Origen, though, was nothing daunted. Christians might have no monuments to compare with those that had drawn Caracalla to the city, no rivals to the massive bulk of the Serapeum; but they did not need them. ‘All of us who believe in Christ Jesus are said to be living stones.’32 Here, constructed out of the world’s Christians, and with Christ himself as ‘the chief cornerstone’,33 was the great temple that Origen aimed to buttress against its adversaries. Unlike the homelands of other peoples, that of the Christian people existed beyond the dimensions of altars, and hearth-fires, and fields. Indeed, without their belief in Christ as Lord, it would not have existed at all. It was Ignatius, a century before Origen, who had first given it the name that would endure for ever after.34 Christianismos, he had called it: ‘Christianity’.
‘Every time we understand,’ wrote Origen, ‘we owe it to our faith that we understand.’35 So novel was what Christians meant by Christianismos that it could not help but colour the way that they saw the rest of the world. The various haereses taught by Basilides and his ilk did not, in the opinion of Origen, constitute simply a range of different opinions and philosophies, but rather a hydra-headed parody of the one True Church. Ioudaismos, a word that in the centuries before Christ had sometimes signified a Jewish way of life, and sometimes its propagation and defence, had come to possess for Christians a much more precise meaning, one that cast Jews as the citizens of a presumed counter-point to ‘Christianity’: ‘Judaism’. Most baneful of all, though, were the cults of those whom Paul had termed ‘outsiders’:36 those who, from the rising to the setting of the sun, set up idols. Christians, precisely because they defined themselves in terms of their faith, could not help but assume the same of those who worshipped other gods. That a Philoserapis like Caracalla was concerned pre-eminently not with whether Serapis existed or not, but rather with honouring him in the mandated way, with respecting the taboos that hedged about his worship, and with paying him the correct dues of sacrifice, tended to pass them by. Even Origen, who knew perfectly well that many of those who made offerings to idols ‘do not take them for gods, but only as offerings dedicated to the gods’,37 shuddered before the horror that such rituals seemed to imply. To spatter an altar with gore betrayed much about the beings that could demand such an offering. That they battened onto carcasses. That they were vampiric in their appetites. ‘That they delighted in blood.’38 To propitiate them was to feed the very forces that threatened humanity with darkness.
Yet there was a paradox. Origen, for all his hostility towards the seductions and the assumptions of the great city in which he lived, remained a native of it through and through. More completely, perhaps, than anyone before him, he blended Alexandria’s various traditions within himself. The city – multi-cultural though it was – had never been a true melting pot. The interest that many Greeks took in Jewish teachings, and that many Jews took in philosophy, had always been circumscribed by the prescriptions of the Mosaic covenant. Christianity, though, provided a matrix in which the Jewish and the Greek were able to mingle as well as meet. No one demonstrated this to more fruitful effect than Origen. A devotion to Christianity’s inheritance from the Jews was manifest in all he wrote. Not only did he go to the effort of learning Hebrew from a Jewish teacher, but the Jewish people themselves he hailed as family: as the Church’s ‘little sister’, or else ‘the brother of the bride’.39 Marcion’s sneer that orthodox Christians were Jew-lovers was not one that Origen would necessarily have disputed. Certainly, he did more to embed the great body of Jewish scripture within the Christian canon, and to enshrine it as an ‘Old Testament’, than anyone before or since. A critic as honest as he was subtle, he did not deny the challenge that this represented. That the sacred books of the Jews, their biblia, were rife ‘with riddles, parables, dark sayings, and various other forms of obscurity’40 he readily acknowledged. Yet all of them derived from God. Contradictions only hinted at hidden truths. The challenge for the reader was to access them. Scripture was like a mansion with an immense number of locked rooms, and an equal number of keys, all of which lay scattered about the house. This haunting image, so Origen declared, had been suggested to him by his Hebrew teacher; and yet, in his own efforts to track down the keys, to open the locked doors, he relied on methods that derived from a very different source. In the great library of Alexandria, scholars had long been honing methods for making sense of ancient texts: treating their subject matter as allegory, and their language as an object of the most methodical study. Origen, in his own commentaries, adopted both techniques. Jewish the great mansion of the Old Testament may have been; but the surest method for exploring it was Greek.
‘Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.’41 That God had spoken to the Greeks as well as to the Jews was not a theory that originated with Origen. Just as Paul, in his correspondence, had approvingly cited the Stoic concept of conscience, so had many Christians since found in philosophy authentic glimmerings of the divine. No one in the Church, though, had ever before rivalled Origen for his sheer mastery of the discipline. Schooled in the classics of Greek literature since childhood, and familiar with the most cutting-edge work of his philosophical contemporaries, he identified in it the same quest to which he had devoted his own life: the search for God. Christianity, in Origen’s opinion, was not merely compatible with philosophy, but the ultimate expression of it. ‘No one can truly do duty to God,’ he declared, ‘who does not think like a philosopher.’42 Sure enough, even when Origen left Alexandria he never forgot his roots in the capital of Greek learning. First in 215, in temporary flight from Caracalla, and then again in 234 on a permanent basis, he settled in Caesarea, a port on the coast of what he termed the ‘Holy Land’ – and established there a school that embodied the very best of his native city. ‘No subject was forbidden us,’ one of his students would later recall, ‘nothing hidden or put away. Every doctrine – Greek or not – we were encouraged to study. All the good things of the mind were ours to enjoy.’ 43
Naturally, Origen did not propose that philosophy be studied as an end in itself. That, he warned his students, would be to wander for ever lost in a swamp, or a labyrinth, or a forest. Shot through with errors though the speculations of philosophers might be, they nevertheless could still help to illumine Christian truth. Just as traditions of textual inquiry honed in Alexandria had helped Origen to elucidate the complexities of Jewish scripture, so did he use philosophy to shed light on an even more profound puzzle: the nature of God himself. The need was urgent. The gospel proclaimed by Paul, the conviction that had animated him and all the first generation of Christians, the revelation that a crucified criminal had in some unspecified but manifest way been an aspect of the very Creator of the heavens and the earth, constituted the molten heart of Christianity. Yet it raised an obvious question. How, when Christians accorded Jesus a status that was somehow divine, could they possibly claim to worship only the single god? Greek philosophers no less than Jewish scholars, when they deigned to take note of the upstart faith, would relentlessly home in on this point. The challenge could not be ducked. The struggle, then, was to find an adequate way of expressing a mystery that seemed to defy expression. It was not just Jesus who had to be integrated into the oneness of God, but his Spirit as well. The solution, by the time Origen came to this puzzle, was already clear in its outline. The unity of God came, not in spite of his Son and Spirit, but through them. One was Three; Three were One. God was a Trinity.