At least I got the idea that the difference in their ideas may have led to this difference in history by reading a review of 2 books,
Sin: The Early History of an Idea ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691128901?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0691128901 ) by Paula Fredriksen and
Heaven's Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199736049?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0199736049 ) by Isabel Moreira in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. The review does not directly address your question, but does discuss the ideas of these 2 early church leaders. Unfortunately, the review is not available online, but here is a brief excerpt:
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In the third chapter, entitled “A Rivalry of Genius,” we meet two very different men—Origen of Alexandria (circa 187–254) and Augustine of Hippo (354–430). It is Origen who needs the most introduction. At first sight, he seems the milder and the more optimistic of the two. He believed that all sins would eventually be corrected, and that all sinners would be forgiven: even the Devil and his angels would eventually be converted. But he also seems alien to us because he shared with his contemporaries the majestic view of the universe that Fredriksen expounds in chapter 2. In this universe, human beings were only part of the story. The entire universe appeared to him to be caught up in a mighty process of transformation. He looked up at the sun, thinking that he saw in it a great soul like himself. Like himself, the sun groaned for deliverance. At some unimaginably distant time, the sun would replace its present, shining carapace with something yet more glorious, as Origen hoped that his own body would be transformed, by becoming ever more spiritual and translucent.
Hence the shock of meeting Augustine at the very end of the book. He is the first figure who seems to tread on familiar ground. Augustine placed the complexity of the human will at the center of his notion of sin. He limited his concern for salvation to human beings alone. Compared with the immensity of the universe, so resolutely human-centered a view of sin and redemption would have struck many as claustrophobic. Fredriksen makes clear how idiosyncratic Augustine’s solution was. Yet it would prove decisive, at least in the Christianity of Western Europe. This was by no means the case with the wider Christian world of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, for which a more “cosmic” positioning of humanity remained attractive. Though Origen was condemned as a heretic, the lingering influence of his magnificent cosmic vision still accounts for many of the differences between the Christianities of East and West.
And so we end with two very different styles of Christianity. One—associated with Origen and continued, in modified forms, in Eastern Christianity—saw sin against the backdrop of a universe whose serene immensity dwarfed the human sense of hurry. It was all a matter of time. What was wrong with the human condition would eventually be set right, by a slow process of purification that stretched unimaginably far into the future, and that involved the universe as a whole.
The other—associated with Augustine, and continued largely in the Catholic West—put human beings at the center. The universe and its unhurried rhythms took second place. And with the eclipse of the universe came a heightened sense of urgency. Human sin was not part of a cosmic drama, which had begun aeons before and would continue for aeons ahead. It involved a human battle against the grip of a concrete human past. And it was a battle that could be fought out only within the narrow walls of an ever more prominent human institution—the Catholic Church.
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