Origen

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Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – c. 253) was the most learned and most adventurous Christian thinker of the early church: a biblical scholar of vast output, an ascetic, and the first writer to attempt a complete account of God, the cosmos, and the soul in distinctly Christian terms. He was also, three centuries after his death, formally condemned — which is why much of what he wrote survives only in fragments, in translation, or in the citations of his enemies.

He was born to Christian parents in Alexandria, then the intellectual capital of the Greek-speaking world, and lived through its persecutions. His father, Leonides, was executed in the persecution under Septimius Severus in 202, when Origen was not yet seventeen; the family property was confiscated, and the boy was left as the eldest, with his mother and six younger brothers to support. Eusebius reports that the young Origen, fervent to the point of recklessness, had to be physically prevented by his mother from following his father to martyrdom — she hid his clothes so he could not leave the house. He earned his keep teaching grammar, then took over the catechetical instruction of Alexandria while still in his late teens, succeeding to a school that Clement of Alexandria had made the intellectual front line of the eastern church. The biographical detail most often repeated — that as a young man he had himself castrated to put temptation beyond reach, taking a verse of Matthew with brutal literalness — comes from Eusebius, who told it with evident unease. Modern scholars treat it with caution and some with outright doubt: Origen never alludes to it, and his own mature commentary on that same verse of Matthew condemns precisely the literal reading the story credits him with. It may have happened; it may be malicious gossip fastened onto a famously austere man — the sources Eusebius drew on do not let us choose between them.

What is firmer is the work, which astonished antiquity for its sheer scale. A wealthy convert named Ambrose supplied Origen with a team of shorthand writers and copyists, and the output that followed was so large that Epiphanius later gave the impossible figure of six thousand volumes. The crown of his scholarship was the Hexapla — a six-column edition that set the Hebrew text of the Old Testament beside its Hebrew in Greek letters and beside four Greek translations, the Septuagint among them, so that a reader could collate the versions line by line. It was the first work of comparative textual criticism in the Christian world, an immense labor undertaken to give the church firm ground in its arguments with the synagogue, and it was too large ever to be fully copied; the original perished in the library at Caesarea, surviving now only in scattered quotation. He produced commentaries and homilies across most of scripture, and in On First Principles — the Peri Archon, written at Alexandria in the 220s — he set out a systematic theology before the church had agreed what its system should be.

The threefold sense of scripture

That theology rested on a method of reading. Origen held that scripture, like the human being, has a body, a soul, and a spirit — a plain bodily sense for the simple, a moral sense for those making progress, and a spiritual sense reserved for the perfect, the deeper teaching that the surface narrative both veils and carries. He set the scheme out plainly in the fourth book of On First Principles: as a human is said to consist of body, soul, and spirit, so also does sacred scripture, granted by divine bounty for the salvation of humanity. The literal letter is “the very body of Scripture,” the common and historical sense; above it stands “the very soul of Scripture,” for those who have begun to make progress; and highest is the spiritual law, for those who are perfect. The difficult and the scandalous passages — the ones a literal reading turns into absurdity or offense — are, on this account, deliberate snags placed in the text by the Spirit to force the attentive reader upward, off the surface and toward the meaning hidden beneath it. Where the bodily sense fails, the reader is meant to climb.

The debt here is to the Alexandria that produced him. The allegorical reading of a sacred text as a coded philosophy of God and soul was already a mature art in the city, perfected by Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish thinker who had read the Pentateuch as a Platonist reads a scripture; and Origen had Philo close at hand — his copies of Philo, deposited in the library at Caesarea, are the archetypes from which the surviving Greek Philonic manuscripts descend. From Philo through Clement of Alexandria to Origen runs a continuous Alexandrian technique of exegesis, refined at each step, until in Origen it becomes a complete hermeneutic system answerable to a complete cosmology.

The cosmology of fall and return

That cosmology was bolder than the method that fed it, and it is the part of his work that the later church could not absorb. In the beginning, Origen held, God created a finite number of rational beings — pure minds, equal, free, contemplating their Maker. All of them but one fell away through a cooling of their love, a satiety or negligence that drew them down from contemplation; the single mind that did not fall is the soul united to the Logos, the Christ. The degree of each mind’s fall fixed its present rank in the cosmic order — angels who fell little, human souls who fell further, demons who fell furthest — so that the visible world of bodies is not the original creation but a vast graded schoolhouse, a remedial order God fashioned to discipline fallen minds and draw them home. Souls, then, are older than the bodies they wear; the body is the consequence of a prior fall, and embodiment is at once punishment and the appointed means of repair.

Because the fall came from freedom, the return is also free, and it is long. Across ages beyond counting, through this world and others, every rational creature is being educated back toward the contemplation it abandoned. At the end of all the ages stands the apokatastasis — the restoration of all things, the phrase taken from the Acts of the Apostles — in which God will at last be all in all and the whole rational creation gathered back into unity. Origen pressed the logic to its sharpest edge: if punishment is medicinal rather than vengeful, and if freedom is never finally extinguished, then in principle even the devil might at the last be healed and restored. Whether he asserted this as doctrine or floated it as a possibility was disputed already in antiquity; he wrote in a church that had not yet drawn the lines that would later be used to judge him, and he wrote, by his own account, as an inquirer testing what the rule of faith left open.

The Alexandrian air

He worked in the same Alexandrian air that produced Middle Platonism, and the proximity is no accident. Ancient report — Porphyry’s, relayed by Eusebius — places Origen and the philosopher Plotinus together as pupils of the elusive teacher Ammonius Saccas, the same Ammonius from whom the Neoplatonism of the third century descends; and the architecture of Origen’s thought, a single source from which all rational being descends and to which all is being drawn back, runs parallel to the Platonist scheme of procession and return. The contemporary Platonist Numenius of Apamea, whom Origen had read and cites by name, supplies part of the bridge. The resemblance has been read both ways — as Origen baptizing philosophy for the church, and as philosophy quietly bending scripture to its own shape, with no consensus on which way the borrowing ran. What is not in doubt is that Origen built, out of biblical materials and Platonic scaffolding, the first Christian metaphysics ambitious enough to rival the schools.

His defense of Christianity against the pagan critic Celsus, Against Celsus, belongs to the end of his life, around 248, written at the urging of the same patron Ambrose. Celsus had composed, some seventy years earlier, a sweeping philosophical assault on the new religion called the True Word; the work is lost, and survives almost entirely because Origen answered it sentence by sentence, quoting his opponent at length in order to refute him. The result is the most formidable apologetic of the ante-Nicene church and, by accident, the principal witness to the most serious pagan case ever mounted against early Christianity — the church’s most dangerous critic preserved in the words of its ablest defender.

Caesarea, persecution, and death

A long quarrel with Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, over Origen’s ordination to the priesthood by bishops of another province drove him from his native city around 231; he settled at Caesarea in Palestine, founded a school there, and built the library that would shelter his books and, a generation on, train Eusebius. The end came in persecution, as the beginning had. Under the emperor Decius, about 250, Origen was arrested, imprisoned, and deliberately tortured — stretched on the rack, his persecutors intent on a recantation they never extracted. He outlived the emperor but not the injuries; he died a few years later, probably at Tyre, his body broken by what he had refused to renounce. He was, in the end, very nearly the martyr he had wanted to be at sixteen.

The condemnation and after

The verdict came late, and it came in his absence. In the sixth century the emperor Justinian, alarmed by a militant Origenism among the Palestinian monks, moved against the dead theologian: an edict of 543 condemned a list of his propositions, and at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 a set of anathemas against the Origenists condemned the pre-existence of souls and the universal restoration, with Origen’s name attached to the censure. The cost was severe. It stripped him of the standing of a father of the church and consigned much of his Greek original text to neglect and destruction; On First Principles survives entire only in the Latin of Rufinus, who translated it in 398 and admitted to softening the passages he judged heretical, so that the work most central to the controversy reaches us through the very filtering the controversy produced.

Yet his method outlived the censure, and so in muffled form did much of his substance. The allegorical reading of scripture, the threefold sense, the very vocabulary of mystical ascent, the doctrine of endless progress in the knowledge of God — these passed to Evagrius Ponticus, condemned with him and yet copied under safer names, and through the Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa above all, who took up the hope of universal restoration and was never himself condemned for it. What the contemplative tradition of the Christian East and West later took for granted about reading the Bible and ascending to God traces back, by roads the official record would rather not name, to a man the church could neither fully keep nor entirely let go.

Texts and scholarship

Origen’s Greek originals are largely lost; what survives reaches the reader through translation, fragment, and quotation, which makes the editorial history unusually load-bearing. The standard English of On First Principles is G. W. Butterworth’s Origen: On First Principles (London: SPCK, 1936), translated from Paul Koetschau’s critical Greek-and-Latin edition and still the working scholarly text; John Behr’s facing-page Greek-Latin-English edition (Oxford University Press, 2017) is the modern critical replacement, with a translation that reorganizes the fragments around the Rufinus version. The standard English of the apologetic is Henry Chadwick’s Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge University Press, 1953), whose introduction and notes remain the indispensable guide to the lost Celsus the work preserves. The foundational modern study is Henri Crouzel’s Origen (Edinburgh: T&T Clark / San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989; from the French Origène of 1985), the synthesis against which later scholarship measures itself; Joseph W. Trigg’s Origen in Routledge’s Early Church Fathers series (1998) gives a compact critical biography with translated selections. On Origen’s inheritance of the Alexandrian allegorical method from Philo and on his role as the transmissional pivot through whom the Greek Philo survives, the survey is David T. Runia’s Philo in Early Christian Literature (Assen: Van Gorcum / Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).

For the primary texts in the public domain, the Edinburgh Ante-Nicene Christian Library — reissued as the American Ante-Nicene Fathers — carries Frederick Crombie’s nineteenth-century English of both De Principiis and Against Celsus in its fourth volume; the Christian Classics Ethereal Library hosts the full text of that volume at ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04, and the threefold-sense passage discussed above can be read in Book IV of De Principiis in Crombie’s rendering. The ancient biography that frames every modern account — the source of the martyred father, the shorthand writers, the Hexapla, and the contested self-mutilation — is the sixth book of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, hosted in the public-domain translation at ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf201.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906): The Gnosis According to its Foes

→ Related: Logos · Neoplatonism · Numenius Of Apamea · Irenaeus · Evagrius Ponticus · Gnosis · Alexandria · Clement Of Alexandria · Philo Of Alexandria · Platonism · Christianity · Cappadocian Patristics · Patristic Heresiology