Word: origen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...that next to him Christ looked almost pallid. Faust's fiendish friend, Mephistopheles, is one of literature's great protagonists. It is no new thing for the Rolling Stones to conjure up Sympathy for the Devil. He had it long ago, even from so famous a church father as Origen, who speculated that Satan and his fallen angels would be saved at the end of time...