Origen

Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253) was an early Christian theologian, scholar and ascetic, and one of the most influential figures of the church in its first centuries. He was born and spent the first half of his career in Alexandria, where Greek learning was deeply rooted, and his work shaped how eastern Christianity thought about scripture, philosophy and doctrine. He is counted among the church fathers, although his reputation became contested after his death.

According to the tradition preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, his father Leonides, a teacher of literature and an openly practising Christian, was beheaded during Septimius Severus's persecution in 202, when Origen was still a teenager. His mother prevented him from surrendering to the authorities. With the family left impoverished, he was appointed catechist at the Catechetical School of Alexandria at eighteen. Scholars doubt that he ever led the school, and think he more likely held a paid teaching post. He lived with great austerity: he went barefoot, owned a single cloak, abstained from wine and meat, and fasted often. He studied philosophy in several schools in the city, including the Platonic circle of Ammonius Saccas. Later, the patronage of Ambrose, a wealthy former follower of Valentinian Gnosticism who converted to orthodox Christianity, gave him secretaries and copyists, which allowed him to produce an enormous body of work, estimated at around two thousand treatises.

Among his major works are On First Principles, a systematic attempt to set out Christian doctrine that shaped later theologians; Contra Celsum, a defence of Christianity against the pagan philosopher Celsus and perhaps the most influential piece of early Christian apologetics; and the Hexapla, an edition of the Hebrew Bible that placed the Hebrew text beside several Greek translations in parallel columns. He also wrote hundreds of homilies and biblical commentaries, many of which read Scripture allegorically.

His central ideas blend Platonic philosophy with Christian faith. He taught that God first created the souls of all rational beings, which turned away from him and were then given material bodies; the physical world, in this view, follows from that fall rather than being its starting point. He hoped that all might eventually be saved, though he always presented this as speculation rather than settled doctrine. He defended free will, advocated Christian pacifism, and developed an early version of the ransom theory of atonement. His thinking on the Trinity was subordinationist, though it helped prepare the later formulation of the doctrine.

His influence was especially strong in the East, where Athanasius of Alexandria and the three Cappadocian Fathers counted among his devoted followers. His teachings also provoked controversy: the first Origenist crisis broke out in the late fourth century, and in 543 Emperor Justinian I condemned him as a heretic and ordered his writings burned. The church rejected his doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, but his allegorical method and his way of thinking about faith remained present in later theology.