SOURCE: "'I Beseech You: Be Transformed': Origen," in The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 160-77.

In this excerpt, Peter Brown discusses how Origen in his exposition of Christian theology and his biblical interpretation understood and used the Platonism that permeated the Christian East of his day and how his understanding, profoundly Christian, was fundamentally different from that of his contemporary pagan Platonists.

Between May 200 and the middle of 203, Laetus, the Augustal Prefect of Egypt, rounded up a group of Christians from Alexandria and from Egypt proper. The father of Origen had been among them. Origen was sixteen or seventeen at the time, the eldest son of a family of seven. His mother hid his clothes, lest he should rush out to join his father by presenting himself to the authorities. "It was," wrote Eusebius of Caesarea a century...