It is a commonplace of Origen scholarship to say that Origen’s
scriptural hermeneutics are intertwined with his understanding of
ascent. The status of the body in Origen’s notion of ascent, however, is
not easily settled, for ambiguities of argument and metaphor make it
difficult to determine how and to what extent Origen thinks that the
body participates in ascent. In this short communication, I argue that
in both De Principiis IV.2.iv (229) and the Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs (241),
the body plays a critical role in the process of Scriptural and
soteriological ascent. These ambiguities begin with Origen’s
articulation of the threefold senses of Scripture in De Principiis as flesh, soul and spirit, which I interpret to mean that all three senses
of Scripture, and indeed the whole person of the reader, are active
participants in almost every instance of reading Scripture. In the later
Prologue, Origen claims that the reader of Scripture ought to move
continually from the corporeal to the incorporeal to the eternal, as
though leaving the body behind. Yet Origen’s persistently bodily and
affective language in the Prologue suggests that the insights gained
from bodily experience continually shape the spiritual insights of
Christian readers. Moreover, I argue that this shift in Origen’s
treatment of the body attests to Origen’s developing sense of a
Christian Logos: more than a cognitive event (e.g., Torjesen, 1985), but
reflected in the Christian life as a whole (e.g., Martens, 2012) and
thus necessarily incarnate.
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