3 Man of the Church at Caesarea
3 Man of the Church at Caesarea
DOI: 10.4324/9780203011997-3
Caesarea
In 234 Origen left Alexandria permanently for Caesarea in Palestine, where Bishop Theoctistus had ordained him as a presbyter. This was to be his only real home for the rest of his life. There, with Ambrosius’s assistance, he continued to publish, producing most of the works that have come down to us and becoming one of the most prolific authors of Antiquity. There too, as a presbyter, he had the opportunity to preach at the eucharistic gathering as well as to teach, and was also involved at least twice in examining bishops for heresy. Although smaller than Alexandria, Caesarea was, like Origen’s former home, a prosperous seaport and seat of Roman administration. It was also a splendid location for a student of the Bible. As we see below in his Commentary on Lamentations, fragment XCIII, Origen already knew Palestine as the “holy land” (he is one of the first authors to use the term in its present sense). He made use of the opportunity to gain a better understanding of biblical geography and to pursue his quest for manuscripts. Even more importantly, Caesarea had a flourishing Greek-speaking or bilingual Jewish community with which Origen had extensive, if touchy, intellectual relations. He not only consulted rabbis for technical information but made himself familiar with Jewish traditions, so much so that his works provide a valuable window on Palestinian Jewish thought of the time. There also is tantalizing evidence that Jewish scholars, perhaps Rabbi Hosha’ia, may have borrowed Origen’s copies of Philo’s works.
A student’s testimonial
It is in Caesarea, at some time no earlier than 238 and no later than 245, that a student composed the Address to Origen, which provides a picture and a reflection of the man and of his teaching methods. The author is traditionally identified as Gregory Thaumaturgus (i.e. “Wonderworker”), also identified as the recipient of Origen’s Letter to Gregory below. Gregory ascribes his encounter with Origen to a “marvelous oikonomia.” Divine providence, working through his guardian angel, accomplished this by taking him from a home in which he was brought up in error, worshipping false gods, to Caesarea, where Origen had arrived after being driven out of Egypt. Arrived there, his angel gave him over to Origen’s oikonomia, “and then perhaps somehow he rested, not out of any weariness, for the race of divine ministers cannot be wearied, but because he had conferred me to a man who would exercise all possible providence and care.” In his account, Origen first trains him in philosophy, beginning with ethics, understood in an entirely practical way as, in Robert L. Wilken’s words, “training in virtue.” He also uses Greek philosophy to teach him physics and logic. With this necessary preparation, Gregory can go on to the study of the Christian Scriptures. Regarding them, Gregory presents Origen as a uniquely inspired exegete, partaking of the same Spirit who originally inspired the oracles (i.e. the Christian Scriptures). His unmediated access to the Logos is guaranteed by his having, as his personal guardian angel, the Logos himself, the Angel of Great Counsel. Gregory explains that such insight is necessary because Scripture is obscure, either because God deliberately veils the meaning from the unworthy, or because it is actually plain but seems difficult to us.
Gregory’s account of Origen’s teaching practice demonstrates how he exercised God’s providence along with human care for his pupil. Its fundamental concern was integrating the student’s personality, or, more precisely, reintegrating it, into the image and likeness of God. Thus Gregory states that Origen “taught that part of our soul which it falls to the lot of dialectic alone to correct,” namely its rational part, “but also its lowly part,” the part moved by affections and appetites. In his teaching about the natural world, Origen enabled his pupil to move from an irrational to a rational awe in the face of its beauty and majesty of the “sacred oikonomia of the universe and its irreproachable nature,” the higher and lower parts of the soul entertaining the same emotion. Such integration involved the union of theory and practice. Gregory stresses that Origen’s students did not simply learn about the principles of morality but, in so far as possible, and he demurs in his own case, they exercised the virtues themselves. The hallmark of such education is personal appropriation of ideas as opposed to simply knowing information. Gregory contrasts Origen favorably to an earlier teacher in Roman law, whom he simply sought to please out of obedience rather than out of love for his subject. Evidently the genuine teacher’s goal is not to have the student reproduce his ideas but to become like himself. In the Socratic tradition, such a teacher’s role is not to inculcate ideas but to serve as a midwife, enabling the student to develop his own. Origen must have selfconsciously placed himself in this tradition, since his student described him as attaching himself “very Socratically” to his students, his words being like the bit to a wild horse. Unlike pagan teachers of rhetoric, who were concerned only with purity of style, Origen was concerned that his students learn how not to be deceived. Guarding against deception therefore played a special role in Origen’s teaching of Greek philosophy, which, Gregory says, he taught capably by virtue of prolonged study. Origen disapproved the tendency of the Greeks to be convinced by the doctrines of the first philosophers they ran across and sought to inculcate his students against such an uncritical attitude. To assure that his student would develop his own critical sense, Origen would exercise oikonomia in the ethical sense, accommodating himself to his pupils by deliberately concealing his own opinions. He would often present doctrines he considered sound in an offhand way and those he considered specious with seriousness, only revealing his actual opinion after his students had grappled with them. The Address thus presents an Origen whose actual pedagogy reflects the ideal of Christ himself, the teacher whose aim is to transform his disciple into his own likeness. Origen sets forth this pedagogical ideal in his discussion of footwashing in our selection from Book 32 of the Commentary on John.
Preaching
As a presbyter at Caesarea Origen seems to have preached regularly, at least for some years, at the eucharistic gathering. His homilies provide our fullest access by far to Christian preaching in the anteNicene period. On the basis of them, Nautin has argued that the Caesarean church heard the entire Bible in its eucharistic services over the course of a three-year period. (See the opening of Origen’s fifth homily on 1 Samuel below, which indicates that four lengthy chapters of 1 Samuel had just been read.) Origen’s procedure was to go through a passage that had just been read and explain it, roughly verse by verse, while drawing out its moral implications. Twohundred and five homilies survive in Latin translations by Rufinus or Jerome and twenty on Jeremiah and one on 1 Samuel survive in Greek. Four homilies, two that survive in Greek and two on Luke preserved in Jerome’s translation, are included here.
Although Origen’s homilies constitute, in effect, commentaries on the books on which he preached, he treated the homily as a distinct genre from the commentary. His homilies are more hortatory, much more concise, less technical, and less speculative than his commentaries. As a teacher, Origen recognized that he was not speaking to the learned audience at the eucharistic gathering, but, as a teacher, he also sought to make his hearers a bit more like himself by initiating them into the transformative study of Scripture. He therefore sought to provide them an example of a reverent and, above all, prayerful approach to the Bible that they could apply themselves. His preaching style was therefore “homiletic” in the root sense of the word, that is, conversational. He frequently asks hypothetical questions, as in the fifth homily on 1 Samuel, where hypothetical debating partners are aghast that the great prophet Samuel could actually be in hell. He frequently employs the second-person singular as if he were addressing each member of the congregation individually – “You, a sinner, must taste something very bitter … so that … you may be saved.” or “Just as you, when you read the Scriptures …” (Homilies on Jeremiah 12.3 and Homilies on Luke 19.5, below). In the thriving port of Caesarea he singled out avarice and lust for particular attention. Origen also warned his congregation against heresy and false ideas. Following his principle of utility, he consistently provides an allegorical interpretation to a historical narrative or a legal edict. Thus Gideon’s fleece (Judg. 6:36–40) symbolizes the transition from Judaism to Christianity; the dew of Moses that originally alighted only on the Jewish people now leaves them dry and alights on the surrounding gentiles. The commandment to keep alight the fire on the altar of holocaust (Lev. 6:12–13), applies to “the fire of faith and the lamp of knowledge” in Christians. He frequently preaches about Scriptural interpretation. Thus the grass in Psalm 36:2a [37:2], “they are dried up swiftly like grass,” reminds him of Jezebel’s attempt to seize Naboth’s vineyard and replace it with a field of grass (1 Kings 20). This suggests an allegory about the continuing danger that carnal wisdom (Jezebel) will replace spiritual interpretation of the Bible (Naboth’s vineyard) with carnal interpretation (a field of grass). He also maintains a high doctrine of the preached word. Thus he criticizes his congregation for their inconsistency in being (rightly) scrupulous not to lose one crumb of the eucharistic bread while being negligent about applying their understanding so as to not to lose one detail of God’s word. This criticism is one indication that Origen’s homilies were sometimes ill received; in one homily he scolded members of his congregation for not listening and in another he complained that they did not want to hear what he had to say. Although his thoughtful homilies pointedly address moral and spiritual concerns, Origen evidently was not a preacher who could (or necessarily wanted to) control a congregation like John Chrysostom or Augustine.
On the Passover and Dialogue with Heraclides
In his early years at Caesarea Origen continued to work on his Commentary on John and Commentary on Genesis. During these years he may have composed his treatise On the Passover, recovered in 1941 in a cache of books hidden in an ancient quarry at Tura near Cairo. In it philology contributes to spiritual insight. Origen begins by making short work of Christians who ignorantly identify the Hebrew word pascha (Passover) with the Greek paschein (to suffer) so as to interpret the Passover as a prefiguration of Christ’s passion. The Jewish Passover, described in Exodus 12, for which he gives a spiritual interpretation, is not Christ’s passion, but our passage into a transformed life in Christ.
The cache at Tura contained another previously unknown work, Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides. This was not a literary dialogue like those of Plato but an actual transcript of a hearing investigating a bishop on charges of heresy. Origen was evidently called in to share his theological expertise. The circumstances are similar to another occasion we know about from Eusebius. There Origen played a prominent role in the investigation of Beryllus, bishop of Bostra in what is now Jordan, whose writings implied that Jesus Christ did not subsist on his own before his Incarnation, nor even then did he have his own proper divinity distinct from the Father. According to Eusebius, Origen, after a close investigation, successfully straightened out what was unorthodox and persuaded Beryllus by his reasoning. From Origen’s questions at the beginning of the Dialogue with Heraclides, he suspected that Heraclides held views similar to those of Beryllus.
Besides showing Origen as a respected proponent of orthodoxy, the Dialogue with Heraclides provides a significant glimpse of important elements in his theology. He brings Heraclides to the point of agreeing that “we need not dread to say that in some way there are two Gods, but in some way there is one God.” Besides affirming that the Savior is God yet distinct from the Father, Origen argues that the Son assumed full human nature: body, soul, and spirit. In a statement that prefigures Gregory of Nazianzus’s famous formula, “What is not assumed is not healed,” he affirms the soteriological necessity of Christ’s assuming full humanity:
So then our Savior and Lord, wishing to save man as he did, for this reason wished to save the body, just as he wished to save the soul as well; he also wished to save the remaining part of man, the spirit. The whole man would not have been saved unless he had assumed the whole man.
The Dialogue ends with Origen explaining his theological anthropology in response to a question “Is the soul the blood?” In this discussion Origen identifies the inner and outer human beings spoken of by Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:16 and Romans 7:22 with the two creation narratives in Genesis. Genesis 1:26, where human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, narrates the creation of the inner human being, and Genesis 2:7, where God formed the first man from the dust of the earth, the creation of the outer human being. Of these the first, by virtue of being in God’s image, is “immaterial, superior to all bodily existence.” Therefore, in answer to the original question, Origen sets forth the principle of homonymy:
Just as the outer human being has the same name as the inner, so also do the parts of his body, with the result that each part of the outer human being has a name corresponding to a part of the inner human being.
This inner human being also has spiritual senses corresponding to the senses of the outer human being and may undergo a spiritual death corresponding to but more serious than the death of the outer human being.
On prayer
In those same years Origen received a request from Ambrosius and from a lady, Tatiana, to write a treatise on how and, more importantly, why we should pray. They specifically asked him to set forth and refute the arguments of those who consider prayer superfluous. Origen’s response, his treatise On Prayer, accessible in several excellent translations, elicited his powers as a spiritual guide, a philosopher, an interpreter of Scripture and an upholder of orthodox Christian doctrine. He opens the treatise with a statement that “a clear, exact and appropriate account of the whole matter of prayer” is humanly impossible but “becomes possible by the exceeding grace of God (see 2 Cor. 9:14) to those who are no longer servants, but friends of the Logos (see Jn 15:14–15).” He therefore prays that the Spirit enable him to perform so weighty a task. Origen deals with objections to the need or efficacy of prayer in a self-contained philosophical discussion of providence and free will. His primary endeavor, however, was not so much to defend the efficacy of prayer as to redefine it. He argues that we should look on prayer not as a way to obtain benefits, especially earthly benefits, from God, but as a means of becoming more like God. The very act of prayer, bringing with it the benefit of a settled condition, prevents sins and promotes good deeds. Indeed, by separating itself in prayer from the concerns of the body, the soul lays aside its condition as a soul, that is a rational being whose ardor for God has cooled, and becomes more spiritual. Origen reinterprets the material benefits received by the saints of the Old Testament in spiritual terms. Thus, just as God answered Hannah’s prayer for a child, so he answers the prayers of those today who find their reason barren and their minds sterile, enabling them through the Holy Spirit to conceive discourses filled with true insights. Origen interprets Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17) to mean that the whole life of a saint should be one unbroken prayer, including virtuous deeds as a form of prayer. Nonetheless, “what is commonly called prayer” is also a necessary part of such a life. He therefore discusses when and how one should engage in private prayer, recommending, for example, an orientation toward the East. In doing so he provides a precious insight into early Christian practice. The centerpiece of Origen’s treatise is a detailed interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer. Ever the grammateus, he carefully discusses differences between the Matthaean and Lucan versions before engaging in a verse-by-verse analysis that includes, among other things, an insightful discussion of the uses of temptation.
An Exhortation to Martyrdom
In 235 the Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother, Julia Mammaea, lost their lives at the hands of troops who installed Maximinus Thrax, an Emperor who did not share his predecessor’s favorable attitude to Christianity. Because of his wealth and associations with the previous regime, Ambrosius, along with Protoctetus, a presbyter associated with him, had reason to fear arrest and execution. Their situation called forth another short treatise, Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom. In it Origen encourages his friend to meet steadfastly his prospective fate: “I pray you,” he writes,
throughout the present struggle to remember the great reward laid up (see 2 Tim. 4:7–8) in the heavens for those who are persecuted and reviled on account of the Son of Man (Mt. 5:11–12), and to rejoice and to exult and to leap for joy just as the apostles rejoiced when on one occasion they were esteemed worthy to suffer insults for his name (Acts 5:41).
He echoes his older contemporary, Tertullian, saying:
If we wish to save our soul, so that we may receive it back as better than a soul, let us lose it by martyrdom. For if we lose it for Christ’s sake, throwing it to him in dying for him, we purchase for it true salvation.
Ambrosius will find tranquillity if he allows the mind of Christ to speak in him as he meditates on the Psalms:
And if sometimes you feel distress in your soul, may the mind of Christ within us speak to the soul – even as your own state of mind does what it can to confuse even this mind of Christ – saying “Why, my soul, are you sad? And why do you disturb me? Hope in God, for I will make my confession to him” (Ps. 41:6 [42:5]).
He makes short work of rationalizations that might tempt his patron to temporize. Believing in Christ in his heart will avail him nothing unless, when the test comes, he also confesses Christ with his mouth (see Rom. 10:10). Neither should he think that names are indifferent, so that he could dissemble by worshipping the true God under the name of Zeus. Origen the “almost fanatical Christian” still remains a grammateus, listing variants when he cites from the gospels exhortations to be steadfast in the face of persecution.
We might speculate that Ambrosius received with mixed feelings a treatise so urgent about his putting his neck on the line, but there can be no question of Origen’s sincerity; the Exhortation to Martyrdom reveals the living piety behind the theology of Peri Archon. Origen thus sets forth the cash-value of a belief in the divine oikonomia:
Since God evidently watches over the movement of the heaven and the stars in it and over that which takes place by his divine skill in earth and sea, in the birth and nurture of all kinds of animals and in the origin and growth of all plants, it would be absurd for us to close our eyes and not to look to God, but in fear to turn our eyes upon men who will soon die and be handed over to the punishment they deserve.
As in Peri Archon, eschatological hope entails understanding Scripture:
With profound meaning Isaiah says: “I gave Egypt for your ransom and Ethiopia and Syene for you, for you were precious in my sight” (Isa. 43:3–4).” The right meaning of this and other such sayings you will understand if you have a love of learning in Christ and already wish to surpass that which is seen through a glass, in an enigma (see 1 Cor. 13:12), and hasten towards him who has called you.
Such understanding of Scripture is, however, but a step toward the ultimate Christian hope, the immediate knowledge of God:
Then, as never before you will comprehend face to face, as friends of the heavenly Father. Friends learn not by obscure hints, or by mere knowledge of sounds and words, symbols and types, but by a vision through which they attain to the nature of intelligible things and the beauty of the truth.
Even more clearly than in Peri Archon, this hope entails sharing God’s immateriality:
I consider that they love God with all their soul who with a great desire to be in fellowship with God withdraw and separate their soul not only from the earthly body but also from any sort of body. Such persons accept the putting away of the body of humiliation (see Phil. 3:21) without distress or emotion when the time comes for them to put off the body of death (see Rom. 7:24) by what is considered to be death.
In 238 Ambrosius’s anxieties ended when Maximinus fell by the same violent means that brought him briefly to power. With his assistance, the remaining fifteen years of Origen’s life were astonishingly productive, even by Origen’s standards. He composed more volumes of his mammoth Commentary on John along with multivolume commentaries on Matthew, Luke, most of the Pauline letters, the Psalms, and most of the Old Testament wisdom and prophetic books. Of this output, we possess certain volumes of the Commentary on John, two of which are represented here, and about half of the Commentary on Matthew, surviving either in Greek or in an anonymous Latin translation. Apart from fragments, the only other commentaries that survive are those on the Song of Songs and on Romans, both in translations by Rufinus.
Commentary on the Song of Songs
Origen seems to have composed the Commentary on the Song of Songs during a prolonged sojourn in Athens. Nautin speculates that he may have gone there because of tension with hitherto supportive bishops in Palestine. Jerome, gave it his highest praise: “Origen, who in other books excelled everyone else, on the Song of Songs excelled himself … so that it seems to me that in him is fulfilled the Scripture, ‘The king has brought me into his storehouse’ (Song 1:4).” We have three books translated into Latin by Jerome’s erstwhile friend, Rufinus. Origen opens his preface with a brief characterization of the book:
This little book is an epithalamium, that is, a wedding song, written by Solomon in what appears to me to be the form of a drama. He sang it from the perspective of a bride being married who burns with an ardent love for her groom, who is the Word of God. Thus the one who loves him is either the soul made in his image or the church.
As a grammateus, Origen establishes its genre: a wedding song in which characters or prosôpa (a bride and groom, and, as he goes on to say, their friends) have dramatic parts. Throughout his commentary he pays attention to the dramatic context in which these characters speak. As a spiritual interpreter, he identified the groom as the Word of God and the bride as either the individual soul or the church. In identifying the bride as the church Origen follows in a Christian tradition already attested by Hippolytus, one that probably derived from Jewish identification of the bride with Israel. We find such nuptial imagery for the relationship between God and his people in some Hebrew prophets and, far more abundantly, in the New Testament (most notably in Ephesians 5, which speaks of marriage as a “mystery” signifying the relationship of Christ to the church). The identification of the bride as the individual soul may have been Origen’s innovation. If so, such identification follows naturally from his view that God’s oikonomia applies to the individual as well as to the collective. Henri Crouzel has pointed out that for Origen the church functions in many ways like the third divine hypostasis of Plotinus, the Soul in which individual souls participate.
As we have seen, Origen considered the Song of Songs to be the third book in Solomon’s progressive series providing instruction in philosophy. As such, it deals with the culmination of philosophy, intimate and unmediated communion with God. To profit from its teaching the person reading it must, therefore, have reached spiritual maturity:
But first we must know that, just as childhood is not moved to passionate love, so the babyhood and childhood of the inner man is not allowed to receive these words – those, that is, who are nourished in Christ with milk, not solid food (see Heb. 5:12 and 1 Cor. 3:1–3) and, at this initial stage, desire the rational and guileless milk (see 1 Pet. 2:2). For in the words of the Song of Songs is that food concerning which the Apostle said: “Moreover, solid food is for the perfect” and requires hearers, “who, in order to accept it, have their senses exercised in the discernment of good and evil” (Heb. 5:14).
Although almost all of Scripture has a meaning that is appropriate for the spiritually immature, this is not true of the Song of Songs: its erotic imagery can easily lead them astray:
If someone has access to it who is a man according to the flesh only, for such a person there issues no small risk and danger. Because he does not know how to listen to the language of love purely and with chaste ears, he diverts everything he hears away from the inner man to the outer, carnal man, he turns from the spirit to the flesh, and nourishes in himself carnal desires, and on the occasion of divine Scripture seems to be moved and incited to the lust of the flesh.
Because it has no positive message for the immature and can so easily lead them astray, Origen approves a Jewish custom of keeping the Song of Songs, along with the beginning of Genesis and the beginning and end of Ezekiel, out of the hands of the spiritually immature. The Song of Songs is for those who have the immediate and intimate access to the Logos about which Origen speaks in detail in Commentary on John, Book 1 below.
Although Origen believes that the Song of Songs has an entirely spiritual meaning and considers it dangerous for the immature, he resolutely affirms its eroticism. Its lush imagery is no embarrassment to be papered over by a sterile, spiritualizing interpretation, but an opportunity to draw on a profound human experience to illuminate the human relationship with God. The power of erotic love is evident in a wife who wants to do whatever pleases her husband; in the same way mature souls in an intimate relationship with God act out of love rather than mere fear. To sever the connection between a fundamental human emotional drive, sexual love, and the love of the bride for her divine bridegroom would destroy the homonymy between the inner and the outer man, between human beings as created in the image of God and human beings as created from the dust of the earth. In the Prologue to his Commentary on the Song of Songs Origen sets forth this principle in much the same terms as in his Dialogue with Heraclides. He was well aware that the Scriptures he read in Greek, including the Song of Songs, almost always used the relatively uncommon word agapê for love and avoided the usual word, erôs, but he argued that these concepts are the same. Although the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren, in his influential work Agape and Eros, attacked Origen for identifying concepts that should have been kept separate, more recent scholars have effectively upheld Origen’s interpretation. They have shown that, as a theoretician of love in the Christian tradition, Origen has no peer but Augustine, many of whose positions he anticipates.
For Origen, nonetheless, the Song of Songs is as much about biblical interpretation as it is about love. When the groom tells the bride, in verse 1:15, “Your eyes are doves,” this is because “she understands the divine Scriptures, no longer after the letter, but after the Spirit and sees in it spiritual mysteries, for a dove is the symbol of the Holy Spirit.” Mature Christians for whom the Song of Songs was intended could be said to have entered the king’s storehouse (Song 1:4), as Jerome once believed Origen had. They had access, that is, to “Christ’s secret and hidden mind,” so that, with Paul, they could say, “we have the mind of Christ … so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God,” (1 Cor. 2:16 and 2:12, which Origen often cites together in this way). The word “mind” (Greek nous) also means “sense” or “meaning”; the soul that has Christ’s mind thus, by God’s gracious gift, perceives things as Christ does, thereby having access to the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3) hidden in him. Origen may have considered his interpretation of verse 1:5 “I am dusky [or, in other versions, black] and beautiful” as such a treasure. We have just seen an understanding of an oracle concerning Egypt, Ethiopia and Syene promised as a reward of martyrdom and in Peri Archon the meaning of “the diversity of races” mentioned in Scripture is a hidden truth, a mystery one might hope to learn in the afterlife. In his commentary Origen identifies the “black and beautiful” bride with Ethiopians in Scripture: among others, Zipporah, Moses’ Ethiopian wife, with the Queen of Sheba. As such, he argues that she is an image of the gentile church. Such divinely given insights do not exhaust God’s truth, but belong to an ever-continuing process in which all rational beings participate. This is especially clear in Origen’s interpretation of 2:4, “bring me into the house of wine”:
That wine, which issues from the true vine (Jn 15:1), is always new. In the case of those who advance in learning, their understanding of divine knowledge and wisdom is always renewed. This is why Jesus said to his disciples: “I shall drink that new wine with you in the kingdom of my Father” (see Mt. 26:29). For the understanding of hidden things and the revelation of secrets is always renewed by the wisdom of God, not simply for men, but for angels and heavenly powers.
The Commentary on the Songs of Songs is thus another book, like the Exhortation to Martyrdom, that leads us into the heart of Origen’s piety. Nowhere is this more evident than in his interpretation of verse 1:2, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” where the bridegroom’s kisses are insights into the meaning of Scripture. Such language indicates that, for Origen, mystical experience, if we choose to call it that, is as much cognitive as it is affective. The Song of Songs thus teaches us that biblical interpretation is itself erotic.
Commentaries on Paul’s epistles
Charles Bigg, in his 1886 Bampton Lectures, characterized Clement and Origen as participants in “the first of those Pauline reactions, which mark critical epochs of theology.” Specifically, they, along with Irenaeus, effectively recovered the Pauline writings from Gnostics and brought them back into the mainstream of the Christian tradition. Nonetheless, Origen has, at least until recently, received little credit as a major interpreter of Paul and even less as a Paulinist thinker. His Commentary on Romans, the only one of his Pauline commentaries to survive more or less intact, is only now appearing in modern critical edition after having been the orphan among his major works. The neglect or disparagement of Origen’s Paulinism is initially puzzling since, besides being trained in the analysis of literary texts, he was culturally and linguistically closer to Paul than any other major interpreter. Nevertheless, his interpretation lies outside the mainstream of Pauline interpretation in the Western tradition, from Augustine through Luther to Bultmann, a tradition concerned almost exclusively with the individual’s salvation by grace. For Origen, rather, Paul was the apostle of spiritual transformation – the transformation of human apprehension of God from the oldness of the letter to the newness of the Spirit and the transformation of believers into the image of Christ. Paul was also the preeminent theoretician of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture, which, for us, is necessary for such transformation.
Only recently, particularly in the wake of studies that take seriously Paul’s Jewish identity, have scholars begun to recognize the value of Origen’s Pauline interpretation. Thus Peter Gorday demonstrated how Origen’s interpretation of Romans 9–11 integrated three otherwise troublesome chapters into the epistle as a whole, and a colloquium of Italian scholars have examined sympathetically his interpretation of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Romans 9:14–18. Theresia Heither, in a recent study of Origen’s Commentary on Romans, takes Origen seriously as someone who can help us understand Paul. She shows how Origen views Romans as a whole within the context of Paul’s life and thought, relating each individual passage to that coherent whole as he explains its peculiarities of style and expression. She does not accept a priori that salvation by grace alone is the “essential and exclusively essential” element in Pauline theology and judge Origen wanting for not finding it so. In Origen’s interpretation of Romans, Paul dealt specifically with two aspects of a transfer of religion: on the one hand, from the Jews to the gentiles and from the Old to the New covenants, and, on the other, from the letter to the Spirit or from the outer to the inner man. Thus Paul gave a new, spiritual meaning to key Jewish concepts such as law, Israel, and circumcision. Heither also shows how Origen dealt sensitively with individual passages. Thus, for example, in his interpretation of Romans 5:12–14, he clarifies the fundamental lines of Paul’s soteriology without oversimplifying a difficult passage.
Although we have lost the rest of Origen’s commentaries on Paul, Origen cites and comments on key passages from the other Pauline epistles throughout his works. Origen made no distinction between Pauline and Deuteropauline literature, but epistles now considered genuine, particularly 1 Corinthians, are central to his thought. Apparently he never attempted a commentary on 1 Corinthians, although he did preach on it; perhaps he saw no need to pay special attention to a book he dealt with lavishly throughout his works. The selections presented here, except for the brief Letter to Gregory, show how Origen uses that epistle to buttress key concepts. Thus the discussion of the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12 authenticates his own role as teacher (Commentary on Lamentations fr. CXVI; see also Peri Archon, Preface 3, quoted above). Likewise, verse 1:24, where Paul refers to Christ as the “wisdom of God and the power of God,” links the Logos of John 1 with the Wisdom of Proverbs 8:22 (Commentary on John 1.55). He generalizes verse 9:22, where Paul speaks of becoming all things to all people, to apply to Christ and to the angels (Commentary on John 1.217 and 13.99). 1 Corinthians is particularly important for Origen’s eschatology. It provides a key text for purification after death, verses 3:10–15, where fire proves each person’s work, destroying what is built with wood, hay, and stubble even as the person is saved. It also provides, in , an account of resurrection suggesting that, in the end, God will be “all in all” (v. 28).
Our selections illustrate how 1 Corinthians also provided key texts for holding up Paul as a model spiritual person. Thus in Commentary on John 1.42 we see how Paul’s discussion of how he accommodated himself to the Jews in verse 9:22 also provides a pattern for the spiritual man who accommodates himself to simple believers. As a spiritual person, Paul was, for Origen, foremost, in one recent scholar’s phrase, the “master of Scriptural interpretation.” Origen uses both Corinthian letters to show how Paul set forth and put into practice a spiritual hermeneutic. The single most important passage in this regard is 1 Corinthians 2, a passage that is as vital for Origen’s hermeneutics as Chapter 15 is for his eschatology. He begins his twelfth Homily on Jeremiah with a reference to 1 Corinthians 2:14, “The soulish man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him.” That homily ends with a discussion of Jeremiah (13:17 LXX), “if you do not listen in a hidden manner,” that recalls verse 2:7, “we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, that which is hidden, which God foreordained before the ages fot our glory.”’ According to verse 2:10 God does, through the Spirit, reveal this hidden wisdom. Origen echoes this verse in Homilies on 1 Samuel 5.10 below concluding that his exposition has demonstrated that “everything is marvelously written and is understood by those to whom God reveals the interpretation.” In Commentary on John 1.35 and in Homilies on Jeremiah 12.3 below Origen cites another vital verse, 10:11, “these things [i.e. the Old Testament narratives] were written down for our instruction,” to demonstrate that Scripture’s hidden meaning meets the spiritual needs of Christians. Origen uses 1 Corinthians 13 to argue that Scriptural interpretation is an open-ended process, never complete in this life. As in Commentary on John 13.58 below, he appeals especially to verses 9 (“we know in part”) and 12 (“now we see through a mirror in an enigma,” Greek en ainigmati). In the latter verse Origen, like other Fathers, takes entirely seriously the Greek phrase “in an enigma” (“dimly” in the Revised Standard Version) as a technical term pointing to an allegorical interpretation. Key texts for Origen’s spiritual hermeneutic from 2 Corinthians are, notably: 3:6 (“the letter kills, the spirit gives life”), indicating the danger of literalism; 6:12 (“words no one could speak”), indicating the need for discretion in dealing with divine mysteries; and 4:7 (“we have this treasure in earthen vessels”), justifying the Bible’s humble style in comparison with Greek literature. Although controversial in his own time and later, Origen’s use of 1 Corinthians deserves to be taken seriously for bringing to the fore aspects of Paul’s thought which later interpreters, including most in our own time, have neglected or suppressed. Robert Grant argues concerning 1 Corinthians 15 that “In dealing with the problem of the resurrection his interpretation is both grammatical and ‘spiritual’ and certainly comes closer to the meaning of Paul than that of his opponents.” The same might be said of the esotericism in 1 Corinthians 2.
Such principles, drawn heavily from 1 Corinthians, determine Origen’s own approach to Paul’s writings and to Scripture as a whole. They are intimately associated with his concept of a divine oikonomia. Origen explains in his Commentary on John that Paul acted as a “steward [oikonomos, i.e. one who practices oikonomia] of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1). Such a steward seeks out, as, “the appropriate time for introducing [certain] doctrines, so as not to harm the person listening and to calibrate carefully what is to be left out or added, even when he observes the appropriate time.” Thus Origen argues that, in Romans 5:12–14, a notoriously difficult passage, Paul deliberately leaves out important information. He compares Paul to the servant of a great king, who may indeed display the wealth of his master to impress others with the king’s power, but who is careful not to divulge information that would enable the king’s enemies to steal into his storerooms on their own. Thus when Origen speaks in the Preface to Peri Archon of the apostles’ having set forth certain doctrines straightforwardly while being silent about others, leaving them for those who would be lovers of wisdom, he generalizes from Paul to the New Testament as a whole.
Contra Celsum
Late in his life, most likely in 248 or 249, Ambrosius sent Origen a copy of a work entitled True Logos by Celsus, a long-departed author. Although we cannot be certain who Celsus was, Origen took him to be the Celsus who was a friend of the second-century satirist (and enemy of Christianity) Lucian. James Francis has recently made a case that such an identification is plausible. Evidently written in the late second century, it might be called an anti-apology, a pagan response to pleas for toleration by Christian authors. Its title, implying that Christians proclaimed a “False Logos,” is evidence that Celsus knew of a Logos theology such as that taught by Justin at Rome before his death in 156, and he seems to be responding to arguments like those of Justin or Aristides. Beginning with the accusation that Christians constitute an illegal, secret society and ending with an indictment of their refusal to worship the Emperor, his work constituted, in effect, a brief in defense of persecution.
The parlous state of the Empire, threatened as never before by inflation, internal dissension, and external invasion, induced in some pagan intellectuals an apocalyptic mood as Rome celebrated the millennium of its founding in 247. Some blamed Christians, favored by the reigning Emperor, Philip the Arab, who tolerated Christians and with whom Origen himself had been in correspondence, for Rome’s disarray. Ambrosius, sensitive after his last brush with persecution, must have found the circulation of Celsus’s treatise disturbing; he looked to Origen for a response. The need to provide arguments against renewed persecution was probably more pressing than any need to reassure weak Christians who might be disturbed by Celsus’s arguments. (Origen pointed out that the Apostle Paul, when he enumerated things that might even conceivably separate us from the love of God in Christ [Rom. 8], did not include “arguments” in the list.) Although hesitating to rescue from oblivion a work he had never heard of before, Origen undertook a detailed refutation in eight books, his Against Celsus (commonly known by its Latin title, Contra Celsum). As it happens, this is his longest work preserved in Greek and in its entirety, a testimony to the value subsequently placed on it.
Celsus’s criticisms are satirical and hard-edged, but demonstrate a real acquaintance with the New Testament. Celsus also had a clear-sighted perception of Christianity’s departures from and threat to Greco-Roman social and cultural values. The way he deals with Christian claims that Jesus performed miracles shows that he was no rationalist in the post-Enlightenment sense. He does not argue that these never occurred, but accuses Jesus of having performed them by the means of magic arts. Although Origen assumed that a friend of Lucian would be an Epicurean – conveniently enough for polemical purposes, since Epicureanism was the least popular philosophical sect in his day – he came to admit that this was not the case. Celsus was, rather, a conservative Platonist, fully supportive of traditional pagan cults even though understanding them as expressions of worship for one God. Celsus actually considered himself a more consistent monotheist than the Christians, who worshipped Jesus Christ as a second God. His God is entirely transcendent, dealing with the world through inferior beings, demons, that is, gods worshipped in the pagan cultus. All the more rich for being varied, worship offered to these demons redounds to the one God. Evil comes about as a result of matter, which God did not create. Although Plato was, in Celsus’s opinion, the clearest and most authoritative exponent of this doctrine, it represented an “ancient logos” shared by all peoples. All peoples, therefore, had a responsibility to maintain their ancestral worship. Christians, however, would lure them away from such worship. Thus, as Robert Wilken points out, Celsus pursues “not simply a debate between paganism and Christianity, but a debate about a new concept of religion. Celsus sensed that Christians had severed the traditional bond between religion and a ‘nation’ or people.”
Celsus’s affirmation of a philosophia perennis has resonance in our time, as do his objections to Christianity’s presumption that God’s only concern in all the cosmos is the human race. Humans, he argues, are not even the only rational animals for God to be concerned about; birds must be rational, since they foretell the future, and elephants, since they keep their oaths. Although he accepted God, demons, and magic along with traditional pagan cults, Celsus also represented a philosophical tradition that subjected religion to rational scrutiny. Christians, he argued, broke with that tradition by urging on their followers an irrational fideism, saying such things as “Do not ask questions, just believe,” “Your faith will save you,” and “The wisdom of the world is an evil, and foolishness is a good thing.” While allowing that Jesus might have impressed people by magic arts, he refuses to accept the apparition of the Spirit at Jesus’ baptism or the accounts of his resurrection, impeaching the veracity of testimony. Although the most consistent impression Celsus leaves is that Christianity is unspeakably tacky by the standards of elite Greco-Roman culture, he also raises objections that go to the heart of Christian theology. The Christian doctrines of Creation and Incarnation, in his view, fatally compromised the transcendence of God. Creation made God responsible for matter and the evil inevitably associated with it. The Incarnation, besides hopelessly confusing sensible and intelligible realities, would involve an irrational change on God’s part from a better mode of existence to a worse. Regarding the Incarnation, Celsus took advantage of the rejection of Jesus on the part of Jews. In a section in which he attacks Christianity from the perspective of Jew, Celsus asks: “What God is not believed when he appears among men, especially when he manifests himself to those who are expecting him? Why indeed should he not be recognized by those who had been waiting for him for a long time?” Nonetheless, although Jews, unlike Christians, had persisted in ancestral traditions long enough to be tolerable, they had little beyond that and their rejection of Christ to recommend them. He regarded them as Egyptians who, like Christians, had abandoned their traditional religion under the influence of another charlatan, Moses, who performed magic tricks.
Universally respected for his learning, Origen was, simply by being who he was, a refutation of Celsus’s charge that Christians discouraged thought. (Celsus might still have taken heart from the reaction to Origen on the part of Christians who did not care to be dismissed as “simpler.”) Origen’s attitude toward miracles, for example, was much like Celsus’s, not denying their possibility but subjecting them to rational criticism. While uncompromising about Christian participation in the pagan worship of the Emperor, Origen was also willing to agree with Celsus so far as to grant that the Empire played a positive role in God’s oikonomia. He considered Jesus’ birth in the principate of Augustus to be a sign that the Pax Romana was God’s way of preparing the world for the gospel. Furthermore, many things Celsus found objectionable – not to say ludicrous – in Christianity, Origen objected to just as strenuously: irrational fideism, belief in a vindictive and otherwise anthropomorphic God, an expectation that Christians would someday reanimate their corpses. The opportunity to score points off simpler Christians by refuting Celsus was probably an inducement to comply with Ambrosius’s request.
Origen’s use of the Contra Celsum to defend himself against those (“simple” in his opinion) who objected to his ideas is most evident in his response to Celsus’s charges that Christians conceive of God as a celestial cook planning to set fire to the world and that they irrationally hope to reanimate their corpses. Like ancient Greek philosophers, who may themselves have learned it from “the more ancient race of the Hebrews,” Christians teach
that a cleansing fire is applied to the world, and possibly to each of those who need the chastisement and healing brought by fire. It burns but does not consume those who do not have matter that needs to be cleansed by that fire, but it burns and consumes those who have built the building, figuratively speaking, of their deeds, words, and thoughts out of “wood, hay, and stubble” (1 Cor. 3:12). For the divine oracles say that the Lord will visit each of those who require such treatment “like the fire of a smelting-furnace and like a cleanser’s herb” (Mal. 3:2) because of the evil matter derived from vice that has amalgamated with the soul.
But, although Scripture, rightly understood, represents this fire as entirely beneficial in its effects,
The prophet Isaiah will also testify that we do not say that God applies fire like a cook, but as a God who is a benefactor to those needing punishment and fire in what was written in the oracle to a sinful nation, “Because you have coals of fire, sit on them, so that they will be a help to you” (Isa. 47:14–15, LXX).
Nonetheless, most Christians admittedly do not understand this because “the Logos, having accommodated himself to what is appropriate for the crowd who happen upon the Scripture, mysteriously speaks harsh words with wisdom to induce fear in those who could not otherwise turn away from the dissolution of sins.” Immature Christians are thus like infants who must be scared into good behavior:
And perhaps just as one adapts what one says to infants in proportion to their infancy, in order to exhort them to turn to the better even though they are children, even so to those whom the Logos calls “the foolish of the world,” “ignoble,” and “despised” the superficial interpretation of punishments is appropriate, since they have no inducement to avoid many evils without a motivation through fear and the portrayal of punishments.
“Even so,” Origen writes, “the attentive reader will find an indication of the purpose of the harsh and severe language brought to bear on those who endure them.” He justifies speaking so openly because “I have been constrained to hint at things not suited to those who believe simply and who need simple statements in words accommodated to them”, so as not to leave the charge unrefuted if Celsus should say: “when God will apply fire just like a cook.” Origen responds to the charge that Christians hope to reanimate their corpses with the claim that:
Neither we ourselves nor the divine Scriptures say that those who have once died will live again in the flesh without its having undergone any change for the better when they rise again from the earth. Celsus slanders us in saying so. Let us listen to the many Scriptures speaking of the resurrection in a manner worthy of God. It will suffice for the present to cite the text from Paul in First Corinthians, where he says: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? And with what will they come?’ Fool, in your own case what you sow does not activate, unless it dies, and when you sow, you do not sow the body that will come to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other plant, and God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its won body” (1 Cor. 15:35– 8)…. We hear the Logos teaching at length about the difference between the one which is, in a manner of speaking, sown and the one which is, as it were, awakened by him: “It is sown in corruption, it is awakened in imperishability. It is sown in dishonor, it is awakened in glory. It is sown a soulish body, it is awakened a spiritual body.” Let him who is able, comprehend what he had in mind when he said: “As is what is earthy, so are they who are earthy, and as is what is heavenly, so are they who are heavenly. And just as we have borne the image of the earthy, so we shall bear the image of the heavenly” (see 1 Cor. 15:42–9).
Origen admits that the passage in question is obscure, but ascribes that obscurity to deliberate reticence on Paul’s part:
Nonetheless, the Apostle, wishing to hide things not to be said in this passage and unsuitable for the simple and to the hearing of the ordinary crowd who are influenced toward improvement by believing, was compelled nonetheless, so that we should not misunderstand him, to say, after the words “we shall bear the image of the heavenly”: “This I say, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor can the corruptible inherit incorruptibility.” And being well aware that there was something ineffable and mystical about this passage, as is fitting for someone leaving behind in writings the sense of his thought, he added: “See, I tell you a mystery” (see 1 Cor. 15:49–51). This is precisely the way to allude to doctrines that are very profound and very mystical and appropriate concealed from the many. Thus it is written in Tobit, “It is a good thing to conceal the king’s mystery,” then, with regard to what is famous and appropriate for the many, properly managing the truth, “It is a good thing to reveal gloriously the works of the Lord” (Tob. 12:7).
After a learned comparison with pagan philosophical ideas, he concludes that “we say that, just as the seed of grain is awakened as an ear, so a certain rational principle (logos) exists in the body, by means of which the body ‘is awakened in incorruptibility’ (1 Cor. 15:42).”
Origen applies to the True Logos the same close attention and techniques learned as a grammateus that he applies to biblical passages. These enable him to point out where Celsus misquotes biblical passages or takes them out of context. He is particularly effective at showing the implausibility of Celsus’s hypothetical Jew. Like a schoolboy fumbling through his first exercise, Celsus breaks the most basic rule in the creation of a prosôpon: having one’s character speak in an appropriate way. Origen’s philosophical learning also enabled him to give Celsus’s quotations from Plato the same critical attention. Thus, for example, he correctly pointed out that the well-known passage in Plato’s Timaeus (28C): “to find the Maker and Father of this universe is difficult, and after finding him, it is impossible to declare him to all men” does not, as Celsus assumed, imply that God is “indescribable” and “nameless,” but rather that God can be known by only a few.
Origen turns the tables on Celsus’s arguments about Christianity’s obscurity with an elegant illustration from Plato; considering Jesus’ vast impact on the world, his poverty and obscure upbringing is all the more reason to believe that he was no ordinary man:
Plato’s Seriphian reproached Themistocles, who had attained renown for his generalship, with not having derived his fame from his own character but from his having happened to be from the most remarkable country in all of Greece. Themistocles, a reasonable man, recognizing when he heard this that his country had contributed to his fame, replied “If I had been a Seriphian, I would not have been so famous, but neither would you have become a Themistocles if you had been born in Athens.” Our Jesus also, reproached for having been born in a village and that not even a Greek one, nor from any nation held in honor by the many, defamed as one who was the son of a woman who made her living by weaving and as one who left his homeland to work as a hired laborer in Egypt, and thus, in accordance with the example just cited, not just born a Seriphian, that is, from the smallest and most obscure island, but even among Seriphians, so to speak, the least noble, was nonetheless able to make a sensation before the whole world of men, not just more than Themistocles the Athenian, but more than Pythagoras, Plato or any other of the world’s sages, or kings, or generals. Who, therefore, unless he is investigating the nature of things superficially, would not be struck with admiration for this man who has overcome all circumstances that would make for obscurity and has been able to surpass in glory and all famous people whatsoever?
When Celsus states that Jesus, in teaching about turning the other cheek, is borrowing and cheapening the celebrated passage from Plato’s Crito (49B–E) where Socrates, about to take the hemlock, argues that we must not return injustice with injustice, Origen responds that even if Jesus came after Plato, Moses and the prophets, who taught the same doctrine, came before him. Besides, it is their words that have actually had widespread beneficial effects:
Is it not then an established fact that when, according to Celsus, Jesus says in a coarse style “To someone striking you on one cheek, offer also the other” and “To someone taking you to law for your cloak, let him have your tunic as well” (Lk. 6:29; Mt. 5:40), he promoted and illustrated his doctrine with more real-life usefulness by speaking this way than Plato did in the Crito, who is not only incomprehensible to the ignorant but scarcely understood by those who have received a good education until they have specifically studied the venerable philosophy of the Greeks.
Origen also points to the sexual continence practiced, along with all the other virtues, by ordinary Christians. These people live in a way philosophers advocate but cannot achieve even for themselves, much less inculcate in others. (On the other hand, in the Commentary on Matthew, written about the same time, he sought to shame greedy Christians by holding up the example of Crates, a pagan Cynic philosopher who liberated himself by giving away all his possessions.) Just as philosophy, despite its good doctrines, has little effect on lives, so, even though it effectively criticizes pagan polytheism, it still connives with it. Although Celsus has little good to say about him, Origen argues (following Philo and Clement) that Moses taught Platonic philosophy long before Plato. Thus Moses and the prophets, in practicing homonymy, implicitly taught the inferiority of the sensible reality to a higher, nonsensible reality:
The most ancient doctrine [logos] of Moses and the prophets knows that genuine things have the same names as things that are more generally known by those names here, for example, a “genuine light” (1 Jn 2:8) and a “heaven” (Gen 1:6–8) that is not the same as the vault of the sky and a “Sun of justice” (Mal. 4:2) that is different from the sensible one. Also in one concise expression it says that, in contrast with sensible things, none of which are genuine, “God, his works are genuine” (Dan. 4:34), classifying the works of God as genuine and classifying as inferior his so-called “handiwork” (Ps. 101:26 [102:25]).
Origen’s open but critical response to the Greek philosophical heritage in the Contra Celsum implicitly belies assertions that he somehow betrayed biblical faith by reinterpreting it in Greek philosophical terms. Such an attitude colored Adolf Harnack’s deeply learned and often admiring presentation of Origen in his History of Dogmas. Harnack believed that early Christians like Origen fundamentally misunderstood their own tradition, failing to perceive a discontinuity between Greek metaphysics and the simple message of Jesus or, as later theologians would put it, between Greek thought and Hebrew thought. Neo-Orthodox theologians of the next generation, otherwise critical of Harnack’s theological liberalism, tended, like Nygren, to accept uncritically his belief that Origen “secularized” the gospel by interpreting it in Greek philosophical terms. As we see below in his Letter to Gregory, Origen held that Greek philosophy leads to error when it contradicts the church’s rule of faith, even as he also considered philosophy a useful adjunct to Christianity. In the Contra Celsum Origen was clear about the need to accept philosophy critically. He gives no ground on his belief that God created the material world. More importantly, he gives no ground on the issue of God’s Incarnation in Jesus Christ. God’s becoming a human being is at the heart of the divine oikonomia, since only thus could God eradicate the evil in human nature while respecting our free will. Using Platonic concepts against Celsus, Origen argues that, because of God’s immateriality, God’s presence in Christ does not mean that God left one place to go to another. The Incarnation belongs to a pattern of divine condescension that applies to Scripture as well. Such divine condescension is indispensable, Origen argues; we cannot return to God unless God first comes to us. Thus after correcting Celsus’s interpretation of Plato on the knowability of God, Origen takes the occasion to add that “We affirm that human nature is not sufficient in any way to seek for God and to find Him in His pure nature, unless it is helped by the God who is the object of the search.” The Incarnation is God’s way of making himself accessible to our limited human understanding. Once we have known Christ after the flesh, we can then, but only then, advance with his assistance to know him as the Logos of God and through him to know the Father. At its heart, therefore, Origen’s last major work is a vindication not simply of the Incarnation, but of God’s grace.
Persecution and death
Revived interest in Celsus’s True Doctrine did, in fact, presage a new hostility toward Christianity in Roman ruling circles. In 249 Decius overthrew Philip the Arab and launched the most deadly and effective persecution the church had yet seen. He sought to force all inhabitants of the Empire – except Jews – to worship the pagan gods, requiring them to obtain papers certifying they had done so. As it turned out, because Decius’s reign was short, the church suffered most from internal dissension over how to deal with those who had obtained certificates. Decius also went specifically after Christian leaders, executing Fabian, bishop of Rome, and imprisoning Origen’s supporter, Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, who, like Bishop Babylas of Antioch, died in prison. Origen was also imprisoned and tortured, but not executed, evidently in the hope that a recantation on his part would be more valuable to his persecutors than his death. As a result, he survived the persecution, but, apparently, with his health broken, so that he died within a year or so of regaining his freedom. An unequivocal death by martyrdom would have been better for Origen’s posthumous reputation.