Annotatio CCXIII

”What is that which has been done? The same thing which is to be.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9

Origen, as Methodius is witness in the book On the Resurrection, when in the commentaries on Ecclesiastes he was discussing the proposed clause, said that Solomon signified by this saying both that before this world there were other worlds, and that after this world there will be others¹ — which of old, among the ethnic philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus handed down. This same thing Jerome, in the epistle to Avitus, reports that Origen wrote in the third book of the Peri Archon; which, when I myself perused it, I read in it these words: “The adversaries are wont to object to us, saying: If the world began from time, what was God doing before the world was made? For to say that the nature of God is idle is at once idle and absurd, [and so is it] even to think that the goodness [of God] at some time did not act, and the omnipotence at some time did not exercise [its] power. To which propositions we, observing the rules of piety, will answer: that God did not then first begin to work when he made this visible world; but that, as after the corruption of this world there will be another world, so also, before this one was, we believe there were others. Both of which the divine Scripture confirmed by [its] authority. For that there will be another world after this one, Isaiah teaches, saying: ‘There shall be a new heaven, and a new earth, which I will make to remain in my sight, saith the Lord.’² But that before this world there were others also, Ecclesiastes shows, saying: ‘What is that which has been done? The same thing which is to be. And what is that which has been created? The very thing which is to be created; and there is nothing at all new under the Sun. But who shall speak and say, “Behold, this is new”? It was already in the ages which were before us.’³ By which testimonies both are proved: that there were ages before, and that there will be [ages] afterward — yet it must not be thought that many worlds exist at once, but that after this [one] others will be, in the meantime.”

These things [are] in the books of the Peri Archon: whether they were corrupted by the corruptors of Origen’s volumes, or whether Origen himself either imprudently uttered [them], or knowingly and willingly committed [them] to writing, is uncertain. Yet no one would think that Origen — a man of exceptional erudition — was so dull and stupid as not to have perceived that the objection of the adversaries could be resolved no less easily than [it could be] evaded. For if he had preferred to deride [it], there was ready at hand [the retort] which Augustine, in book 11 of the Confessions, chapter 12, writes that a certain [man] said: who, to those asking, “What was God doing before he founded the world?”⁴ — jestingly enough mocking the vanity of the question — answered, “He was preparing hells for those who pry into deep things.” Or, if he had thought the question unworthy of laughter, he might indeed have answered that the nature of God was never idle, nor did his goodness and power ever grow torpid by ceasing.⁵ For that eternal Deity, remaining ever in itself, outside all place, was working within itself by an unceasing action of intellect and will — namely, beholding in [its] mind the world which it bore in [its] thought, handling [it] with intelligence, and deliberating and determining by [its] will that the world itself should not be made from eternity, but together with time, when the divine providence knew that it would be good and opportune for it to exist. For it was not because the world’s being-to-come was good that God therefore founded the world; but because God willed the world to be, therefore it was good that the world exist.⁶ Rightly, therefore, was the world founded then, when God decreed it to be good, and not before.