SOURCE: "Origen," in The Christian Platonists of Alexandria: Eight Lectures, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1886, pp. 115-34.

In this lecture, Bigg provides an overview of Origen's life and work in its various aspects: textual criticism, exegesis, and religious philosophy.

Clement as we have seen is a philosopher of a desultory and eclectic type and so far as the needs of his tranquil spirit led him on. Egypt is his world, Gnosticism his one trouble. Origen had travelled to Rome in the West and Bostra in the East, and had found everywhere the clash of arms. But apart from this he was not one of those who discover the rifts in their harness only on the morning of the battle. His sceptical intelligence pries unbidden into every defect, and anticipates the hostile thrust. He stands to his arms for life or death, like a Dominican theologian of the thirteenth...