Origen

Based on Wikipedia: Origen

Imagine castrating yourself because you took a Bible verse too literally. That's the story the ancient historian Eusebius tells about Origen of Alexandria—though Origen himself, writing near the end of his life, called anyone who'd interpret that particular passage so literally an idiot. The truth? We'll probably never know. But this scandalous rumor has followed one of Christianity's most brilliant minds for nearly two thousand years, overshadowing achievements that shaped Western theology in ways most people never realize.

Origen lived in the third century, a time when being Christian could get you killed. He was born around 185 AD in Alexandria, Egypt—then one of the intellectual capitals of the ancient world, home to the famous library and a melting pot of Greek philosophy, Jewish thought, and emerging Christian theology. By the time he died around 253 AD, broken by torture during an empire-wide persecution of Christians, he had written roughly two thousand works. He had created the first critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. He had systematized Christian theology in ways that would influence thinkers for centuries. And he had become so controversial that an emperor would eventually order all his writings burned.

A Boy Who Knew Too Much

Origen's father, Leonides, was a professor of literature—a respectable, thoroughly Greek-educated bourgeois who also happened to be a devout Christian at a time when that combination was dangerous. Every day, Leonides made his son memorize passages of scripture. The boy proved so talented at this that he could recite extended passages well into adulthood. But young Origen wasn't content just to memorize. He asked questions. Hard ones. Eventually, his father couldn't answer them anymore.

Then came 202 AD.

Emperor Septimius Severus ordered the execution of Roman citizens who openly practiced Christianity. Soldiers arrested Leonides and threw him in prison. According to Eusebius, the sixteen-year-old Origen wanted to turn himself in—to die alongside his father as a martyr. His mother, whose name history has forgotten, stopped him in the most practical way imaginable: she hid all his clothes. Origen, apparently, refused to leave the house naked.

It wouldn't have mattered anyway. The emperor was only executing Roman citizens, and Origen's mother was likely of lower social status, which meant her son probably wasn't a citizen. Leonides was beheaded. The state confiscated everything the family owned. Overnight, Origen went from being a professor's son to being responsible for feeding his mother and eight younger siblings.

He was seventeen years old.

The Workaholic Scholar

At eighteen, Origen got a teaching job at the Catechetical School of Alexandria—essentially a school for adults who wanted to convert to Christianity and needed instruction in the faith. This was probably a relief effort for his impoverished family as much as anything else. But Origen didn't just teach. He transformed his entire life into a kind of intellectual monasticism.

He spent entire days teaching. Then he stayed up late into the night writing treatises and commentaries. He went barefoot. He owned exactly one cloak. He didn't drink alcohol. He ate simply and fasted often. The man was an ancient workaholic, running on what sounds like an unsustainable schedule—except he sustained it for decades.

Then he got lucky.

A wealthy man named Ambrose had fallen into Valentinian Gnosticism—a mystical religious movement that competed with what would become orthodox Christianity. Origen converted him. Ambrose was so grateful, so impressed by this young scholar's mind, that he became Origen's patron. He gave Origen a house. He gave him a personal secretary. He gave him seven stenographers—people who would take down his words as he spoke. He provided copyists and calligraphers to turn those dictations into polished manuscripts. And he paid to publish everything.

This was the ancient equivalent of giving someone their own publishing house.

Origen, already prolific, became unstoppable. Those two thousand works? They happened because a rich convert handed a genius the resources to write as fast as he could think.

The Hexapla: A Monument of Obsession

To understand what Origen accomplished, you need to understand the problem he was trying to solve.

By the third century, Christians were arguing with Jews about what the Bible actually said. The Hebrew scriptures had been translated into Greek centuries earlier—the famous Septuagint translation—but the Greek didn't always match the Hebrew. Which text was authoritative? What did the original really say? And how could you trust any translation when you couldn't check it against the source?

Origen's answer was the Hexapla, which means "sixfold" in Greek. Picture a massive book with six columns running side by side across each page. In the first column: the original Hebrew text. In the second: that same Hebrew text transliterated into Greek letters, so Greek speakers could at least pronounce the words. Then four different Greek translations, lined up so you could compare them word by word.

This was the first critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. It was also enormous—estimates suggest it ran to around 6,500 pages. The original probably couldn't be copied in full; it was too big. Origen kept it in Caesarea, where scholars could consult it. Fragments survived into the medieval period, but the complete work is lost.

The Hexapla represented something revolutionary: the idea that you could study scripture scientifically. You could compare texts. You could look for errors and variants. You could try to reconstruct what the original authors actually wrote. This approach—what scholars now call textual criticism—would become fundamental to biblical scholarship, but Origen was doing it eighteen centuries before it became standard practice.

On First Principles: Building a System

Origen didn't just study texts. He thought systematically about what Christians actually believed—and why.

His treatise On the First Principles was a landmark. No one had tried before to lay out Christian theology as a coherent philosophical system. Origen asked the hard questions. What is God? What is the soul? What happens after death? How do we interpret scripture? What is free will, and do we have it?

His answers were often speculative—and he said so. He hoped, for instance, that all people might eventually attain salvation. Not just Christians. Everyone. Even demons. Even Satan himself. This idea, called apokatastasis or universal restoration, was deeply controversial. Origen was careful to present it as speculation, not doctrine. But it made enemies.

He also developed what scholars call the ransom theory of atonement. The basic question: how does Jesus's death save humanity? Origen's answer, in fully developed form, was that humanity had become enslaved to Satan through sin. Jesus's death was a ransom payment to free us. Satan accepted the deal, not realizing that he couldn't actually hold the Son of God. It was, in essence, a divine trick—a cosmic sting operation. This theory dominated Christian thinking about salvation for centuries.

Origen also contributed significantly to the doctrine of the Trinity—the idea that God exists as three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) in one divine being. This concept wouldn't be fully formalized until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, decades after Origen's death, but his thinking laid crucial groundwork.

The Bishop Problem

Origen's success created a problem: he didn't fit neatly into the emerging church hierarchy.

In Alexandria, Bishop Demetrius was consolidating power. Before Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria had been more like a first among equals—a priest elected to represent other priests. Demetrius transformed the role into something more exalted, a rank clearly above ordinary clergy. He ruled his congregation, as one historian put it, with an iron fist.

Origen, meanwhile, was styling himself as a Christian philosopher. Not a priest. Not a catechist. A philosopher—someone who taught wisdom independently, in the Greek tradition. This was a role that had existed in earlier Christianity, but it challenged the bishop's authority. Demetrius was not pleased.

The tension exploded in 215 AD.

Emperor Caracalla visited Alexandria that year. The students there made fun of him for murdering his own brother. Caracalla, not famous for his sense of humor, ordered his soldiers to ravage the city. They executed the governor. They killed protesters. And they expelled all teachers and intellectuals.

Origen fled to Caesarea, in Palestine, where he found bishops who adored him. They invited him to preach in their churches—remarkable because Origen wasn't ordained. He was just a layman, technically. But his fame as a teacher and philosopher was so great that they wanted to hear him anyway.

Demetrius was furious. He sent deacons to demand that the Palestinian bishops return "his" catechist immediately. He issued a decree condemning them for letting an unordained person preach. The Palestinians fired back, accusing Demetrius of being jealous of Origen's fame.

Origen returned to Alexandria. But the conflict would continue.

Reading the Bible Allegorically

If Origen had just stuck to textual criticism and systematic theology, he might have avoided some controversy. But he also had strong ideas about how to read scripture—ideas that struck many as radical.

Origen believed that the Bible operated on multiple levels. There was the literal meaning, yes. But beneath that lay deeper spiritual meanings that required interpretation. Sometimes the literal meaning was even intentionally absurd, he argued, to force readers to look for the hidden truth.

This approach is called allegorical interpretation, and Origen applied it aggressively. When he preached on the Old Testament, he often treated the stories as symbols pointing to spiritual realities. The journey of the Israelites through the wilderness? That was the soul's journey toward God. The battles and conquests? Spiritual warfare against sin.

This made Origen's sermons intellectually rich. He wrote hundreds of them, covering almost the entire Bible. But it also opened him to charges that he was explaining away the plain meaning of scripture—that he was too clever by half, finding meanings that weren't really there.

The Pacifist

Here's something that might surprise modern readers: Origen was a pacifist. He believed Christians should not serve in the military. He advocated for nonviolence as a Christian virtue.

This wasn't unusual in early Christianity. Before the Emperor Constantine legalized the faith in the fourth century, many Christians refused military service. The issue would become more complicated once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and Christian emperors needed Christian soldiers. But Origen, writing in the third century, could still maintain that followers of Jesus should not kill—even in war, even in self-defense.

He also defended free will against those who argued that everything was predetermined by fate or the stars. Humans, Origen insisted, had genuine choices. We could choose good or evil. This mattered for his theology of salvation: if we weren't free, we couldn't be held responsible for our sins, and redemption would lose its meaning.

Contra Celsum: The Great Defense

Around 248 AD, Origen wrote what may be his most lasting work: Contra Celsum, meaning "Against Celsus."

Celsus was a Greek philosopher who had written a devastating attack on Christianity decades earlier, around 177 AD. His work, called The True Word, doesn't survive directly—we only know it through Origen's quotations. But from those quotations, we can reconstruct his arguments. Celsus thought Christianity was a religion for fools. He mocked the virgin birth. He pointed out contradictions in the gospels. He argued that Christians were disloyal citizens who undermined Roman society.

These weren't strawman arguments. Celsus was intelligent and well-informed. His criticisms were genuinely challenging.

Origen's response ran to eight books. He quoted Celsus extensively—often preserving the only record we have of what Celsus said—and then systematically answered each objection. The result was the most sophisticated work of Christian apologetics (meaning defense of the faith) that the ancient world produced. Later thinkers would draw on it for centuries.

The End

In 250 AD, Emperor Decius launched an empire-wide persecution of Christians. Unlike earlier persecutions, which had been sporadic and local, this one was systematic. Every citizen had to sacrifice to the Roman gods and obtain a certificate proving they had done so. Those who refused faced torture and death.

Origen refused.

The authorities arrested him. They tortured him extensively, trying to make him sacrifice. The details are grim: he was stretched on the rack, threatened with fire, kept in chains in a dark dungeon. But he didn't break. He didn't sacrifice.

The persecution ended when Decius died in battle in 251 AD. Origen was released. But the torture had shattered his health. He died three or four years later, probably in his late sixties—ancient by the standards of his time—his body broken but his faith, apparently, intact.

The Controversy After Death

You might think that being tortured for your faith would settle any questions about your orthodoxy. You would be wrong.

Origen's speculative ideas—especially his hope for universal salvation and his theories about the pre-existence of souls—made him increasingly controversial as Christianity developed its formal doctrines. The pre-existence idea was particularly problematic: Origen seemed to suggest that human souls existed before their bodies, and that life on earth was a kind of fall from a higher spiritual state. This clashed with emerging orthodoxy about creation and the nature of the soul.

In the late fourth century, roughly 150 years after Origen's death, a battle erupted over his legacy. Epiphanius of Salamis and Jerome—himself once an admirer of Origen—attacked his teachings as heretical. Rufinus and John of Jerusalem defended him. Friendships were destroyed. The church was divided.

Then, in 543 AD, Emperor Justinian I formally condemned Origen as a heretic and ordered his writings burned. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 AD may have officially anathematized him—scholars still debate whether the council formally condemned Origen himself or only condemned certain teachings that people claimed (perhaps falsely) came from Origen.

The result: most of Origen's two thousand works were lost. What survives are fragments, quotations by other writers, and works preserved in Latin translations (often by people who had to pretend they weren't preserving Origen's ideas). The Hexapla is gone. Many commentaries are gone. We have maybe five percent of what he wrote.

The Legacy

Despite the condemnations, Origen's influence proved impossible to erase.

Athanasius of Alexandria, the great champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy in the fourth century, was deeply influenced by Origen's thinking. So were the Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa—who shaped what became orthodox Christian theology. These thinkers were considered saints, pillars of the church. And they had learned from a man the church condemned as a heretic.

The allegorical approach to scripture that Origen championed became standard in medieval Christianity, influencing how Christians read the Bible for a thousand years. His systematic approach to theology established a template that later thinkers would follow. Even his speculative ideas kept resurfacing: the hope for universal salvation has never entirely disappeared from Christian thought, no matter how many times authorities have tried to suppress it.

The historian John Anthony McGuckin called Origen "the greatest genius the early church ever produced." It's not an unreasonable assessment. Before Origen, Christian theology was scattered and unsystematic. After Origen, it had a framework—even if later generations would modify, reject, or condemn parts of what he built.

Did He Really Do It?

We should probably return to that story about self-castration.

The verse in question is Matthew 19:12, where Jesus says: "There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Eusebius, writing about fifty years after Origen's death, claims the young Origen took this literally and either castrated himself or had someone else do it. The motive, Eusebius says, was to protect his reputation as a teacher of both men and women—if he were a eunuch, no one could suspect him of impropriety.

Some scholars accept this story. Joseph Wilson Trigg argues that Eusebius, who admired Origen deeply, would have had no reason to record something so embarrassing unless it was "notorious and beyond question." On this reading, Origen's later condemnation of literal interpretations of the verse represents him "tacitly repudiating the literalistic reading he had acted on in his youth." In other words: he did it, regretted it, and spent the rest of his life arguing against anyone else making the same mistake.

Other scholars are skeptical. McGuckin calls the story "hardly credible." He points out that Origen's female students would have been accompanied by attendants at all times—standard practice in the ancient world—so there was no real concern about impropriety that castration would solve. McGuckin suspects Eusebius was either passing along malicious gossip or deliberately trying to distract from more serious questions about Origen's orthodoxy.

Henry Chadwick suggests Eusebius may have been "uncritically reporting malicious gossip retailed by Origen's enemies, of whom there were many."

The strongest argument against the story is Origen himself. In his commentary on Matthew's Gospel, written near the end of his life, he discusses this exact verse and condemns literal interpretation in the harshest terms. Only an idiot, he says, would read it that way. His tone, as McGuckin notes, "suggests quite clearly that he regards the idea as offensive."

Would a man who had mutilated himself in his youth based on a literal reading describe anyone who'd do such a thing as an idiot? Maybe. People do repudiate their youthful mistakes with vehemence. Or maybe the whole story was invented by enemies who wanted to make Christianity's greatest intellectual look foolish.

We'll never know for certain. The evidence points both ways. What we do know is that Origen accomplished extraordinary things—two thousand works, revolutionary biblical scholarship, systematic theology that shaped centuries of thought—and yet this single scandalous rumor has stuck to his name for nearly two millennia. There's probably a lesson in that about how history remembers people, but Origen would likely have preferred to be remembered for his ideas.

Given that those ideas got him condemned as a heretic and his books burned, perhaps he'd have settled for being remembered at all.