After this he took either one or two other journeys. He was sent into Greece, and visited Athens, with letters from his bishop, to refute heresy and confirm the Christian religion. He also stayed awhile at the great central see of Antioch.
On his journey to Greece, he had been ordained priest at Caesarea, by his friend St. Theoctistus. When he returned to Alexandria, about the year 231, Demetrius, the patriarch, was pleased to be exceedingly indignant at his ordination. We cannot go into the controversy here; we need only say that a synod of bishops, summoned by the patriarch, decreed that he must leave Alexandria, but retain his priesthood; which seems to show that they thought he had better leave for the sake of peace, though they could not recognize any canonical fault; for if they had, they would have suspended or degraded him. Demetrius, indeed, assembled another synod some time later, and did degrade and excommunicate him. But by this time Origen had left Alexandria, never to return [{489}] and was quietly living at Caesarea. We dare not pronounce sentence in a cause that has occupied so many learned pens; but we dare confidently say this, that it is impossible to prove Origen to have been knowingly in the wrong. We must now follow him to Caesarea.
If some Levantine merchantman, manned by swarthy Greeks or Syrians, in trying to make Beyrout, should be driven by a north wind some fifty miles further along the coast to the southwest, she might possibly find herself, at break of day, in sight of a strange-looking harbor. There would be a wide semi-circular sweep of buildings, or what had once been buildings; there would be a southern promontory, crowned with a tower in ruins; there would be the vestiges of a splendid pier; and there would be rows of granite pillars lying as if a hurricane had come off the land, and blown them bodily into the sea. An Arab or two, in their white cotton clothes, would be grimly looking about them, on some prostrate columns; and a stray jackal, caught by the rising sun, would be scampering into some hole in the ruins. Our merchantman would have come upon all that is left of Caesarea of Palestine. If she did not immediately make all sail to Jaffa, or back to Beyrout, it would not be because the place does not look ghostly and dismal enough. And yet it was once the greatest port on that Mediterranean coast, and far more important than either Jaffa, Acre, Sidon, or even Beyrout now. It owed its celebrity to Herod the Great. Twelve years of labor, and the expenditure of vast sums of money, made the ancient Turris Stratonis worthy to be rechristened Caesarea, in honor of Caesar Augustus. Its great pier, constructed of granite blocks of incredible size, afforded at once dwelling-places and hostelries for the sailors and a splendid columned promenade for the wealthy citizens. The half-circle of buildings, all of polished granite, that embraced the sea and the harbor, and terminated in a rocky promontory on either side, shone far out to sea, and showed conspicuous in the midst the great temple of Caesar, crowned with statues of Augustus and of the Roman city. An agora, a praetorium, a circus looking out to sea, and a rock-hewn theatre, were included in Herod's magnificent plans, and fittingly adorned a city that was to become in a few years the capital of Palestine. We see its importance even as early as the days immediately after Pentecost. It was here that the Gentiles were called to the faith, in the person of Cornelius the centurion, a commander of the legionaries stationed at Caesarea. His house, three hundred years later, was turned into a chapel by St. Paulo, and must therefore have been recognizable at the time of which we write. It was here that Herod Agrippa I. planned the apprehension of St. Peter and the execution of St. James the Greater; and it was in the theatre here that the beams of the sun shone upon his glittering apparel, and the people saluted him as a god, only to see him smitten by the hand of the true God, and carried to his palace in the agonies of mortal pain. St. Paul was here several times, and last of all when he was brought from Jerusalem by the fifty horsemen and the two hundred spearmen. Here he was examined before Felix, and before Festus, in the presence of King Agrippa, when he made his celebrated speech; and it was from the harbor of Caesarea that he sailed for Rome to be heard before Caesar. For many centuries, even into the times of the crusaders, it continued to be a capital and haven of great importance. Between 195 and 198, it was the scene of one of the earliest councils of the Eastern Church, and, as the see of Eusebius, the founder of church history, and the site of a celebrated library, it must always be interesting in ecclesiastical annals. But perhaps it would require nothing more to make [{490}] it a place of note in our eyes than the fact that when Origen was driven from Alexandria, in 231, he transferred to Caesarea not the Alexandrian school, it is true, but the teacher whose presence and spirit had contributed so much to make it immortal.
Caesarea, indeed, was at that time a literary centre only second to Alexandria or Antioch. It was in direct communication with Jerusalem by an excellent military road, and with Alexandria by a road that was longer, indeed, but in no way inferior. It was not far from Berytus both by land and sea. Like Capharnaum and Ptolemais, but in a yet higher degree, it was one of Herod the Great's model cities, in which he had embodied his scheme of Grecianizing his country by the influence of splendid Greek art and overpowering Greek intellect. It was also the metropolis of Palestine. St. Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, Origen's fellow-student, was the intimate friend of Theoctistus, bishop of Caesarea; and it is clear that bishops, or their messengers, from the cities all along the coast, as for as Antioch, and even the distant Cappadocia and Pontus, were not unfrequent visitors to this great rallying-point of the church and the empire.
When Origen, therefore, left Alexandria and took up his abode in a city that was in a manner the diminished counterpart of one he had abandoned, he did not find himself in a strange land. St. Theoctistus received him with delight. It was not long before he journeyed the short distance to Jerusalem, to renew his acquaintance with St. Alexander; and these two bishops were only too glad to put on his shoulders all the charges that he would accept. "They referred to him," says Eusebius, "on every occasion as their master; they committed to him alone the charge of interpreting and teaching Holy Scripture and everything connected with preaching the Word of God in the church." From the way in which the historian joins the two bishops together, it would appear that Caesarea was a common school for the two dioceses, and a sort of ecclesiastical seminary whither the clerics from Jerusalem came, as to a centre where learning and learned men would abound more than in ruined and fallen AElia. It is certain, however, that Origen, in a short time, was teaching and writing as fast as at Alexandria. His name soon began to draw scholars. Firmilian, bishop of so distant a see as Caesarea of Cappadocia, one of the most stirring minds of his age, who had controversies on his hands all round the sea-coast to Carthage in one direction, and Rome in the other, was a friend of Theoctistus. It is possible that he knew Origen also, perhaps from having seen him at Alexandria, but more probably from having met him when Origen travelled into Greece. At any rate, he conceived an enthusiastic liking for him. Nothing would serve him but to make Origen travel to his own far-off province to teach and stimulate pastors and people; and, not long afterward, we find himself in Judaea, that is, at Caesarea, on a visit to Origen, with whom he is stated to have remained "some time," for the sake of "bettering himself" in divinity. And, as Eusebius sums up, "not only those who lived in the same part of the world, but very many others from distant lands, left their country and came flocking to listen to him." We need not mention here again the names Gregory and Athenodorus.
The position now occupied by Origen at Caesarea was, therefore, one of the highest importance. He was no longer a private teacher, or even an authorized master teaching in private; he was no less than the substitute for the bishop himself. In the Eastern Church, indeed, the custom by which no one but the Bishop ever preached in the church was not so strictly observed as it was in the West; but if a [{491}] presbyter did received the commission of preaching, it was always with the understanding that what he said was said on behalf of the pontiff, whose presence in his chair was a guarantee for its orthodoxy. When Origen, therefore, on the Lord's day, after the reading of the holy Gospel, stood forward from his place in the presbytery, and began to explain either the Gospel text itself or some passage in the Old Testament which also had formed part of the liturgical service, it was well understood that he was speaking with authority. And this is the first light in which we should view his homilies.
It would be saying little to say that Origen's homilies and commentaries (for we need not distinguish them here) marked an era in the exposition of Scripture. They not only were the first of their kind, but they may be said to have created the art, and not only to have created it, but, in certain aspects, to have finished it and to have become like Aristotle in some of his treatises, at once the model and the quarry for future generations. It may be true, as of course it is, that he was not absolutely the first to write expositions of Scripture. The splendid eloquence of Theophilus of Antioch had already been heard on the four Gospels, and his spirit of interpretation seems to have had much more affinity for Origen's own spirit than for that of the school of his own Antioch two centuries later. Melito had written on the Apocalypse, but his direct labors on Scripture were only an insignificant part of his voluminous works, if, indeed, they were not all rather apologetic and hortatory than explanatory. The Mosaic account of the creation had occupied a few fathers with its defence against Gnostic and infidel. But we know from Origen's own words that he had read and used "his predecessors," as he calls them. And yet we may truly say that he is the first of commentators, not only because no one before him had dared to undertake the whole Scripture, but on account of his novel and regular method. He is turned by one great authority, Sixtus Senensis, "almost self-taught," so little of what he says can he have gleaned from others. But in estimating how much Origen owed to those before him, we should lose a valuable hint towards understanding him if we forgot Clement of Alexandria and the great body of tradition, oral and written, of which the Alexandrian school was the headquarters. We know that the Alexandrian Jew, Philo, two hundred years before Clement's time, had written wonderful lucubrations on the mystical sense of Holy Scripture. The Alexandrian catechetical teachers, catching and using the spirit of the place, had always been Alexandrian in their Scriptural teachings. Clement himself had commented on the whole of the Scriptures in his book called the "Hypotyposes." Origen entered into inheritance. We see the spirit of the time and place in those questionings with which, in his early years, he used to puzzle his father. The unrivalled industry that made him collect versions of the sacred text from Syria, Asia, and even the shores of Greece, must have scrupulously sought out and exhausted every source of information and every extant document relating to Scripture exposition that was at hand for him in his own city. So that Origen, though in one sense the founder of a school, was really the culmination of a series of learned men, and, by the influence of his name, made common to the universal church that knowledge and method which before had been confined to the pupils that had listened to the Catechisms.
Although, however, we may guess, we cannot be certain how progressively or gradually a methodical and scientific exegesis had been growing up at Alexandria; and we come upon the commentaries of Origen with all the freshness of a discovery. Before him we have been accustomed to writings like those of the apostolic fathers: we have been reading apologies of the most wonderful eloquence, whose Greek shames the rhetoricians, [{492}] or whose Latin has all the spirit, earnestness, and tenderness of new language, but in which Holy Scripture is at the most only summarized and held up to view. Or, again, we have been listening to a venerable priest crushing the heretics with the word of God, or to a philosopher confuting the Jews out of their own mouth. Or, once more, we have heard the pagan intellect of the world convinced that truth was nowhere to be found but in Jesus, that the writings of the prophets were better than those of the philosophers, and that the morality of the New Testament cast far into the shade the sayings of Socrates. Splendid ideas, striking applications, telling proofs, grand views, all these the early fathers found in holy Scripture, and all these they used in the exhortations, apologies, or refutations that were called for by the several necessities of their times. But sustained, regular commentary, as such, they have none, or, what is the same to us now, none has come down. The explanation of words, the classification of meanings, the distinction of senses, the answering of difficulties and the solution of objections--all this, done, not for an odd portion of the text here and there, but regularly through the whole Bible, is what distinguishes the labors of Origen from those of all who have gone before him, and makes them so important for all who shall come after him. In making acquaintance with him we feel that we have come across a master, with breadth of view enough to handle masses of materials in a scientific way, and with learning enough never to be in want of materials for his science. We see in his Scripture commentaries the pressure of three forces of unequal strength, but each of them of marked presence, the tradition of the church, the teachings of the great school, and the needs of his own times. To understand him we must understand this pressure under which he wrote. The first two forces may be passed over as requiring no explanation. We must dwell a little on the latter, for unless we vividly realize the necessities under which the Christian teacher in his time lay, of meeting certain enemies and withstanding certain views, we shall be led to join in the cry of those who exclaim against Origen's Scripture exposition as partly useless and partly dangerous.
These necessities arose from two phenomena that appeared almost with the birth of Christianity, and which, with a somewhat wide generalization, we may call the Ebionite and the Gnostic. No one can have looked into early church history without being struck by the difficulty the church seems to have had to free herself from the trammels of Judaism. We need not allude to St. Paul, and his Epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans, and his various contentions with friend and foe for the freedom of the Gospel. The Epistle to the Hebrews, with its thoroughness of dogmatic exposition and its grand style, was also addressed to the Judaizants. Nay, if Ebion himself ever had an existence, it is more than probable that he was teaching at Jerusalem about the very time at which the Epistle seems to have been written and sent, if sent, to the Christian Jews of that city. It is certain, however, that Alexandria was one of the very earliest of the churches which shook itself free, in a marked manner, from the traditions of the law. The cosmopolitan spirit of the great city was a powerful natural auxiliary in a development which was substantially brought about by the Holy Ghost and the pastors of the patriarchal see. The Hebrew element hardly ever had such a footing at Alexandria as it had at Antioch. We can see in the writing of Justin Martyr, (circa 160,) whose wide experience of all the churches makes his testimony especially valuable, a. picture of Christianity, young and exuberant, with its face joyously set to its destined career, and with the swathing-bands of the synagogue lying neglected behind it. Justin had an [{493}] Alexandrian training, and among his many-sided gifts shone pre-eminent that intellectual culture which was the most effectual of the human weapons that beat off the spirit of Judaism. And in Clement himself there is no trace of any narrow formalism, but, on the contrary, a grand, world-embracing charity, that can recognize the work of the Divine Logos in all the manifold varieties of human wisdom and human beauty. So that long before the time that Origen succeeded his master, the Alexandrian church was free from all suspicion of clinging to what St. Paul calls the "yoke of bondage;" and knew no distinction of Jew or Greek. But the party that had troubled the Apostle, and spread itself through the churches almost as soon as the churches were founded, was by no means extinct, even at Alexandria. Since the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews had become scattered all over the empire. The great towns, such as Antioch, Caesarea, and Alexandria, each contained a strong Jewish community. At Alexandria they were numerous enough to have a quarter to themselves. Now, it is not too much to say that many so-called Jews and Christians in such a city were neither Jews nor Christians, but Ebionites; that is, they acknowledged the divine mission of Christ, which destroyed their genuine Judaism, but denied his divinity, which was still more fatal to their Christianity. The consequences of such a state of things to the interpretation of Scripture are manifest. The law was still good and binding. Jerusalem was still the holy city, the chosen of God, and the spiritual and temporal capital of the world. St. Paul was denounced as one who admitted heathen innovations and destroyed the word of God. Everything in holy Scripture, that is, in the Old Testament and in the scanty excerpts from the New, which they admitted, was to be understood in a rigorously literal sense; and the "Clementines," once falsely attributed to St. Clement of Rome, but now considered to belong to the second century, and to be the work of an Ebionite, are the only writings of the period in which the allegorical sense is totally and peremptorily denied. Ebionism was not very consistent with itself, and the Ebionites of St. Jerome's time would hardly have saluted their sterner brethren of the apostolic age; but the name may always be truly taken to typify those whose views led them to hold to the "carnal letter" of the Old Testament. They carried the old Jewish exclusiveness into Christianity. They considered the historical parts of the Scripture to have been written merely because their own history was so important in God's sight that he thought it right to preserve its minutest record. The prophecies were only meant to glorify, to warn, or to terrify themselves, and had no message for the Gentiles. Even the parables and figures that occurred in the imagery of the inspired writer were dragged down to the most absurd and literal significations. The adherents of Ebionism were neither few nor silent in the time of Origen.
But if the Ebionite party in Alexandria, and in the Church generally, was strong and stirring, there was a party not less important, perhaps, who, in their zeal for the freedom of Christianity against the bonds of Judaism, were in danger of going quite as far wrong in a different direction. It is always the case in a reaction, that the returning force finds it difficult to stop at its due mark. So it had been with the reaction against the Ebionites, and especially at Alexandria. There was a body of advanced Christians who did not content themselves with not observing the law, but went on to depreciate it. It was not enough for them to see the Old Testament fulfilled by Jesus Christ, but they must needs show that it never had much claim to be even a preparation and a type. It was full of frivolous details, useless records, and absurd narrations. [{494}] Who cared for the minutiae about Pharaoh's butler, Joseph's coat, or Tobias's dog? Of what importance to the world were the marchings and counter-marchings, the stupid obstinacy and the unsavory morality of a few thousand Hebrews? Who was interested to hear how their prophets scolded them, or their enemies destroyed them, or their kings tyrannized over them? How could it edify Christians to know the number and color of the skins of the tabernacles or the names of the masons and blacksmiths that built the Temple, or the fact that the Jewish people considerably varied their carnal piety by intervals of still more carnal crime and idolatry? The state of things represented by the Old Testament had passed away, and they were of no interest save as ancient history; and therefore, it was absurd to treasure up the Pentateuch and the Prophets as if they were anything more, and not rather much less, than the rhapsodies of Homer and the travels of Herodotus. In fact--and to this conclusion a considerable party came before long--the Old Testament was certainly not divine at all; at any rate, it was not the work of the Father of the Lord Jesus, but of some other principle. And here the Gnostic interest was at hand with an opportune idea. Who could have written the Old Testament but the Demiurge? That primary offshoot of the Divinity, just, but not good, (this was their distinction,) can never have been more worthily employed than in concocting a series of writings in which there was some skill, some justice, and very little goodness. The Demiurge was certainly a handy suggestion, and the consigning of the Old Testament to his workmanship made all commentary thereon compressive into a very brief space. Away with it all, for a farrago of nonsense, lies, and nuisances!