Origen and the School of Alexandria

Eusebius says that Clement of Alexandria had charge of the instruction of converts in the church at Alexandria and that Origen, as a boy, was among his pupils (Eusebius, Church History 6.6). In the persecution under Severus Origen’s father was beheaded. Origen, not yet seventeen, wanted to give himself up and was kept at home only because his mother hid his clothes (Eusebius, Church History 6.1–6.2.12). In his eighteenth year the bishop, Demetrius, entrusted the teaching of converts to him. He sold his books of Greek literature for a small daily allowance, fasted, and slept on the floor (Eusebius, Church History 6.3.3–9). Eusebius also reports, as a rash act of his youth, that he took literally the saying about those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:12) (Eusebius, Church History 6.8.1–3).

His life’s work was the Bible. He learned Hebrew, collected the Greek translations and set them in parallel columns beside the Hebrew text in the work called the Hexapla (Eusebius, Church History 6.16). A wealthy friend, Ambrose, paid for more than seven shorthand writers and as many copyists, and the commentaries followed (Eusebius, Church History 6.23.1–2). In On First Principles he separated what the apostles had taught plainly, about God, Christ and the Spirit, from the questions they had left open, on which he offered his own reasoning; and he held that Scripture has a meaning beyond the obvious one (Origen, On First Principles preface 2–8). A reader, he wrote, should find in it three levels, like the body, soul and spirit of a person (Origen, On First Principles 4.1.11). The pagan philosopher Porphyry, in a passage that Eusebius quotes, says that he met Origen in his youth and complains that he applied to the Jewish Scriptures the figurative methods that Greek writers used on their own mysteries (Eusebius, Church History 6.19.4–8).

On a journey he was ordained presbyter by the bishops of Palestine, and Demetrius turned against him (Eusebius, Church History 6.8.4–5, 6.23.4). He left Alexandria for Caesarea Maritima (Eusebius, Church History 6.26), where students came to him from other provinces and where, past sixty, he wrote his reply to the pagan critic Celsus (Eusebius, Church History 6.30, 6.36.1–2). In the persecution of Decius he was chained, racked and threatened with fire (Eusebius, Church History 6.39.5). He died not long afterwards, aged sixty-nine (Eusebius, Church History 7.1).

Origen’s work bears on what the church read as Scripture and on how it read it. Eusebius quotes his list of the twenty-two books of the Hebrew Scriptures and his statement that four Gospels alone are undisputed in the church (Eusebius, Church History 6.25.1–4). His opinions were contested after his death: when Rufinus put On First Principles into Latin more than a century later, he explained in his preface that he had left out or altered passages on the Trinity that he judged to be corrupt (Origen, On First Principles prologue of Rufinus).