Origen, Plato and the Afterlife

Abstract

This paper argues that at First Principles 2.3.6 Origen is responding to Gnostics who used a particular reading of Plato’s myths about the afterlife to justify their own belief that the elect will go after death into an incorporeal state. It examines (1) the use of the terms idea and phantasia in commentary on Plato’s Phaedo; (2) the evidence for Origen’s knowledge of such commentary; (3) the evidence which allegedly shows that Origen himself believed in an incorporeal paradise; and (4) the evidence that Gnostics in the third century drew on Platonic eschatology.