Book Note | In the Image of Origen

David Satran. In the Image of Origen: Eros, Virtue, and Constraint in the Early Christian Academy. University of California Press, 2018.

In the Image of Origen reconstructs the pedagogical relationship between a teacher and his pupils in third century Palestine, overcoming the obstacles of conflicting portraits and lacunae in historical evidence. David Satran thereby sheds new light on the community that formed around one of early Christianity’s most renowned (and controversial) pedagogues: Origen of Alexandria. To do so, Satran draws much of his evidence, not from Origen, but from the “Thanksgiving Address” of Gregory Thaumaturgus. Through analysis of this important and overlooked oration, Satran supplements our understanding of Origen as well as of late antique education. The implications of Satran's study also bear on questions of modern pedagogical methods. What can modern teachers and students learn from Gregory's relationship with Origen?

Later writers—both in Late Antiquity and in modern scholarship—produced many images of Origen, shaping his legacy and giving rise to multiple “Origenisms.” Gregory’s “Thanksgiving Address” provides one such late antique image, constructed by one of Origen’s students. That student, Gregory Thaumaturgus ("Wonderworker"), was a Christian theologian and Greek author in his own right. In addition to the Address, he is known for his treatises "Discourse on the Passible and Impassible in God" and "Treatise on Consubstantiality."

Nevertheless, few modern historians of Origen or late antique education are familiar with Gregory’s Address. This oversight is unsurprising since at first glance Gregory provides little detail about his educational background or experiences with Origen. He even reflects on the paradox of his own silence as a student and the urge to speak:

How well I lived, listening to [my] teacher speak and remaining silent; would that even now I learned to keep still in silence, rather than—this novel spectacle—to turn the teacher into a listener. What need did I have of these words? Why give voice to such things, when it was right to remain here and not to set out? (16.185–186; Satran p. 146).

Here, Gregory struggles to speak in front of his teacher, reflecting the hierarchy and power dynamics of the teacher-student relationship. Origen's presence therefore shapes, and maybe censors, Gregory's address to him. Despite what Gregory passes over or embellishes, Satran alerts readers to the importance of this moment of speech.

Beyond Gregory’s reticence to speak explicitly, there is also the problem of reliability. Can we trust this document? Can we find the person of Origen behind the elaborate rhetoric presenting him? Satran's careful examination of Gregory's rhetoric reveals many images, like the one above, of Origen as master and Gregory as student, and yet these images together mediate a personal relationship. In his speech Gregory even compares his personal relationship with Origen to the famously intimate relationship of David and Jonathan (p. 40-44). By analyzing these analogies, Satran shows how an understanding of the personal relationship between Gregory and Origen contextualizes not only Origen’s pedagogical methods but also the circumstances of Gregory’s Address.

Satran's re-evaluation of the genre of Gregory's Thanksgiving Address further clarifies the depiction of the relationship it contains. While some scholars have identified the work as a Greco-Roman logos suntaktikos, or "leave-taking address," Satran suggests that an alternative model for understanding Gregory's speech may lie with contemporary Palestinian rabbinic public discourse. He points to evidence for a formalized practice of “asking permission [to leave the master]" (netilat reshut). He also relates this to fragmentary evidence of Aramaic aftara ("dismissal")—a public discourse which engages in exegesis of scripture delivered in the presence of the teacher (p. 144). Whether Gregory was directly influenced by rabbinic practice or not, this conceptual model preserves a specific teacher-student structure.

This image of a teacher-student relationship also includes analysis of the pedagogical ideals that Gregory attributes to Origen. On the one hand, Satran identifies specific elements that characterize Origen’s pedagogy as one of constraint. As in the text quoted above, Origen compels silence from his students and restrains them from independent speculation. As a result, Origen forces his students to accompany him through philosophical digressions and discursive explorations. In Gregory's own words: "He contrived by every stratagem to bind us to [him]..."(6.74; p. 35, Satran trans.). Here Satran raises a critical question: how does Origen's pedagogy of binding and constraint relate to his own philosophical arguments about free will and apocatastasis? What sort of pedagogy idealizes a lack of personal autonomy on the part of the student (p. 53)?

On the other hand, although Origen practices an approach that sometimes constrains and coerces his students, Origen's pedagogy proves to be much more open-ended and flexible in terms of its goals. This is in contrast to the homogenous structure of modern standardized education. Origen's pedagogy does not proceed upon a pre-determined syllabus and does not practice uniform examinations of all students. His classroom may move only according to the will of the master, but this will is also shaped dialectically by the master's discernment of the progress of each individual student. Satran proposes that in Origen’s open classroom he utilizes dialectical methods, aiming to liberate the student's mind from bad mental habits. Satran frames this description of Origen’s pedagogy as a critique of the depersonalizing tendencies of standardized education which lack individual attention (p. 175). Contrary to this modern approach, Origen employs cyclical education focused less on course and content, and more on the progressive formation of the student.

For Satran, therefore, Gregory's “Thanksgiving Address” is not only a historical resource for the past but also a challenge to modern pedagogical theories, a contrast between ancient and modern classrooms also grounded in theological observations. Origen was well-known for speculating that everyone on earth would be eventually saved and restored to the perfect condition of their original creation, a contentious and frequently maligned doctrine of universal salvation. Satran links Origen's soteriological optimism, where all will be saved, to a pedagogical optimism, where any student can learn. All students will eventually succeed. As a teacher, therefore, Origen saw himself guiding each soul in his care along their individualized route to salvation. Thus, while Origen’s pedagogical method may appear based on hierarchical and esoteric principals, Satran argues it is undergirded by the hope of future restoration. In this way, Satran understands the Address to describe the most "open" educational model of the second and third centuries (p. 169). He also argues that this cyclical education is the ancillary to later Byzantine and Medieval Latin formulations of philosophical study as the "handmaiden" of theology (philosophia ancilla theologiae) (p. 174).

Satran rightly underlines that the key pedagogical lesson observable in Gregory's Address is that the teacher-student relationship transcends the simple transmission of knowledge. In my opinion, the personal relationship between teacher and student is integral to understanding both Gregory’s representation of Origen and Satran’s interpretation. In order to describe his personal relationship with his teacher, Gregory appeals to an allegory of David and Jonathan. Gregory describes Jonathan as passive, referring to the erotic pedagogical paradigm of Plato's Symposium (p. 41). Jonathan, the inferior partner, is bound to the soul of David. Noticing this comparison, Satran highlights an "essential inequality of the relationship between the teacher and student, between Origen and Gregory” (p. 42). Later in the Address, Gregory inverts this erotic relationship. According to the traditional Platonic model, the active superior teacher desires the beloved. In Gregory’s version, however, the student desires the superior unmoved teacher. The teacher as master of the logos (“discourse”) in the classroom reflects, by derivation, the Christian Logos itself, the Word of God. In this way, he imagines the relationship of the teacher and the student as a sort of divine emanation. The true teacher is the Father who teaches either through Christ or in the Holy Spirit through Paul (p. 119–20). In this way, Gregory casts the teacher-student relationship as a mimetic shadow of the relationship between God and God's creation.

In summary, Gregory's description of his teacher illuminates Origen's place in the development of Christian education and in the ideological competition between Christianitas and Romanitas in the third and fourth centuries. As Satran outlines, the image of Origen that Gregory describes is constraining, optimistic, and in some ways Platonic. In his description of Origen's pedagogy, Satran moves gracefully between the text of Gregory’s Address to Origen himself, rendering the speech a gateway into Origen's texts. Thus Satran investigates some of Gregory's broader claims about Origen's tutelage within the context of Origen's own reflection on learning, reading, and teaching. In this way, Satran's work supplements an ongoing discourse on education in Late Antiquity by filling a critical lacuna: the perspective of Origen’s student. Satran's writing helps us place Gregory in an archive of Christian late antique resources on education, popularly dominated by figures from the fourth century: Basil of Caesarea, Jerome, Augustine, and the non-Christian but influential, Libanius. Satran's own book expands our bibliography on late antique education and the boundaries of Christianity (Christianitas) and Roman-ness (Romanitas), supplementing works such as Pierre Hadot’s What is Ancient Philosophy, Susanna Elm’s Sons of Hellenism, Edward Watts’s City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, Rafaella Cribiore’s Gymnastics of the Mind, and Mark J. Edwards, Origen Against Plato.

Helpfully, Satran also reflects on the implications of his study for pedagogical practice. To whom are we entrusting ourselves when we follow a particular instructor? To what extent should our will be constrained by a teacher, friend, rabbi, abba? Or is it an image of these figures? What do we make of teaching practices that restrain habits of thinking and opinion? What is the role of Tradition? Because we are not students of Origen, but readers of Origen and his students, we must be careful in how we decipher our answers to these questions. For this David Satran's In the Image of Origen is a helpful aid.

Allen Wilson is a Ph.D. Student in Christianity in Antiquity at Fordham University. He can be contacted at awilson65@fordham.edu, and you may follow his research on Twitter: @AGWilsonn.