Lecture 12: The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy
Origen of Alexandria
• With Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254), the place of a philosophical
Christianity was firmly secured.• An indication of the changing face of Christianity is the fact that
Origen was born of Christian parents and raised from childhood in
the faith.
o His father was martyred in the persecution of 202. When
Clement fled the city, Origen took over (at the age of 17!) as
head of the Alexandrian catechetical school.o He traveled to Rome and Arabia, settled for a time in Palestine,
returned to Alexandria, and finally settled in Caesarea. As a
priest, he preached regularly on the Scriptures.o We saw earlier that he wrote fervently on the ideal of
martyrdom. In the persecution of Decius (250), Origen was
imprisoned and tortured but steadfastly professed the faith.
He died soon after, not technically a martyr but certainly a
confessor of the faith.• Origen was a prodigy of scholarship; although only a small portion
of his work has survived, it was vast.
o As a biblical scholar, he produced a six-column version of the
Old Testament in Hebrew, a transliteration, the Septuagint, and
three other Jewish Greek translations, complete with critical
apparatus. He also wrote commentaries on many books of the
Bible and countless homilies.o He was Christianity’s first systematic theologian, attempting to
align the truths of the faith with a wider understanding of reality
established by reason. In his First Principles, Origen placed the
Christian faith within a wide-ranging and ambitious vision—
basically Platonic—of the derivation of all being from God and
the eventual restoration of all creatures in God (apokatastasis).