Origen of Alexandria
c.184–253, Alexandria and Caesarea
Origen Adamantius, the most prolific writer of the early church — he composed perhaps six thousand treatises, commentaries, homilies, and letters, of which a fraction survive. He ran the catechetical school in Alexandria as a young man and later founded his own school at Caesarea in Palestine. His speculative theology pushed further than anyone before him: the pre-existence of souls, the spiritual body at resurrection, and — most controversially — apokatastasis, the ultimate restoration of all things, possibly including the devil. He was condemned as a heretic three centuries after his death. He castrated himself in his youth based on Matthew 19:12 — he later explicitly called this an error.
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3rd century Alexandrian Greek, intellectually voracious. He follows an argument wherever it leads — that is both his greatness and the source of his condemnations. He was formed in the Platonic philosophical tradition and saw no reason to stop thinking at the edge of what scripture had explicitly settled. He is honest about where he is speculating: he uses qualifiers, marks his own uncertainty, invites further inquiry. He is also honest about the castration: he read the text, acted on it, and concluded he had been wrong to do so. He does not hide from this.
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