Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life by Peter W. Martens (review)

This revised Notre Dame doctoral dissertation takes a fresh look at a rather worn subject. In a clear and helpful introduction, Martens contrasts the approach he will take with previous approaches. These, it is claimed, contextualized Origen in ancient philology, theological topics, or special agendas. This book takes a biographical approach and focuses on Origen the exegete. “As important as themes such as literal and allegorical exegesis … are,” Martens asserts, “they do not grasp the sweeping contours of the exegetical project as Origen understood it, since they do not grasp its central and organizing force: the interpreter” (5). The author proposes that his study advances “a new and integrative thesis about the contours of the ancient exegetical life as Origen understood it” (6). It is this sweeping thesis statement that the book ambitiously sets out to establish.

The book is clearly laid out. There are two major sections, “The Philologist” (two chapters) and “The Philologist and Christianity” (eight chapters). Each section and chapter begins with a verbal map showing the reader where the author is going and closes with a brief recapitulation of where he has been. The first part treats most of the standard topics of ancient education. There is much helpful information in this section. The study of rhetoric, however—the one overarching area that made up a significant part of every boy’s education—is, surprisingly, not discussed. It is difficult to see how the presentation of Origen, in the first section, differs significantly from the way earlier studies have contextualized him in the area of ancient philology.

It is in the second section of the book that Martens’s particular thesis takes on more discernible flesh. Here, Origen’s understanding of the Christian faith and its practical applications begin to intersect with the description of his practice of exegesis. This section proposes that for Origen, the high road to salvation is the life of the mind focused on the exegesis of Scripture. “Commitment to scriptural interpretation” is said to be the mark of “advancing Christians” (105–6). The statement, however, that the divine image is not to be found in the human body but in the mind (95) is somewhat misleading. Origen does say that, but he says more. It is the virtues that constitute the divine image in a person, not the intellectual life alone. The divine image, Origen says, is found in “the prudence” of a person’s “mind, in his righteousness, his self-control, his courage, his wisdom, his discipline, in fact, in the whole company of virtues which exist in God essentially, and may exist in man as a result of his own efforts and his imitation of God” (Princ, 4.4.10; tr. Butterworth, 327). It is the virtues that constitute the “kind of blood-relationship with God” (tr. Butterworth, 327, cited on 95). This provides a broader basis for the expectation of Christian achievement than the intellectual life alone.

Origen’s critique of gnostic and Jewish exegesis occupies chapters six and seven. Literalism for Origen, it is claimed, involves doctrinal, not “procedural error.” Origen understood Christian pluralism to be the result of the variant ways Scripture was exegeted. The gnostic exegesis, which could be excessively literal in reading parts of the Old Testament, produced “a dualistic account of God and a deterministic theory of” human nature (115). Jewish literalism, on the other hand, supported the continuation of devotion to the law and the rejection of Jesus as messiah (141, 143). It was these results, it is argued, that were censured in Origen’s attacks on literalism. Ideal exegesis, on the other hand, takes its cue from Jesus and Paul, both of whom read Israel’s Scriptures figuratively, or allegorically, as Martens labels it.

The final chapters set Origen’s exegetical approach in the broader fields of the moral life of the interpreter, his personal relationship with God expressed especially in a life of prayer and devotion...