Origen

History

Life

Origen was born at Alexandria in 185. He was seventeen when persecution struck the city and his father Leonides was imprisoned; Origen wanted to join him and was stopped only because his mother hid his clothes, so he wrote his father a letter urging him to stand fast. Leonides was martyred, and the family’s property was confiscated (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Origen and Origenism”, 1911, secondary; the whole biography rests on Eusebius, Church History VI).

He taught grammar, then took over the catechetical school of Alexandria while still in his teens. He learned Hebrew, consulted Jewish teachers, and read Plato and the Stoics as his predecessors Pantaenus and Clement had done. Eusebius reports that as a young man he castrated himself on a literal reading of Matthew 19:12; some modern scholars treat the story as hostile legend, and Origen himself later argued that the verse should not be read literally.

A quarrel with Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, over his ordination as a presbyter at Caesarea drove him out of Egypt around 232. He settled at Caesarea in Palestine, taught, preached almost daily, and wrote his late masterpieces there, including Contra Celsum, the first full answer to a pagan philosophical attack on Christianity. The persecution under Decius in 250 caught him. He was imprisoned and tortured, outlived Decius, and died in 253 or 254 at Tyre at sixty-nine, probably from what he had suffered. He was buried as a confessor.

Influence

Nobody before him had attempted so much. Epiphanius put his output at six thousand items; Jerome said Pamphilus’s catalogue listed fewer than two thousand titles, and even that was incomplete. The Hexapla set six versions of the Old Testament in parallel columns and effectively invented textual criticism. Most of the work is lost or survives only in the Latin of Rufinus and Jerome, translators who smoothed what they found: a hundred and eighteen homilies survive in Rufinus’s Latin and seventy-eight in Jerome’s, against twenty-one in Greek.

His reach is hard to overstate. The Cappadocians compiled an anthology of his writings; Gregory of Nyssa’s mystical theology runs through him; Ambrose and Jerome carried him west. He is the source of the allegorical reading of the sacrificial law that Christian commentators used for centuries, set out most fully in his Homilies on Leviticus (c. 240s). His account of the final restoration of all things gave Christian Universalism its earliest Christian form.

Key ideas and contributors

Three senses of Scripture. In On First Principles 4 Origen argued that Scripture has a bodily, a soul and a spiritual sense, corresponding to the beginner, the maturing and the perfect. The literal sense is real but sometimes impossible on purpose, and the difficulties are there to drive the reader deeper. Leviticus was his standing example: the ritual law means something, and it is not butchery.

Free will against determinism. Much of On First Principles answers Gnostic teaching that souls are saved or lost by nature. Origen’s answer is rational freedom: God made all rational creatures equal and free, and their histories differ because their choices did. He read the hardening of Pharaoh the same way — one sun melts wax and hardens clay (On First Principles 3.1).

The pre-existence of souls. The corollary he is most criticised for. If souls differ now because they chose differently, the choosing began before this life, and the material world is in part a response to a fall among rational beings.

Apokatastasis. The restoration of all things, drawn from 1 Corinthians 15:28: punishment is remedial, and in the end God may be all in all. Origen held it as a hope and an argument rather than a settled doctrine, and said so.

Subordination within the Trinity. Origen taught the eternal generation of the Son, a decisive contribution, while using language that later Nicene writers found insufficient. Both Arianism and its opponents would later quote him.

Key controversies

Was he condemned? The usual answer is that the fifth ecumenical council anathematised Origen in 553, and the matter is less clear than that. The Catholic Encyclopedia (secondary) notes that the council was convoked exclusively over the Three Chapters, that the acts of its eight sessions treat only that question, and that a series of later popes discuss the council without mentioning Origenism. The fifteen anathemas against Origenist propositions appear to come from a synod of bishops assembled at Constantinople before the council opened, under Justinian’s edict. The propositions condemned — pre-existence, apokatastasis, the resurrection body as spherical — are in several cases positions of sixth-century Origenist monks rather than of Origen himself.

The first Origenist controversy. It began two centuries earlier, around 400, between Jerome, who had translated and praised him, and Rufinus, who kept defending him. Epiphanius pressed the attack and Theophilus of Alexandria took it up. The quarrel was as much about translation and allegory as about doctrine, and it destroyed a friendship.

Allegory and its limits. Antiochene exegetes answered that Origen’s method lets the interpreter find whatever he brings, and the Reformers made the same objection far more sharply: Sola Scriptura needs a text whose plain sense can be checked. Defenders answer that Origen never denied the literal sense where it held, and that his rule was the apostolic preaching, not free association.

A saint or not. The Eastern and Western churches have never canonised him, and yet both read him constantly, and no theologian of his era is quoted more. Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou led a twentieth-century rehabilitation that recovered him as an exegete and a man of the church rather than a speculative philosopher.

What remains unresolved

Whether Origen himself held the doctrines condemned under his name, and in what form, is still argued, in part because the texts that would settle it survive mostly in translations made by partisans. The larger unresolved question is the one his method raises: how far a reader may go beyond what a passage says before the text stops governing the reading.