Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church

288 Pages·2011·0.87 MB·English

by  Ronald E. Heine

christian theology in context
SERIES EDITORS
Timothy Gorringe Serene Jones Graham Ward
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT
Any inspection of recent theological monographs makes plain that it
is still thought possible to understand a text independently of its con-
text. Work in the sociology of knowledge and in cultural studies has,
however, increasingly made obvious that such divorce is impossible.
On the one hand, as Marx put it, “life determines consciousness”. All
texts have to be understood in their life situation, related to questions
of power, class, and modes of production. No texts exist in intellec-
tual innocence. On the other hand texts are also forms of cultural
power, expressing and modifying the dominant ideologies through
which we understand the world. This dialectical understanding of
texts demands an interdisciplinary approach if they are to be properly
understood: theology needs to be read alongside economics, politics,
and social studies, as well as philosophy, with which it has tradition-
ally been linked. The cultural situatedness of any text demands, both
in its own time and in the time of its rereading, a radically interdiscip-
linary analysis.
The aim of this series is to provide such an analysis, culturally
situating texts by Christian theologians and theological movements.
Only by doing this, we believe, will people of the fourth, sixteenth
or nineteenth centuries be able to speak to those of the twenty-fi rst.
Only by doing this will we be able to understand how theologies
are themselves cultural products—projects deeply resonant with
their particular cultural contexts and yet nevertheless exceeding
those contexts by being received into our own today. In doing this,
the series should advance both our understanding of those theo-
logies and our understanding of theology as a discipline. We also
hope that it will contribute to the fast-developing interdisciplinary
debates of the present.
Origen
Scholarship in the Service
of the Church
Ronald E. Heine
1
3
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To Gillian
Contents
Preface vii
Abbreviations x
1. Alexandria near Egypt 1
2. Alexandrian Christianity and the Formation of
Origen’s Thought 26
3. Origen and the Bible of the Alexandrian Christians 65
4. The Beginnings of Origen’s Published Biblical Scholarship 83
5. The Alexandrian Commentaries on the Old Testament 104
6. The Alexandrian Polemical and Theological Literature 127
7. Settling in Caesarea 145
8. Origen as Preacher in Caesarea 171
9. Scholarship and Teaching in Caesarea 188
10. The Works and Themes of the Senior Scholar 219
Bibliography: Primary Sources 257
Bibliography: Secondary Sources 261
Index 273
Preface
Origen’s life is somewhat unique among the Church Fathers because there
is a major hiatus in the middle of it. He began his life, lived his forma-
tive years, and built a reputation as a Christian scholar and teacher in the
thriving intellectual center of Alexandria. There he rubbed shoulders with
some of the greatest pagan intellectuals of his day: philosophers, gram-
marians, physicians, mathematicians, poets, literary and textual scholars,
geographers, and others. They came to Alexandria to study, do research, or
teach. This center had also attracted some of the great intellectuals of the
second- and third-century Church. Its legacy included the Gnostic thinkers
Basilides and Valentinus, and the more orthodox Pantaenus and Clement.
Alexandria’s population was a cosmopolitan mix of Greeks, Romans,
Jews, and Egyptians. The city had earlier had one of the largest Jewish
populations in the world, but this population had been greatly reduced as
a result of Jewish revolts during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian in the
early second century ad. It was in Alexandria that Origen did what no other
Christian theologian of his day had done, and very few did after him in the
Patristic period. He learned the Hebrew language so that he could work
with the Hebrew Scriptures.
In mid-life, because of disagreements between himself and the bishop of
Alexandria, Origen left the city and settled permanently in Caesarea of Pal-
estine. Caesarea was also a Hellenized, pagan city and a seat of Roman gov-
ernment but it must have seemed like an intellectual wasteland to an exile
from Alexandria. There was, however, a thriving Synagogue and a famous
rabbinical school in Caesarea. In this new context Origen was ordained a
priest and entered fully into the life of the Church. He founded a Christian
school and library, preached in the liturgical cycle of the Church, which
he had not been allowed to do in Alexandria, counseled the persecuted,
and seems to have interacted regularly with the rabbis in Caesarea. It was
here that he produced the majority of his written works. These two local
settings of Origen’s life form the major divisions of this study. The fi rst six
chapters look at Origen’s life and work in Alexandria, and Chapters 7–10
treat his activities in Caesarea.
I have made a serious attempt in this book to treat Origen’s Alexandrian
works and his Caesarean works separately, without throwing their con-
tents into one bowl and stirring them together to give an h omogenized
viii Preface
view of his thought. It is in this rigorous separation of his works into
their two settings with their unique contexts that this study differs from
preceding books on Origen. This separation also distinguishes, conse-
quently, between the thought of the young Origen and the old Origen.
Neither of these distinctions has been taken very seriously in studies of
Origen. He has, in fact, often been presented as having developed a sys-
tem of thought in his early period in Alexandria and never deviated from
it. This approach is partly the result of the focus on his Alexandrian work,
On First Principles, as the most important of his works, and certainly the
most convenient way into his thought. The argument in this book is that
new situations brought new problems for Origen, and these new prob-
lems caused him to turn his attention in new directions, and sometimes,
even to rethink old positions.
The majority of Origen’s works are either commentaries or homilies on
Scripture. His commentaries on Scripture are not like modern academic
commentaries. His goal in writing commentaries was not to solve the
problems associated with a book of Scripture and explain what it meant
to its fi rst audience. He wrote commentaries on Scripture to solve prob-
lems in the Church. This was especially true in his Alexandrian period.
He used the particular Scriptural book that he commented on because
he believed that this book, or some portion of it, addressed issues facing
the Church and individual Christians of his day. This focus on specifi c
theological or ecclesiastical problems is why his Alexandrian commen-
taries treat only selected portions of Biblical books. None of these early
commentaries covered an entire book of the Bible. He was interested in
commenting only on those parts used by opponents of the Church or
what he considered erring members of it, in order to show their errors
and refute their views. His scholarship was always in the context and
service of the Church.
Origen had been thoroughly educated in the disciplines of Greek edu-
cation. He was trained as a grammaticus and as a philosopher. His works
show evidence of this Greek education both in the way that he approaches
them and in some of the assumptions he brings to them. But he was fi rst
and foremost a man of Christian faith. He considered his Greek educa-
tion only a “handmaid” to serve the Christian faith. His life was devoted to
understanding, defending, and promoting the faith.
I wish to thank Peeters Publishers in Leuven for permission to use parts
of my article, “Origen’s Alexandrian Commentary on Genesis” in Origeniana
Octava, ed. by L. Perrone (Leuven/Peeters, 2003), 63–73, in ch. 5, and Mohr
Siebeck in Tuebingen for permission to use parts of my article, “Origen
Preface ix
and the Eternal Boundaries”, in their forthcoming The Septuagint and Chris-
tian Origins, ed. by H. Lichtenberger and S. Caulley, in ch. 3. I also wish to
thank Northwest Christian University for some release time from teaching
in the spring semester of 2009 for work on this book.
R. E. H.
All Saints Day, 2009