What I find most interesting about Origin is that he was untainted by the philosophy that followed him. He was more concerned about what he read in "scripture" led him. I put scripture in quotes as the Bible as we know it was not around. Origin went where his mind led him, he was castigated, not by contemporaries, but by those who came after him. They judged his work by their standards, not the standards he worked with in his time and place. It is like making an ex post facto law, then persecuting the dead for not following the law. I do not think that Origin, in his life, ever said anything that he did not first think, reflect or pray over. His students had a great love for his wisdom and his teaching skills and methods. His compilation of the scriptures and translation of the the scriptures allowed the Jerome to do his work and claim stake to the greatest single edition to history. Alas, with out the writing and work of Origin, Jerome would still be in his room, trying to gather the information needed to complete what would become, the Vulgate Edition of the Bible.
However, what intrigues me more than the exegetical work of Origin, is his thinking on souls and what becomes of them. He basic idea , and if thought of correctly, makes a lot of sense. Four things are necessary to accept if you are to follow my thinking:
1) What is in the mind of God is real, not potential. If God thinks it, it is real from the moment of the thought.
2) All creation (no matter how it came to be) is from this "mind" of God, and as such, contains that "image and likeness" of that God.
3) Creatures, with rational souls, make free choices, with real consequences.
4) Time, as we use it in common everyday usage is not the realm of God, who exists beyond time, or better yet is time itself, constant and always in the now.
If you can accept these four principles, you may be able to follow me a bit better as I use these ideas to express my understanding of Origin and "life after life".
All rational souls originate in God's mind, weather at the moment of conception (an absurdity if you think that God is dependent upon a carnal act to create a rational soul each and every time) or that they have pre-existed in his mind from all time. Being Free creatures, created and immortal, souls have consciousness from the very moment of their creation. For they would be alive in the mind of God. This is Origin's idea, and he says that at some point souls waver, fall, separate from God, not just by sin, but by degree of participation in the Divine Life. These souls, through the mercy of God are given life in human form to try and realize that there is a way back to Him. In a sense, each soul is predestined to return to the mind of God as perfected in their love for him (I will use the male pronoun as that is what is most common and easy for people to understand, but we must also remember that gender is not a trait of a spiritual being, but only of physical beings.).
If we accept this idea of the "falling away from the divine" as a reason for souls being here on earth, it makes sense then that the "original sin" was not a sin committed by an individual, which is transmitted to all humans by birth, but is the "common sin" that all souls have by their own free will, are present here on earth, for their failure to stay within the Divine Plan of being in the presence of their God. Origin refers to this as a "cooling of desire". Thus the need for "redemption" and the Felix Culpa of Aquinas. The happy fault is that we have all failed in the first level, now we have another chance to redeem ourselves (as redemption is a choice).
How we live our lives, how we try to make life better for ourselves and others. How we love and endear ourselves to others and how we seek the good in people, not the evil. How we try to emulate others in their good deeds and life styles, and above all, our desire to be back with the God from whom we have fallen from, will in the end, bring us back to that God. Now I understand that I have left out a lot of things, and many will have issues with the fact I did not mention the Church or sacraments or Bible Study or prayer or Sunday worship, but are not all of those things included in what I said we must do? You see, the road is much more clear and simple less cluttered and less road signs to distract. Simple, as Aquinas says God is simple and not complex. If those are the roads you choose, then that is the route you take. If those are not roads you choose, then you go a different way. However, all roads that seek perfection and goodness, lead to the same end. Some are more convoluted than others, some are more comfortable than others (in a personal way, not a touchy-feely way) and some, if chosen poorly do not work at all. "My father's house has many rooms."
Where all this is still confusing to me and I am still thinking and working is that, as free willed beings, souls can lose their way even after achieving the goal, and Origin does not discount the fact that all of creation can be repeated in a new age. Why would a soul, with so many life experiences not wander in thought and direction. Some may not, they stay in that eternal now forever, in fact have never left. Others, like me, wander about and lose direction often, but always come back. Why not multiple ages of man, why not multiple physical existences? Why would one deter from God the constant love he has to bring us all back. Origin goes so far as to say the devil himself (again keeping the male pronoun for linguistic comfort) could come back to God, but is there a desire to return on his (the devil's) part?
What then is this all about? Predestination. We are predestined, but not in our actions or our free will, we are just all predestined to return to whence we came, the mind of God. This is my response to predestination, my account of how it can be that all our actions lead us in one direction. "How many times must we forgive our brothers? 70 times 70". Why would God only give us one life, one chance one age to reach and regain what we lost of our own free will?
