It was Origen, though, more comprehensively and more brilliantly than anyone before him, who drew on the resources of philosophy to fashion for the Church an entire theologia: a science of God. The language he used to explore the paradoxes of the divine was deployed in the full knowledge of the uses to which it had long previously been put by a Xenocrates or a Zeno. His school in Caesarea, for all its insistence on the Christian canon as the ultimate summit of wisdom, was recognisably in a line of descent that reached back to Aristotle, and beyond. No one, after Origen’s labours in the service of his faith, would be able to charge that Christians appealed only to ‘the ignorant, the stupid, the unschooled’.44 The potency of this achievement, in a society that took for granted the value of education as an indicator of status, was immense. Contempt for those who lacked a grounding in philosophy ran deep. Knowledge – gnosis – was widely viewed as a definitive marker of class. Even Christians were not immune to this prejudice. When Irenaeus described teachers such as Basilides as ‘Gnostics’, he was identifying as their defining characteristic their claim to be better informed than everyone else. ‘Tradition they scorn, insisting that they know things that neither the elders of the Church knew, nor even the apostles – for they alone have identified the unadulterated truth.’45 This was the temptation against which Origen, in labouring to shape a theology that could satisfy the learned, had to guard. Much was at stake. Cults, after all, were rarely categorised as philosophies; nor philosophies cults. The claim of Christianity to a universal message could not rest merely on the presence of churches from Mesopotamia to Spain. It had to appeal to people of every class, and of every level of education. In a society that ranked philosophy alongside vintage statuary and exotic spices as one of the perks of the rich, Origen was a living, breathing paradox: a philosopher who defied elitism.
That an identity might be defined by belief was in itself a momentous innovation; but that the learned and the illiterate alike might be joined by it, ‘becoming – despite their multitude – one single body’,46 was no less startling a notion. The genius of Origen was to create out of the inheritance of Greek philosophy an entire new universe of the mind – one in which even the least educated could share. When he hailed God as ‘pure intelligence’,47 he was arguing nothing that Aristotle had not long previously said. Philosophy, though, was only the beginning of what Origen had to teach. The divine nous, far from lingering in the motionlessness of a chilly perfection, had descended to earth. The mystery of it was at once beyond the comprehension of even the greatest of scholars, and a cause of wonder that labourers and kitchen maids could admire. If Origen, drawing on the great treasury of Greek and Jewish literature, would sometimes describe Christ as divine reason, and sometimes as ‘the stainless mirror of the activity of God’,48 then there were times as well when he confessed himself quite as stupefied as the littlest child. When contemplating how the Wisdom of God had entered the womb of a woman, and been born a baby, and cried for milk, the paradox of it all was too much even for him. ‘For since we see in Christ some things so human that they appear to share in every aspect in the common frailty of humanity, and some things so divine that they are manifestly the expression of the primal and ineffable nature of the Divine, the narrowness of human understanding is inadequate to cope. Overcome with amazement and admiration, it knows not where to turn.’49
Here, in this fusion of deeply read sophistication and wide-eyed awe, was something recognisably of the seed-bed of Alexandria – and yet also disconcertingly new. By scorning to see the contemplation of heaven’s mysteries as philosophers had traditionally done, as the exclusive preserve of the educated and the wealthy, Origen had created a matrix for the propagation of philosophical concepts that would prove to have momentous reach. Far from damaging his reputation, his refusal to behave in the manner of a conventional philosopher ended up only enhancing his fame. Turning sixty, Origen could reflect with pride on a career so influential that even the mother of an emperor, intrigued by his celebrity, had once summoned him to instruct her in the nature of God. Such fame, though, was as likely to stoke hostility as admiration. The age was a treacherous one. The violence brought by Caracalla to the streets of Alexandria had been an ominous portent of even darker times ahead. In the decades that followed, sorrows had come not single spies, but in battalions. Caracalla himself, murdered while relieving himself on campaign, had been just one of a succession of emperors slain in a blizzard of assassinations and civil wars. Meanwhile, taking full advantage of the escalating chaos, barbarian warbands had begun to seep across the frontiers. On the empire’s eastern doorstep, a new Persian dynasty – the most formidable to have emerged since the time of Darius – visited a succession of humiliations on Roman power. The gods, it seemed, were angry. The correct religiones were manifestly being neglected. The fault, in the wake of Caracalla’s mass grant of citizenship, lay not just in Rome, but in the empire as a whole. Accordingly, early in 250, a formal decree was issued that everyone – with the sole exception of the Jews – offer up sacrifice to the gods. Disobedience was equated with treason; and the punishment for treason was death. For the first time, Christians found themselves confronted by legislation that directly obliged them to choose between their lives and their faith. Many chose to save their skins – but many did not. Among those arrested was Origen. Although put in chains and racked, he refused to recant. Spared execution, he was released after days of brutal treatment a broken man. He never recovered. A year or so later, the aged scholar was dead of the sufferings inflicted on him by his torturers.
The magistrate presiding over his case, respectful of his reputation, had taken no pleasure in the torments inflicted on such a brilliant man. As they had ever done, the Roman authorities found the refusal of Christians to make sacrifice to the gods as pig-headed as it was subversive. Why citizens who insisted on their loyalty to the empire should refuse to demonstrate it and simply make a pledge of allegiance bewildered them. That a ritual sanctified by both tradition and patriotism might cause anyone offence was an idea that they struggled to comprehend. Origen had been put to torture as much in sorrow as in anger.