Treasure Hidden in a Field: Reading the Bible with Origen
Furches’ Method
A long, long time ago, in a land far, far away…during my freshman year of college, every Thursday night I scampered over to the Baptist Collegiate Ministry house for the freshman Bible study. We were all wide-eyed Jesus nerds, hungry for depth and detail, and our teachers were super-cool sophomores, excited to dish it out.
Most of us, including the teachers, as we read the Bible, took what I would call a historical and an ethical approach. We wanted to know what the scripture meant “originally,” in its historical context for its “original” audience, and we also wanted to apply the text to our personal lives, either by imaginatively identifying with the story or situation, or by analyzing its moral implications. Growing up in a world of psychological novels, action movies, and cliff-hanger tv-shows, our interpretive instincts had been honed to follow the story closely, to get into the shoes of the characters or author.
Over the weeks of the Bible study, however, one young man, Brian Furches (we all just called him Furches, to differentiate him from several other Brians) distinguished himself with what seemed to me to be a curious style of interpretation. He spoke with daring and excitement, as if he were discovering new puzzle pieces with every word of scripture. To him the Bible was intricately related with itself. Probably all of us believed that the Bible was unified in the love of God, perhaps summed up with the great commandment or John 3:16 or some such verse, but he led us to more than that. And not only did he find evidence of intricate, intertextual connections, but lo and behold the connections were connected! A great pattern emerged! Everything that could be symbolic was symbolic, and if you followed the silvery thread from symbol to symbolized, you always ended up somewhere awesome.
I loved hearing him work on a passage of scripture, you could hear the wheels turning and dots connecting. I didn’t whole-heartedly buy into his method or conclusions - it seemed too easy for him to find the meaning he was looking for...but couldn’t you say that about all of us? There is always a circular shape to exegesis, but his circle seemed particularly tight and complete, too tight for my porous, post-modern, certainly-uncertain self. Nevertheless, his process was energetic and fun, and I wanted in.
Heirs to Origen
Fast forward many, many years! It’s December 2018 and I have to pick a saint or church mother or father for my Ruah report. I wanted to pick someone I was unfamiliar with, and/or someone crazy...that didn’t narrow it down very much! I’d heard two things about Origen: that he had castrated himself, and that he was notoriously symbolic with his Biblical interpretation. Bingo! He’s my man.
Well, in reading Origen and reading about him, I’ve discovered that my old friend Furches was continuing a long and venerable tradition of Biblical interpretation. In many ways, he, and the rest of us in the freshman Bible study, were heirs to Origen.
Origen was an all-star “allegorical” interpreter. For him, “allegorical” meant ‘other speaking,’ or any non-literal understanding (Martens). For critics today, “allegory” usually refers to a story or scenario that, in addition to its ordinary meaning, also has a symbolic or abstract meaning. Pilgrim’s Progress and Hinds Feet in High Places are very explicit spiritual allegories. Think vertical, like a double decker bus; the first deck is the literal meaning (“give us this day our daily bread”), and situated above it is the second deck, the symbolic meaning (dear God teach us your holy Word, or nourish us with Christ’s body, etc).
Furches also demonstrated what critics today call “typological” interpretation: the ordinary meaning of a story or scenario prefigures another story or scenario. Think horizontal, like an articulated bus; the back part of the bus (Moses makes a bronze snake and puts it on a pole) connects by a stretchy middle to the front part of the bus (“just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”...John 3:14), which is really the motorized part.
See, I just used a double decker bus and an articulated bus allegorically to refer to allegory and typology! I’m learning already. No, seriously, we do it all the time without thinking about it. Symbolism, metaphor, allegory, “figures of speech” - they are part and parcel of language. The question isn’t, do we use allegory? The question is, when and how can we interpret the Bible allegorically?
Some allegory and lots of symbolism are explicitly named into the Bible. For example, Nathan tells a story about an abusive rich man to David and then interprets it, “You are that man!”, in order to convict David of his sin. In the gospels Jesus interprets the parable of the sower allegorically for his disciples. Paul interprets Hagar and Sarah allegorically in Galatians, and the author of Ephesians uses marriage as a “mystery” of Christ and the Church. The gospels use lots of Old Testament imagery and story-line to typologically situate Jesus as messiah.
Origen takes this and runs with it, as we shall see. In fact, Origen is convinced every word of scripture has at least two or three levels of meaning. What stood out about Furches, and what stands out for me about Origen, is their passion for allegorical adventures, their thorough commitment to discover the symbolic treasure hidden in the field of the Bible.
Origin of Origen
Before I’m completely swept away by Origen’s hermeneutics, let’s take a look at his life. Most if his biographical information comes from the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, who was a big fan of Origen’s and also wrote an apology for him. Origen, one of the most prolific ecclesiastical writers - Jerome quipped that he wrote more than anyone could ever read - apparently wrote very little about his own life.
Origen was born in 185 C.E. in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt and one of the most prominent cities in the Roman Empire. His parents were Christian, so he was brought up in the church, feed daily by the scriptures, and his father, Leonides, was a teacher, so that Origen also studied the Greek classics from an early age. When Origen was a teenager, his father was imprisoned during a wave of persecution under Emperor Septimius Severus. Eusebius writes that Origen yearned to join his father and face martyrdom together with him, but that his mother prevented him by hiding his clothes and with other ingenious strategems. (He was willing to face death but not public nudity? Perhaps it would have been a serious sin to run naked through the streets.) His father was eventually killed, and Origen took up his father’s trade in order to support his family.
Before long he was asked by the local bishop Demetrius to head the “catechetical school,” where he had studied himself. He was only 19 years old at the time and had big shoes to fill. The famous Clement had only recently left the post. Apparently Origen fit the role hand-in-glove, for the school grew quickly.
Eusebius describes Origen as a very devout young man, fasting, praying, denying himself, eager to serve the Lord and search the scriptures. Origen strove to become “worthy” of understanding, and he writes that worthiness is achieved through Christ in ethical living as well as scriptural study. “For these things go together inseparably: the pure word in the soul and an irreproachable life” (B 641).
“Origen’s Daring Deed” (Eusebius)
In Origen’s pursuit of the irreproachable life, Eusebius relates that “he took the words, ‘There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,’ in too literal and extreme a sense.” Or perhaps he applied Jesus’s advice, “it is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell.” Or maybe Paul’s claim in Galatians that In Christ “there is no longer male and female.” In other words, he had himself castrated.
How ironic! The master of allegory takes the Bible too literally! But it’s more complicated. Origen was a popular young teacher with many admiring students, both male and female. Eusebius speculates that he wanted to protect his reputation and purity of heart. Peter Brown, in The Body and Society, explains that the surgical procedure was common enough to be controversial in the early church. The ancients believed that cutting off the testicles would basically eliminate the sexual “heat” of a man, but if Origen was 19 or 20 at the time, I doubt it solved any of his lust problems. Brown notes that Origen himself preached against taking the “eunuch” verse literally, so perhaps that is evidence that Origen regretted his decision. Another historian, Henry Chadwick, thinks the whole story was made up.
Perhaps Origen also wanted to prevent his ordination, or felt unworthy of it. Following Biblical legal tradition, the council of Nicea (much later than Origen) stated that a man castrated by choice should not be ordained, or if he was already ordained, he should be suspended. This may have already been an unwritten rule in Origen’s day (I think I remember him explicitly referring to it, but I can’t find the passage now).
In any case, Eusebius writes that Origen “thought this [castration] would not be known by many of his acquaintances. But it was impossible for him, though desiring to do so, to keep such an action secret.” Tough luck for Origen! He is most famous for something he hoped would be secret.
You Can Write A Lot With Seven Hands
As the catechetical school grew, Origen decided start an advanced class, “modeled upon the philosophical schools of his day” (Greer 4), and he left the catechesis class to his student, Heraclas, who later became bishop of Alexandria. Origen not only taught but constantly studied, learning Hebrew from and arguing with a local Jewish Rabbi - Alexandria had a vibrant Jewish community. Over the course of 28 years, Origen gathered and studied manuscripts, creating a kind of Old Testament study guide, called the Hexapla, comparing in six columns the Hebrew text with the Septuagint and other Greek translations.
Origen also continued to read and discuss philosophy. Porphyry, the famous writer and disciple of the even more famous Plotinus, records that Origen also studied with Plotinus’ teacher Ammonius. Porphyry writes that Origen “was continually studying Plato, and he busied himself with the writings of Numenius and Cronius,...and those famous among the Pythagoreans…, Ch’remon the Stoic” and so forth. Origen hoped to, in the spirit of Paul, become intellectually a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks, so that “by all possible means [he] might save some” (1 Cor 9:22). Eusebius quotes one of Origen’s letters, “When I devoted myself to the Word, and the fame of my proficiency went abroad, and when heretics and persons conversant with Grecian learning, and particularly with philosophy, came to me, it seemed necessary that I should examine the doctrines of the heretics, and what the philosophers say concerning the truth.”
One such heretic, a wealthy man named Ambrose, a follower of the gnostic Christian Vallentius, came to hear Origen. The encounter had such an effect on Ambrose that he not only converted to orthodoxy, he pleaded with Origen, “dude, you’ve got to be writing this stuff down!” Ambrose paid for “more than seven amanuenses” (stenographers), as well as copyists, to write in shifts.
Origen was prolific, and intense, earning the nickname “Adamantius,” man of steel. Gregory Nanzianzen called him “the whetstone of us all.” Hans Balthasar says he dictated to his team “practically day and night.” Thanks to Ambrose’s publication squad, Origen produced, according to Epiphanius, 6000 volumes: mostly commentaries and homilies on scripture. Much of this work was condemned and destroyed under the Emperor Justinian, long after Origen’s death.
A Preaching Scandal
From our perspective, becoming a eunuch seems like the biggest tabloid story of Origen’s life. But according to Eusebius his real scandal started with a sermon. It wasn’t what he was preaching that was the problem, but to whom he was preaching. At some point early in his career he visited Caesarea, where the bishops of Palestine and Jerusalem asked him to expound the scriptures during service, even though Origen had not been ordained as presbyter or priest. His own bishop, Demetrius, the same man who had appointed him as head of the catechetical school, on hearing this took great offence; “such an act was never either heard or done before, that laymen should deliver discourses in the presence of the bishops,” he wrote in a letter. Demetrius recalled and rebuked Origen, who apparently accepted his punishment without protest.
Years later, Origen was called to Greece to help dispute heretical teachings, and Demetrius gave him a letter of recommendation. When Origen passed through Palestine, those same two bishops ordained him presbyter, perhaps hoping to avoid committing the same faux pas. Alas, they only added insult to injury. When Origen returned to Alexandria, Demetrius called a synod and had Origen excommunicated from the church in Alexandria and demoted from the office of presbyter. Maybe Demetrius was jealous of Origen’s fame; maybe he was just a stickler for the rules. Whatever the case, Origen returned to Caesarea, one of the only churches in which he was still recognized as a presbyter, and continued his study, writing, and teaching.
Like Father Like Son
Christianity was growing rapidly in the Origen’s time, and not everyone was happy about that. The Roman Empire was generally tolerant of local religion, but refusal to participate in civic-religious ceremonies, or other counter-cultural, anti-social behaviors on the part of Christians, led to their periodic persecution. Paradoxically, the killing of Christians and the way they approached their execution added fuel to the fire of the church. Tertullian, another famous African Christian several years older than Origen, wrote, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Origen himself wrote An Exhortation to Martyrdom, dedicated to Ambrose and to another friend, and Eusebius lists many of Origen’s students among the martyrs in Alexandria.
Sometime around 250 C.E., the Emperor Decius decreed that all subjects of the empire must sacrifice to the Roman gods and the health of the emperor. Many Christians refused and were executed, many fled into hiding, others performed the sacrifices. Origen, 65 by this time, finally followed in his father footsteps, just as he had desired as a youth. He was imprisoned and tortured in Tyre, and was later released, but died soon after, near the age of 70.
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