The scholar who castrated himself
Origen's early zeal
Origen is eighteen years old when his father Leonidas is martyred in the Severan persecution. He tries to join his father. His mother hides his clothes to prevent him from leaving the house. He writes a letter urging his father not to recant for the family's sake. The letter reaches Leonidas in prison. He does not recant.
Origen is left as the eldest of seven children with no income and no father. A wealthy Christian woman takes the family in. Within months Origen has opened a school and is earning money as a teacher of grammar. He teaches pagans in the day and instructs Christian converts in the evening.
The bishop of Alexandria, impressed and overwhelmed, entrusts him with the full catechetical school at eighteen.
The intensity of Origen's early life is extraordinary. He sleeps on the floor. He fasts more than the church requires. He walks barefoot. He owns no extra clothes. He sells his library of classical texts for a modest stipend so that he can spend all his time on scripture.
And then — in a decision he will spend the rest of his life wishing he could take back — he reads Matthew 19:12, the verse about those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom, and takes it literally.
He acts on it himself.
The church is appalled. The bishop of Alexandria, who had trusted him with the school, is disturbed. Later in his life, when Origen is ordained by bishops in another province, Alexandria refuses to recognize it partly on these grounds.
Origen will spend decades teaching that the verse was never meant literally. He will be right. He will never stop paying for having been wrong.
“The soul, making progress, comes at last to the Word, who is the beginning of all things, and in him finds its rest.”
— Origen, On First Principles, c. 220 AD
“who also made us sufficient as servants of a new covenant; not of the letter, but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.”
Origen took scripture seriously enough to act on a literal reading of it, and the action was irreversible and wrong.
This is a sobering story about the danger of reading the Bible without the community — without the accumulated wisdom of those who have read it before you, without the check of others who love both the text and you.
The church's rule of faith was not only a theological guardrail. It was also protection against the kind of solitary, hyper-literal reading that produces irreversible mistakes made with the best intentions.
Have you ever made a decision based on a reading of scripture that you later understood differently? What would it mean to hold your interpretations more humbly — not less seriously, but more submitted to the reading community?