Well, in his defense, Origen was a great favorite with St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzus, as the “Philokalia” attests.
Origen was a very early philosopher, prior even to the major Creeds, and dealt with things that hadn’t been handled before, working with only minimal guidelines. He got some of them right, and some of them he either got wrong or expressed in a very ambiguous manner. He was definitely a Platonist, but at the same time he seems to have been very dedicated to Orthodoxy (even having re-converted some of the heretics that abounded in the area), and he was certainly dedicated to Scripture. But he was, as I said, working in completely new territory. Furthermore, the things that were later condemned are actually not his doctrine, but those of an extreme group who claimed to be his followers.
One of the problems with all of the early philosophical fathers of teh Church is that they were creating a new language and new concepts. Furthermore, they lived in a world where philosophy was as important as “American Idol” nowadays to most Americans (not me!), and people actually used to riot and kill each other over rival philosophies. This led to extreme overreactions and overcorrections, which then became heresies themselves.
So I think that all of the early writers have to be read with great care, simply because the body of tradition didn’t exist at the time they were writing. Now we can rely on a church which has defined orthodoxy through its centuries of thought and accumulated tradition to keep us from seizing one bit of somebody’s work and running amok with it. So I think that if Origen - or similar early thinkers - are viewed through the lens of the Church, it’s possible to detect what is good and screen out what is bad. And Origen definitely had some good points, which I think the Pope is pointing out.
I agree with everything you have written. I simply observe that Origen, like a few other early theologians, can be a dangerous read. The key is, as you write:
“Now we can rely on a church which has defined orthodoxy through its centuries of thought and accumulated tradition to keep us from seizing one bit of somebody’s work and running amok with it. So I think that if Origen - or similar early thinkers - are viewed through the lens of the Church, it’s possible to detect what is good and screen out what is bad.”
So many people, especially educated ones and even more especially educated converts, jump into the Fathers with both feet. Unless they read the Fathers under the guidance of a spiritual father, all sorts of bad things can happen, from excessive legalism arising from an untutored reading of The Rudder to, frankly, heresy from reading the likes of Origen or Tertullian. The Church indeed has separated the wheat from the chaff, but individuals acting on their own, and I don’t mean simply lay people, lacking a knowledge of the consensus patrum and the spiritual virtue of discernment can easily fall into error. Imagine what spiritual havoc some of us could do if we proceeded, without the guidance of a spiritual father early in the days of our patristic studies, to proof text Origen or Tertullian!