Origen Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Joseph W. Trigg

Critical Essay by Joseph W. Trigg

SOURCE: "The Charismatic Intellectual: Origen's Understanding of Religious Leadership," in Church History, Vol. 50, No. 1, March, 1981, pp. 5-19.

In this essay, Trigg contends that Origen had succeeded in reconciling his two roles as intellectual or philosopher and as a faithful churchman by making churchmanship a function of intellectual achievement.

Origen's vocabulary is quite definitely that of an intellectual; it owes little to daily life or to the vernacular of the time.… He seems … to manufacture his own language, often hermetic, abstract, or difficult to understand, the language of a man concerned above all with ideas, somewhat cut off from the real world, and constitutionally separated from concrete realities. Are we wrong in attaching a particular significance to the fact, so characteristic of his passionate idealism as well as of his introversion, that he made himself a eunuch?¹

Thus Marguerite Harl, over twenty years ago, introduced Origène...
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