1 The Making of a Scholar and Theologian

DOI: 10.4324/9780203011997-1

Early life

We know Origen mainly through his thought. The loss of all but two of his letters deprives us of the rich human detail that enlivens and enriches accounts of comparable figures like Augustine or the Cappadocians. Eusebius, whose Ecclesiastical History provides most of our information about his life, had access to Origen’s extensive correspondence in his library at Caesarea. He used it, along with further information that his mentor, Pamphilus, gathered for his Apology for Origen, to promote Origen as a scholar and saint. We can supplement Eusebius with data gleaned from Origen’s own works and from other sources, notably an Address to Origen composed by a student traditionally identified as Gregory Thaumaturgus. Pierre Nautin sifts through such information in his ground-breaking reconstruction of Origen’s life. Other scholars have challenged details of Nautin’s work, and he himself admits that many points are uncertain, but his basic outhne is persuasive. Nautin subjects Eusebius to source criticism, establishing criteria for isolating information from reliable sources such as Origen’s correspondence. He dismisses as hearsay stories about Origen’s relationship to his father, whose very name – Leonides according to Eusebius – he considers doubtful. One such story is that Leonides was so amazed and impressed by his son’s precocious inquiries about the deeper meaning of Scripture that he would often uncover his breast as he slept, kiss it with reverence as the shrine of a divine spirit, and thank God for deeming him worthy to be father of such a boy. Even if not reliable, such stories indicate the impression Origen made on others. Nautin’s outhne, which I follow here, gives us a glimpse of an active and often embattled figure, recognized in his own time as a great man, who made intractable enemies as well as generous and loyal friends.

Origen was born around AD 185 and reared in Alexandria, one of the principal intellectual centers of the ancient world and long the home of a thriving and creative Greek-speaking Jewish community. The origins of Christianity in Alexandria are notoriously hazy. We can be fairly certain that Christianity came to Alexandria early, that its matrix was Hellenistic Judaism, and that it was never homogeneous. Since Basilides and Valentinus, two of the earliest Alexandrian Christians we know of, were Gnostics, Walter Bauer postulated that Gnosticism preceded an orthodoxy imported later from Rome. Papyrological evidence, however, demonstrates the early presence of a nascent orthodox community that employed particular manuscript abbreviations for divine names and that availed itself of Irenaeus’s anti-Gnostic writings shortly after their publication. Clement of Alexandria, writing during the decades around AD 200, is our first witness to this community. He advocated a “rule of truth” or “of the church,” corresponding to the united testimony of the apostles. He did not say what constitutes this rule, except that it affirms the unity of Scripture. This distinguished him and his believing community from heretical Gnostics who ascribed the Old and New Testaments to different gods. We may safely assume that he would affirm the enumeration of the church’s principal doctrines in the Preface to Origen’s Peri Archon (see below), one that mirrors those of other second- and thirdcentury Christian writers. At the same time, Clement remained open to the Gnostics’ ideas and was relatively fair-minded toward them, an indication that the boundary between what we may call Ecclesiastical Christianity and Gnosticism was still porous during Origen’s youth. As Origen matured, the church’s self-definition became tighter under the leadership of Bishop Demetrius, whose oversight began while Origen was a youth.

The church in which Origen grew up defined itself not only by its commitment to the rule of faith, but by radical demands for Christian commitment. It thus formed Origen as, in the words of the Danish scholar Hal Koch, “an almost fanatical Christian of the most exclusive variety.” A leitmotiv of second-century Christian literature is the veneration of martyrdom as the ultimate expression of Christian commitment. This is especially true of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, which Origen knew, and of the early martyr acts. Origen’s own works provide vivid testimony that he was in full accord with this type of piety. His Exhortation to Martyrdom contains his most impassioned writing and, in a sermon given during a long period free from persecution, he expressed nostalgia for the days of the martyrs when “there were few believers, but they really did believe, and they traveled the strait and narrow way that leads to life.” Because the church forbade religious compromise with the Roman state, martyrdom was an ever-present possibility. Origen’s church also self-consciously set itself apart from the larger GrecoRoman society by upholding a strict sexual morality and by valuing sexual renunciation. One of our earliest testimonies to Alexandrian Christianity is Justin Martyr’s account of a young man who sought to disprove pagan calumnies by applying (unsuccessfully) to the Roman Prefect, Felix, for permission to be castrated.

Eusebius reported that Origen’s father taught his son the Christian Scriptures as he studied pagan Greek literature; certainly Origen’s works – including, notably, his Contra Celsum, but other works as well, including the selection from the Commentary on Genesis included in this volume – evidence a splendid education, almost unrivaled among the Fathers. Origen clearly mastered the standard Hellenistic curriculum: the study of Greek literature along with mathematics and astronomy. His command of Scripture, likewise remarkable, also bespeaks a familiarity nourished from childhood. When Origen was 17 (around 203) his father died during a persecution under Septimius Severus, an Emperor who targeted converts and catechists in an apparent attempt to stem the spread of the church. This event confirmed his veneration of martyrdom and left him with a life-long sense of obligation. Thirty or more years later, in a homily delivered at Caesarea, he declared: “Having a martyr as a father is no advantage to me unless I live well and bring credit to the nobility of my birth, namely to his testimony and to the confession which made him illustrious in Christ.” Nautin argues that his father’s martyrdom constituted a tie of blood that attached Origen to the church. The accompanying confiscation of his father’s estate left Origen impoverished and responsible as the eldest son for his large family.

Training as a grammateus

A wealthy Christian woman enabled Origen to complete his studies. He could then support his family in the respected occupation of grammateus, a teacher of Greek literature. These literary studies were one of the most significant factors shaping Origen’s thought and his legacy. As a grammateus, Origen made his own a four-stage method of approaching a literary text, a method Hellenistic grammarians developed at Alexandria four hundred years earlier for the study of Homer and other literary classics. These four stages are, respectively, textual criticism, reading, interpretation, and judgment.

Textual criticism, an arcane specialty today, was practiced – in an age when all works were copied by hand and each manuscript was inevitably different – whenever a teacher and students sought to make sure they were all reading the same text. In earlier centuries Alexandrian scholars established criteria, including the detailed examination of variants, to arrive at the most plausible original reading. Origen’s later text-critical work demonstrates his mastery of these techniques.

Reading, the second stage in the grammarian’s approach to the text, simply meant reading the text aloud. This exercise, valuable as it is today, was indispensable in an age when manuscripts lacked lexical aids we take for granted: capital letters, spaces between words, and most punctuation marks. An important aspect of reading, especially in the absence of quotation marks, would be identifying the persona (prosôpon) speaking. Thus below, in his Homily 5 on 1 Samuel, Origen distinguishes words spoken in the persona of the narrator from words spoken, say, in the persona of the necromancer. Marie-Joseph Rondeau has shown the pervasiveness and subtlety of the technique of identifying prosôpa in Origen’s works not just in his Scriptural interpretation, but in his response to Celsus.

The third stage, interpretation (exêgêsis) involved bringing to bear information useful for understanding the text. At its most basic level, interpretation involved identifying the meaning of the words an author used (glôssêmatikon). Since the Homeric epics, the fundamental text in the Hellenistic curriculum, were written in an archaic dialect containing many words and constructions no longer current, such close attention to words themselves would be second nature for a grammateus. A second branch of interpretation was the study of the narrative itself (historikon). Such interpretation could include information we would regard as properly “historical” such as chronology, but could also involve applying information drawn from fields such as geography and the natural sciences. A third branch of interpretation, known as technikon, dealt with the author’s rhetorical procedures, beginning with his use of grammar and continuing with his use of figures of speech. An example of Origen’s employment of such methods is his discussion in Commentary on John 32.112 of whether Jesus’ statement in John 13:12 “[Do you] Know what I have done.[?]” should be read as question or a command. Technikon would also deal with the author’s use of order (taxis) and plan (oikonomia) in light of a particular goal or intention (skopos). The concept of oikonomia would, as we shall see, assume great importance in Origen’s thought. Early commentators on the Iliad gave as examples of skillful use of oikonomia Homer’s providing Thetis a consistently helpful character so as to make her interventions seem appropriate, and his intensifying the pathos of Hector’s death by leaving his wife Andromache unaware of the duel with Achilles so that she gains her first intimation of it by hearing the lamentation over his fall. Origen would ordinarily deal with the book’s skopos in an introduction to the book as a whole, as he does below in the opening chapters of Book 1 of his Commentary on John. A fourth branch of interpretation, metrikon, dealt with the meter and, more broadly, the style an author used. Included in the study of style would be the investigation of whether a particular narrative is intended as a factual account, one which would involve looking closely at its consistency and plausibility.

Fourth and finally, the grammateus would exercise judgment (krisis), evaluating the author’s work and drawing helpful lessons from it for his students. As a general principle, applicable in all modes of interpretation, Origen would have learned that the best way to interpret a difficult passage in any particular author is to seek an explanation from another passage in the same author’s work, the principle summed up by the phrase, “Clarify Homer from Homer.”

Origen’s studies in this period may also have included further work in other branches of “general education” (enkuklios paideia) such as music, mathematics, and astronomy, the latter including what we call astrology. The student who composed the Address testified to the importance of the natural sciences in Origen’s own teaching, crediting him with helping him move from an irrational to a rational awe in the face of the beauty and majesty of the “holy plan (oikonomia) of the universe.” The selection below from Origen’s Commentary on Genesis displays an understanding of astrology (in spite of his rejection of it) and of astronomy unexcelled in any ancient Christian author. He also learned some principles of ancient medicine, which he would later apply in describing the therapeutic work of God in the soul.

Encounter with Gnosticism

Origen’s benefactor also provided accommodations for a teacher from Antioch, Paul, whom Origen characterized as a heretic. This person attracted great numbers, not only of heretics, but also of persons belonging to the orthodox party, to hear his teaching. Origen stated that he “loathed” Paul’s doctrine, which was probably some form of Gnosticism, and that he never joined in the heretics’ prayers, maintaining instead the “rule of the church.” Whatever Paul may have taught, Origen’s works testify to an intimate familiarity with Gnostic doctrines, particularly those of Valentinus and Marcion, and to serious engagement with the challenges they presented to the church’s faith, particularly as regards the goodness of the God of Israel and the extent of human free will. What defined Gnosticism for Origen, as for other Fathers, was not, as we might suppose today, its esotericism, but its denial that the God and Father of Jesus Christ was also the God of Israel, the creator of the world and giver of the Law. Such a position united Valentinus, Marcion, Basilides, and their followers, however they might differ on other matters. Marcion, reveling in the savage cruelty occasionally displayed by Israel’s God in the Old Testament, used such incidents to prove that such a god could not be the loving and gracious Father whom Jesus came to reveal. Origen’s initial impetus toward allegorical interpretation of Scripture may have come from the need to obviate Marcion’s criticism. Marcion, along with Basilides and two of Valentinus’s followers, Ptolemaeus and Heracleon, anticipated Origen in applying Hellenistic critical methods to the study of Scripture. Origen’s Commentary on John illustrates how such works could spur him to respond in kind. This is evident in the detailed response to Heracleon, who wrote his own commentary on the gospel, in the selection below from Book 13 of that work.

Of the Gnostics, Valentinus and his followers had the most profound influence on Origen. Like Marcion, they challenged the identity of Israel’s God with the God and Father of Jesus Christ. Their doctrine of three natures of souls, the spiritual, the soulish and the material – corresponding to Gnostic adepts, ecclesiastical Christians, and non-Christians – seemed to deny free choice and moral responsibility, a prospect all the more disturbing because they could make a plausible Scriptural case for divine determinism. Even more important, Valentinian doctrines made sense in terms of an overall theological system for interpreting Scripture. Such a system, eliminating apparent Scriptural crudities and inconsistencies, appealed to thoughtful Christians. Reaction to Valentinianism so profoundly influenced Origen that Holger Strutwolf, in a recent monograph, can refer to Origen’s work as “the reception of Valentinian Gnosticism” into the mainstream of Christian thought. By this he means not that Origen was a Valentinian, but that, by a process involving both acceptance and rejection, he, in effect, appropriated and transformed Valentinianism. An example is the way Origen treats Christological titles that take on an existence of their own as the Aeons in the Valentinian Pleroma; as we see in Book I of the Commentary on John below, he presents these as aspects of the divine and human natures of Christ.

Clement of Alexandria

Although, curiously, he does not mention him in his extant writings, we may presume that Origen came under the influence of Clement of Alexandria. Clement was an original theologian, not just an Origen manqué, but his theological writings adumbrated many themes that Origen would develop more fully and systematically. In particular, Clement pioneered using Greek philosophy and allegorical interpretation against the Gnostics. He repeatedly juxtaposed insights from the Bible with ideas taken from Greek literature and philosophy, combining biblical and classical terminology or moving seamlessly from a citation of a pagan author to a similar idea in the Bible and vice versa. Clement went so far as to suggest that, just as, in Paul’s words, the Torah served as a pedagogue for the Jews until Christ came (Gal. 3:24), so philosophy served as a pedagogue for the Greeks. This favorable attitude toward Greek philosophy did not extend to pagan religion, toward which Clement exhibited the same implacable opposition that characterizes all early Christian authors. Clement’s writings demonstrate that Origen grew up within a distinct school of thought, a learned Christianity distinguished from Gnosticism by its loyalty to the church’s rule of faith, which was already flourishing in Alexandria. Clement and Origen’s shared concerns include a defense of the ecclesiastical tradition against the Gnostics on the basis of allegorical interpretation of the Bible and an eschatology in which God’s punishments are purificatory rather than retributive. Both authors also distinguish between simple Christians motivated by fear and more advanced, spiritual Christians motivated no longer by fear but by love. The latter have a responsibility to guard certain advanced, secret doctrines from premature disclosure that would only harm the former. A fundamental division of Christians between what he termed a “simpler” majority and a minority who are genuinely “spiritual” would constitute a prominent feature of Origen’s thought, as we see, for example, when he discusses those who drink from Jacob’s well in Commentary on John 13 below. Clement sought to fulfill his responsibility for guarding advanced doctrines by composing the Stromateis in a deliberately obscure style, passing from one topic to another and hinting at one thing while demonstrating another in such a way as to kindle the interest of the mature while throwing the spiritually immature off the track. Other important aspects of Clement’s thought, particularly his stress on negative or apophatic theology, in which he is a precursor to the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Dionysius, evidently had less appeal for Origen. Pierre Nautin considers Origen’s decision to compose, as one of his first books, a work entitled Stromateis to be the strongest single piece of evidence that he came under Clement’s influence. It is hard to imagine what would inspire Origen to choose such an unusual title (only otherwise attested in a work by Plutarch, a pagan author in whom he showed no interest) unless he intended it, at least in part, as a tribute to Clement, whose most important work bore that title. Unfortunately, Origen’s work is no longer extant, except for fragments. Even if he had written no such work, it is hardly conceivable that Origen, with his insatiable intellectual curiosity, would have neglected a figure as deeply learned as Clement, as long as the two were, as they seem to have been, in the same city at the same time.

One can, in fact, plausibly see Origen’s treatise Peri Archon (also known as On First Principles) as the fulfillment of a theological agenda Clement set forth but never, so far as we know from his surviving works, fully achieved. This planned work would have been, in Brian Daley’s words, “a systematic anti-Gnostic consideration of Scriptural doctrine, all as a prelude for a ‘truly gnostic’ account of the cosmos and God, based on the book of Genesis and consistent with the ‘Rule of Truth.’ ” Even if, as seems so likely, Clement exercised a formative influence on him, Origen characteristically went his own way, especially in his style. Although, as we can tell from the Contra Celsum, Origen knew Greek philosophy better than Clement and probably knew Greek literature at least as well, he gives an absolute privilege to biblical language and terminology. Furthermore, while he may be cagey in his expression of ideas that he deemed inappropriate and dangerous for immature Christians, his writing is always clear and cogent, logically building whatever case he chooses to make.

Jewish influences

Jewish learning also exercised a formative influence on Origen and remained a compelling interest to him throughout his life. Introducing him to Philo’s works was one of Clement’s most momentous legacies to Origen, and, through him, to subsequent Christian tradition. Philo, a first-century Jewish theologian from Alexandria, wrote treatises in impeccable Greek interpreting the Torah in terms of Plato and vice versa. Clement’s massive, if usually unacknowledged, debt to Philo is evident throughout his work, especially in the Stromateis. David Runia has recently shown that Clement is the earliest Christian author who, without question, knew Philo’s works. He also shows that Origen’s own library is the source of the manuscript tradition for all of Philo’s surviving works. We may thus presume that Origen, who openly admired Philo, learned about him from Clement. Runia argues, persuasively, that Philo “furnished a new starting-point for more than two centuries of Alexandrian Christian theology,” not by teaching Clement Platonism, which he already knew, but by teaching him how to relate Platonism to the Bible. The allegorical method Philo used for relating Platonism to the Torah provided Clement with a method for refuting the Gnostics, who denied the identity of the God of the Old Testament with the God and Father of Jesus Christ. Philo also mediated the Platonic use of the metaphor of initiation into the mysteries (in Plato’s case these were the Eleusinian and Bacchic rites that were the fundamental religious expression of his time) as an image of intellectual and moral transformation. In Philo allegorical interpretation of Scripture opens up a mystical understanding of the text inaccessible to those who were intellectually and morally unworthy of it. Like the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, Philo thus, in effect, extends the Hebrew wisdom tradition, assimilating Greek philosophy just as that tradition had assimilated the wisdom of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Drawing on Philo, Clement and Origen extend that tradition still further.

Although the Jewish presence in Alexandria seems to have been weak in Origen’s time, he not only encountered there the works of Philo but also found at least one Jewish teacher who helped him with Hebrew and introduced him to Jewish exegetical traditions. In his Homilies on Jeremiah Origen recalls a Jewish tradition explaining the presence of two call narratives in the Book of Isaiah. (The prophet rashly said “Here I am, send me” in and had to deliver a message no one wanted to hear. He was more careful when, in Chapter 40, “a voice said, ‘Cry’ ”; before accepting a second assignment, he asked, “What shall I cry?”) Origen describes his informant as “a man who, because he had come to believe in Christ and had abandoned the law for something higher, fled his native land and arrived where we were living.” He thus seems to have been a Palestinian Jew who converted to Christianity and emigrated to Alexandria. Pierre Nautin identifies this man as “the Hebrew” whom Origen refers to in two other works from his Alexandrian period, his early Commentary on Psalms 1–25, included here, and Peri Archon. This informant thus opened Origen’s eyes to a rich living tradition of Scriptural interpretation on which he would draw throughout his life. It is easy to see why Origen would have found “very beautiful” this Hebrew’s image (in the selection below from the former work) of the way one passage of Scripture unlocks the meaning of another. Not only would it have seemed exegetically sensible to a student of Greek literature, taught to “clarify Homer from Homer,” but its esotericism would have appealed to a reader of Philo and student of Clement of Alexandria encouraged to seek through Scriptural interpretation an initiation to the knowledge of God. Recognizing his limitations in Hebrew, Origen also made it his practice throughout his life to check out linguistic information with Jewish informants.

Ammonius Saccas

According to the pagan philosopher Porphyry, Origen also encountered the Platonist Ammonius Saccas during his formative years. There is every reason to believe that Origen acquired his superb education in philosophy from him. Porphyry also tells us that, at what seems to have been a later time, Ammonius taught Plotinus, the pagan philosopher accounted the founder of Neoplatonism. Plotinus himself held in the highest esteem a fellow-student of Ammonius named Origen, the author of three (now lost) philosophical treatises. The fellow-student whom Plotinus knew may, however, have been a pagan of the same name. One evidence that they had a common teacher is that Origen and Plotinus are the first ancient authors to set forth the doctrine expressed below in our selection from Origen’s Commentary on Genesis, that the stars are signs rather than causes. Presumably through Ammonius, Origen gained his familiarity with Plato, Aristotle, Stoic philosophers, and philosophers in the school we call Middle Platonism.

The importance of Origen’s philosophical formation cannot be overestimated, but it can easily be misconceived. We misconceive Origen’s debt to philosophy if we anachronistically see it as the adoption of a rationalistic mentality foreign or antagonistic to piety. Ancient philosophers were critical, as Origen was, of the unthinking piety of the masses, but none of them – especially not Platonists of Origen’s time – questioned the reality of God. The Platonists’ goal was to follow their master’s exhortation in the Theaetetus to transform themselves with the help of wisdom so as to become like the divine as much as possible. We also misconceive Origen’s debt to his philosophical formation if we see it as the adoption of philosophic doctrines alongside or instead of the doctrines of the Christian faith. Henri Crouzel has set forth the ways Plotinus and Origen share similar doctrines, demonstrating that Origen did not accept Platonism uncritically, but only when it was consistent with the church’s rule of faith. But specific doctrines are not the point; Origen became a philosopher. He made his own the precise use of language and the inquiring, critical approach to reality inculcated by a rigorous philosophical training. As a teacher himself, Origen would seek to replicate his formation by evoking from his students the “the part of the soul that exercises judgment.” As Pierre Hadot has pointed out, for Origen, as for all ancient loversof-wisdom, philosophy was a way of life. Eusebius testifies to such a conception in praising Origen for “right actions of genuine philosophy,” in marvelous conformity with the saying, itself an echo of Plato, “as was his speech, so was his manner of life.”

This was a way of life which Origen, like most other early Christians, found profoundly compatible with the Christian faith. That faith, indeed, presented itself to the ancient world not just as the cultus of a Jewish man-god, but as a philosophy. Thus Justin Martyr referred to his conversion to Christianity, after finding all the Greek philosophical schools inadequate to his quest, as his reason for being a philosopher. Similarly, Clement promoted the biblical tradition as “the barbarian [that is, non-Greek] philosophy.” As a teacher himself, Origen therefore employed the study of philosophy, understood as an exercise involving moral purification as well as intellectual training, as a necessary preparation for the study of Scripture. Implicitly presenting his own enterprise as a continuation of ancient Hebrew wisdom, Origen described the books ascribed to Solomon – Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs – as a progressive philosophical curriculum. This is the curriculum of mystical, physical, ethical, and logical teachings that constitute the allegorical significance of the “ways of Zion” in fragment XIV of the Commentary on Lamentations below. For Origen, as we see below in Book 28 of his Commentary on John, Jesus himself, who made his disciples like him, transforming them from servants into friends, is the ultimate teacher.

Becoming a Christian teacher and ascetic

When a new Roman Prefect renewed persecution during Septimius Severus’s reign, he targeted catechetical instructors along with converts. Clement, who had no zeal for martyrdom, was probably among the Christian teachers who left town at this time. In their absence, some pagans interested in Christianity sought out Origen, the brilliant young Christian grammateus, to prepare them for baptism. Among these, a certain Plutarch actually was martyred. Fearless for his own life, Origen not only served as a catechist but visited the martyrs in prison and was present to encourage them at trials and executions. During this heroic time, Origen acquired his identity as Christian teacher. Following Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:8, which he often cited, Origen considered his teaching vocation a divinely conferred gift of grace. He identified the teaching gift with the talents in Jesus’ parable (Mt. 25:15–30), talents which the person receiving them had to use to best effect. Origen assumed the role of Christian teacher on his own, without consulting his bishop; Demetrius, perhaps feeling that he had little choice, sanctioned him after the fact as a catechist. This newfound identity probably induced Origen’s conversion to a rigorously ascetic life in conformity with the gospel precepts to give away worldly goods. He abandoned his occupation as a grammateus along with his books of Greek literature so that he could devote himself entirely to teaching and the studying the Bible. Nonetheless, in taking on a new identity, he did not forget what he had learned; in his earliest work, a Commentary on the Song of Songs composed during his youth (not the longer work of his maturity we have in Rufinus’s Latin translation), he discussed the importance of ascribing biblical passages to the appropriate prosôpa. It seems that Origen’s youthful ascetic enthusiasm led him to follow what he then took to be a counsel of self-castration in Matthew 19:12. Eusebius tells us that Origen later regretted the act, and in his Commentary on Matthew he explicitly repudiated any such interpretation.

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