Origen, Also Called Adamantius

Origen, surnamed Adamantius, was about seventeen years old when a persecution was raised against the Christians in the tenth year of Severus Pertinax. His father Leonidas received the crown of martyrdom for Christ, and Origen was left in poverty with his six brothers and his widowed mother, for their property had been confiscated because they confessed Christ. When he was only eighteen years old, he took up the work of teaching the catechumens in the scattered churches of Alexandria. Later Demetrius, bishop of that city, appointed him successor to the presbyter Clement, and he flourished for many years. When he had already reached middle life, he was traveling to Athens by way of Palestine, on account of the churches of Achaia, which were torn by many heresies, and he went under the authority of a letter from the church. He was ordained presbyter by Theoctistus and Alexander, bishops of Caesarea and Jerusalem, and this offended Demetrius, who was so wildly enraged at him that he wrote everywhere to damage his reputation. It is known that before he went to Caesarea he had been at Rome, under Bishop Zephyrinus. Immediately on his return to Alexandria he made the presbyter Heraclas, who went on wearing his philosopher’s cloak, his assistant in the school for catechumens. Heraclas became bishop of the church of Alexandria after Demetrius. How great Origen’s fame was can be seen from this: Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea, with all the bishops of Cappadocia, asked him to visit and kept him as a guest for a long while. Some time afterward Firmilian, going to Palestine to visit the holy places, came to Caesarea and was taught the Holy Scriptures at length by Origen. It can be seen also from this: at the request of Mammaea, mother of the emperor Alexander and a woman of religious mind, he went to Antioch and was held in great honor there. He also sent letters to the emperor Philip, who was the first of the Roman rulers to become a Christian, and to Philip’s mother, and these letters still survive. Who does not know, too, that he was so devoted to the study of the Holy Scriptures that, against the spirit of his time and of his people, he learned the Hebrew language? Taking the Septuagint translation, he gathered the other translations as well into a single work: that of Aquila of Pontus, the proselyte; that of Theodotion the Ebionite; and that of Symmachus, an adherent of the same sect, who also wrote commentaries on the Gospel according to Matthew, from which he tried to establish his teaching. Besides these, he sought out with great diligence a fifth, a sixth and a seventh translation, which we also have from his library, and compared them with the other editions. Since I have given a list of his works in the volumes of letters I have written to Paula, in a letter I wrote against the works of Varro, I pass over it now. But I do not fail to mention his immortal genius. He understood dialectic as well as geometry, arithmetic, music, grammar and rhetoric, and he taught all the schools of the philosophers, so that he also had eager students in secular literature. He lectured to them daily, and the crowds that flocked to him were astonishing. He received them in the hope that, by means of this secular literature, he might establish them in the faith of Christ. [a]

There is no need to speak of the cruelty of the persecution raised against the Christians under Decius, who raged against the religion of Philip, whom he had killed. In that persecution Fabian, bishop of the Roman church, perished at Rome, and Alexander and Babylas, pontiffs of the churches of Jerusalem and Antioch, were imprisoned for confessing Christ. Anyone who wants to know what was done about Origen’s standing can learn it clearly, first from his own letters, which he sent to various people after the persecution, and second from the sixth book of the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea and from Eusebius’s six volumes in defense of this same Origen. [f] He lived until the time of Gallus and Volusian, that is, until his sixty-ninth year, and he died at Tyre, in which city he was also buried.