Abstract

In his account of his Düsseldorf conversations with G.E. Lessing shortly before the latter’s death in 1781, F.H. Jacobi records the Enlightenment poet and philosopher’s allusion to the Kabbalistic philosophy of Henry More, whom he cited in support of his shocking Spinozist creed of the hen kai pan. Origen’s first Christian philosophy hinges upon a conviction of universal divine goodness which cannot but share its riches with beings capable of participating in it by virtue of their own free will. From this first Christian truth flow the infamous doctrines of the pre-existence of souls and, above all, the restitution of all things envisaged as a never-ending process of autonomous moral soul-making. Origen’s philosophy of divine goodness and human freedom appealed deeply to the Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, who cited the Church Father in support of their metaphysics of God’s benignity and man’s free will. German rationalist G.W. Leibniz was also a close reader of Cudworth and More. Both his Theodicy and his Monadology—notably the notion of a best possible world created by a good God and inhabited by self-improving spiritual monads—are indebted to the Church Father’s Christian philosophy. G.E. Lessing, reviewing the controversial discussions about the apokatastasis in his day, staunchly defended Leibniz’s Origenist rationalism in several works devoted to his philosophical eschatology. Above all, he restated Origen’s notion of salvation as divine pedagogy in his celebrated Education of the Human Race. The present essay establishes the deeply Origenist character of the historic systems of these two seminal German rationalists, with their shared concern for God’s creative goodness and man’s free perfectibility.