Professor Ilaria Ramelli has, over past decades, established her reputation as one of the world’s leading commentators on early Christianity in the context of late antique philosophy and culture, with seminal works on Apokatastasis (2013), Evagrius’ Kephalaia gnostika (2015), Christianity and slavery (2017), Bardaisan of Edessa (2019), women’s leadership in the Early Church (2021) and the T&T Clark handbook to the Early Church (2014). But Origen of Alexandria has always been a fascination to which she has returned throughout her career. The present volume is the testimony to her deep focus on this, arguably the most important theologian among the long list of Christian thinkers after the age of the apostles. It represents the presentation in English of twenty of her published essays and two additional lengthy and previously unseen studies, turning around many different aspects (what he himself would have called epinoiai) of the life, context and philosophical theology of Origen.

The work is a mammoth one, and will be valued by all students of Origen as an important resource. The editors at de Gruyter evidently gave up on the idea of an index of subjects, or persons, or even a final bibliography for that matter. But one is grateful that the extensive footnotes are actually printed at the foot of the relevant pages as the reader progresses, and they are a rich source of information. The author herself contextualises this long pilgrimage through Origen’s universe in an introductory essay, as well as in the opening essay, which considers what it means to rank Origen as a philosopher, and how controversial that was both for the Early Church authorities and for the Hellenes of his own age, who often refused that title for those who did not conform to the canons of the accepted schools.

To aid navigation through this volume we are given a very close breakdown of each article (pp. vii–xiii), presenting the specific title in bold type, followed by a detailed listing in terms of subject micro-subheadings. This certainly helps the reader to navigate, transforming a large body of work into something like a reference manual on important topics such as allegorical interpretation; Origen’s relation to philosophers such as Attikos, Plotinos, Porphyry and Alexander of Aphrodisias; his influence on the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine; and his ideas on hypostasis, nous apokatastasis and materiality. This is a work clearly of importance and relevance to the Origenian specialist, but anyone interested in the deeper analysis of the real interfaces of early Christian reflection and late Hellenistic philosophy will likewise find much of value.