John Solheid博士：奥利金论祈祷——索尔海德新译本访谈

[Dr. Pino]: When my wife saw the note on my calendar that we were going to be discussing Origen, she said, isn’t that that heretic? Welcome everybody. I’m T. Campino, director of the Pappas Patristic Institute at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Boston. Joining me today is Dr. John Solheid. John is going to be talking to us about Origen’s celebrated treatise on prayer, which he’s preparing for the Breckles Library of Christian Sources series. I want to tell you, John, when my wife saw the note on my calendar that we were going to be discussing Origen, she said, isn’t that that heretic? And of course, as a good Orthodox Christian, I said, yes, but.

[Dr. Pino]: But we’re going to dive into this topic with John. But first, a few words of introduction. John holds a PhD from the University of St. Michael’s College. He’s currently serving as adjunct professor of patristics and theology at St. Augustine Seminary in Toronto. He’s also adjunct professor of biblical Greek at the St. John’s School of Theology at the seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota. And he’s a fellow of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, also in Toronto. His book, Pedagogy of the Heart, Grammar, Philosophy, and the Christian Reader, In Origen’s Greek Homilies on the Psalms has been published in Brill’s Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae series and is out now. So welcome, John. It’s great to have you with us.

Dr. Solheid: Ticon, thank you very much. It’s great to be here. I’m very delighted to have this conversation with you. Thank you very much.

[Dr. Pino]: Thank you, John. Let’s start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you got into this topic, because the subject of Origen and his exegesis and his theology is something that bridges your previous work with this project that you’re working on now. So how did you come to this?

Dr. Solheid: That is a big question. I first came to Origen, On Prayer was one of the first texts from Origen that I ever read. I read it in a patristics class as a master’s student a very long time ago. I knew then that I wanted to read Origen, even though On Prayer is a very complicated text to read and get through, but it’s beautiful. When I did my doctoral work, as you mentioned, I looked at Origen’s homilies on the Psalms, which were discovered in 2012, sitting at the State Library in Munich. It was a collection of 29 homilies on 10 different psalms in Greek. They had been sitting there for a very long time. I can’t remember how old the manuscript is, 14th century maybe, or maybe even earlier, but no author had been attributed to it. There’d been some speculations. I think at some point in the transmission, somebody suggested maybe Michael Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher and poet. But in 2012, the librarian there cataloging these manuscripts saw evidence that they’re actually from Origen. So she collaborated with Lorenzo Perrone and a group of Italian scholars, and they verified that this was indeed from Origen. That was shortly before I started my doctoral program, so it made for an easy choice to do something new on this new area of Origen studies.

The thing that always strikes me about Origen is he’s so concerned to lead his audience towards a direct encounter in the heart. He repeats it over and over again that when scripture talks about sense organs, it’s doing so in a figurative way to talk about the spiritual organs, and the spiritual organ par excellence is the heart, the mind, or in the Stoic term, the hegemonikon, kind of like the moral governing center of the human person. This is where we encounter God, and this is where we see God as depicted in Matthew 5.8 in the beatitude. So all of his teaching when he’s presenting grammatical instruction, talking about specific points of grammar, whether it’s a definition of terms, scripture’s way of speaking, prosopology, so identifying who the characters are in the text who are speaking, it’s all oriented towards getting his audience to focus their mind on these subjects such that they’re putting away all distractions. They’re able to then focus the mind on what its proper object is, and that’s contemplation of the divine.

Prayer emerges as almost the situation where we have this contact. It’s not a leap. Origen, in his homilies, will talk about needing to pray in order to gain this kind of divine insight. Because for him, there’s this huge gap. There’s this ontological gap between human beings and God that can’t be bridged by human means alone. So he would reject Kant, for example, religion within the bounds of reason alone. He said that’s insufficient. So there’s this other thing that’s needed, and that’s prayer, which both is really, as we would commonly understand it, praying for divine aid, but also settling your mind, getting it into a disposition in which it can receive God, in which it can become this chora, this receptacle for divine grace. And then it is able to know something of the divine. So it really wasn’t a far leap for me to go from that project into, well, what is prayer for Origen in general? Because I didn’t really get into that in the dissertation, only bits and pieces of prayer. It just became something that was natural for me to say, well, maybe I should look at what Origen understands about prayer itself and to look at this text to do so.

Secondly, I also wanted to do a translation of something from Origen. A friend of mine, Lavinia Cerioni, knew of Tom McLaughlin, who is out at, or Tom…

Dr. Solheid: Thomas O’Loughlin. She knew he was looking for somebody to do translations for this series that Brepols has been running, so she got me in touch with him at Oxford in 2024. It just so happened he wanted somebody to do this, and here we are. Those are the two things that brought me to doing this particular project on Origen’s On Prayer.

[Dr. Pino]: So before we dive into the treatise on prayer itself, can you tell us a little bit about the state of the question in terms of Origen studies and Origen scholarship? Most people will have their understanding of Origen, his reputation, his legacy, and his work. But where do things stand in terms of our study and our knowledge of Origen and his corpus? Partly because we have these newly discovered or more recently discovered treatises.

Dr. Solheid: To be honest, Origen studies is one of these fields that’s a bit like Augustinian studies. It’s huge. It’s just massive. I don’t know if I could boil it down to one status quaestionis, but if I had to, I would probably say something like this: tradition, particularly going back to the Origenist controversy in the late 4th century, has read Origen theologically through the lens of the Council of Nicaea. That means asking whether Origen said that the Son of God was a creature, a ktisma, something that would put him in the Arian camp in the early 4th century. Did he apply the term homoousios to the Son and the Father? He doesn’t. In fact, Origen expresses great reluctance to talk about the homoousios. He uses the term, but not quite in the Nicene sense, in his commentary on John. He expresses a lot of reluctance to even talk about ousia, the substance, when it comes to God, partly because he sees the danger of dividing God into parts, which he would accuse the Gnostics of doing with their different emanations, such that each emanation is a lesser part of the divine. On the opposite extreme, you have the Monarchians, whom he accused—we don’t have a lot of literature from the Monarchians, but he accused them—of diminishing the individual substances, the individual beings within the Trinity, such that the distinctions between the Father, Son, and Spirit were blurred. He wanted to maintain those distinctions. So it becomes easy for someone in the anti-Nicene camp, or even someone somewhat sympathetic to Arius’s position like Eusebius of Caesarea, to take Origen as their champion. At the same time, Athanasius can also claim Origen as his champion. I think modern scholarship has now begun to recognize that we can’t read Origen through that lens. We have to read him according to the concerns he had at his time. Now we’re getting more interest in Origen’s Trinitarian theology in response to the Monarchians or Gnosticism, rather than seeing him through the lens of Nicaea and asking whether he is a heretic or not.

That’s one angle. Other angles, like we talked about, involve the heresy part. Some of that comes from his notion of the pre-existence of the soul. Scholars are pretty much in consensus, for the most part. There might be a couple who say that Origen didn’t really teach a pre-existence of the soul, but I think most agree that he did, though it’s very unclear what it is. Whether this pre-existence was some point in time in age, as we would commonly think of it, or if he’s just thinking about the logical implications of certain questions.

And then there’s the apokatastasis, which is universal salvation, where he gets accused of saying that the devil himself will be saved. I think there’s more disagreement on that. Ilaria Ramelli, for example, would take the position that, yes, for Origen, every rational being will be saved, and that includes the devil. It’s just that the devil is not devil by nature. The devil became the devil through habituating to evil to such an extent. There’s merit to that argument, though I’m still not completely convinced by it. Origen would say that humans and angels are all rational beings. We have this nous and reason. Of course, he would never say that the devil was evil by nature, because then that would implicate God in the devil’s evil. So logically, he had to conclude that, yes, even the devil would eventually be saved. It’s just that God’s grace would overpower him to such an extent that he would choose to receive it, and he would no longer be an enemy.

But then there’s the question of whether the devil and the demons will all share the same kind of status in relationship to God as the saints. There, I think, we’re probably on firmer ground to say that no, they wouldn’t. Origen even says there’s a hierarchy in heaven, such that saints are people who in the eschaton are much closer to God. Then there are others who hadn’t really done as much as the saints, yet they merit their eternal reward, and so on and so forth. If we were to say that the devil would no longer be devil, no longer be evil, he still wouldn’t share that same status as Moses or Isaiah or the apostles. So those are some of the questions that circulate around Origen. I don’t know how much is really being done with the apokatastasis. I wrote a paper on it a couple of years ago. It’s coming out in Studia Patristica. I don’t like it. It’s not a good paper. It’s garbage.

Dr. Solheid I think the real interesting questions now are looking at Origen’s Trinitarian theology in light of pre-Nicene concerns. This is opening up very interesting avenues of research, some of which are even relevant for my translation of On Prayer.

[Dr. Pino] Are we still limited by the question of the availability of texts and problematic translations, for example, the Latin translations of Rufinus?

Dr. Solheid Unfortunately, that is just the reality. The most important text is On First Principles, which is the one everybody knows. It is only extant in Greek fragments, preserved mostly in the Philokalia. There is debate about who compiled the Philokalia, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. We do have it in its entirety in a translation by Rufinus. Then we have Greek fragments preserved by Epiphanius of Salamis, who perhaps more than anyone ushered in the Origenist controversy in the 4th century. Some scholars will read his Greek fragments as though they faithfully represent what Origen said. Others are more skeptical and say he had polemical reasons, so we shouldn’t take his fragments of Origen at face value. I don’t have a position on that; I haven’t looked into it very much, but that is one of the questions. The Latin of Rufinus has the same problems. People will say he is polemically indebted to Origen and a staunch defender of Origen, so he is going to manipulate the text to present Origen as a pro-Nicene theologian. Again, I don’t really have a position on that, although I think there is a scholar—Adele Monaci, I believe, going on memory here—who has an essay re-examining Rufinus as a translator of Origen. We have from him five homilies from Origen on Psalm 36 translated into Latin. If I’m not mistaken, she shows that his translation of those is quite faithful to what Origen is saying, though we only have four Greek homilies, not five, as we do in Rufinus’s Latin. Of course, that could just be because there is nothing doctrinally problematic in those homilies. Those are certainly some of the questions that still linger, and I don’t know if there will ever be a satisfactory answer given the nature of the texts we have.

[Dr. Pino] Is this not the case with the treatise On Prayer, which exists in a complete Greek text?

Dr. Solheid That is correct. It exists in a complete Greek text, in one manuscript at Cambridge estimated to be from the 15th century. We have this in its entirety in Greek. There are some lacunae, or gaps, in the text—nine altogether—but they are very early on in the treatise, through the first five or six sections of it. There are 34 sections in total, so the gaps are very early. Fortunately, this is one of the texts we have in Greek in its entirety, along with the homilies on the Psalms. I can’t remember how many homilies on Jeremiah we have in Greek. His homily on the Witch of Endor in 1 Samuel is in Greek, I think. His commentary on John is in Greek, although of the 32 books he originally composed, we only have seven or eight, maybe even less. It’s very unfortunate. Most of our texts from him come from Latin.

[Dr. Pino] It’s interesting, and perhaps people listening are not aware, that it is significant the treatise On Prayer comes from a 15th-century manuscript. People might not know that most manuscripts we have are late Byzantine. The majority are from the 15th and 14th centuries. As you go further back in time, you get fewer and fewer. We have a lot of manuscripts from the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, some from the 10th and 9th, but as you go further back, you have fewer and fewer. This is one of the reasons people are so interested in things like Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Sinaiticus. These are early—and by early, we mean late antique manuscripts—so none of them go back to the apostles. But this also means that people are copying Origen in the 15th century. In other words, around the time of the Council of Florence, around the time of Mark of Ephesus for our Orthodox listeners, people are still copying manuscripts of Origen, and that is significant.

Dr. Solheid Yes, I agree. As for where the copying takes place, Photius’s library in Constantinople is a tremendous source of copied Byzantine manuscripts. This one is interesting. The manuscript of On Prayer is digitized, and I sent you the link. I don’t know if we’d ever be able to open it up, but if we do during our conversation, we can see that it is bound together with the extant Greek manuscript of Origen’s commentary on Matthew, which is another text we have in Greek, though not in its entirety, but most of it. At some point in the transmission, they were bound together, and you can even see where they tied them up in the binding. That manuscript was at one point in the library of Worms, Germany, and I don’t know if that’s where it was copied. I would ask, were they copying Byzantine manuscripts in Worms, Germany, in the 1400s? I don’t know, but Venice, maybe.

Dr. Solheid But then there’s also Constantinople, where it might have come from. But whatever the case with that, Pierre Daniel Huet, the 17th-century bishop in Paris—or outside of Paris, I can’t remember where exactly—gives us a history of what he knew of the text. He tells us he made a copy. He finds it in Stockholm, Sweden, in the late 1600s. He makes a copy of it, and in his copy, he gives a Latin introduction where he talks about it being in Worms, Germany. The city, I think, gets raided by an army, and a soldier takes a manuscript and sells it to someone. It makes its way up to, I think, the Hague in the Netherlands, and then from there, I think it goes to Sweden. Isaac Vossius, who I think was in the Queen of Sweden’s court, works with it. He gives it to Herbert Thorndike, who’s a canon at Westminster in London. Then Herbert Thorndike gifts it to Cambridge. That’s kind of its history. Somewhat, I guess we could maybe say somewhat.

[Dr. Pino] It’s miraculous in some way that the soldier said, “Hey, let’s not destroy this thing, let’s sell it to somebody who might use it.” So the manuscript has a pretty interesting history itself. John, pull up the manuscript at any point. You should be able to share your screen any point that you want to share it, but like I said, we can also add it into the video after.

Dr. Solheid Okay, great. Let me just pull it up right now and I’ll show you what I mean by them being bound together. I had the fortune of going to Cambridge in August. It’s at the Wren Library, Trinity College, and it’s well preserved. It’s on paper.

[Dr. Pino] Paper as opposed to parchment for those.

Dr. Solheid Paper as opposed to parchment, that’s correct. Which I think comes from China, doesn’t it? Didn’t Europe acquire paper from China or somewhere in Asia?

[Dr. Pino] Comes from the East, yeah. Which tells you it’s generally later, but not always.

Dr. Solheid Yeah, I think we start to see it, what, in about the 11th century, maybe a little bit earlier?

[Dr. Pino] I think there are instances of earlier from the Arab world, from the trade coming, but generally it’s not the main medium until later.

Dr. Solheid All right, can you see the screen?

[Dr. Pino] Yes.

Dr. Solheid Okay, so you see here on the right, the first page of On Prayer, and then on the left, the final page of the commentary on Matthew. If you look closely, you see these things here that look like a tear. That actually comes from the previous binding that they just must have cut off, and then you can see they’re sewn together right here. On the first page, there’s a bit of damage. You can see a tear here and then a patch that somebody put on there to cover up some kind of damage that was done. This is one of the lacunae, and this is a difficult one to try to solve. But yeah, this is an example of what that would be. You talked about reception. If I can show real quickly here, I think it’s on 219 verso, is it? Nope, 218 verso. Yes, okay. We’re going to talk about the structure of On Prayer in a little bit, but here’s this, which is very interesting. If you look on the far left, which would be the far right margin of 218 verso, you see these marginalia. You can see the pages were kind of cut off when they rebounded, probably. We’ve got “Ir, Ima, Ton.” I can’t remember what this is. It’s been reconstructed, so this should be “Epikarima,” and then “Ton.” And then it’s “of those who reject prayer.” A little bit further down, there’s another one: “P. Kerima,” and then there’s two more, another one, and another one right there. These correspond to the part in the text where Origen is enumerating the different objections of people who reject the practice of prayer. So these would be objection number four, objection three, objection two, and objection number one up here. It seems like a scribe working with the manuscript, or perhaps even the copyist himself—I’m not well trained in comparing hands yet—found this helpful as a reader’s aid, which I think is quite interesting also for the reception of On Prayer. Other notes that might be of relevance here: we’ve got a whole bunch of these “simiose” or “nota bene.” This is a sigma eta, the abbreviation with the little mark up here indicating the abbreviation. There are tons of these in the text, so somebody reading it liked it and wanted to note a whole bunch of points that Origen was making.

[Dr. Pino] So tell us about the structure of the text and its contents.

Dr. Solheid Yeah, okay. Let me just stop sharing. The structure is roughly divided into five parts. Here we go. It starts with a prologue. As I said before, there are 34 sections or chapters, if you want to call it that. Those numbers are not in the manuscript; they come from the critical edition of Paul Koetschau from 1899. The first two are a prologue, and Origen really situates the work and the problem of talking about prayer within epistemology, because he says there are certain things that are impossible for human beings because our minds are weighed down by our corruptible bodies. He cites Wisdom 6:13 there. There are these things that are impossible, so we need divine grace to help us comprehend something of them. One of these things he says is prayer.

Dr. Solheid And what prayer is and how do we pray. That’s pretty much the prologue, and there he brings up Paul, Romans 8:26, how we do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit intercedes with sighs. After that prologue, he transitions to the main argument, the main body of the text. In sections three to four, he goes into how scripture uses the terms euche and proseuche. He contrasts them. There are certain occasions where it’s used in the sense of a vow, where somebody says, “God, if you do this to me, I will commit to doing this.” He says that’s not really prayer in its proper sense that we’re going to be talking about here. So then he talks about the different types of prayer. There’s the petitions, there’s prayers, there’s what is it? Confessions? No, what is it? Oh, I can’t remember. And thanksgivings. So from 1 Timothy. And then after this discussion of what prayer is and how, defining his terms, so then he can outline his argument. In section five, he goes on to these objections, and we see here in 5.1 the occasion for the text because he references this guy Ambrose and this woman Tatiana. We don’t have any other information about who Tatiana is, but she’s probably not Ambrose’s wife. I think that would be Marcella, whom Origen mentions at the end of his letter to Julius Africanus. So Tatiana could perhaps be their daughter or Ambrose’s sister. We just don’t know. We know from Origen and Eusebius that Ambrose was Origen’s patron. Eusebius tells us that Origen meets Ambrose, who is a member of this Valentinian group in Alexandria. He persuades Ambrose to take on an orthodox form of Christianity. Ambrose then decides he’s going to underwrite all of Origen’s scholarly activities. He provides Origen with stenographers, copyists, and whatever materials he needs to compose his work.

[Dr. Pino] Is it true that Origen had female scribes among his copyists?

Dr. Solheid Well, that is in Eusebius. The calligraphae is in the feminine. The tachygraphoi is masculine. So we don’t really know the precise makeup of these, but some do appear to have been women, which is actually quite interesting. Clement of Alexandria, Origen’s predecessor in Alexandria, was very open to having women in his teaching sessions in his classes, if you will. And I think Origen here, if this is accurate, probably the same. But we just don’t know more precisely about that. I’m trying to think. I mentioned this letter to Julius Africanus. Sextus Julius Africanus was in Jerusalem, and he was a polymath in the early church. He writes to Origen and says, “I was really amazed to hear you give a discourse on the story of Susanna in the book of Daniel. And you treated it as if it’s an authentic part of the book, where if we look at it from a literary perspective, there’s evidence that it’s actually a later composition, an addition to the text.” So Origen writes back. He gives his defense of why he thinks it’s original. He says, even if it’s not original, the church uses it, so he doesn’t think we should get rid of it. We should keep our tradition. But then at the very end, he wraps up saying, “This is what I have to say. I send you greetings, or give my greetings to so-and-so who are there in Jerusalem with you, and Ambrose, and then some other people. And I think Marcella and a couple of other names here send their greetings as well.” So you get a sense of who these people are that are in this little group. But I can’t remember if Marcella was the only woman or not. I’d have to look again. Yeah. If that answered your question, I don’t really know. Ambrose is so interesting. We know very little about Ambrose except for what Origen tells us. Origen, in about the year 231, somewhere around there, leaves Alexandria after he gets into this conflict with his bishop Demetrius, and he goes to Caesarea Maritima in the Holy Land. He tells us in the prologue to book six of his commentary on Matthew, that he started working on book six in Alexandria, but the storm brewed up against him and he had to flee. He laments that his copy didn’t come with him. I think his stenographers didn’t make it with him either, if I remember what he says. So when he gets to Caesarea, he starts book six all over again. We can date book six to about 231 or 232. Then in book 10, there are some discussions which overlap with his commentary, with his On Prayer, which then gets Paul Koetschau to think, okay, On Prayer is probably written around the same time. Pierre Nautin and pretty much anybody who studied this text situates it between 231 and 235, somewhere around there. He mentions Ambrose in this text. What does Ambrose do? What does he say? He says, “Ambrose gave him a number of objections to the practice of prayer, and he asked Origen to give a response, a philosophical response.” Origen’s language here, he talks about it as a problema. When he lists these objections, he then responds to them immediately. Section five is the objections, and then section six is his initial response to them. The objections all boil down to something to the effect of: God has providence, and if God is unchanging, first of all, if God is unchanging, prayer is irrational because you’re not going to change God’s mind. God is simple. Second, God is provident. If God foresees what’s going to happen in the future, it’s going to happen regardless of what you do about it.

Dr. Solheid I can’t remember a couple of the other objections specifically, but they revolve around these particular themes. Origen starts his refutation with a discourse on the nature of motion in different beings. Sticks and stones and beings that don’t have any life in them can only be moved by something outside of themselves. If we get into living things, things that might appear to have their own self-motion, some have it as just the nature of their bodily constitution. It’s within the nature of bodies to change and to go through flux, addition, and so forth. But that’s not a rational kind of movement, and it’s not a movement impelled by any kind of image.

Dr. Solheid When we get into things that have some kind of soul, like animals, they respond to an image that arises and then they respond by impulse. Then you have rational beings like us who receive this impulse, but we have this thing called reason, which allows us to discern right from wrong and choose accordingly. He says if you take away our ability for self-movement, movement through ourselves, you take away what makes us who we are. He says we would no longer be rational. In fact, we would not even be a living being if we took away this kind of self-motion that even animals have to some extent, though lesser so than humans.

Dr. Solheid Lorenzo Peroni has mentioned this in his huge, mammoth book on prayer in Italian. What we’re dealing with here as a text is something that’s akin to the problemata kai lyseis, or problems and solutions genre, that goes back at least to Aristotle. I think he’s right. I think this is a philosophical text structured as such. You get his preface where he introduces the topic and talks about how it’s unknowable for human beings and we need divine aid to get there. When he begins his discourse on what prayer is, he goes through the definition of terms. When we get to these philosophical objections, he begins with fundamental principles of motion. As the argument progresses, he talks more about how even if we don’t get the kinds of benefits of prayer that we might think we should get, we still get benefits because we compose ourselves in a certain way. We focus our mind on its proper object, the divine, and in doing so, we clear the hegemonikon, or the heart, of all this clutter that gets in the way and bogs it down. So even if we don’t get some kind of material benefit, we get a benefit that’s more proper to who we are. That makes up the first part, chapters 3 to 16 or 17, which Origen himself calls the problem of prayer, the problema. The second part, chapters 18 to 31, is a lemma by lemma or verse by verse commentary on the Lord’s Prayer.

Dr. Solheid Origen transitions here in a way that’s quite suggestive. He says, now that we have struggled with the problem of prayer, the problema, it’s now time to talk about what we learn about prayer from the scriptures, the prayer that we are taught to do, and this is where he gets into the Lord’s Prayer. There’s an interesting thing in the manuscript where in the marginalia, a scribe writes archē, and that’s where Origen transitions to his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer. But he first goes through comparing the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke and says they looked for evidence in Mark to see if there was a similar thing there.

Dr. Solheid He concludes that these are two separate prayers. In Matthew, it comes immediately after the Sermon on the Mount, whereas in Luke, it’s in response to one of the disciples asking Jesus to teach them how to pray. He says these are really two different prayers, even though they overlap in many ways. His verse-by-verse commentary really focuses more on Matthew’s articulation of it.

Dr. Solheid It’s interesting when he says, now that we’ve struggled with this, we are going to go on to this. He uses plurals there. It’s almost as if he’s talking to a group classroom, maybe. But at least Ambrose and whoever else—there might have been a couple other people in there doing this project. He says, we looked in Mark to see if there was anything similar and we didn’t find anything similar. It’s almost like there’s a group exercise going on that’s unfolding in this process.

Dr. Solheid If we read his plurals as plurals—I know some people say it’s more the majestic plural—but in my translation, I’m going to stick with the actual plural when he says we did this. Then you get the verse by verse on the Lord’s Prayer. After his little discourse where he compares Matthew and Luke, he actually gets into the verses: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” At that point in the manuscript, there’s another marginalia that says archē. If you’ve read Origen enough, you know that before he really gets into talking about something, he’s going to have a lengthy preface to what he’s going to say. Sometimes he doesn’t actually get into the heart of it until later. I’m wondering if the scribe is writing down archē at the very beginning of this, thinking, okay, he’s going to get into his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, and then two pages later he finally gets to the actual verses. I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think what the scribes were doing when they were copying or reading this manuscript. After the Lord’s Prayer, he talks about having to come back to the problem of prayer again, almost like an addendum, and there he talks about different practical aspects.

Dr. Solheid So what kind of bodily posture should we have when we’re praying? If we are making supplications—that is what it is, supplications, not confessions—then it is petition, prayer, supplication, thanksgiving. For somebody who is giving supplication, it is proper to be kneeling because that is the proper disposition for a soul that is really asking for forgiveness. When giving praise, you should stretch out your arms in the Orans position, and so forth.

Dr. Solheid He asked the question: should we pray in whatever direction the sun is setting, or should we always pray to the east? He says he can understand why people would say we pray to wherever the sun is, but we should really pray to the east, regardless of where the sun is, because that is where the sun rises. This, of course, is symbolic of the resurrection of the Sun of Justice.

Dr. Solheid After those kinds of practical questions for prayer, he gives his conclusion, which is very brief. It is not even really a conclusion. It is just, “This is what I have for you guys. It was hard.” We talked about all these different things. Read it with a little bit of grace because I am human and cannot get everything perfect. That is the structure.

[Dr. Pino] The structure lends itself to asking some questions about the content. He speaks at the beginning about distinguishing but not distinguishing between euche and proseuche, which is an interesting terminological digression. But then he has this distinction or structure that you mentioned: petition, praise or glorification, something that is called adoration, supplication, and then thanksgiving. The Greek terms are harder to align with those categories, I feel. Proseuche would be the term translated as glorification or praise, adoration. Does he talk about that, or does he just draw these lines between the Greek terms and the English?

Dr. Solheid Euche and proseuche, he takes as interchangeable. He looks through different appearances of them in scripture and how scripture uses them. He says they are effectively the same thing. He does not distinguish between them. I would have to look at my translation to see what specific biblical passages he uses. I cannot remember off the top of my head. Proseuche, of course, was also in Hellenistic Judaism the house of prayer, but Origen seems to take it as synonymous with euche. He does not seem to distinguish between the two.

[Dr. Pino] The other thing is deesis and enteuxis, this petition or supplication, petition versus supplication. How does he distinguish those? This is number one and number three on the list.

Dr. Solheid I think the petition is simply asking for… let me get back into my translation and take a look real quick to make sure I am getting it right here. In section 14, he brings up 1 Timothy and says that Paul gives us four terms that are relevant for our discourse: supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings. Supplication, he says, is a prayer that is sent up to obtain something that is lacked by someone. Prayer, euche or proseuche, is sent up by someone with praise for greater things. Petition is a request to God for certain things by someone who…

Dr. Solheid It seems like the difference between supplication and petition—the first and the third—is that supplication is sent up by someone who lacks something, and there is a bit of humility there. Whereas a petition, he says, is a request very similar to supplication, but the person who presents it has a greater boldness, a greater parrhesia. I do not know if there is a certain kind of condition that is changed between a supplicant and someone making a petition.

Dr. Solheid Here is one. Deesis, supplication. Here he gets to Luke. Gabriel says to Zechariah, when Zechariah appears to be praying about the birth of John the Baptist: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your supplication was heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear a son with you, and you will call his name John.”

Dr. Solheid Then in Exodus, the making of the golden calf, it says: “Moses prayed before the Lord God and said, Why are you provoked to anger, Lord, for your people whom you led out of Egypt with great strength?” That is a supplication. Let us see, and then petition, enteuxis, is used by the apostles. Paul reasonably assigns prayer to our control, but petition Paul links with the Spirit. It is something that we need the Spirit’s help to do, because being greater than us and one who possesses boldness, when he says, “Paul is greater than us and possesses a certain boldness,” when he says, “How we ought to pray as we ought, we do not know, but the Spirit himself with unspeakable groans intercedes with God, and he who searches the heart knows the will of the Spirit that intercedes with God for the saints.”

[Dr. Pino] This is sort of calling in a favor, making a request of somebody who will grant the request, as opposed to asking for some kind of patronage.

Dr. Solheid I think that is spot on. That is probably why for petition, we need the aid of the Spirit to do it, because there is a certain additional kind of confidence that we bring with it.

[Dr. Pino] Interesting. That is illuminating because when you read descriptions of the text, these two are not necessarily distinguished very clearly. So that is helpful. But this brings us to the question of who we pray to. Origen famously says that we pray to the Father, and that we pray with Christ as our confrere. He himself is one who prays, so we do not pray to him; we pray to the Father. Can you talk a little bit about that? It is an important feature of the text.

Dr. Solheid It is a very important feature of the text, and it is one that would land Origen in a little bit of trouble. In the 4th century, this is where he gets accused of what is called subordinationism, where for Origen, the Son was somehow less in dignity than the Father. Here, in section 15, is where he gets into that. This is how he says it: if we listen—akousomen—to what prayer actually is—proseuchē—and I think actually is to onti, but I cannot remember what the Greek has there—we must not pray to any begotten beings. Notice he does not call the Son here created, but begotten. So we do not pray to any begotten beings, not even to Christ himself, but to the God of the universe and the Father alone, to whom our Savior himself prayed, as we said previously, and as he teaches us to pray.

Dr. Solheid His argument at this point is twofold. First, we do not pray to begotten beings, which he distinguishes here from created beings. Second, scripture itself: Jesus himself teaches us to pray to the Father. He did not teach us to pray to him. This is really where we get into this issue of Origen as a pro-Nicene or anti-Nicene father, and where those labels are anachronistic and not helpful. He says, “For if he is distinct from the Father, as it is shown in other places, the Son of the Father has his own being and individual existence.” That is how I am rendering kat’ ousian, his own being, and his own individual existence, which he here calls not hypostasis, but hypokeimenon. The Son is distinct from the Father, he says here, both in substance and in what lies underneath that substance. Then we must pray either to the Son and not the Father, or to both, or to the Father alone. If we maintain that the Son is distinct from the Father, we ask ourselves: are we supposed to pray to multiple beings, to multiple gods? He says everyone will acknowledge that the one who will speak to the Son and not to the Father is most absurd and contrary to the self-evident truth. But if it is to both, then it is clear that we would offer requests in the plural, and we would say something like, “You all grant, you all save,” which are obviously absurd. Nor has anyone demonstrated that this is found expressed in these ways in the scriptures. I think what he is doing here is applying one of his first principles in talking about God: that God is a simple substance. There is no multiplicity in God, and there is no change in God, and so on. If we were to offer prayers to the Father and the Son, we would do so in the plural, which he sees as inappropriate to address to a simple substance. That is what he is talking about here. But then he does say what we actually do: “Therefore, it remains for us to pray to the God of the universe and Father alone, but not without the high priest, who was appointed with an oath by the Father. According to the verse, he swore an oath and he will not change his mind.” That is Hebrews 7:20-21. So, giving thanks to God in their prayers, the saints expressed gratitude to him through Jesus Christ. He does not say that we leave Christ out. He just says that Christ is not the proper recipient of our prayer, but we pray to the Father through Christ. He gives a Trinitarian lens to it.

[Dr. Pino] It is interesting that it replicates the doxological formula that will come into controversy later. We pray in the Spirit through the Son to the Father. It is a sort of reverse doxology. It is also interesting that he distinguishes the Son here as genitos. One of the things we are told when we study fourth-century theology is that the distinction between genitos with two n’s and genitos with one n—the difference between begotten and created—is not a firm distinction until later, until the time of Athanasius. Do you see this clearly distinguished here in this treatise?

Dr. Solheid Well, when you phrase it like that, I am not sure I would go that far. What does he mean here by genitos? Is he creating some kind of a distinction? We have to remember that in On First Principles, Origen articulates the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. He does this also, I think, in his commentary on John, perhaps in book one, though I cannot remember now. On the premise that God is unchangeable, when we call God Father, we do not mean that there was a time when God was not Father and then later became Father. Origen reasons that the Son is always the Son, and this generation is eternal. It does not take place in time. Logically, you could say from that there was no time when the Son was not, whereas someone like Arius would say there was a time when he was not. But does Origen…

Dr. Solheid …who opposes petitionary prayer on very similar grounds to the ones articulated in the objections that Origen lists here. He is engaging in a much broader philosophical discourse. When he does that, like with Epiusion, and gets into this discussion of hyle, I really want to bring that out and make it clear to the reader that this is more than just something for church practice and spirituality. He is actually providing a rational account for a Christian practice using philosophical language.

[Dr. Pino] Well, John, thank you so much for coming and talking about this project of yours. We look forward to seeing your translation. Is there anything you would want to add that we haven’t covered?

Dr. Solheid Well, there’s a lot, but for the sake of time, I think probably not. There is something interesting, though, that I came across by chance. For a paper I presented in Toronto at the Canadian Patristic Society last year, I was looking at Didymus the Blind’s lectures on the Psalms. Those are very interesting because they are transcripts taken down by stenographers that, for whatever reason, were not edited and revised for publication. We see student questions in the transcript, and then we see Didymus replying. There is one student in there—I can’t remember which lecture on which psalm, I think it was maybe Psalm 40 or something like that—who says, “Don’t we pray using the imperative rather than the optative?” Didymus says, “Well, yes, we do,” and he doesn’t expand on that. But that is an element we see in On Prayer, where Origen is addressing why imperatives are used instead of optatives in the Lord’s Prayer. Do we have a window here, again, with Didymus into the reception of this text in the mid to late 4th century? I think that’s a very interesting question. I think the Cappadocians even get into praying with the imperative sometimes too, rather than the optative, because you would think the optative is used to express wishes. Origen takes Tatian to task, Justin Martyr’s student, Tatian, for not recognizing that scripture uses imperatives rather than optatives to express prayer. The first thing he goes to is, why do you think the imperatives are used in Genesis 1? Would God have needed to use an optative to wish that these elements of creation unfolded? No, he just commanded and there it was. So another interesting element of the text and its reception.

[Dr. Pino] Yeah, that’s very interesting. I hope you’ll continue to bring that out. Again, thank you so much for doing this and for talking to us about this project, and if nothing else, just for reawakening our interest in this massively important historical treatise on prayer. It’s one of the earliest treatises on the subject, and sometimes we take these things for granted, but it’s providential that it survives in this manuscript. Again, we look forward to reading your translation. Thank you very much.

Dr. Solheid T-Con, thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.