Word: origen
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First there was Peter, who had denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed and who finally was martyred, according to Origen's histories, crucified upside down on a hillside. Then came St. Linus, St. Anacletus and St. Clement I, who may or may not have been drowned off Crimea with an anchor around his neck. These were the first of the heirs of St. Peter, the Popes of Rome, some of them loved, some feared, some venerated, some murdered. One of the proudest and most powerful, Innocent III (1198-1216), started calling himself the Vicar of Christ because...
Early Christians condemned birthday celebrations as a repugnant heathen custom and kept no record of the anniversary of Christ's birth. As late as 245 A.D., the African church father and philosopher Origen wrote that it was sinful even to contemplate observing Jesus's birthday "as though he were a King Pharaoh...
...herbivores from Neanderthal man to the Hare Krishna people. Between her gargoyle book ends, this vegetarian convert presents a series of case histories. Each serves to dispel the notion that vegetable dieters are as alike as peas in a pod. Here is the early Christian theologian-and heretic-Origen, who castrated himself, and the American Benjamin Franklin, who did not. Here is Pythagoras, who denounced beans, and Horace Greeley, who renounced coffee. Here are the diverse saints and satans of human history: Gandhi and Hitler, Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Bormann, Albert Schweitzer and Richard Wagner. In The Vegetable Passion...
Early Christianity had its own embryonic scriptural criticism. The great 3rd century church father Origen declared that some passages in the Bible "are not literally true but absurd and impossible." Even St. Augustine of Hippo, a 5th century champion of biblical orthodoxy, cautioned against literalism. "We must be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are farfetched or opposed to science," he wrote, "and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers." Despite such precedent, this spirit of critical inquiry?limited though it was?did not carry over into medieval Christendom...
...celebrated than Boston Jesuit Leonard Feeney. Technically, the Vatican excommunicated him in 1953 for refusing to meet with the Pope, but his beliefs caused his earlier 1949 suspension by Archbishop Richard Gushing. Feeney's undoing was his hard-line reading of the formula, first proposed by Church Fathers Origen and Cyprian in the 3rd century, that "outside the church there is no salvation...