ABSTRACT
Origen (c. 185-c. 251-4) is always in the eye of the beholder. Although he wasthe greatest early theologian of the East – only Augustine is comparable in the West – his corpus is remarkably fragmentary and fragile. He warned in his own lifetime that copies of a debate which he had with another theologian had been interpolated and rewritten by his opponent ( Jerome, Apologia Contra Rufinum 42-4; Hritzu 1965; Laudet 1982; Rufinus, De alteratione librorum Origenis 10-13; Dell’Era 1983). In Arabia to serve as a skilled expert in a meeting which was to focus on the questionable positions of a bishop named Heraclides, his own views came under scrutiny when another bishop asked him if the soul is the blood. His response shows how deeply concerned he was with simple believers’ understandings of material language used in scripture for things spiritual. It is so clumsy that a third bishop summarizing Origen’s views gives the impression that Origen relies more on Platonists than scripture (Origen, Dialogue with Heraclides; Scherer 1960; Daly 1992). At home in Alexandria, Demetrius, his bishop, had supported him early in his youth, but became quite angry with him when he was ordained by bishops in Palestine (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 6.8, 19, 23 Schwartz and Mommsen 1903, 1908; Lawlor and Oulton 1927). After Origen’s death, his reputation changed with the tides. His scriptural exegesis of whole books and short passages, however, stayed for the most part within various traditions of orthodoxy.
