"In its earliest days, Christianity had been criticized as a religion of the poor and uneducated and indeed many of the faithful had come from the lower classes. As Paul had written, in the church there were "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble" (1 Corinthians 1:26).
By the third century, however, the greatest scholar of the age was a Christian. Heathens, heretics, and Christians admired Origen, and his immense learning and scholarship would have an important influence on future Christian scholarship.
Origen was born in Alexandria, about 185, of devout Christian parents. In about 201 his father, Leonidas, was imprisonsed during the persecution of Septimus Severus. Origen wrote to his father in prison and encouraged him not to deny Christ for the sake of his family. Though Origen wanted to turn himself in to the authorities and suffer martyrdom with his father, his mother hid his clothes and kept him from such zealous foolishness.
After Leonidas's martyrdom, his property was confiscated, and his widow was left with seven children. Origen set about supporting them by teaching Greek literature and copying manuscripts. Since many of the older scholars had fled Alexanderia at the time of the persecution, the Christian catechetical school had a great need for teachers. At eighteen Origen became president of the school and embarked on his long career of teaching, studying, and writing.
He lived an ascetic life, spending much of the night in study and prayer and sleeping on the bare floor, whenever he did sleep. Following Jesus' command, he only had one coat and no shoes. He even followed Matthew 19:12 literally and castrated himself as a defense against all fleshly temptations. Origen's strongest desire was to be a faithful man of the church and to bring honor to the name of Christ.
A tremendously prolific writer, Origen was able to keep seven secretaries busy with is dictations. He produced over 2,000 works, including commentaries on almost every book of the Bible and hundreds of homilies. His Hexapla was a feat of textual criticism. In it he tried to find the best Greek rendering of the Old Testament, and in six parallel columns displayed the Hebrew Old Testament, a Greek transliteration, three Greek translations, a Greek transliteration, three Greek translations, and the Septuagint. Against Celsus was a major apologetic work defending Christianity from pagan attacks. On First Principles was the first attempt at a systematic theology; here Origen carefully examined the Christian beliefs concerning God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, creation, the soul, free will, salvation, and the Scriptures.
Origen was largely responsible for establishing the allegorical interpretation of Scripture that was to dominate the Middle Ages. In every text he believed there were three levels of meaning: the literal sense; the moral sense, which was to edify the soul; and the allegorical or spiritual sense, which was the hidden meaning important to the Christian faith. Origen himself neglected the literal or historical-grammatical meaning of the text and emphasized the deeper, allegorical meaning.
Origen tried to relate Christianity to the science and philosophy of his day. He believed Greek philosophy was a preparation for understanding Scripture and used the analogy, later adopted by Augustine, of Christians "spoiling the Egyptians" when they used the wealth of pagan learning in their Christian cause (Exodus 12:35-36).
In accepting the teachings of Greek philosophy, Origen adopted many Platonic ideas alien to orthodox Christianity. Behind most of his errors was the Greek assumption that matter and the material world was implicitly evil. He believed in the preexistence of the soul before birth and taught that man's position in the world was due to his conduct in a preexistent state. He denited the material resurrection and toyed with the idea that eventually God would provide salvation for all men and angels. Since God could not create the material world without coming in contact with base matter, the Father eternally generated the Son, who created the eternal world. When the Son died on the cross, it was only Jesus' humanity that died as a ransom-payment to the devil for the world.
For errors such as these Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria called a council that excommunicated Origen from the church. Though the Roman and Western church accepted the excommunication, the church in Palestine and much of the East did not. They still sought out Origen for his learning, wisdom, and scholarship.
During the Decian persecution, Origen was imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to the stake. Only the death of the emperor prevented that sentence from being carried out. Broken in health from the ordeal, Origen died about 251. He had done more than anyone else to promote the cause of Christian scholarship and make the church respected in the eyes of the world. Later fathers in both the Eastern and Western church would feel his influence. The diversity of his thought and writings easily gained for him the reputation as the father of orthodoxy as well as the father of heresy.
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