Origen

Joseph W. Trigg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134815258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Origen was the most influential Christian theologian before Augustine, the founder of Biblical study as a serious discipline in the Christian tradition, and a figure with immense influence on the development of Christian spirituality.
This volume presents a comprehensive and accessible insight into Origen's life and writings. An introduction analyzes the principal influences that formed him as a Christian and as a thinker, his emergence as a mature theologian at Alexandria, his work in Caesarea and his controversial legacy. Fresh translations of a representative selection of Origen's writings, including some never previously available in print, show how Origen provided a lasting framework for Christian theology by finding through study of the Bible a coherent understanding of God's saving plan.

Part I Introduction

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.¹ 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.² Other scholars have challenged details of Nautin’s work,³ and he himself admits that many points are uncertain, but his basic outline 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.⁴ Even if not reliable, such stories indicate the impression Origen made on others. Nautin’s outline, 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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹ 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.¹²

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.”¹³ Nautin argues that his father’s martyrdom constituted a tie of blood that attached Origen to the church.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷

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,¹⁸ 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.¹⁹ 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.”²⁰

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.”²¹ 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.²²

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.”²³ Whatever Paul may have taught, Origen’s works testify to an intimate familiarity with Gnostic doctrines, particularly those of Vale...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• The Early Church Fathers
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• A note on translations
• Abbreviations
• Part I Introduction
• 1 The Making of a Scholar and Theologian
• 2 The Mature Years at Alexandria
• 3 Man of the Church at Caesarea
• 4 A Controversial Legacy
• Part II Texts
• Commentary on Psalms 1–25 Fragment from Preface
• Commentary on Lamentations Selected Fragments
• Commentary on Genesis, Fragment from Book 3
• Commentary on John, Book 1
• Commentary on John, Book 13.3–192
• Homily 12 on Jeremiah
• Homilies 19 and 20 on Luke
• Homily 5 on 1 Samuel
• Letter to Gregory
• Commentary on John, Book 32.1–140
• Commentary on John, Book 32.318–67
• Notes
• Bibliographical note
• Index of Scriptural citations
• Subject index