do everything, including those things that God did not in fact do. The same question, and a similar answer, appears in Origen’s work Contra Celsum: God can do everything except that which is evil. The impossibility of doing evil, however, does not diminish the omnipotence of God, because evil, is by its very nature, non-being. Beyond that, Origen, in numerous statements appearing in his exegetical works, distinguishes between the absolute power of God, which is infinite, and the power of God that creates the world and operates within it, which has a certain God-given limit – that is, this power is adapted to the abilities of the creatures who receive it. The purpose of this article is to show that, in the light of the distinction of the potentia Dei absoluta and the potentia Dei ordinata, fragments of De principiis (II 9.1 and IV 4.8), in which a finite world and finite power of God are posited, can be interpreted in a new way. Many contemporary scholars, on the basis of these fragments, conclude that Origen inherited from the Greek philosophers a negative understanding of infinity as something imperfect, but the analysis carried out in this article shows something different. In talking about a certain range of God’s power, which is available to creatures, or in which creatures participate only partially, Origen does not actually exclude the proposition that, in God himself, power – existing in an absolute way – can be infinite.

Refine search results

2 Vox Patrum

1 2018

1 2017

2 Mrugalski D.

Search results

Nieskończoność Boga u Orygenesa: przyczyna wielkiego nieporozumienia

Potentia dei absoluta et potentia dei ordinata u Orygenesa? Nowa próba wyjaśnienia kontrowersyjnych fragmentów "De principiis"