Episode 28 The Life and Times of Origen

I dove further into the life of Origen with this episode (found here), and below are the various items that I cited during the podcast.

Doxamoot info, “A Reverence for Things Nobler” is here.

Patterns for Life is here.

From Eusebius

He had a great name with all the faithful,” he says, “for the way he always welcomed the holy martyrs and was so attentive to them, whether he knew them or not. He would go to them in prison and stay by them when they were tried and even when they were brought out to die. . . . Often, when he went up to the martyrs unconcernedly and kissed them, regardless of the consequences, the crowd standing by—being pagan—flew into a passion and very nearly made an end of him. He was persecuted day after day, until the . . . city . . . became too small to hold him. He went from house to house, changing his lodgings all the time and being turned out of every place he went to because such crowds came to him to learn about the things of God . . . What made so many people want to imitate him was, first and foremost, the divine power that governed his actions.

From Eusebius

He forced himself to live as austerely as possible, now fasting, now allowing only the scantiest measure of time for sleep, which he tried not to take in bed as a general rule: he preferred to snatch what rest he could on the floor. He thought that people ought to take more notice of what our Saviour says in the Gospels about not having two garments or using sandals or wearing oneself out with worry about the future. … In ways like that, his existence was a model of what the philosopher’s life ought to be.

From St. Gregory the Wonderworker

There are many different kinds of literary study in this world. You find people beginning with grammar, in the course of which they study the works of the poets and the plays of the comic writers. . . . They then pass on to rhetoric, where they try to acquire all the tricks of fine writing and speaking. After that, they come to philosophy, go through dialectics, see how syllogisms are fitted together, experiment with measurements in geometry and enquire into the orbits of the stars and the laws that govern the heavenly bodies. They take in music as well. They become accomplished through studying all these widely differing subjects but they learn nothing from them about the will of God. They accumulate . . . wealth but they take it from the stores of sinners.

From St. Gregory the Wonderworker

He told us to approach philosophy by collecting all the extant writings of the ancient philosophers and poets . . . and not to reject anything . . . except the works of the atheists [i.e., the Epicureans] . . . who deny the existence of a Providence. He wanted us to read … all the others without preferring one system… or rejecting another:… we were to hear them all. Origen took care not to introduce us to one philosophical system only or to allow us to settle down in any single one of them. He took us through them all and would not have us ignorant of any. He himself was our guide … on this journey . . . He was a past master of the art of philosophy, which he had frequented for so long that it had no secrets from him. … In every philosophy he picked out what was true and useful and set it before us, while what was erroneous he rejected. . . He advised us not to give our allegiance to any one philosopher, even though he should be universally acclaimed as perfect in wisdom, but to cleave to God alone and His prophets