Justified True Belief

(●) The most learned Christian of the third century, who gave the church its first system of theology and its first critical text of the Old Testament. + Imagine a man who reads six columns of the Bible at once, laid out in parallel on a desk the size of a door, checking every line of the Greek against the Hebrew because he does not want to argue from a text he has not verified. That was Origen, and nobody in the church had ever done anything like it before. He is the first Christian we can properly call a scholar. Before him, Christian writers answered attacks, wrote letters, and preached; Origen did all of that and then built the tools: a six-column comparative Bible, running commentaries on book after book of Scripture, and the first attempt to set out the whole Christian faith as a connected body of thought rather than a list of things believed. Almost every habit of Christian study since, the commentary, the critical text, the systematic theology, the reasoned reply to an unbeliever, has him somewhere near its beginning. He is also the most argued-about teacher of the early centuries. Some of his students became bishops and martyrs; his own bishop drove him out of Egypt; three hundred years after his death a council at Constantinople put his name on a list of condemned errors. Here is the fact a reader will remember: he wrote so much that Jerome, listing the titles for a friend more than a century later, could only compare him to Varro, the most prolific author Rome ever produced, and called him "our Christian man of brass, or, rather, man of adamant." Of that enormous output, most is lost, and the church has spent seventeen centuries deciding what to do with what is left.

(●) c. 185 AD: Born in Alexandria, in a house where Scripture was the first lesson of the day. + Alexandria in the late second century was the intellectual capital of the Roman world: a Greek city on the Egyptian coast with the largest library anyone had heard of, a large and old Jewish community, lecture halls full of Platonists, and a Christian congregation that had already produced teachers of real weight. Origen was born there, most likely around 185 AD, working backwards from Eusebius, who says he died at sixty-nine in the reign of the emperor Gallus. The name means something like "child of Horus," an Egyptian god, which tells us his family was recently Christian in a thoroughly pagan city. His father Leonides did something unusual with him. Eusebius, the church historian who gathered the details from letters and from people who had known Origen, says the father drilled the boy in Scripture every day before letting him near the Greek curriculum, requiring him to learn passages and recite them back. It worked better than expected. The child would not settle for the plain sense of a passage and kept pressing his father for what lay underneath it, until Leonides had to tell him to stop searching beyond his age. In private, Eusebius reports, the father would stand over the sleeping boy, uncover his chest as though the Spirit of God were housed inside it, and kiss him. That is a warm story, and it is worth noticing what it produced: a man for whom the words of the Bible were never merely words, and who spent fifty years convinced that there was always more in them than he had yet found.

(●) 202 AD: His father was beheaded, and his mother hid his clothes to stop the boy following him. + In the tenth year of the emperor Septimius Severus the persecution in Alexandria turned lethal, and Leonides was arrested and beheaded. Origen was not quite seventeen. According to Eusebius he wanted to walk into the courtroom and die beside his father, and his mother, having pleaded with him and got nowhere, hid every piece of clothing in the house so that he physically could not leave. Held in by nothing but decency, he wrote his father a letter instead. One line of it survives: "Take heed not to change your mind on our account." The family lost everything. Roman law confiscated the property of the condemned, so a widow and seven sons, Origen the eldest, were left with nothing at all. A wealthy Alexandrian woman took him in, which solved the immediate problem and created another, since her household also supported a celebrated teacher from Antioch named Paul whose doctrine Origen judged to be heresy. The boy stayed under her roof and would not pray with the man, which is the first recorded instance of a lifelong pattern: he would learn from anyone and agree with almost no one uncritically. Meanwhile there was a household to feed. He supported his mother and his brothers by teaching grammar and literature, which was the ordinary trade of an educated young man in that city, and his father had prepared him well enough that he was good at it.

(●) c. 203 AD: At eighteen he took charge of instructing converts, in a city that was executing them. + Instruction of new believers in Alexandria had collapsed, because everyone qualified to give it had fled the persecution. Inquirers came looking for someone to teach them and found a teenager who had not run. Eusebius says he was in his eighteenth year when the catechetical school, the church’s course of instruction for converts, was put into his hands, and Bishop Demetrius later entrusted it to him alone. Understand what the job meant that year. Several of his first students were executed: Plutarch, then Serenus, then Heraclides and Hero, who were beheaded, then a second Serenus, and a young woman named Herais who died before she could be baptized. Origen went with them to the executions and kissed them goodbye in front of hostile crowds, which more than once nearly got him killed as well. Soldiers were posted around the house where he lodged, and he moved from address to address because the whole city knew who he was. He also chose a way of living that alarmed his friends. He sold his collection of classical literature, the working library of his old profession, for a fixed income of four obols a day, roughly a labourer’s minimum wage, and stopped teaching grammar for money. He fasted, slept on the floor rather than a bed, went barefoot for years, drank no wine, and studied Scripture for most of the night. Eusebius, who admired him, still thought he went far enough to endanger his health. Eusebius also records, at this point in his narrative, that Origen took the words of Matthew 19:12 about those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven "in too literal and extreme a sense" and castrated himself, and that Demetrius made public use of the story years later. The account is early, but historians have long doubted it. Origen himself, writing on that verse as a mature man, treats the literal reading as exactly the mistake a reader should avoid, and the story has the shape of a charge polished by enemies. It is best held as what it is, a report by a sympathetic historian a century later, believed by many and doubted by many.

(●) c. 215 AD: A wealthy convert gave him a team of stenographers, and the books began to pour out. + Ambrose was a man of means who had belonged to a gnostic group, one of the movements that treated the God of the Old Testament as a lesser being and salvation as secret knowledge for insiders, and Origen argued him out of it. Ambrose then spent his fortune on the man who had converted him, and what he bought was staff. Eusebius says Origen dictated to more than seven shorthand writers working in shifts, with as many copyists again, and women trained in fine handwriting to produce the finished volumes. It is the earliest description we have of anything like a Christian publishing house, and it explains the sheer scale of what followed. In these same years he equipped himself for the work in ways no Christian before him had bothered with. He learned Hebrew and obtained the Hebrew Scriptures. He hunted down rival Greek translations of the Old Testament beyond the familiar three of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, finding one at Nicopolis near Actium and another, Eusebius reports, in a jar at Jericho. He attended the lectures of Ammonius Saccas, the Alexandrian philosopher who also taught Plotinus, a fact we owe to the pagan critic Porphyry, who met Origen when young and could not resist mentioning it while attacking him. There were journeys in these years as well. He went to Rome while Zephyrinus was bishop, and to Arabia at a governor’s request, and to Antioch, where Julia Mamaea, the mother of the emperor Alexander Severus, sent a military escort to fetch him because she wanted to hear him. A man who has soldiers sent to bring him to the emperor’s mother might be forgiven for lingering near a court. Then he went back to work.

(●) c. 231 AD: Ordained a presbyter in Palestine, condemned by his own bishop in Egypt, he left Alexandria for good. + Travelling to Greece on church business, Origen passed through Palestine, where two bishops who had known him for years, Alexander of Jerusalem and Theoctistus of Caesarea, ordained him a presbyter, an elder set apart to preach and to lead the church’s worship, the office an English speaker would now call a priest or a minister. They meant it as an honour. Demetrius of Alexandria, who had not been consulted, and in whose diocese, the district a bishop governs, Origen belonged, took it as an insult, and the friendship of thirty years came apart. What followed was ugly, and Eusebius, who is on Origen’s side and says so, does not tidy it up. He writes that Demetrius had earlier praised the act reported of Origen’s youth, the self-castration, and now circulated it against him, and that the bishop, "overcome by human weakness," wrote to bishops across the world about it once his teacher became too famous. Synods at Alexandria, meetings of the bishops of a region sitting together to settle a question, first drove Origen out of the city and then stripped him of the presbyterate. Rome agreed with Alexandria; Palestine, Arabia, Phoenicia and Achaia did not, and simply went on treating him as a presbyter. So the most learned man in the Egyptian church packed up and left it. He handed the catechetical school to his former student Heraclas, who would shortly succeed Demetrius as bishop, and moved to Caesarea in Palestine, where the bishops who had ordained him were waiting. He was about forty-six. Everything he is chiefly remembered for as a churchman was still ahead of him.

(●) c. 233 AD: At Caesarea he built the school and the library that trained the next century of Christian teachers. + Caesarea was a harbour city on the Palestinian coast, and it gave Origen twenty settled years. Alexander of Jerusalem and Theoctistus of Caesarea attended his lectures as though they were students rather than bishops, and let him preach and expound Scripture in their churches. He built a library there that outlived him by generations; Pamphilus enlarged it, Eusebius used it to write his history, and Jerome consulted it a century and a half later. His most famous pupil arrived from Pontus meaning to study Roman law and left as a bishop. Gregory, later called Thaumaturgus, "the wonder-worker," wrote a farewell address describing what the teaching had been like: philosophy first, from every school, with nothing declared off limits and nothing swallowed whole, and Scripture at the end as the thing all of it had been preparing him to read. He preached constantly, and once he was past sixty he finally let stenographers take his sermons down as he delivered them, which is why we still have hundreds of them. Bishops called him in to settle disputes; a shorthand record of one such hearing, his questioning of a bishop named Heraclides in front of an assembly, lay lost in an Egyptian quarry until 1941, when workmen clearing a wartime ammunition dump at Tura near Cairo found a stack of ancient papyrus. It is the closest thing we have to a recording of a third-century church meeting. And in about 248, at Ambrose’s insistence, he sat down with a seventy-year-old pagan attack on Christianity called The True Word and answered it line by line, in eight books.

(●) 250 AD: The emperor Decius had him tortured to make him recant, and he outlived the emperor without breaking, dying two or three years later in c. 253 AD. + Decius launched the first empire-wide persecution of Christians, and unlike earlier officials he was not chiefly after executions. He wanted recantations, and famous men who recanted were worth more than dead ones. Origen, by then about sixty-five and the best-known Christian teacher alive, was exactly the prize the policy was designed to take. Eusebius describes what they did to him: chains, bodily torture, an iron collar, a dungeon, and days with his feet stretched to the fourth hole in the stocks, which is a way of saying his legs were pulled apart until the joints gave. They threatened him with fire. The judge, Eusebius notes with grim precision, worked hard to keep him alive, because a dead man cannot recant. He did not recant. Letters he wrote afterwards, comforting other people, were still circulating in Eusebius’ day. Decius was killed in battle in 251 and the persecution stopped. Origen was released, and died a year or two later, aged about sixty-nine, in the reign of Gallus. Jerome says he died at Tyre and was buried there. Neither Eusebius nor Jerome says outright that the prison killed him, though both set the death close enough to it that historians have generally drawn the line, and a man of sixty-five does not come out of an iron collar and the stocks the way he went in. He had wanted to die for the faith at seventeen, and his mother had hidden his clothes; nearly fifty years later the empire gave him the chance, and he took it, and what it took from him it took slowly.

What He Taught

(T1) Scripture has a body and also a spirit, and the reader is meant to go looking for both. + Anyone who has read a letter from someone they love knows that words carry more than their surface. Your mother writes that the roses came back this year, and you understand that she is telling you she is well enough to garden again. The sentence is true on its face and it is also carrying something else, and you would be a poor reader to take only the first. Origen thought the Bible worked that way, and he built a rule out of it. A human being, he said, is body, soul and spirit, and Scripture is made the same way. There is the literal sense, the plain historical meaning of what the words say, which he called the body and which he insisted feeds ordinary believers perfectly well. There is the moral sense, the soul of the text, which shows a reader how to live. And there is the spiritual sense, which shows how the passage points to Christ and to the life of the world to come. Reading Scripture this way is called allegory, from a Greek word meaning to say one thing and signify another, and Origen did not invent it: Paul says outright that the story of Hagar and Sarah "may be interpreted allegorically" (Galatians 4:24), and Jewish teachers in Alexandria, Philo above all, had been reading Moses this way for two centuries. What Origen did was turn it into a working method and apply it to the whole Bible, page by page, which is why the ancient world’s difficult texts stopped being an embarrassment to Christians. The Israelite war stories, the ritual laws about mildew and hem-lengths, the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs: all of it opened up. There is a real danger here and Christians have argued about it ever since, because a reader who can find a hidden meaning anywhere can find one that is not there, and Origen sometimes wrote as though certain passages had no historical sense at all. But notice what drove him. He believed every word was given by God for the reader’s good (2 Timothy 3:16), and a passage that seemed to say nothing worth saying was therefore not empty but unopened.

(Q) "For as man is said to consist of body, and soul, and spirit, so also does sacred Scripture, which has been granted by the divine bounty for the salvation of man." + Source: Origen, On First Principles IV.1.11 (Frederick Crombie translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Modern editions number the passage IV.2.4. Origen has just said that the simple reader is fed by the body of Scripture, the reader making progress by its soul, and the mature reader by its spirit (T1). The threefold division is not a filing system he imposes on the Bible; he draws the rule from Proverbs, which tells a reader to describe such things in a threefold manner, and the three parts from the make-up of a human being.

(T2) Before Scripture can be expounded, the text of it has to be established. + Origen kept running into an awkward problem in debates with Jewish scholars. He would quote a verse; they would answer that the verse was not in their Bible. He was reading the Old Testament in the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in Egypt a few centuries before Christ and used by nearly every Christian in the empire, and the Septuagint did not always match the Hebrew. Sometimes it had whole passages the Hebrew lacked, sometimes it was missing what the Hebrew had, and sometimes the wording simply differed. Most people in that situation pick a side. Origen did something else. He set out the evidence in parallel columns so that anyone could see the differences for himself: the Hebrew text, the Hebrew written out in Greek letters so a Greek reader could sound it out, then the translations of Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion. Six columns, which is why it is called the Hexapla, from the Greek for "sixfold." For the Psalms he added a fifth, sixth and seventh version where he could find them. Eusebius says one of them turned up in a jar at Jericho, which is a striking detail to read after 1947 and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then he marked the Septuagint column. Where it carried words the Hebrew did not have, he set an obelus, a small horizontal stroke, beside them; where the Hebrew had something the Greek lacked, he supplied it from another version and flagged it with an asterisk. Those two marks are among the ancestors of the critical apparatus, the block of small print at the foot of each page in a scholarly Bible that tells you which manuscripts read what, and every critical edition of the Greek and Hebrew text carries one today. Notice what he refused to do with his own findings. He would not tell the churches that the books they had been reading were forgeries and that they should go and get better copies from the synagogue. God’s providence, he wrote, had been feeding those congregations from those copies, and a scholar who forgets that has mistaken his own expertise for the church. Honesty about the evidence and confidence in the God who had preserved a people were, to him, the same posture.

(Q) "And in many other of the sacred books I found sometimes more in our copies than in the Hebrew, sometimes less. I shall adduce a few examples, since it is impossible to give them all." + Source: Origen, Letter to Africanus 3 (Frederick Crombie translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Julius Africanus, a Christian scholar and a friend, had written to say that the story of Susanna could not be a genuine part of Daniel, partly because its Greek wordplay could not have been written in Hebrew. Origen’s reply is the earliest sustained piece of Christian textual criticism that survives. He concedes the differences at length, describes the obelus and the asterisk he used to mark them (T2), and then argues that the churches should not be told to discard the Bibles they have been living on.

(T3) The Son is begotten of the Father without beginning, the way brightness is begotten of the sun. + Take an ordinary lamp burning in a room. The lamp is the cause of the light and the light comes from the lamp, and yet there is no moment at which the lamp is burning and the light has not yet arrived. Cause and effect here, and origin and offspring, do not stand one after the other in time. They are simply together, and the one is from the other. That picture is Origen’s answer to the hardest question of early Christian thought. Scripture calls Christ the Son, begotten of the Father, and it also calls him God (John 1:1). How can something be begotten and yet not be a creature that began? Earlier Christian writers had tended to speak as though the Word came forth from God at some point for the purpose of creating the world, which quietly makes the Son the first and greatest of God’s works. Origen would not have it. God is Father, he argued, and a God who was not always Father would have had to change in order to become one, and there is no changing in God. Nor could anyone say that God was ever without his own Wisdom, waiting to acquire her. So the Son’s generation, his being begotten, has no beginning and no end. He is eternally from the Father and never after the Father. The technical name for this is eternal generation, and Origen is where Christian theology got it. Read the creed of Nicaea in 325, and the fuller version the church settled at Constantinople in 381 with its Son "begotten of the Father before all ages," and you are reading a settled form of the point he was the first to argue at length. He is not on the far side of every later question. He also wrote of the Son as subordinate to the Father in ways that the fourth century, once Arius had begun teaching that the Son was a creature with a beginning and split the church over it, would learn to say much more carefully. It does not help that some of what survives of him in Greek is preserved by hostile witnesses quoting him in order to convict him. But the load-bearing insight is his: the Son is not a thing God made, and the difference between "begotten" and "made" carries the weight of the whole Christian doctrine of God.

(Q) "Because His generation is as eternal and everlasting as the brilliancy which is produced from the sun. For it is not by receiving the breath of life that He is made a Son, by any outward act, but by His own nature." + Source: Origen, On First Principles I.2.4 (Frederick Crombie translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). He has just warned his readers that no comparison drawn from how animals or human beings beget offspring is fit to be used of God, and then reaches for light instead, because light is the one begetting we know of that involves no interval and no diminishing of the source (T3).

(T4) Every rational creature is genuinely free, and nothing outside it can force it to sin. + This was not an abstract question in the third century. Educated people around Origen believed that the stars settled human conduct, that a person born under one configuration would be a thief and under another a magistrate. Others, the followers of the teacher Valentinus, held that human beings came in fixed kinds: some made of spirit and saved by nature, some made of clay and lost by nature, with nothing anyone could do about it either way. Both views made a moral life a performance with the ending already printed. Origen answered both by making freedom part of what it means to be a rational creature at all. Every soul that can reason can choose, he said, and no influence, whether a demon, a star, or the makeup of your body, can compel it. Influences press; they do not decide. And he drew the consequence out loud: if that is false, then praise and blame are theatre, and the judgment of God is unjust, because nobody can be answerable for what they could not help. He argued it from the text in an interesting way. The hard passages are the ones where God appears to do the deciding, above all the verses in which the Lord hardens the heart of Pharaoh (Exodus 9:12). Origen’s answer is that the same sun that melts wax hardens clay, and the difference is in the material, not in the sun. God’s dealings with Pharaoh were the dealings of patience, and it was Pharaoh who turned patience into hardening. Christians have never all agreed with him here, and the argument between those who read Scripture more as Origen did and those who follow Augustine on the will’s bondage to sin is a family argument that runs to this day, with serious readers of the Bible on both sides. What is not in dispute is that Origen put the question on the table and made the church answer it.

(Q) "From which it follows, also, that we understand ourselves not to be subject to necessity, so as to be compelled by all means, even against our will, to do either good or evil." + Source: Origen, On First Principles, Preface 5 (Frederick Crombie translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). The preface is Origen’s list of what the apostolic preaching has clearly handed down, as distinct from the questions it leaves open for inquiry. Free will is on the settled list, not the open one: "every rational soul is possessed of free-will and volition," he writes, and the sentence quoted here is the conclusion he draws from it (T4).

(T5) The gospel carries a proof of its own, which no Greek argument supplied and none can replace. + Around 178 AD a pagan philosopher named Celsus wrote the first serious book-length attack on Christianity, The True Word. He had done his homework. He knew the Gospels, he knew Jewish objections and used them, and his charges are the ones still made: that Jesus was an illegitimate child who learned magic in Egypt, that the resurrection rests on the word of a hysterical woman, that Christians recruit the ignorant and tell them not to think. Seventy years later Ambrose asked Origen to answer it, and Origen did so at a length that has preserved Celsus for us; roughly three-quarters of the lost book can be reconstructed from the quotations Origen answers. His method is the striking thing. He quotes his opponent fully and fairly before replying, which is why we have Celsus at all, and he grants what can be granted. Yes, most Christians believe without having compared the philosophical schools; but so does every Stoic and every Epicurean, since almost nobody has leisure to examine all the options, and a philosophy that only the leisured can hold is no use to a working world. What Celsus calls credulity is what everyone actually does, and the question is not whether a person begins by trusting but whether what they trust is true. Then he makes the positive claim. The gospel does not need Greek dialectic to prove it, because it comes with a proof of its own: the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures fulfilled in Christ, and the power still visible in changed lives and in what the churches were seeing. Paul had described his own preaching as coming "in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (1 Corinthians 2:4), and Origen takes him at his word. None of which made him a despiser of learning. His advice to Gregory was to strip the philosophy of the Greeks for whatever serves the study of Scripture, the way Israel walked out of Egypt carrying the Egyptians’ gold and used it for the furnishings of the tabernacle (Exodus 12:35–36). Take the gold, he says, and leave the idols, and he warns in the same letter that some who tried came back with a golden calf.

(Q) "We have to say, moreover, that the Gospel has a demonstration of its own, more divine than any established by Grecian dialectics." + Source: Origen, Against Celsus I.2 (Frederick Crombie translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Celsus had argued that Christianity came from barbarians and that Greeks are better than anyone at judging and finishing what barbarians discover. Origen answers that a Greek who came to the gospel could indeed supply whatever a Greek would think its demonstration lacked, and then says the sentence quoted here (T5). He explains it immediately: the Spirit, because of the prophecies, and power, because of the signs.

(Q) "Do you then, my son, diligently apply yourself to the reading of the sacred Scriptures. Apply yourself, I say. For we who read the things of God need much application, lest we should say or think anything too rashly about them." + Source: Origen, Letter to Gregory 3 (Frederick Crombie translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Written to the young Gregory Thaumaturgus, who had come to Caesarea to study and was deciding what to do with his life. Origen has just told him to plunder Greek learning for the service of Scripture, and now tells him what the learning is for. He ends by insisting that prayer, not technique, is what finally opens the text: "Be not satisfied with knocking and seeking; for prayer is of all things indispensable to the knowledge of the things of God." The whole of his teaching career is in those few lines, and so is his hold on the generation that came after him.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He taught the teachers, and the men he trained carried the church through its next two centuries. + Origen’s influence travelled first through people rather than books, which is the ordinary way a teacher’s work gets carried, and the people who carried his are worth naming one at a time. Heraclas and Dionysius, both of them his students, became bishops of Alexandria in turn. Gregory Thaumaturgus went home to Pontus and evangelised a province. Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia thought so highly of him that he brought him into his own region, and when that was not enough he made the journey to Judea to sit under him again. Pamphilus, the scholar who built up the library at Caesarea, wrote a defence of Origen from a prison cell while he waited for the death that made him a martyr, and Pamphilus’ own student Eusebius devoted most of the sixth book of his history to the same man. In the fourth century the debt was paid forward in a striking way. An anthology of the best of Origen was gathered out of his works and given the name Philocalia, "the love of the beautiful." A tradition carried in the manuscripts names the compilers as Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, two of the theologians who secured the doctrine of the Trinity; some scholars now doubt that, but nobody doubts what the collection did. Because of it, a few chapters of Origen’s most controversial book survive in his own Greek rather than in a translator’s Latin. Athanasius, fighting Arius, quoted Origen for the Son’s eternal generation, which was exactly the point at issue. The West received him through translation. Ambrose of Milan preached in a manner learned from him, and it was Ambrose’s way of opening the Old Testament that first made the book credible to the young Augustine. Rufinus of Aquileia translated On First Principles, the commentary on Romans, and many homilies into Latin. Jerome, before the quarrel that consumed his later years, translated dozens of Origen’s homilies, the sermons he had preached through a book of the Bible passage by passage, and in the preface to two of them, on the Song of Songs, wrote that "Origen, while in his other books he has surpassed all others, has in the Song of Songs surpassed himself."

(†) He gave Christian scholarship its shape: the commentary, the critical text, and theology as a connected whole. + Consider what a Christian teacher had to work with in the year 200. There were the Scriptures, the rule of faith summarised at baptism, a growing pile of letters and treatises answering particular attacks, and no method for putting any of it together. By the year 250 there was one, and it was Origen’s. - The commentary. He worked through book after book of Scripture verse by verse, asking what the words mean, how they fit the whole, and what the reader is to do about them. Thirty-two books on John alone. Every Christian commentary since stands in that line. - The critical text. The Hexapla established that a Christian arguing from the Bible is answerable for the wording he argues from (T2). Jerome went to Caesarea to consult it while making the Latin Vulgate, the translation the West would read for a thousand years. - Systematic theology. On First Principles asks how God, Christ, the Spirit, creation, the soul, freedom, evil, Scripture and the last things hang together as one account. Nobody had tried it. Everyone since, from Augustine to Aquinas to the Reformers, has been doing some version of what he started. - Apologetics. Against Celsus set the pattern of quoting the objector at full strength and answering him point by point, which is still the only honest way to do the work. - The vocabulary. Eternal generation, the Son begotten and not made (T3), Scripture read on more than one level (T1): these entered the church’s speech through him and never left. There is also the preaching, which is easy to overlook. Hundreds of his homilies survive, mostly in Latin translation, and they are not lectures. They are a pastor walking a congregation through Leviticus or Joshua on an ordinary morning, finding Christ in the text and pressing the application home. For centuries of monks and priests who never read a word of his speculative theology, that was Origen: the man who showed them how to preach the Old Testament.

(†) Where he went wrong: souls before bodies, an allegory that could dissolve the history, and a hope for the end that Scripture will not bear. + Origen was condemned by name three centuries after his death. In 553 bishops meeting at Constantinople approved a set of anathemas, formal sentences of condemnation declaring a teaching to be outside the faith, against a list of propositions drawn from him and from later teachers who claimed him, and his name has carried the shadow ever since. Some of that verdict is unfair to him, since it convicts him of positions his followers hardened, and some of the evidence used against him comes from enemies quoting him. But the ledger is not empty, and three things in it are genuinely his. - Souls before bodies. Origen held that rational souls existed before the bodies they now inhabit, and that the differences between people, and between angels and human beings and demons, come from what those souls did with their freedom before this life. It is an attempt to defend God’s justice, and it fails, because Scripture starts the human person where the body starts: "then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature" (Genesis 2:7). The soul that returns to God at death is the soul God gave with the life (Ecclesiastes 12:7), not one returning to a station it fell from. - Allegory that dissolves the history. His method (T1) is sound where the plain sense stands and the deeper sense grows out of it, which is how Paul reads Hagar and how the Gospels read the bronze serpent. Origen went further and wrote that some passages have no bodily sense at all, meaning that nothing happened and only the hidden meaning is there. The gospel cannot be read that way. Christian faith stands or falls on events: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). - Hoping the punishment ends. He raised the possibility that at the last all rational creatures, perhaps even the devil, will be restored to God, the restoration of all things he found hinted at in Acts 3:21 and in the promise that God will be all in all. It is a hope born of a high view of God’s goodness and of the freedom he defended so well (T4), and the church has judged that it will not stand, because the Lord himself set the two destinies side by side in the same sentence and gave them the same adjective: "And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life" (Matthew 25:46). Two things are owed to him in fairness. First, he flagged this material as speculation while he was writing it, saying in On First Principles, as he opened the question of how all things end, that such subjects are treated "with great solicitude and caution, in the manner rather of an investigation and discussion, than in that of fixed and certain decision," and in the same book he sorted what the apostles taught plainly from what they left open. He was inquiring where he thought inquiry was permitted, which is not the same offence as teaching error as doctrine, though it is not a licence either, since inquiry published is inquiry taught. Second, he was condemned for it after he could no longer answer, and by an age less generous than his own. The proper response is neither to excuse him nor to lose him: to read him for what he saw, and to correct him where the church, going back over his work with Scripture in hand, found that he had reached past what was given.