Origen of Alexandria

Origen Adamantius (c. AD 184–253) was, in sheer volume of output and depth of engagement, the most remarkable biblical scholar the ancient church produced. He is estimated to have written more than two thousand works — commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible, systematic theology, apologetics, homilies, textual criticism. He was the student of Clement of Alexandria, and after Clement fled the Severan persecution, Origen took over the catechetical school in Alexandria at the age of eighteen. He spent the rest of his life reading, writing, and teaching, with an intensity that became legendary in its own time and which still impresses historians of the period. He was tortured during the Decian persecution of 250, and died of the injuries a few years later. And then, three centuries after his death, the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) condemned a list of speculative propositions associated with his name. He is the most complicated figure in the early church after Tertullian, and the honest account has to include both.

The Hexapla

Origen's greatest achievement in biblical scholarship was a work called the Hexapla (from the Greek for "sixfold"): a parallel edition of the Old Testament in six columns — the Hebrew text, the Hebrew text transliterated into Greek letters, and four Greek translations, including the Septuagint and the translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. He annotated the Septuagint column to show where it differed from the Hebrew, using diacritical marks borrowed from Alexandrian literary criticism. This was the most sophisticated piece of textual work produced in the ancient church, and it reflects the conviction that fidelity to the actual text mattered enough to spend the enormous labor it required. The original survived into the seventh century in the library at Caesarea; only fragments remain today.

Against Celsus

Around AD 248, Origen produced the longest and most thorough apologetic work of the early church: Contra Celsum (Against Celsus), a systematic response to a second-century pagan philosopher named Celsus who had written a sophisticated attack on Christianity around AD 177. Celsus argued that Christians were credulous, uneducated, dependent on blind faith rather than reason, and that the Jesus story was derivative of other traditions. Origen went through the work point by point over eight books, not to score rhetorical points but to meet every argument with the strongest available response — philosophical, historical, and scriptural.

His handling of the relationship between the light of Scripture and the light that the Greek philosophers had partially glimpsed shows the same instinct that had shaped Clement's approach — that genuine light, wherever found, comes from the same source:

This is Origen doing what Alexandria had trained him to do: holding the philosophical tradition and the biblical text together in the same frame, acknowledging what Plato had rightly seen, and then pointing to where the light that Plato glimpsed had shone in full — in the Logos, the Word made flesh (John 1:9).

Scripture's divine breath

In the fourth book of On First Principles, Origen's systematic theology, he addressed the question of how to read the Scriptures — and his answer began not with method but with the experience of the person who comes to the text with reverence:

The man who produced the most technically demanding textual work of the ancient church on the ground that the exact words mattered also believed that the words, read rightly, carried a weight that had no merely human explanation. Scholarship and reverence, in Origen, were the same thing.

The speculations

What earned Origen his posthumous condemnation was not his biblical scholarship but his theological speculation — and Origen was, in the On First Principles, genuinely speculative in ways that could not be reconciled with what the church would later settle as orthodoxy.

The two positions most associated with his condemnation were: first, the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls — that rational creatures existed before the creation of the visible world, and that the body and the material order were a consequence of a prior fall from that pre-material state; and second, the apokatastasis, or universal restoration — the suggestion that at the final end, all rational beings, perhaps including the devil himself, might eventually be reconciled to God. Both positions ran against the church's developing anthropology and eschatology, and both were condemned as heretical by Justinian's council in 553.

It should be noted that by 553, Origen had been dead for three hundred years. There is scholarly debate about how accurately the condemned propositions represent what Origen himself taught versus what his followers had drawn from him and developed further. He was a speculator by nature and by method, and he himself acknowledged that some of what he was doing in the On First Principles was exploratory rather than settled:

What he contributed to the rest

The chain of influence from Origen forward runs through virtually every major theologian who came after him. His commentary on the Gospel of John is the first great verse-by-verse commentary on a New Testament book. His homilies, which survive in Latin translations made by Rufinus and Jerome, established the form that expository Christian preaching would follow. His insistence that Scripture had to be read on multiple levels — the literal, the moral, and the spiritual — gave the medieval church its interpretive framework, for good and for ill.

He belonged, in the deepest way, to the Alexandria that Clement had shaped: the conviction that the faith was not afraid of the full reach of a trained mind, that the text of Scripture rewarded the most rigorous attention, and that the Light of John 1 was the same light that serious philosophers had been reaching toward in the dark. He reached further than the data supported, and the church said so. He also saw further into the text than almost anyone before him, and the church used what he saw.

Related: Clement of Alexandria (his teacher), Athanasius (formed in the same tradition), John Chrysostom (whose preaching drew on Alexandrian scholarship), The Church, One Story. Sources: Origen's On First Principles (public-domain Rufinus translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers series), Contra Celsum (public-domain, ANF), Commentary on the Gospel of John (ANF). Note: De Principiis quotes are from the Latin of Rufinus, whose translation is generally faithful but occasionally softened difficult passages — the original Greek survives only in fragments.