Origen

Origen. By Joseph W Trigg. The Early Church Fathers. London & New York: Routledge, 1998. x + 292 pp. $75.00 (cloth).

This is the third volume in the series titled "The Early Church Fathers," which aims to present introductions to the lives and work of prominent Christian writers of late antiquity together with translations of significant selections from their works. Origen-the Alexandrian scholar, apologist, and confessor whose active life spanned roughly the first half of the third century-is a towering figure in the history of Christian thought and doctrine, not only because of his contributions to the Church's trinitarian and Christological teaching, or because of his response to the challenge of Christian gnosticism, but above all for his careful, reflective, and extensive exegeses of the Scriptures in the form both of homilies and of lengthy, exact and exacting commentaries. To the work of this thinker, Dr. Trigg here presents a useful, and indeed a distinguished, introduction, and one which goes his earlier book-Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Early Church (1983)-one better.

Origen has been read, studied, and puzzled over in Christian circles for a very long time-indeed from the time of Methodius of Olympus in the third century and the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth. Jerome pored over his commentaries and learned more from them than he dared or desired in the end to admit. Augustine eagerly sought Latin translations of them. Origen's opinions fill medieval Byzantine catenas and inform medieval Latin exegesis. In the Reformation and modern eras, his writings have created as much controversy as they did in that of the Emperor Justinian, who had labored enthusiastically to contrive his condemnation as a heretic in 553. Only since the time of the Second World War, however, has modern scholarship attended seriously to Origen the exegete and achieved thereby a fresh perspective on his exposition-and speculative development-of the Church's basic catechetical teaching in his treatise On First Principles.

The portrait of Origen's life and thought that is emerging from contemporary scholarship is deftly outlined in Trigg's introduction, which describes his writings as it follows the course of his career in Alexandria and later in Caesarea Maritima. The introduction gives special attention to the treatise On First Principles and the late and great apologetic work Against Celsus, presumably because, important as they are, they are not among the writings Trigg has excerpted in this volume. Instead, he has chosen, wisely, to present a selection of Origen's exegetical writings, from certain of the fragments of his commentary on Lamentations, to significant excerpts from the Commentary on John (and not least Origen's discussion of the meaning of "beginning" in John 1:1, and his treatment of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4), to a selection of his homilies (among them the controversial homily on 1 Samuel 28:3f, dealing with Saul's encounter with the "witch" of Endor). The selections present a fair picture of Origen's methods and concerns, and the translations seem to this reviewer to do a good job of capturing something of Origen's rather curious style-his directness and plainness, not to mention his deceptive way of compassing large ends by a series of apparently trivial steps. The book, like all of its kind nowadays, is too expensive; but for anyone who wants to get started with Origen it is not only worth the price but almost essential.

RICHARD A. NORRIS

New York, New York

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2000
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