There were two great cities in the Roman Empire of the second and third centuries of the Christian era which, from their opulence, the number of their inhabitants and their general commercial importance, occupied a position only second to Rome itself. The one was Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, the other Carthage, the chief city of the wealthy and populous province of North Africa. There is no doubt that in the first days of Christianity the religion of Jesus penetrated into these great centers of population. But it is only in quite the latter years of the second century that their churches came to occupy a prominent position.
In both these cities at that period arose teachers who attained extraordinary prominence among all the leading communities of Christians.
Alexandria was the emporium through which the trade of Egypt, Arabia, and far-away India largely flowed on its way to the capital and the Western provinces of the Empire. In the days of the earlier Emperors it was said to contain as many as three hundred thousand free inhabitants and an equal number of slaves. Tradition ascribes to Mark the introduction of Christianity into the Egyptian capital, which subsequently became the cradle of Gnosticism, and the center of its strange philosophical speculations.
There is, however, little to show that Christianity spread among the native Egyptians, in what would now be termed the "hinterland" of the great city, before the latter half of the third century; we have learned in late years much about the condition of Egypt under the Empire, but all that has come before us serves only to confirm the well-known picture of the historian of the Decline and Fall. "The progress of Christianity was for a long time confined within the limits of a single city, and till the close of the second century the predecessors of Demetrius (Bishop of Alexandria, A. D. 189) were the only prelates of the Christian Church. The body of the natives, a people distinguished by a sullen inflexibility of temper, entertained the new doctrine with coldness and reluctance, and even in the time of Origen it was rare to meet with an Egyptian who had surmounted his early prejudices in favor of the sacred animals of his country. As soon, indeed, as Christianity had mounted the throne, the zeal of those barbarians obeyed the prevailing impulsion; the cities of Egypt were filled with bishops, and the deserts of the Thebais swarmed with hermits.
In the city of Alexandria existed a catechetical school, dating, some think, from the days of Mark. The school, after the middle of the second century, assumed a position of considerable importance as a seminary of Christian instruction, and its mastership was held by a succession of eminent men, who spread its fame into distant countries.
The first of these distinguished teachers was Pantsenus, whose teaching work in Alexandria seems to have begun somewhat before A. D. 186. Of this Pantsenus we know little beyond the high testimony paid him by his pupil and successor, Clement, who, after enumerating the great teachers at whose feet he had sat, refers to Pantsenus in the following remarkable terms: "When I came upon the last (he was first in power), having tracked him out concealed in Egypt, I found rest. He, the true, the Sicilian bee, gathering the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, engendered in the souls of his hearers a deathless element of knowledge. Well they (the teachers whom Clement had listened to), preserving the tradition of the blessed doctrine derived directly from the holy Apostles Peter, James, John and Paul, the son receiving it from the father (but few were like the fathers), came by God's will to us also to deposit those ancestral and apostolic seeds."
The second of the great masters of the Alexandrian school was the famous Clement, whose words have just been quoted. Clement's life story, beyond the fact of his having followed his master, Pantsenus, in the head-ship of the Alexandria school, is almost a blank, save for what we gather incidentally from his surviving writings. He tells us that he spent his earlier years in search of wisdom, that he was the pupil of various eminent teachers, but that it was in Pantsenus' teaching that at last he found rest. He was driven from his work in the school at Alexandria by the persecution of Severus early in the second century, and tradition speaks of his dying about the year 220. But although the details of most of his life are unknown, he has left behind him many writings, very considerable portions of which we still possess. These works of his were widely read at the end of the second and through the third centuries, and they exercised a great, even a lasting, influence on the Catholic Church.
It was Clement who really introduced into Christian teaching the study of heathen philosophy. Justin Martyr, about a quarter of a century earlier, had in some measure anticipated him here in the view that a Christian training by no means excluded the study of the great masters of antiquity; but the reading of Justin was altogether on a much narrower scale than that of the great Alexandrian master. It may be generally assumed that, prior to Clement, Christian teachers viewed all the great philosophers with dislike, and looked on their writings as opposed to Christianity. Clement took a broader and truer view of the great Greek masters, and urged that in them might often be found glimpses of the truth; that, in fact, the noble Greek philosophy was the preparation of the Greeks for the full revelation of Christ. It may be said that Clement and his successor, and in some respects his disciple, the yet greater Origen, did for the schools in the Hypostases (or Institutions). This work, however, is lost; but Eusebius especially refers to the above-quoted passage from the Stromata, which he believes refers to this Pantaenus.
Clement has been well represented as seeking the truth from whatever quarter he could obtain it, believing that all that is good comes from God, wherever it be found. His orthodoxy in deep fundamental questions, as far as it went, has never been fairly impugned. He believed in a personal Son of God, who was the Reason and Wisdom of God, and distinctly taught that the Son of God became incarnate. This true scholar was a voluminous writer. His three great works—(1) "The Exhortation to the Heathen" (2) "The Instructor or Pedagogue" (3) "The Stromata or Miscellanies" (literally "The Tapestry")—we possess, complete or nearly complete. They form a series, and are the largest and perhaps the most valuable early Christian remains which have come down to us, dating, as they do, only a little more than a century after John's death. There is a long list of other treatises and works by Clement given us by Eusebius and Jerome, but with the exception of the treatise or more probably the sermon, "Who is the rich man that is saved?" and a few fragments, these are all lost. It is noteworthy that all the Books included in the Canon of the Old Testament, save Ruth and the Song of Solomon, are quoted as authoritative in his extant works. In the New Testament Canon he refers to and quotes from all the Books of the Canon, with the exception of Philemon, the second Epistle of Peter, and the Epistle of James.
The third of the famous teachers of the Alexandrian Catechetical school was, in all respects, a more distinguished theologian and thought leader than either of his eminent predecessors. Origen holds a unique place among the Christian teachers of the first three centuries. Unlike either Pantsenus or Clement, the story of his stormy and chequered career is fairly well known.
Born at Alexandria somewhere about A. D. 185, of Christian parents, at an early age he was placed under the tutelage of Pantsenus or Clement. His father, Leonidas, suffered martyrdom early in the third century, and the young Origen, who had displayed extraordinary talents and powers of work, was soon placed by the Bishop of Alexandria Demetrius at the head of the catechetical school in his native city. But although thus early a prominent teacher, he remained still an indefatigable student, not only of Christian lore but of the principal Greek writers. He devoted himself besides with great ardor to Hebrew studies. An apparently true tradition speaks of his ascetic, devoted life. His fame as a teacher and a profound scholar soon spread far beyond Alexandria, which, however, remained the principal scene of his literary activities for some twenty-eight years, though he undertook many journeys to Rome, Syria, Arabia, Palestine. It was in this period of his career that he was summoned to visit Mamsea, the mother of Alexander Severus, who became subsequently Emperor, to instruct her in Christianity. He remained with this illustrious lady some time, "exhibiting," as Eusebius tells us, "innumerable illustrations of the glory of the Lord, and of the excellence of divine instruction."
It was about A. D. 228-30 that the real troubles of Origen's life commenced. A bitter feud sprang up between Bishop Demetrius and the world-renowned scholar. Many students of the period somewhat reluctantly see in the hostility of the bishop a restless jealousy of the brilliant writer and teacher; they are probably accurate in their conclusions, but at the same time Origen's apologists are compelled to recognize in him a want of subordination, and at times even an ill-balanced zeal; nor can his warmest admirers always defend his theological opinions, which not infrequently took the form of wild and somewhat baseless speculations. The powerful bishop procured his banishment from Alexandria, so long his home, and even his deposition from the status of a presbyter, to which office he had been ordained by the Bishops of Palestine. Henceforward we find Origen living under the ban of the Alexandrian Church, and indeed of many other important communities influenced by Alexandria. He now took up his abode at Caesarea, where he organized a school of divinity, the reputation of which, under his matchless teaching, was said to rival that of Alexandria. In his later years we hear of him in correspondence with the so-called Christian Emperor Philip, and his Empress. But it was a mournful evening to the life of the great and famous scholar, and a poor guerdon after all to live on thus condemned, and viewed with suspicion, if not with positive dislike, by a very considerable portion of the Catholic Church, for which he had labored for so many long years with such tireless devotion and conspicuous success. He was subsequently arrested and maltreated by the Pagan authorities in the Decian persecution; dying not long after the persecution had ceased, about the year 254, at Tyre, where his grave was still pointed out in the Middle Ages.
In some respects Origen was a follower of Clement, his teacher and predecessor in the head-ship of the catechetical school, inasmuch as he was a profound student of the great Greek philosophers. He even composed an important work in ten books, of which only fragments remain, in imitation of, and bearing the same name as, the famous Stromata of Clement. During a long life of ceaseless work Origen put out, so Epiphanius tells us, as many as 6,000 volumes, but to reach anything like this amazing number (which is probably greatly exaggerated) every treatise, large and small, every homily must have been reckoned as a separate volume. Jerome, too, who at one time was a strong admirer of Origen, says, "He wrote more than any individual could read."
Perhaps the greatest of his literary achievements, and one to which the friends and foes of the great Alexandrian must unite in awarding unstinting praise, was his noble work in criticism. He spent large portions of more than twenty years in attempting to provide a complete revision of the text of the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament Scriptures. It is said that his studies in Hebrew were undertaken to qualify himself for this task. Large sections of this work have been preserved, but the bulk of his notes and texts, contained, it is said, in forty or fifty volumes, has perished. It is supposed to have been burnt in the library of Caesarea when that city was taken by the Arabs in A. D. 653. This scholarly and careful effort in Textual Criticism was far in advance of anything undertaken in the Christian Church for centuries after Origen's death.
Although the extant works of this most eminent teacher are numerous, they bear no comparison to the number of his lost writings. The enormous mass of his compositions may be roughly divided as follows:
(1) His Textual studies, perhaps the most important of all, of which we have already spoken.
(2) His Apologetics. Origen's principal work in this department of theology, with which we are acquainted, is his book "Against Celsus," written at Caesarea far on in his life, when Philip, the so-called Christian, was reigning. This important composition we possess in its entirety. The writing in question is considered, by many scholars, as the great apologetic work of Christian antiquity. It bears the mark of Origen's profound studies in ancient philosophies which clearly colored much of his more speculative theology. It has been well said that his argument is most effective "when he appeals to the spirit and power of Christianity as an evidence of its truth."
(3) His exegetical labors. These extend over the whole of the Old and the New Testaments, and consist of scholarship, short notes largely grammatical; of Homilies, or Expositions; and of more or less elaborate Commentaries. Very few of all these have been preserved in the Greek originals, but we possess many Latin translations of portions of them.
It is in this department of his vast work that this true-hearted toiler for God excited much of the animosity which has in all ages pursued him. It was no doubt a dangerous principle, and one that admitted of much perilous exaggeration to ajffirm, that things written in Holy Scripture which offended his exegetical sense, might be fairly looked upon as allegories. Of this danger, however, he evidently was sensible when he wrote the following words: "Let no one suspect that we do not believe any history in Scripture to be real, because we suspect certain events related in it not to have taken place ... we are manifestly of opinion that the truth of the history may and ought to be maintained in the majority of instances." This whole section of the De Princilous deserves careful study by both the friends and foes of the famous Alexandrian master.
(4) Of his dogmatic writings only one important work has come down to us, the "Fundamental Doctrines," and that in the Latin translation of Rufinus, the translator of which has in many passages taken upon himself, as we know, to alter and " improve" upon the original. The Greek version which Origen really wrote has perished; only a few fragments have been preserved. It is from these mainly that it has been ascertained that Rufinus has in various places altered the original. The Stromata, above referred to, has perished, save for a few fragments.
In great essentials Origen was generally a Catholic teacher; he held that Christianity was a practical and religious saving principle, and he pressed home to the hearts and heads of men that simple faith was sufficient for the renewal and salvation of man. Later, in times of bitter controversy, both the Catholics and the Arians appealed to his teaching; but the inferences of Arius in respect to his Christology were distinctly unfair. It has been well said that "a mind so speculative as that of Origen, and so engrossed with the deepest and most difficult problems of human thought, must sometimes have expressed itself in a way liable to be misunderstood." It must, too, in forming any judgment on Origen's statements, be ever borne in mind that "when he lived and taught, no General Council had yet been held, to formulate in clear-cut language the teaching of the Catholic Church upon any of those great questions of theology which convulsed the Christian world during the two centuries, the fourth and fifth, which followed the century in which the Alexandrian master thought and wrote."
There is no doubt that Origen gave grave offense to serious theologians in his own day and in subsequent times, rather by his isolated propositions than by his statements regarding great Catholic doctrines. Some of these isolated propositions from their very strangeness and novelty acquired a wide notoriety, and, unfortunately, it is by these often somewhat wild speculations that Origen is best known. Those who, not unrighteously, condemn these as purely speculative, as outside if not contrary to Scripture, forget the real and massive work of the great master's life, a work simply unique in the story of Christendom. Textual critic, grammarian, exegete, homilist, Christian apologist, teacher of the highest theology, Origen was all these. From the days of the divinely taught Apostles of the Lord no Christian scholar had arisen comparable to him. In the long ages which have elapsed since "the passing" of the Great Teacher, it would be hard to find his peer.
Among the most noted of the speculative propositions—unheard of in those Holy Scriptures which Origen loved so well—which have been condemned by Catholic Christianity, and are esteemed by many as blots upon the white record of his blameless scholar life, are his curious doctrines respecting the pre-existence of souls, and his teaching respecting punishments, which he held to be merely corrective, being ordained in order that all creatures may be eventually restored to their original perfection. No condemned soul, according to Origen, was without hope, although thousands of years of torment might elapse before the suffering to which the soul was condemned had wrought its cleansing sect.
There is no doubt, however, that the unmerited persecution he underwent during the later years of his life, which separated him from the communion of his own Church of Alexandria and of other influential churches, placed him in a false position, and opened the door to much of the subsequent onslaught on his reputation. During the latter years of his life Origen was clearly under the ban of the larger portion of the Catholic Church—unfairly it seems, but the fact still remains.
After his death his orthodoxy, rightly or wrongly, was very soon widely impugned; but as early as the fourth century his memory found many able and zealous defenders, amongst them the famous historian Eusebius, and even the great Athanasius. Nor were these true scholars and divines by any means alone in their generous advocacy of Origen's claim to Catholic reverence.
But after all they were in the minority. In the West the famous and widely-read Vincent of Lerins, in the first half of the fifth century, spoke of Origen as a warning and example, in his well-known Commonitorium, pointing out how even the most learned of Church teachers might become a misleading light. Even the school of Alexandria, although, perhaps unconsciously, profoundly influenced by his writings, repudiated the greatest of her sons, and the Church of Antioch followed suit. In the year 553 Justinian and the fifth (Ecumenical Council of Constantinople anathematized the teaching of Origen.
In modern times, far removed from an age when jealousies and prejudices unfavorably affected the Church's estimate of his powers, both Romanists and Anglicans have come to entertain a broader and nobler conception of the greatest of the Church's scholar-writers of the first three centuries. They do not attempt to condone his errors, but they unite in acknowledging the mighty debt which the Catholic Church of all ages owes to the great Alexandrian. For instance. Bishop Bull, who will ever hold a high place, perhaps the highest, among our Anglican divines, defends his general orthodoxy; while Tillemont, "the sure-footed" historian of Port Royal, whose matchless erudition is one of the household words of all fair-minded Catholics, Roman and Anglican alike, whose praise is justly in all the Churches, dares to say in the face of ancient condemnation and jealous misrepresentation, "that although such a man might hold heretical opinions, he could not be a heretic, since he was utterly free from the spirit which constitutes the guilt of heresy."