Origen

• 1. Introduction

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  Origen of Alexandria was, by any measure, one of the most restless minds the ancient world produced. He wrote roughly 2,000 treatises over a lifetime that ended not in a library but in a prison cell, where he was held in an iron collar with his feet stretched in the stocks. He survived two years of torture under the Decian persecution, walked free after Emperor Decius was killed fighting the Goths at the Battle of Abritus in June 251, and then died less than a year later from the injuries his body had absorbed.

  He has been described by the scholar John Anthony McGuckin as "the greatest genius the early church ever produced". Yet in 543, Emperor Justinian I declared him a heretic and ordered all his writings burned. The questions that run through his story are both theological and deeply human: how does a man become the foundation of a tradition and its most dangerous outcast at the same time? And what did he actually believe that made him so threatening for centuries after his death?

• 2. An Alexandrian Childhood

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  Origen was born in either 185 or 186 AD in Alexandria, in a city where Greek learning, Jewish scripture, and the new Christian movement collided every day. The philosopher Porphyry later called him "a Greek, and educated in Greek literature". His father Leonides, described by Eusebius as a respected professor of literature and a devout Christian, made the young Origen memorize passages of scripture daily. Origen's facility with the Bible became so pronounced that Eusebius reports the father could no longer answer his own son's questions about it.

  In 202, when Origen was, in Eusebius's phrase, "not yet seventeen", Emperor Septimius Severus ordered the execution of Roman citizens who practised Christianity openly. Leonides was arrested and beheaded. The state confiscated everything the family owned. Origen, the eldest of nine children, was now responsible for the whole household. According to Eusebius, Origen had wanted to turn himself in alongside his father, but his mother hid all his clothes and he refused to leave the house naked.

  At eighteen, he was appointed a catechist at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. He adopted the ascetic lifestyle of the Greek Sophists: he went barefoot, owned only one cloak, drank no alcohol, ate sparingly, and often fasted for long periods. He spent his days teaching and his nights writing. His patron at this period was a wealthy man named Ambrose, whom Origen had converted from Valentinian Gnosticism to orthodox Christianity. Ambrose was so impressed that he provided Origen with a house, seven stenographers, a crew of copyists and calligraphers, and paid for all his writings to be published.

• 3. The Hexapla and the Word

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  Origen's most technically demanding achievement was the Hexapla, a massive comparative edition of the Hebrew Bible arranged in six parallel columns: the original Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, and four separate Greek translations, including versions by the Jewish scholars Theodotion (from around 180 AD) and Aquila of Sinope (from around 117-138 AD), the Ebionite scholar Symmachus (around 193-211 AD), and the Septuagint.

  He was the first Christian scholar to introduce critical markers to a biblical text. Passages found in the Septuagint but absent from the Hebrew received an obelus (the symbol ÷); passages found in the other Greek translations but missing from the Septuagint received an asterisk. The Hexapla became the cornerstone of the Great Library of Caesarea, which Origen himself founded. Jerome records having consulted it on multiple occasions. When Emperor Constantine the Great ordered fifty complete copies of the Bible to be produced and distributed across the empire, Eusebius used the Hexapla as the master copy for the Old Testament.

  For one of the two Hebrew columns, Origen used a manuscript he had purchased in Jericho: an antique scroll containing the full text of the Hebrew Bible, reportedly found stored in a jar. The original Hexapla has been lost, but the text survives in numerous fragments and in a more-or-less complete Syriac translation made by the seventh-century bishop Paul of Tella. For the Psalms, Origen included no fewer than eight Greek translations, expanding that section into what he called the Enneapla, meaning 'Ninefold'.

• 4. Conflict, Ordination, and Exile

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  Origen's intellectual independence put him on a collision course with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria. Demetrius was, according to McGuckin, a charismatic ruler who governed the Alexandrian congregation with an iron fist and was the most direct promoter of elevating the bishop's office above that of an ordinary priest. Origen, by styling himself as an independent Christian philosopher, was reviving a role that challenged this newly consolidated episcopal authority.

  In the autumn of 215, the Roman Emperor Caracalla visited Alexandria. Students at the city's schools mocked him for having murdered his brother Geta (who had died in 211). Caracalla ordered his troops to ravage the city, execute the governor, and expel all teachers and intellectuals. Origen fled to Caesarea Maritima in Roman Palestine, where the bishops Theoctistus and Alexander of Jerusalem invited him to preach in their churches, despite the fact that he was not ordained.

  Demetrius was infuriated and recalled him, and Origen obeyed. Around 231, Demetrius sent Origen on a mission to Athens. Stopping in Caesarea on the way, Origen asked his friend Theoctistus to ordain him as a priest. Theoctistus gladly did so. When Demetrius learned of this, he declared the ordination an act of insubordination and, according to Eusebius, published the allegation that Origen had secretly castrated himself, which was a capital offense under Roman law and would have rendered his ordination invalid, since eunuchs were barred from the priesthood. Demetrius died in 232, less than a year after Origen left Alexandria, but the accusations he had raised followed Origen for the rest of his career. Origen addressed them in his Letter to Friends in Alexandria, vehemently denying that he had ever taught that even the Devil would attain salvation.

• 5. The School at Caesarea

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  Caesarea had long been a center of learning for Jews and Hellenistic philosophers, but it lacked a Christian school of higher education until Origen arrived. He built one from the ground up. According to Eusebius, the school was primarily aimed at young pagans who were interested in Christianity but not yet ready to seek baptism. Origen began with classical Socratic reasoning, then moved his students through cosmology and natural history, and only finally introduced theology, which he regarded as the summit of all philosophy.

  The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry traveled to Caesarea specifically to hear Origen lecture, and afterward he reported that Origen had extensively studied the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as major figures in Middle Platonism, Neopythagoreanism, and Stoicism, including Numenius of Apamea, Moderatus of Gades, and Cornutus. Porphyry nonetheless accused Origen of betraying philosophy by subordinating it to the interpretation of the Christian scriptures.

  Origen was summoned at one point to Antioch at the request of Julia Avita Mamaea, the mother of Emperor Severus Alexander, to discuss Christian philosophy and doctrine with her. When Emperor Maximinus Thrax came to power in 235 and began targeting Christians who had supported his predecessor, Origen went into hiding in the home of a faithful Christian woman named Juliana the Virgin, who had herself been a student of the Ebionite leader Symmachus. While in hiding, Origen wrote the Exhortation to Martyrdom, honoring his patron Ambrose, who had been arrested in Nicomedia, and the leading priest Protoctetes, who was arrested in Caesarea. The treatise is now regarded as one of the great classics of early Christian resistance literature.

• 6. What Origen Believed

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  Against Celsus, completed around 248, was Origen's last major treatise and his most publicly combative. The pagan philosopher Celsus had in 178 written a polemic called On the True Word, arguing that no serious Platonic philosopher would ever become a Christian. The church had largely ignored it. Ambrose brought the work to Origen's attention, and one specific claim by Celsus provoked Origen into responding: that no self-respecting philosopher of the Platonic tradition would be foolish enough to adopt Christianity. Origen replied point by point, arguing that Christianity and Greek philosophy were not incompatible, and that while philosophy contained much that was true, the Bible contained far greater wisdom than Greek philosophers could grasp.

  On the question of salvation, Origen's position was careful and nuanced, though it made him a permanent target. He suggested that all human souls might eventually be purified and reunited with God in what he called the apokatastasis, or final restoration, reasoning that "the end is always like the beginning" and that all divine punishment was medicinal. But he was consistent in insisting that this was speculation, not doctrine. In Book 6 of Against Celsus, he explained his caution directly: detailed eschatological teachings were not for everyone, because many people could only be kept from wickedness by the fear of eternal punishment.

  Origen was the first to propose the ransom theory of atonement in its fully developed form, arguing that Christ's death on the cross was a ransom paid to Satan in exchange for humanity's liberation, and that Satan was then tricked because he lacked the ability to hold the sinless, incarnate Deity. He was also an ardent defender of free will, rejecting the Valentinian idea of election. And he was an explicit pacifist, arguing in Against Celsus that engaging in earthly wars was incompatible with the way of Christ, and that if everyone lived as Christians did, there would be no war.

• 7. Condemnation and Legacy

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  After Origen's death, Pope Dionysius of Alexandria became one of the foremost proponents of his theology. Athanasius of Alexandria, the central defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy at the First Council of Nicaea, was deeply influenced by him. So were Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, the three Cappadocian Fathers. And yet Origen also deeply influenced Arius of Alexandria, and many orthodox Christians in antiquity believed that Origen was the ultimate source of the Arian heresy.

  The formal backlash began in the late fourth century. Epiphanius of Salamis attacked Origen's teachings in his treatises Ancoratus (375) and Panarion (376), compiling a list of beliefs he considered heretical. Epiphanius objected particularly to Origen's subordinationism, his heavy use of allegorical hermeneutics, and his habit of proposing biblical interpretations speculatively rather than dogmatically. The crisis eventually ensnared Jerome and Tyrannius Rufinus, who had been close friends, pulling them onto opposite sides of the debate. In 399, Theophilus I of Alexandria, who had previously preached that God was incorporeal (an Origenist position), reversed himself under mob pressure and labeled Origen the "hydra of all heresies".

  In 543, Emperor Justinian I condemned Origen as a heretic and ordered his writings burned. A second round of condemnation may have come from the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, though scholars debate whether that council condemned Origen himself or only certain teachings that claimed to derive from him. Twenty-nine previously unknown homilies by Origen were discovered as recently as the 11th of June 2012, when the Bavarian State Library announced that the Italian philologist Marina Molin Pradel had found them in a twelfth-century Byzantine manuscript from their collection. The authenticity of the texts was confirmed by Professor Lorenzo Perrone of Bologna University. The search for what Origen actually wrote, and what he actually meant, has never fully stopped.