Origen, Methodius, and Love's Freedom

There seems little doubt that when it came to writing his own Symposium, Methodius had Origen in his sights even more than Plato. For all that Origen might be considered a mystic, or at least the grandfather of a Christian intellectual mysticism (and one who was given pride of place by Bernard McGinn in his multi-volume tracing of that tradition), for Methodius this intellectualism had to be supplemented by a philosophy of eros that would serve the cause of chaste love in practice.1 Also, although in Methodius’ De Autoexousia the moral centre of things accords with Origen’s goal of anti-determinism, nevertheless there is disaccord with the Alexandrian’s means of getting to that goal of “true freedom”. Evil is an accident of substance and it requires being controlled and thereby put in its place. This was not a hard “encratism,” but it did serve to reinforce a popular ideal form of Christianity verging on the encratic, as was becoming standard in Asia Minor and more universally. This paper will examine to what extent Methodius’ vision was a “biblical, Christian” one rather than an elitist, philosophical one.