SOURCE: "'I Beseech You: Be Transformed': Origen," in The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 160-77.

[In this excerpt, Peter Brown discusses how Origen in his exposition of Christian theology and his biblical interpretation understood and used the Platonism that permeated the Christian East of his day and how his understanding, profoundly Christian, was fundamentally different from that of his contemporary pagan Platonists.]

Between May 200 and the middle of 203, Laetus, the Augustal Prefect of Egypt, rounded up a group of Christians from Alexandria and from Egypt proper. The father of Origen had been among them. Origen was sixteen or seventeen at the time, the eldest son of a family of seven. His mother hid his clothes, lest he should rush out to join his father by presenting himself to the authorities. "It was," wrote Eusebius of Caesarea a century later, "an ambition extraordinary in one so young."¹ Origen entered adulthood steeled by closeness to death. For him, the charged antithesis of "true" and "false" paternity, the contrast between continuities created by spiritual guidance and mere physical reproduction, which had been so current in Christian teaching circles in the second century, had become a bitter fact of life. The young man's loyalty to a father who had expected so much from him had been wrenched out of its normal course by the brutal blow of execution. All the continuity, all the loyalty that Origen now wished for lay in the finer, more enduring links of soul to soul, created between a teacher and his disciples within the Christian church.

Settled in Alexandria, Origen became a spiritual guide at a precociously early age. A nucleus of committed young Christians and of recent converts gravitated around the brilliant young teacher and "son of a martyr." When persecution flared up again, between 206 and 210, the group around Origen showed surprising resilience. The Alexandrian clergy discreetly vanished, leaving Origen to maintain the morale of his spiritual charges.² Daring the hostile crowd—no small act of courage in a city notorious for its lynch law—the young teacher would step forward to bestow on his spiritual "children" the solemn kiss that declared they had become worthy of their martyr's death.³

We know surprisingly little, from Origen's own works, of the texture of the remaining forty years of his life in Alexandria and elsewhere. His career as a teacher in Alexandria ended in 234 with virtual exile and the transfer of his school to Caesarea, on the seacoast of Palestine.⁴ He taught there and preached regularly as a priest, expounding the Scriptures in church, until his death some time around 253-254, as a result of the tortures inflicted on him in the previous year in the prison-house of Caesarea.⁵

With Clement, we had been encouraged to look around us, at every detail of the life of a Christian in a great city; with Origen that busy world has vanished: we already breathe the changeless air of the desert.⁶ Time stands still in a spiritual Sinai where, for forty years, Origen, the exegete, had gathered from the Scriptures the sweet bread of the angels.⁷ Origen thought of himself, above all, as an exegete. Facing the unchanging Word of God, he strove to achieve an icon-like tran-quillity, to make his countenance firm before the people⁸ A man whose heart burned with the hidden fire of the Scriptures,⁹ Origen's unhurried, timeless scholarship brought a breath of changelessness into the Christian communities of Alexandria and Caesarea, at the very moment when these communities had begun to hurry headlong into a new age of prosperity, fraught with occasions for compromise with the world and marked by intellectual recrimination and the flagrant quest for power among the clergy.¹⁰ What earned him the admiration of Christian intellectuals in all later centuries was not so much what Origen had taught, exciting and frequently disturbing though that might be; it was the manner in which, as an exegete and spiritual guide, Origen had presented the life of a Christian teacher as suspended above time and space. It was this that made him a role model, a "saint" of Christian culture, a man who could be hailed over a century later as "the whetstone of us all."¹¹

From the start, Origen's message had been stark and confident: "I beseech you, therefore, be transformed. Resolve to know that in you there is a capacity to be transformed."¹² (In this phrase we can actually hear Origen speaking: it is taken from a shorthand record of a discussion between Origen and a group of somewhat puzzled bishops, which has survived on a papyrus discovered in Tura, south of Cairo, in 1941.)¹³

By the year 229/230, Origen felt free to commit himself to his most remarkable book, the Peri Archôn, On First Principles. He was then in his late forties, an age when a serious philosopher could be thought to be sufficiently anchored in decades of meditation and direct experience of oral spiritual guidance (and had stirred up enough criticism among his colleagues) to make it worth his time to commit his thoughts to writing. In this book, he took the opportunity to lay bare the assumptions about the position of human beings in the universe that had underlain his personal alchemy as an exegete and guide of souls.

The problem that Origen posed was simple: "In what way has there come to be so great and various a diversity among created beings?"¹⁴

It was the old Platonic problem—how did the diversity observed in the material world emerge out of the original unity of the world of the Ideas? His answer to the question, however, was magnificently idiosyncratic. In his opinion, each created being had freely chosen to be different from its fellows; and each difference reflected a precise degree of decline from or progress toward an original, common perfection. Originally created equal, as "angelic" spirits, intended by God to stand forever in rapt contemplation of His wisdom, each spirit had "fallen" by choosing of its own free will to neglect, if ever so slightly—and even, in the case of the demons, to reject—the life-giving warmth of the presence of God.¹⁵

What we now call the "soul," the subjective self, was merely the result of a subtle cooling off of the original ardor of the primal, deepest self: the "spirit." As Origen pointed out, the word psyché, for "soul," derived from psychros, "cold." Compared with the fiery spirit that flickered upward, always straining to sink back into the primal fire of God, the conscious self was a dull thing, numbed by the cold absence of love.¹⁶ The baffling diversity of the present universe, divided as it was between ranks of invisible angels and demons, and marked on earth by an apparently infinite variety of human destinies, was the end product of countless particular choices, by which each spirit had freely chosen to be what it now was.

The most obvious feature of such a view was an unrelieved feeling of "divine discontent" with the present limitations of the human person. A vast impatience ran through the universe. Each being—angelic, human, or demonic—had in some way fallen away from God, through the insidious, fatal sin of self-satisfaction. Each mighty spirit had made, and could still make, a dire choice to remain content with its present condition, and to neglect the opportunity to expose itself to the consuming fire of God's love.¹⁷ For Origen, Christ had been the only being whose original deepest self had remained "uncooled" by inertia. Christ's mighty spirit alone had remained inseparably joined to God, much as the white heat of an iron merged with the blaze of the furnace in which it rested.¹⁸ All other beings must experience an unremitting sense of sadness and frustration: the primal, truest, most expansive definition of their self inevitably reached beyond the cramped circumstances of their present mode of existence. A shadow of regret always fell on the body. Whether this "body" was the ethereal frame of an angel or the heavy flesh of a human being, the body was always a limit and a source of frustration. But it was also a challenge; it was a frontier that demanded to be crossed. "Tents," Origen pointed out, were invariably spoken of with favor in the Old Testament. They stood for the limitless horizons of each created spirit, always ready to be struck and to be pitched ever further on. "Houses," by contrast, stood as symbols of dread satiety, "rooted, settled, defined by fixed limits."¹⁹ Even the most resplendent beings were touched by this sadness: Origen believed that the huge soul of the Sun pressed ceaselessly against its radiant disc, and that its spirit sighed, as Saint Paul had sighed: I could desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ: for it is far better.²⁰

If the tension to transcend the present limits of the self was the most vivid aspect of Origen's view of the human person, it was the least original. What concerned him most was how to reconcile a drive for transformation, shared by many Platonists and Christian Gnostics of the school of Valentinus, with whom he remained in constant dialogue,²¹ with a sense of the unfathomable subtlety of God's justice in placing the "fallen" spirit within the temporary limits of a particular material body. The material universe as a whole, in his opinion, had been subjected to frustration, not of its will; but it had been subjected in hope.²² For Origen, the fall of each individual spirit into a particular body had not been in any way a cataclysm; to be placed in a body was to experience a positive act of divine mercy. He distanced himself from many of his contemporaries by insisting that the body was necessary for the slow healing of the soul.²³ It was only by pressing against the limitations imposed by a specific material environment that the spirit would learn to recover its earliest yearning to stretch beyond itself, to open itself "ever more fully and more warmly" to the love of God.²⁴ the body posed challenge that counteracted the numb sin of self-satisfaction. For this reason, "The world before our eyes became a material world for the sake of those spirits who are in need of a life lived in physical matter."²⁵ If anything, Origen thought, it was the demons who were to be pitied: turned by their immense self-satisfaction away from the love of God, their bodies had been left perfectly within the control of their proud wills; their eerie flesh was as supple as a chill north wind.²⁶ "They are regarded as unworthy of this instruction and training whereby, through the flesh, the human race … aided by the heavenly powers, is being instructed and trained."²⁷

Hence, Origen's profound ambivalence about the human body. Looking at the body at close quarters, as a source of temptation and frustration, Origen offered little comfort to his readers:

You have coals of fire, you will sit upon them, and they will be of help to you.²⁸

Yet, in the eyes of God, each particular human spirit had been allotted a particular physical constitution as its appropriate sparring partner. Each person's flesh and blood was particular to that person, and had been exquisitely calibrated by God, "who alone is the searcher of hearts," to challenge the potentially mighty spirit of each to stretch beyond itself.²⁹ Thus, far from regarding the body as a prison of the soul, Origen arrived at an unexpected familiarity with the body. It always seemed to him that each person's spirit must be as vividly distinctive as were the features of his or her face. The gentle precision of God's mercy ensured that each body was adjusted to the peculiar needs of its soul down to the finest details, much as the lines of each person's handwriting remained unmistakably their own. Each person's relations with the body, therefore, had its own, unfathomably particular story: to the eye of God, the "chastity" of a Peter was as different from the "chastity" of a Paul as was each Apostle's signature.³⁰ Confronted with their own, irreducibly particular flesh and blood, all believers struggled to maintain, in themselves, the huge momentum of their spirit's longing for God.

Origen's view of the spiritual struggle entered the bloodstream of all future traditions of ascetic guidance in the Greek and Near Eastern worlds. It involved the human person in a solemn and continuous dialogue with the intangible powers that brushed against the mind. For "if we are possessed of free will, some spiritual beings may be very likely to be able to urge us on to sin and others to assist us to salvation."³¹

Angels and demons were as close to the Christian of the third century as were adjacent rooms. The free soul expanded in love or slipped back into numbed satiety in as far as it chose to "seek counsellors" in the mighty, unseen spirits that stood so close to every person.³² At the moment of intense prayer, for instance, the believer could sense, in the undisturbed serenity of the mind, a touch of the stilled silence of the angelic spirits who stood beside all Christians, lovingly concerned that humans should join with them in their own untrammeled worship of God.³³

Surrounded on every side by invisible helpers and invisible seducers, the thought flow of the Christian could rarely be treated as neutral. Piety and firm resolves rose into consciousness through the soul's willingness to cooperate with its angelic guides. These protecting presences drew the healthful properties of the person to the fore, as mysteriously and as intimately as the contact of healing poultices mobilized the energies of humors that lay far beneath the skin.³⁴ The themes of a Christian's meditations rose within the "heart" with a power that frequently betrayed resources deeper than those of the isolated, conscious mind:

Blessed is the man whose acceptance is in Thee, O Lord: Thy ascents are in his heart.³⁵

It was the same with temptation. Consent to evil thoughts, many of which were occasioned, in the first instance, by the dull creakings of the body—by its need for food and its organic, sexual drives³⁶—implied a decision to collaborate with other invisible spirits, the demons, whose pervasive presence, close to the human person, was registered in the "heart" in the form of inappropriate images, fantasies, and obsessions. For these demonic promptings also had a dynamism that could not be explained by the normal stream of conscious thought. Hence, for Origen, as for all later ascetic writers, the "heart" was a place where momentous, faceless options were mercifully condensed in the form of conscious trains of thought—logismoi. Little wonder, then, that the wise Solomon had said: Keep thy heart with all diligence.³⁷ For to consent to such logismoi was to "consecrate oneself to demonic partners.³⁸ It was to give oneself over, on many more levels of the self than the conscious person, to an alternative identity: it was to lose oneself to the powers of numbness that still lurked in the hidden reaches of the universe, and to take on the character of chill demonic spirits who had been content to exist without the ardent search for God.

Origen bequeathed to his successors a view of the human person that continued to inspire, to fascinate, and to dismay all later generations. He conveyed, above all, a profound sense of the fluidity of the body. Basic aspects of human beings, such as sexuality, sexual differences, and other seemingly indestructible attributes of the person associated with the physical body, struck Origen as no more than provisional. The present human body reflected the needs of a single, somewhat cramped moment in the spirit's progress back to a former, limitless identity.

A body, in the sense of a limiting frame for the spirit, would remain with all created beings throughout their long period of healing. But Origen was careful to point out that this body was not necessarily continuous with the present physical organism. It also would become transformed, along with the spirit, "throughout diverse and immeasurable ages," of which the present life was one short interlude.³⁹ The transformation of the body in the future ages of its existence involved a long, mysterious process, as splendid in its final outcome as was the the pure, "healed" matter that emerged from the alchemist's crucible as gold.⁴⁰ The body itself would become less "thick," less "coagulated," less "hardened," as the numbing inertia of the spirit thawed in the growing heat of its yearning for the Wisdom of God. As under the delicious working of fresh wine, the barriers that cramped the person would be dissolved.⁴¹ The "vessel of clay" of the present self would be shattered, to be remolded, ever again, into containers of ever wider capacity, in stages of life that stretched far beyond the grave.⁴²

This was a view of the bodies of actual men and women taken from a disturbingly distant vantage point. It meant that Origen was prepared to look at sexuality in the human person as if it were a mere passing phase. It was a dispensable adjunct of the personality that played no role in defining the essence of the human spirit. Men and women could do without it even in this present existence. Human life, lived in a body endowed with sexual characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.

Origen was widely believed to have practiced what he preached. It was always said of him that, as a young man of about twenty, around 206, he had discreetly gone to a doctor to have himself castrated.⁴³ At the time, castration was a routine operation.⁴⁴ Origen's supporters were prepared to believe that he had undergone the operation so as to avoid slanderous rumors about the intimacy that he enjoyed with women who were his spiritual charges.⁴⁵ Two generations previously, a young Alexandrian had been prepared to undergo the same operation, for the same reason.⁴⁶

When, as a priest at Caesarea, Origen preached against those who took too literally the words of Christ, when He had blessed those who had made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, he treated the matter in a manner so unruffled as to reveal a chasm between a third-century audience and ourselves.⁴⁷ Given the vivid fantasies that surrounded the adult eunuch, it was far from certain that everyone would have believed that Origen had gained immunity from sexual temptation by such an operation. Postpubertal castration merely made the man infertile; it was, in itself, no guarantee of chastity.⁴⁸ What Origen may have sought, at that time, was something more deeply unsettling. The eunuch was notorious (and repulsive to many) because he had dared to shift the massive boundary between the sexes. He had opted out of being male. By losing the sexual "heat" that was held to cause his facial hair to grow, the eunuch was no longer recognizable as a man.⁴⁹ He was a human being "exiled from either gender."⁵⁰ Deprived of the standard professional credential of a philosopher in late antique circles—a flowing beard—Origen would have appeared in public with a smooth face, like a woman or like a boy frozen into a state of prepubertal innocence. He was a walking lesson in the basic indeterminacy of the body.

This body did not have to be defined by its sexual components, still less by the social roles that were conventionally derived from those components. Rather, the body should act as a blazon of the freedom of the spirit. John the Baptist's soul had been so huge as to have caused his tiny body to leap in his mother's womb. The body of so great a spirit must necessarily have remained a virgin.⁵¹ To reject marriage and sexual activity of any kind was to make plain the fiery spirit's "manifest destiny." Virginity preserved an identity already formed in a former, more splendid existence and destined for yet further glory.

At a stroke, continence ceased to be what it had largely been in the Early Church—a postmarital matter for the middleaged. Origen, indeed, had been unusual in his early commitment as a Christian, and in the fascination that he had exercised on young persons in Alexandria in the first years of his career. His first years in Alexandria give us a rare glimpse of something like the radicalism of a "youth culture" at work in a church more usually dominated by sober greybeards.⁵²

In middle age, Origen tended to present virginity as a state that declared the joining of an "immaculate" spirit with its well-tempered, material frame. As a result of this shift in perspective, virginity could no longer be regarded simply as a perilous state of suspended sexuality, imposed upon the frisky young by their elders in the relatively short period between puberty and marriage. Nor was it an anomaly, made plain by the suspension of a natural destiny to marriage, undergone, in the pagan world, by a few prophetesses and priestesses. Virginity stood for the original state in which every body and soul had joined. It was a physical concretization, through the untouched body, of the preexisting purity of the soul. In the words of an author appreciated by Origen, the continent body was a waxen seal that bore the exact "imprint" of the untarnished soul.⁵³ Identified in this intimate manner with the pristine soul, the intact flesh of a virgin of either sex stood out also as a fragile oasis of human freedom. Refusal to marry mirrored the right of a human being, the possessor of a preexistent, utterly free soul, not to surrender its liberty to the pressures placed upon the person by society.

Origen was quite prepared to draw this consequence. Social and physical mingled inextricably in his thought. Behind the definition imposed upon the spirit by the body, there lay the definition imposed upon the person, through the body, by society. Origen always thought of a body as more than the physical body, seen in isolation. The body was a "microclimate." It was a vehicle through which the spirit adjusted to its present material environment as a whole.⁵⁴ Innumerable subtle filaments led the sprit through the body, into involvement with others, and so into involvement with society. When he spoke of sexually active married persons, Origen took Paul's words on the present necessity (or constraint) not to refer to the pressure exercised on the soul by the sexual drives of the body. He understood constraint in a far wider sense. He thought that Paul had referred to the social bonds that tied the believer to marriage, and, through marriage, to the frame of this world—to the great, extended body of society, into which the Christian became inextricably grafted through marriage.⁵⁵ To reject sexuality, therefore, did not mean, for Origen, simply to suppress the sexual drives. It meant the assertion of a basic freedom so intense, a sense of identity so deeply rooted, as to cause to evaporate the normal social and physical constraints that tied the Christian to his or her gender. Society might see the Christian virgin, the continent boy, or the young Christian widow as persons defined by their sexual physical nature, and so as potential householders and bearers of children. Origen was less certain: the human spirit did not necessarily need to acquiesce to so self-limiting a definition.

Not to belong to married society was to belong more intensely to others. The invisible world was magnificently sociable. It was a "great city" crowded with angelic spirits. The sense of an invisible, alternative society, of a great communion of human and angelic beings, was central to Origen's notion of the virgin state. Bonds based on physical paternity, on physical love, and on social roles derived from the physical person seemed peculiarly evanescent when compared with the resonant unity of a universe that strained toward the embrace of Christ. In the light of such future intimacy, the humble, physical bonds of human marriage, based as they were on a momentary adjustment of the spirit to the heavy climate of earth, appeared peculiarly insubstantial.⁵⁶ A time would come when all relations based upon physical kinship would vanish. His huge identity no longer definable within such narrow limits, even Abraham—so Origen, the son of Leonides the martyr, "dared" to suggest—would no longer be called "father of Isaac," but by some other, deeper name:

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold I will do a new thing.⁵⁷

In thinking in this way, Origen had appropriated, in a characteristically idiosyncratic manner, a distinctive feature of the Platonism of his age, which he may have first encountered through the disciples of Valentinus.⁵⁸ The Platonic doctrine of the Ideas was an essential ingredient of Origen's view of the person. The notion that all beauty and order in the visible world was a distant echo of a yet more majestic, unseen harmony haunted contemporaries. For Origen, everything perceived with senses could be thought of as existing in undimmed intensity in God, the source of all being. The spiritual realm was alive with joys whose sensuous delight was veiled from the pious only by the present numbness of their spirits. Those who could thaw their frozen hearts would once again experience the sharp, precise impression of a wealth of spiritual sensations. The prophets and Evangelists had "felt" the original joy of God's Wisdom. In a manner that escaped normal experience, they had actually "tasted," "smelled," and "drunk" it, savoring the sweet taste of the Wisdom of God with a sensibility undulled by long negligence.⁵⁹

It had been Origen's life's labor, as an exegete and guide of souls, to make the "spiritual senses" of his charges come alive again in their original intensity. By withdrawing from the dull anaesthesia of common, physical sensation, the soul of the "spiritual" person might recapture the sharp delights of another, more intensely joyful world. The believer's spirit would stand totally exposed before the Bridegroom, stripped of all sensual joys, to receive on a "naked" sensibility the exquisite touch of His darts.⁶⁰

Origen wrote Homilies on the Song of Songs, around 240, as a peculiarly consequential exponent of what has been aptly called the "wild" Platonism of his generation.⁶¹ In such a Platonism, sensuality could not simply be abandoned or repressed. Rather, the sharpness of sensual experience was brought back to its primordial intensity: it was reawakened, in the mystic's heart, at its true level—the level of the spirit. By contrast, physical pleasure was a stale and bland displacement of true feeling, a deflection of the spirit's huge capacity for delight into the dulled sensations of the body. The spirit must learn to "burn" in its deepest self, to yearn for the indefinable precision of the scent of God, to hope for the delicious particularity of the taste of Christ deep in the mouth, and to prepare itself for the final embrace of the Bridegroom. This meant, in effect—for Origen and for his successors—a discipline of the senses that was all the more searching because what was at stake was no longer simply continence, but the hesitant, fragile growth of a spiritual sense of preternatural sharpness. Physical indulgence, undue eating, undue enjoyment of sight and sound, the physical joys of sexual bonding in marriage: these became subjects of vigilance. Sensual experiences nurtured a counter sensibility. They led to a dulling of the spirit's true capacity for joy. They were a "cushion," which deadened the impact of those deeper, more vivid pleasures that might fall like kisses on the bared spirit.⁶²

Origen's attitude to marriage was so much sharper than that of Clement mainly because of the streak of "wild" Platonism that ran through his thought. A refined suspicion came to rest on the joys and duties of the married state for which Clement had still been prepared to praise the providence of God. The pleasures of the marriage bed, the intimacy and loyalty of married life, were slurred echoes of the more clear delights reserved for spirits unnumbed and uncushioned by sensual experience. The refined soul was well advised to shun them: they might bring about a degradation of the spiritual sense that was all the more subtle and anxiety-producing because it could not be pinned down with any great precision. Origen, and many like him in later centuries, felt, with the intangible certainty of a refined, almost an aesthetic, spiritual sensibility, that married intercourse actually coarsened the spirit. The spirit was destined for a moment of startling, unimaginably precise "knowledge" of Christ, of which the subtle "knowledge" of a partner gained through physical love was but a blurred and—so Origen was convinced—a distracting and inapposite echo.⁶³ The kisses of the Bridegroom would come only in the empty studyroom:

We find there a certain sensation of an embrace by the Spirit … and, oh, that I could be the one who yet might say: His left hand is beneath my head, and his right arm reaches around me.⁶⁴

Such a view cast a chill shadow over the marriage bed. As a social institution, the partnership of the married couple—their intimacy, their loyalty to each other, the ordered and benevolent hierarchy of husband and wife (topics on which the author of the pseudo-Pauline Letter to the Ephesians had written with such warmth)—struck Origen as valid symbols of the invisible concord of a redeemed creation. But even they were transient symbols.⁶⁵ As for the facts of the marriage-bed, there was something pointedly "inapposite" about them.⁶⁶ No amount of decorum in the sexual act could smooth away the incongruities associated with it. Origen did not share Clement's optimism on that score. Rather, seen with high Platonic eyes, married intercourse could be evoked only in terms of what it lacked. It made painfully clear the extent of the hiatus between itself and "true" spiritual joining. In this, Origen's thought resembled that of the Valentinian Gnostics. Married intercourse took place in a "chamber," that is, "in darkness." An undispelled suspicion of "wantonness" lingered over it. Knowledge of married love could not be a stepping stone, by which the soul might rise, through physical experience, to a higher, more spiritual sense of partnership with God. Rather, the experience of sexuality, even in marriage, was delineated with bleak precision, as a darkened antithesis to the blazing, light-filled embrace of Christ in the spirit.⁶⁷

Yet, with Origen, the same "wild" Platonism that would lead him to cast a dark shadow on the physical concomitants of marriage led him to fasten with complete satisfaction on the isolated virgin body. Here, at last, was a physical symbol that reflected without distortion the purity of the spiritual world. Solemnly set apart from married society, the bodies of the continent— men and women alike—stood out as privileged material objects: they were "temples of God:"

Do not think that just as the belly is made for food and food for the belly, that in the same way the body is made for intercourse. If you wish to understand the Apostle's train of reasoning, for what reason the body was made, then listen: it was made that it should be a temple to the Lord; that the soul, being holy and blessed, should act in it as if it were a priest serving before the Holy Spirit that dwells in you. In this manner, Adam had a body in Paradise; but in Paradise he did not "know" Eve.⁶⁸

Such Statements had practical implications. By 248, it was plain that a general persecution was imminent. The onset of persecution had been associated, in many cities, with a positive revival of a sense of the sacred in pagan communities: mobs had rioted at the instigation of pagan priests, angered by insults to the temples; and the Emperor Decius had come to believe that neglect of the visible gestures of sacrifice had jeopardized the safety of the Empire.⁶⁹ It was a time when a Christian teacher, such as Origen, had to make clear to pagan critics where exactly the "holy" might be found on earth. In order to reassure his devoted patron and disciple, Ambrosius, Origen began to rebut in great detail an attack on Christianity made by Celsus, a pagan Platonist, written some eighty years previously.

The long work contained quite remarkable statements on the "declaratory" role of the Christian virgin in the Roman world of the mid-third century. A sense of history comes to run through Origen's presentation of virginity. Virginity was presented as a privileged link between heaven and earth. For it was only through the "holy" body of a virgin woman that God had been able to join Himself to humanity, thus enabling the human race to speak, at last, of Immanuel, "God among us"⁷⁰ Christ's Incarnation, through His desent into a virgin body, marked the beginning of a historic mutation: "human and divine began to be woven together, so that by prolonged fellowship with divinity, human nature might become divine."⁷¹

And the "human nature" that was on its slow way to the divine was a nature most clearly revealed in bodies untouched by sexual experience. In Origen's view, perpetual continence, now upheld, for a wide variety of reasons, by little groups of Christian men and women all over the Mediterranean, made of such persons clearly privileged representatives of God's deepest purposes for the transformation of the human race.

What was at stake, between Celsus, the pagan, and Origen, the Christian, both of them Platonists, was where to find the holy in the visible world, and consequently from what source to derive the authority that the holy might come to exercise among men. A good Platonist, Celsus had looked to the material universe as a whole. Here was a refulgent "body," palpably worthy of the mighty Creator-soul that embraced it.⁷² The blazing Sun, the heavy clusters of the Milky Way: these were "bodies" set on fire by the touch of the Ideas. The quiet radiance of the One God, delegated to "angelic" ministers, better known to men in their traditional guise as the ancient gods, filtered down yet further beneath the Moon, to touch the dull earth, bathing with an untroubled light the immemorial holy places of pagan worship. Statues, temples, ancestral rites—these were the symbols that echoed most appositely on earth the blazing holiness of the heavens. Compared with these, the individual human body was too frail a thing to carry so much majesty: it was no more than a needy beggar that had sidled up to the soul, demanding with disagreeable insistence a small share of its attention.⁷³ Celsus was deeply angry because Jews, and now Christians, were claiming that they stood above all temples—even above the stars themselves. They claimed that they enjoyed direct communion with the One God of the universe. Celsus, and later Plotinus, Origen's younger contemporary (both of them Platonic philosophers steeped in the same culture as Origen), showed deep religious anger that such an overvaluation of their persons should have led Christians to overturn the established hierarchy of the universe. Mere human beings were to know their place, far below the stars; they must not claim that they could brush aside the gods who ministered to them from the distant heavens. Christians, Celsus had said, were like

frogs holding counsel round a marsh, or worms assembling in some filthy corner, saying "God has even deserted the whole world and the motions of the heavens and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone." They are like worms that say, "There is God first, and we are next after Him in rank … and all things exist for our benefit."⁷⁴

Faced by such withering indignation, Origen, the Christian Platonist, made the gran rifiuto that separated him forever from the "Ancient Wisdom" of his pagan colleagues. Christians, he replied, "have already learned … that the body of a rational being that is devoted to the God of the Universe is a temple of the God they worship."⁷⁵

The human body could be "offered up"; it could be "made holy" for God. The humble "ass" of the body could become the "resplendent" vehicle of the soul.⁷⁶ Each Christian man or woman could build their body into a "holy tabernacle of the Lord."⁷⁷

Look now at how you have progressed from being a tiny little human creature on the face of this earth. You have progressed to become a temple of God, and you who were mere flesh and blood have reached so far that you are a limb of Christ's body.⁷⁸

Let us now follow the fortunes of these "temples of God" in the Christian churches in the Mediterranean and the Near East through the decisive half century that stretched from the death of Origen, through further pagan reaction in the Great Persecution, to the conversion of Constantine and the first public appearance of Saint Anthony.

Notes

1. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.2.6. On the life of Origen, Pierre Nautin, Origène: sa vie et son oeuvre is essential, Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition, pp. 66-94 is judicious. For Eusebius' presentation of the youth of Origen, see Patricia Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man, pp. 69-101. Like all modern scholars, I am particularly indebted to the patient work of F. Crouzel, most especially his Origène et la "connaissance mystique " and Virginité et mariage chez Origène, and to W. Völker, Das Vollkommenheitsideal des Origenes. See also J. W. Trigg, Origen: the Bible and Philosophy in the Third-Century Church.
2. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.3.13-4.3.
3. Ibid. 6.3.4. and 41.1-23.
4. See Nautin, Origène, pp. 69-101 and 421-432 and Trigg, Origen, pp. 130-146.
5. See Nautin, Origène, pp. 433-441 and Trigg, Origen, pp. 241-243. G. W. Clarke, The Letters of Saint Cyprian of Carthage, Ancient Christian Writers 43, pp. 22-39, esp. pp. 35-36, gives a masterly account of the pressure put on leading Christians to sacrifice and the consequent discreet release of those who proved too difficult to frighten into conformity.
6. This aspect of Origen is beautifully evoked by Marguerite Harl, Origéne et la fonction révélatrice du Verbe incarné, pp. 360-363.
7. In Num. 17.4, Griechische christliche Schriftsteller: Origenes Werke 7, p. 163.
8. In Ezech. 3.1, Origenes Werke 8, p. 349.
9. In Joh. 10.18.105, ed. Cécile Blanc, Origène: Commentaire sur Saint Jean, Sources chrétiennes 157, p. 444 and Hom. in Cant. Cant. 2.8, in O. Rousseau, ed., Origène: Homélies sur le Cantique des Cantiques, p. 95. See esp. Marguerite Harl, "Le langage de l'expérience religieuse chez les pères grecs."
10. Origen's view of contemporary bishops was distinctly unflattering: in Matt. 16.6, Origenes Werke 10, pp. 493-497.
11. Gregory Nazianzen cited in Suidas, Lexicon, A. Adler, ed., 3:619.
12. Dialogue with Heraclides 150, in H. E. Chadwick, trans., Alexandrian Christianity, p. 446.
13. Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity, pp. 430-436, provides a quite exceptionally good introduction to the incident.
14. De Principiis. 2.9.7.245, in F. Crouzel and M. Simonetti, eds., Origène: Traité des Principes, Sources chrétiennes 252, p. 368.
15. Ibid. 1.3.8.323, p. 164.
16. Ibid. 2.8.3.120, p. 344.
17. See esp. Marguerite Harl, "Recherches sur l'origènisme d'Origéne: la 'satiété' (kóros) de la contemplation comme motif de la chute des âmes."
18. De Princip. 2.6.5-6.159-192, pp. 318-320.
19. In Num. 17.4, p. 160.
20. De Princip. 1.7.5.180, pp. 218-220.
21. See esp. Elaine Pagels, The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis.
22. Ibid. 1.7.5.156, p. 216, citing Romans 8:19.
23. This has been made plain in general by Hal Koch, Pronoia und Paideusis. Studien über Origenes und sein Verhältnis zum Platonismus, esp. pp. 28-30; see now Trigg, Origen, pp. 103-120 and Margaret R. Miles, Fullness of Life, pp. 49-61.
24. De Princip. 1.3.8.319-320, p. 164.
25. In Joh. 19.20.132, Sources chrétiennes 292, p. 126.
26. De Princip. 1.8.165, p. 86 and 2.8.3.150, p. 346.
27. Ibid. 1.6.3.111, p. 1ll ; in G. W. Butterworth, trans., Origen: On First Principles, p. 56.
28. In Ezech. 1.3, Origenes Werke 8, 324-325.
29. De Princip. 3.2.3.157, Sources chrétiennes 268, p. 164.
30. In Num. 2.2, p. 11.
31. De Princip. Praef. 5.111, p. 84.
32. In Num. 20.3, p. 195.
33. Ibid. 11.9, p. 93.
34. In Jerem. (Latin version) 2.12, Origenes Werke 8:301.
35. De Princip. 3.2.4.250, Sources chrétiennes 268: p. 168.
36. Ibid. 3.2.2.89 and 96, p. 158.
37. Ibid. 3.2.4.292, Sources chrétiennes 268: p. 172, citing Proverbs 4:23.
38. In Num. 20.3, p. 193.
39. De Princip. 3.1.23.1025 [Latin of Rufinus], Sources chrétiennes 268, p. 146; Butterworth trans., p. 209.
40. Ibid. 1.6.4.104, p. 204: On gold as "healed" matter, see esp. S. Averincev, "L'or dans le système des symboles de la culture protobyzantine," esp. p. 63.
41. In Joh. 1.30.205-206, pp. 160-162.
42. In Num. 9.6-7, pp. 62-64.
43. Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. 6.8.2-3: see Pierre Nautin, Lettres et écrivains des iième et iiième siècles, pp. 121-126. The reader should know that Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, p. 67 is unconvinced that such an incident ever happened. I think that the sources for it are sufficiently reliable, that there was nothing impossible about such an action in the third century, and, hence, that—at the very least—Origen could certainly have been viewed as someone who had had himself castrated.
44. Aline Rousselle, Porneia: de la maîtrise du corps à la privation sensorielle, pp. 158-164 takes us into a world little dreamed of by most commentators.
45. Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. 6.8.2.
46. Justin, I Apology 29.2; Henry Chadwick, The Sentences of Sextus, p. 111 provides full evidence on the prevalence of castration in third-and fourth-century Christian circles.
47. In Matt 15.1, pp. 347-353.
48. See Basil of Ancyra, de virginitate tuenda 61, Patrologia Graeca 30: 769C for the misdeeds of eunuchs in Christian circles.
49. In Matt 15.3, p. 356.
50. Claudius Mamertinus, Panegyrici latini 11.19.4.
51. In Joh. 1.31.183 and 187, pp. 330 and 334.
52. Eusebius, Eccles. Hist 6.3.13-4.3 and in Jud. 9.1. Origenes Werke 7, p. 518.
53. Sentences of Sextus 346, Chadwick ed., p. 5; see pp. 114-115 on Origen and "Sextus."
54. Thus fish have a scaly body suited to their watery environment and angels shimmering bodies suited to their life in etherial fire: Origen apud Methodius, de Resurrectione 1.22.4-5: see H. Chadwick, "Origen, Celsus and the Resurrection of the Body."
55. Fragments on I Corinthians, 42 C. Jenkins, ed., p. 512.
56. In Matt 14.22, p. 338.
57. Ibid., 17.33, pp. 690-691.
58. On this topic, see the excellent introduction of O. Rousseau, Origène: Homélies sur le Cantique des Cantiques, pp. 21-25. I am indebted to John Dillon, "Aesthésis Noété: a doctrine of spiritual senses in Origen and in Plotinus," who makes plain that the final formulation of the notion takes place only in Origen's later years. Patricia Cox, "Origen and the Bestial Soul," and now "Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure: Eros and Language in Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs" are suggestive treatments.
59. Contra Celsum 1.48: see the translation and notes of Henry Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, p. 44; cf. in Num. 21.1, p. 200—the Levites are those of "undulled" sensibility.
60. Hom. in Cant. Cant. 2.8, p. 132.
61. The phrase is that of A. H. Armstrong, "Neoplatonic Valuations of Nature, Body and Intellect," at p. 41.
62. Hom. in Cant. Cant. 2.9, p. 134. By the same token, the pains of Hell will be more excruciating for the spirit, just as blows fall more sharply on a naked than on a clothed body: see the citation in Pamphilus, Apologia for Origen 8: Patrologia Graeca 8: 602D- 603B; trans. Nautin, Origène, p. 274.
63. In Joh. 19.4.1, Sources chrétiennes 290, pp. 22-25.
64. Hom. in Cant. Cant. 1.2, p. 65. By contrast, the bedroom is not regarded as a proper place for prayer: de orat. 31.4; see esp. Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Origene: studi di antrop ologia, pp. 234-242.
65. Fragments on Ephesians, 29, J. A. Gregg, ed. p. 566.
66. Hom. in Cant. Cant. 2.1, p. 80.
67. Fragments on I Corinthians, 39, p. 510, citing Romans 13:13.
68. Fragments on I Corinthians, 29, p. 370.
69. Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. 6.41.1: mobs stirred up in Alexandria by pagan priests; on Decius, see Clarke, Letters of Saint Cyprian, pp. 21-25, and now Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 451-454.
70. Contra Celsum 1.35, Chadwick, trans., p. 34.
71. Ibid. 3.28, p. 146.
72. This has been particularly well stated, in the case of Plotinus, by A. H. Armstrong, Saint Augustine and Christian Platonism. Now in R. A. Markus, Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 13.
73. Plotinus, Enneads 1.8.14.
74. C. Cels. 4.23, pp. 199-200; compare Plotinus, Enneads 2.9: Against the Gnostics.
75. Ibid. 4.26, pp. 201-202.
76. in Jud. 6.5, Origenes Werke 7:503.
77. In Exod. 13.5, pp. 277-278.
78. in Jes. Nave 5.5, Origenes Werke 7:319.