I. Veiling and Unveiling in the Ancient World

In the ancient Mediterranean world, women customarily veiled themselves in public and in the presence of unrelated men.Footnote ¹⁴ A veil materially demonstrated a woman's aidōs, her shame, which was closely interlinked with her modesty and honor. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones writes, “In Greek thought, female aidōs is closely connected to the concept of sōphrosynē, an idealistic standard of dignity and discretion. A Greek woman displaying sōphrosynē and aidōs . . . should be silent, submissive, passive and virtuous, and she should not draw attention to herself in any way.”Footnote ¹⁵ Unlike a man, a woman expressed her honor and bodily self-mastery (sōphrosynē) by ensuring that she was properly concealed and demure in public. Ancient writers portrayed women as simultaneously vulnerable (in need of protection from the world) and dangerous (the world must be protected from them).Footnote ¹⁶ The veil functioned, for women, as a mark of separation and feminine virtue, a sign of their vulnerable social status, and a barrier that guarded them from invasion and protected society.Footnote ¹⁷

Paul advocated female veiling in line with the Greek and Roman traditions of which he was a part. In 1 Corinthians 11:10, he advised the women of the Corinthian church to veil themselves: “A woman ought to have authority over her head.” For Paul as for other ancients, the veil situated the woman in her proper place in the social (and gendered) hierarchy by indicating that she had an authority over herself.Footnote ¹⁸ Gail Paterson Corrington summarizes Paul's thinking in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16: “When the appropriate authority (exousia) is abandoned, the woman becomes vulnerable, and hence is a potential source of subversion for the entire ‘order’ of creation.”Footnote ¹⁹ Douglas Cairns summarizes a similar ideology that underlies ancient Greek customs of veiling: “Women's veiling thus marks them out as potential vehicles of dishonor, creatures whose excellence . . . is realized in concealment rather than in openness and exposure.”Footnote ²⁰

There is textual and archeological evidence for male veiling in antiquity, as well.Footnote ²¹ Male adolescents, like women, veiled to demonstrate their aidōs and their proper placement in social hierarchies. Ancient Greek and Roman men veiled themselves in some liturgical settings, for sacrifices and worship practices, to demonstrate deference to the gods.Footnote ²² Both men and women veiled themselves in situations of high emotion, notably anger and grief. Cairns explains: “[A]ll three emotions (aidōs, anger, and grief) involve self-consciousness and self-protection, and all focus on one's vulnerability as an individual for whom interaction in the public arena has suddenly become problematic.”Footnote ²³ For ancient Greeks and Romans, the veil was associated with the construction of gender, the communication of social status and piety, and the management of emotion.

The Greek wedding ritual, the anakalyptēria, is a particularly fruitful site for exploring the function of the veil. The anakalyptēria, literally “the unveiling,” marked a series of encounters between the bride and groom that began in the public sphere and ended in the privacy of the wedding chamber. In his analysis of ancient Greek textual and visual evidence for the anakalyptēria, Llewellyn-Jones has argued that the wedding was punctuated by a series of unveilings. First, before the public in the home of her father, the groom lifted the bride's veil and he and the guests gave gifts (also called anakalyptēria) to the bride. Second, after re-veiling and traveling to the groom's house, the bride and groom were escorted to the bridal chamber where she was again unveiled.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, ancient writers conceived of male-female sexual intercourse, especially with a female virgin, as an unveiling, and thus the consummation of marriage functioned as the final anakalyptēria of the bride.Footnote ²⁵

Unveiling, then, takes on a sexual connotation insofar as it symbolizes the “taking” of a woman's chastity.Footnote ²⁶ Writing from Roman Carthage a few years before Origen, Tertullian draws a connection between a virgin's veil and her hymen: “Place a veil outwardly for those having a covering inwardly. Let her whose lower parts are not bare have her upper likewise covered,” he writes in On The Veiling of Virgins.Footnote ²⁷ A virgin's veil, Tertullian continues, functions as her shield and refuge,Footnote ²⁸ and the exposure of a virgin through unveiling constitutes sexual violation.Footnote ²⁹ Since the veil effects a protective covering for endangered (and dangerous) women, unveiling signifies an exposure of women (and society) to the danger of an unwanted gaze, or, in extreme cases, to sexual violence.Footnote ³⁰

The ideology of the veil is thus implicated in ancient configurations of gender and sexuality that construct women as submissive, penetrable, and passive, on the one hand, and elite men as dominant, penetrating, and active, on the other.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, the veil itself is gendered. Veils are associated with femininity or, in the case of male veiling, with deference, vulnerability, and uncontrolled emotion (i.e. femininity).Footnote ³² The performance of unveiling is sexualized insofar as it is metaphorically associated with the taking of a woman's chastity or sexual violation.Footnote ³³ These social and cultural connotations of the veil form the background for analyzing Origen's exegesis of veils and, in particular, his linkage of the veil with shame, dishonor, flesh, femininity, and Jewish interpretive practices.

II. The Veiled Logos

Origen composed most of his biblical commentaries and homilies during the years that he taught and preached in Caesarea Maritima, from 234 to his death.Footnote ³⁴ Caesarea was, at this time, a center of cosmopolitan and intellectual life in Palestine. The third century witnessed the growth of important rabbinic and Christian academies in the city and the founding of a great theological library, in which Origen played a pivotal role.Footnote ³⁵ In his sermons, Origen describes the attraction of the synagogue for some Caesarean Christians, indicating the blurred lines between Christians and Jews of the time, especially on the level of practice.Footnote ³⁶ John McGuckin describes Caesarea's Christians and Jews as “two ascendant communities who were both cautiously watching their neighbor and rival lest they push ahead, and yet were not averse to pushing ahead themselves if they ever got the chance.”Footnote ³⁷ It is in this context of cultural overlap, contact, and occasional competition that Origen attempted to delimit a Christian orthodoxy and a Christian method of interpreting the Jewish scriptures.

Origen appropriated, learned from, and on occasion openly acknowledged the work of Jewish exegetes and Hebrew speakers upon whom he relied, while at the same time constructing (and simultaneously rejecting) Jewish interpretation as univocally literal and fleshly minded.Footnote ³⁸ In his Epistle to Africanus, Origen describes his encounters with Palestinian Jewish biblical interpreters as opportunities for conversation and debate.Footnote ³⁹ Whereas some scholars have viewed Origen's descriptions of his Jewish interlocutors as evidence of Jewish-Christian dialogue,Footnote ⁴⁰ others have noted how Origen's rhetorical constructions of his Jewish counterparts serve his theological and exegetical purposes.Footnote ⁴¹ Building on this scholarship, one should attend not only to Origen's depictions of Jewish interpreters as “veiled” interpreters of their own sacred texts but also to the usefulness of the image of the “veiled Jew” for Origen's theory of spiritual exegesis. Origen used the imagery of veiled and unveiled readers to draw borderlines between Jews, Christians, and heretics, and he meant for these borderlines to clarify the differences among the diverse religious groups in his city.

Origen's exegesis of biblical veils sheds light on his larger project of defining a Christian orthodoxy and marking “unveiled” Christians as superior to their “veiled” Others, both Jews and heretics. As part of his solution to the problem of Christianizing the Jews' scriptures, Origen describes the Hebrew Bible as originally and inextricably linked to Jesus, the word of God. He depicts the language of the Hebrew Bible as a veil covering the logos and argues that the “old covenant” is, at its core, a story about Christ. One need only remove the outer, fleshy, Jewish layer to reveal the true Christian spirit beneath. Before Christ descended in the flesh, Origen claims, he “came spiritually” to the “patriarchs, and Moses the servant, and the prophets who contemplated the glory of Christ.”Footnote ⁴² But the mysteries concealed within the law and the prophets were not revealed until Christ came. This is how Origen frames it in his exposition of biblical interpretation in the fourth book of On First Principles:

The light of the law and prophets, Origen claims, was only visible after the coming of the light into the world (Jn 1:9). The incarnation of Christ facilitated, for the first time, the unveiling of the truth of scripture.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the beginning of his first homily on Leviticus, Origen draws an analogy between the creation of the Hebrew Bible and the incarnation of Christ. Again, the veil metaphor proves useful. He writes:

So the logos—the word of God—appears among veils. As the “veil of the flesh” covered the human body of Christ, so too, the “veil of the letter” clothes the word of God in scripture. Origen here draws on the imagery of the incarnation to describe not only the veiling of the logos with flesh but also the veiling of the logos with language.Footnote ⁴⁶ The homology between flesh and letter is central not only to his hermeneutic theory but also to his exposition of Jewish-Christian difference, in which Jews are associated with flesh/letter/veiling and Christians with spirit/unveiling.

The language of scripture is, on Origen's account, an imperfect container for the logos. Biblical language can trick, deceive, misguide, scandalize, and cause the reader to stumble.Footnote ⁴⁷ The spiritual meaning of scripture is like a treasure hidden in a field of worldly words. Drawing on biblical images of hidden treasure in 2 Cor 4:7, Mt 13:44, and Is 45:3, Origen describes how spiritual truth came to be housed in such lowly text. The “divine nature of scripture”—that “hidden splendor”—was concealed “under a poor and humble style. For ‘we have a treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power of God may shine forth.’”Footnote ⁴⁸ As the wings of the seraphim conceal the face of God, so the “frail vessel of the poor letter” covers the “treasure” of divine meanings contained within scripture.Footnote ⁴⁹ The holy spirit, Origen explains, arranged for the true teachings of God to be hidden “deeply underneath narratives which appear to be records of actual events, narratives in which people are said to go down into Egypt or to be led captive to Babylon.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The narratives of the Hebrew Bible are the “outer covering” of spiritual truths; they are the “field” in which the treasure is hidden, “dark and unseen and concealed.”Footnote ⁵¹

In his second homily on Exodus, Origen compares the lowly language of the law to the infant Moses lying in the marsh: “The Law, therefore, was cast out, enclosed in coverings of this kind, darkened by pitch and bitumen, dirty, and closed up in the cheap and repulsive understandings of the Jews (uilibus et taetris Iudaeorum sensibus) until the church should come from the Gentiles and take it up from the muddy and marshy places and appropriate it to itself within courts of wisdom and royal houses.”Footnote ⁵² Origen continues to draw out the implications of this comparison of the law to the infant Moses, bringing in 1 Cor 3:2 and Heb 5:12–14 as intertexts: “This Law, however, spends its childhood with its own people. With those who do not know its meaning spiritually it is little, an infant, and has milk as its food; but when it comes to the church, when it proceeds into the house of the church, it is a stronger and more vigorous Moses. For when the veil of the letter is removed, ‘perfect and solid food’ is discovered in its text.”Footnote ⁵³ The anti-Jewish effects of Origen's interpretive theory are clear in these characterizations of Jewish interpretation of the law as dirty, repulsive, and infantile.

Origen also likens the lowliness of biblical language to the lowliness of the flesh, which he, following Paul, consistently devalues in relation to spirit.Footnote ⁵⁴ Origen calls the literal, “close-at-hand” interpretation (τὴν πρόχειρον ἐκδοχήν) the “flesh” of scripture (σαρκὸς τῆς γραφῆς), which is subordinated to the more advanced “soul” and “spirit” of scripture.Footnote ⁵⁵ In another passage from On First Principles, Origen calls this “lower” level of scriptural meaning the “body” of scripture: “For the intention was to make even the outer covering of the spiritual truths, I mean the bodily part of the scriptures (τὸ σωματικὸν τῶν γραφῶν), in many respects not unprofitable but capable of improving the multitude in so far as they receive it.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Not only does Origen consign the “fleshly” and “bodily” interpretation to the “multitude” of Christian readers who have not yet progressed to the more advanced, spiritual understanding; he also associates “fleshly” interpretation with the people “according to the flesh”—the Jews.

III. Moses' Veil

According to Origen, to read like a Jew was to remain enshrouded in veils, attending merely to the fleshly and bodily sense of scripture.Footnote ⁵⁷ The problem, for Origen, was not the literal, bodily meaning, per se, but the Jews' inability to lift the “veil of the letter” and see beyond it to deeper, hidden truths.Footnote ⁵⁸ Origen's defense of the virtues of spiritual interpretation over literal interpretation was thus part of his larger project to secure the Hebrew Bible for Christian use, and, in so doing, to define a Christian orthodoxy as separate and superior to Judaism and other heresies.

In his coordinated efforts to produce Jewish-Christian difference and develop a pure(ly) Christian method of exegesis, Origen found the image of Moses' veil to be particularly useful to his purpose. Moses' veil, described in Exodus 34:29-35 and redeployed by Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:12–18, was the most important biblical veil for Origen's exegetical project. He often described spiritual reading as reading with an “unveiled face” (2 Cor 3:18)—reading that began with the psalmist's prayer to “open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law,”Footnote ⁵⁹ and ended with a “face-to-face” encounter with the logos.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, the imagery of Moses' veil served Origen well in his construal of the ideal Christian reader as “unveiled” (like Paul), to whom Origen contrasted the Jewish reader, who remained a veiled, deficient interpreter of his own scriptures.

Origen, like Paul before him, took liberties with the biblical texts describing Moses' veil. To understand Origen's various contortions of Moses' veil it is important to look first at the passages from Exodus 34 and 2 Corinthians 3, respectively. Exodus 34:29–35 describes how Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant, unaware that the skin of his face was shining because he had been talking with God. Because of his shining face, Aaron and the other Israelites were afraid to approach Moses. After Moses called to them and taught them the commandments,

According to Exodus, Moses speaks to God and to the Israelites with an unveiled face, and the brilliance of his face-to-face encounter with God is manifest in his shining skin. It is only after communicating the law to the Israelites that Moses veils himself.

In 2 Corinthians 3:12–18, Paul interprets Moses' veil as a veil that obscures the glory of the divine. Paul uses Moses' veil to distinguish between fleshly Israel, which has not (yet) turned to the Lord, and true Israel, the believers in Christ. The people of Israel “according to the flesh” (1 Cor 10:18) are, in Paul's rendition of Exodus 34, the veiled ones, since they do not understand that Christ is the hermeneutical key that unlocks the mysteries of scripture. Paul writes:

Paul contrasts the veiled people of Israel with the Corinthian believers in Christ, whom he includes in the group of the “unveiled”: “All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18). Paul thus interprets Moses' veil as that which separates the people of Israel from the glory of the Lord.

In Origen's hands, Moses' veil comes to symbolize the reading practices of Jews, heretics, and untrained Christians, while unveiled reading characterizes the spiritually advanced, or as Origen sometimes refers to them, the “perfect.” Like Paul, Origen understands the veil as that which obscures spiritual understanding. Origen quotes 2 Corinthians 3:12–18 on numerous occasions, mostly in contexts in which he is arguing for the superiority of a spiritual (unveiled) interpretation of scripture over a literal (veiled) one.Footnote ⁶¹ In the first book of On First Principles, Origen quotes 2 Corinthians 3:15–17 (along with 2 Cor 3:6) in the midst of an argument for the spiritual nature of God:

Here Origen understands the veil as that which muddles one's understanding of scripture. In Contra Celsum, he calls it a “veil of ignorance” (κάλυμμα ἀγνοίας) that lies “upon the heart of those who read and do not understand the figural meaning (τροπολογούμενα).”Footnote ⁶³ This ignorance and dullness, he notes, is characteristic of the way that the Jews understand scripture.

In a homily on Exodus, Origen states that “Moses's face was glorified, but the children of Israel were not able to look at his face; the people of the Synagogue were unable to look.”Footnote ⁶⁴ At the end of this sentence, Origen substitutes “people of the synagogue” for the original Pauline phrase, “people of Israel,” thereby solidifying the association of a veiled understanding with his Jewish contemporaries.Footnote ⁶⁵ He summarizes this view in Contra Celsum:

A dulled, veiled understanding of scripture hinders not only Jews in their interpretive practices; heretics and untrained Christians, too, fall short in their biblical understanding. In his twelfth homily on Exodus, Origen chastises his Christian audience: “Even now Moses speaks with a glorified face, but we are not able to look at the glory which is in his face.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Lack of zeal, concern for worldly possessions, and desire for riches—all of these habits prevent many Christians, too, from seeing with unveiled face. Origen thus builds on the ancient Greek and Roman associations of veiling with shame, femininity, and problematic social status and adds to these associations with Jewishness, heresy, immature piety, literal reading practices, and a “dulled” or “coarse” understanding. An unveiled mind (nous) is, for Origen, the measure of a true Christian: manly and rational. The veil is removed only by “turning to the Lord” and renouncing worldly desires and distractions.Footnote ⁶⁸

IV. The Askēsis of Unveiling

Origen's theory of how the Bible came to be and how it should be understood exemplifies the logic of the veil. The work of the biblical exegete is to reveal, to begin with the letter and end with the spirit, to peel back the chrysalis of biblical language and find there the logos. The spiritual reader should strive to live a disciplined life that makes it possible to “turn to Christ” and remove the veil.

Origen understands spiritual interpretation—unveiling—as an ascetic activity and, by proxy, as a performance of masculinity.Footnote ⁶⁹ For Origen, spiritual reading is the vocation of one who has undergone training to renounce anger, lust, dishonor, and weakness. Interpretation kata pneuma is not for “women” (and by “women” Origen means all those—male and female alike—who are “weak, slack and sluggish”) but for those Christians who are ready to “assume a manly constancy” and “hasten swiftly to the perfection of strong men.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In his third homily on Ezekiel, Origen takes up the denunciation of female prophetesses (and their sewn pillows and veils) in Ezekiel 13: “Thus says the Lord God: Woe to the women who sew bands on all wrists, and make veils for the heads of persons of every height . . . I will tear off your veils, and save my people from your hands” (Ez 13:18, 21). Origen uses his preaching on these verses as an opportunity to emphasize the association of veils with the sphere of the feminine: “Whoever does deeds of confusion and sin, it is as if he has womanly veils (muliebria velamina) upon his head.”Footnote ⁷¹ Effeminacy characterizes men who indulge not only in luxury and “carnal pleasure” but also in “extravagant speech (luxuriosam orationem)” and “lascivious eloquence (lascivum eloquium).”Footnote ⁷² Like the false prophetesses of Ezekiel's time, these teachers (who are later identified as the heretics Valentinus and Basilides) seek to charm and please their listeners instead of “converting them from vice.”Footnote ⁷³ Origen slanders the heretics by feminizing them.

Because veils are “womanly,” the practice of unveiling marks a progression towards true manhood. In Origen's homilies, manliness is associated with strength, strenuousness, rationality, the excision of pleasure, and unveiled heads while womanliness is characterized by luxury, lust, excessive speech and pleasure, softness of body, and veiled heads.Footnote ⁷⁴ Origen writes: “The man who has confidence and is truly a man wears no veil upon his head. Instead he prays to God with his head uncovered, he prophesies with head uncovered. In a hidden way he manifests his spiritual reality by the sign of his bodily attire. Just as he has no veil over his head of flesh, so he has no veil over the master faculty (principale) of his heart.”Footnote ⁷⁵ To read with unveiled face is to read like a man. It is no surprise that manliness, here, corresponds with Origen's conception of Christian orthodoxy and its concomitant practice of allegorical interpretation, while Jews, literalists, and heretics are consigned to the position of the veiled female.

Later in the same homily on Ezekiel, Origen explains how one progresses on this scale of manliness by picking up on a linguistic peculiarity of the biblical text in Ezekiel 14:4. The Hebrew text uses the idiom ’îš ’îš to signal distribution (“man-man” = “every man”). The Septuagint retains the doubling: ανθρωπος, ανθρωπος,Footnote ⁷⁶ and Origen exploits this linguistic peculiarity: “All men are born men, but we are not all ‘men-men.’” He exhorts his congregation, “Be men-men (Estote homnes homines) . . . For if we are good and mild (boni et mansueti), we double the term man, so that among us one would not simply be a man but a man-man . . . When the inner man has persevered in the image of the Creator, then a man is born, and he thus becomes, according to the outer and inner man, a double man-man.”Footnote ⁷⁷ By training the self to attend to the inner man and the inner meaning, the Christian reader cultivates self-mastery, goodness, rationality, and manliness; he strives to conform his whole person to the image of the Creator.

Origen's Homilies on Leviticus provide another good test case for showing how he understands the work of the spiritual exegete as an ascetic practice and manly exploit. In his interpretive performances in these homilies, Origen himself becomes the model spiritual reader, who is blessed with “eyes that inwardly see the divine spirit that is concealed in the veil of the letter.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Equipped with a spiritual sight that penetrates through the veils and layers of flesh and printed characters on a page, the manly reader accesses divinity. Yet in his exegesis of Leviticus, Origen moves beyond ocular metaphors and begins to describe the tactile dimension of spiritual interpretation. Exegesis is figured here as an act of erotic uncovering: of peeling away layers, drawing back veils, shaving, cutting, and flaying in order to “touch” the inner truth.

In his first homily on Leviticus, Origen depicts the Christian exegete as one who penetrates to the deeper, spiritual meaning of the text, and the imagery of the Levitical priest preparing an animal for a burnt offering serves his purpose well. Origen writes, “I myself think that the priest who removes the hide ‘of the calf’ offered as ‘a whole burnt offering’ and pulls away the skin with which its members are covered is the one who removes the veil of the letter from the word of God and uncovers its interior parts which are members of spiritual intelligence.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The Christian exegete (represented by the priest in this case) carefully unveils the “spiritual intelligence” of the text by flaying the calf. For Origen, however, the work of unveiling depends upon the highest priest and the “perfect sacrifice,” Christ.Footnote ⁸⁰ The practice of Christological interpretation, signified by pulling away skin and drawing back veils, represents the proper way to “touch” the text of Leviticus.Footnote ⁸¹ The exegete's work, moreover, requires a practice of bodily self-mastery and an embrace of manly rationality. According to Origen, the “priest” who “touches the holy flesh of the Word” must be a “man”; he must “be strict (districtum), dried out by much self-control (continentia), and parched (torridum), in which he can have neither a license for luxury nor a penchant for lust.”Footnote ⁸² In the third-century Mediterranean world, dryness, hardness, discipline, continence, and self-mastery were characteristics that marked—and made—the man.Footnote ⁸³

In his seventh homily on Leviticus, Origen envisions the biblical text not as a sacrificial animal but as a woman whom the (male) spiritual exegete domesticates and takes as a bride. He uses the image of the female war captive in Deuteronomy 21 to illustrate the proper relationship between text and reader. Deuteronomy 21:10–13 states,

Origen claims that this very thing has happened to him: he has gone out to war against his enemies and encountered there a woman with a beautiful figure.Footnote ⁸⁴ By this he means that he has encountered beautiful texts (like the Hebrew scriptures) among the enemies of the church (the Jews). But before he can take this beautiful text home and make her his wife, he must shave her head and manicure her nails. She must receive the full treatment at Salon Origène. He writes:

Here, the Christianization of a biblical text is imagined as the domestication of a female captive, as the forced removal of all features that might cause the text to be “unfaithful” to its Christological meaning. As Lisa Lampert has observed, Origen here “analogizes the process of making the captive a suitable bride with the way a Christian exegete should approach a text . . . By stripping the bride and stripping the text, there is no chance that either will pose a threat to purity.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The unveiling of the text is portrayed as a forced anakalyptēria.

Origen construes the work of the Christian exegete as the domination and domestication of a feminized, Judaized text. In his interpretation of the Levitical sacrifices and the captive woman, the imagery of uncovering and undressing suits Origen's purposes in describing the charged (and violent) encounter between the reader and his text.Footnote ⁸⁷ Spiritualizing interpretation proves, in this instance, to be the domain of the true man, even though the spiritual interpretation itself involves the beautifying, cleansing, and shaving of a text coded as female. Origen's theory of exegesis here hinges on the repeated association of Christianity with manliness and unveiled reading, on the one hand, and Judaism with femininity and veiled reading, on the other.

For Origen, however, getting the girl requires a practice of manly self-mastery, a cultivation of bodily self-control (sōphrosynē) that he consistently links with sexual renunciation. Sōphrosynē refers to that Greek and, later, Roman virtue of moderation, discretion, self-control, chastity, and sobriety, championed in both men and women. When Christian priests and monks began to embrace celibacy as a distinguishing spiritual practice, they needed a way to define masculinity that was not rooted in sexual domination of women or young men.Footnote ⁸⁸Sōphrosynē provided the key. For Origen and other ascetically-minded church leaders, mastery of the body and its desires became a distinguishing mark of the manliest of men. It was this mastery of the body, in turn, which made possible the mastery and true understanding of the Bible.

In these interpretations of biblical passages from Leviticus to Ezekiel, Origen draws on Greek and Roman constructions of manliness and subtly reshapes them to accommodate his version of the ideal Christian man, envisioned here as a celibate, studious exegete scouring the pages of scripture to unveil spiritual truths. To make space for this new Christian man, Origen depicts maleness as simultaneously dominant and penetrating, on the one hand, and restrained and disciplined, on the other. He thus combines two—seemingly paradoxical—constructions of maleness available in the late ancient Mediterranean: the sexual domination of those in subordinate positions (including women, young men, and slaves), and the moderation and control of sexual appetites through the cultivation of sōphrosynē.

To illustrate how the true understanding of biblical laws requires sōphrosynē and renunciation of sexual desire, Origen again turns to the imagery of a sacrificial calf in Leviticus. He argues that if the Christian reader is to understand the spiritual meaning of the Levitical sacrifice, then he must sacrifice his “calf,” and (here is the punch line):

Origen's circular logic drives his interpretation of the ritual of animal sacrifice; he claims that the proper understanding of scripture (here Leviticus) requires the discipline of asceticism, conceived as an agonistic and manly battle. Once one has trained his body, subjected it to spiritual discipline, and turned his mind to contemplate the text in a spiritual manner, the true meaning of the text is illuminated. In this case, the true meaning of the Levitical text is the teaching of bodily chastity and self-mastery. One only accesses the spiritual meaning by habituating the body to a practice of renunciation, and one only learns this divine message of renunciation by discerning the spiritual meaning of the text.

Origen's allegorical and ascetic interpretation of the Levitical sacrifices shows how he frames Christian spiritual exegesis as a masculinized performance of rationality and bodily self-mastery. In his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, he makes a similar point: “Those who put to death their own members from the incentive of lust and rage, and who possess actions in their body that are pleasing to God are offering in a rational manner a sacrifice that is living, holy, and pleasing to God. Moreover, they are fulfilling the law of the sacrifices, which is contained in Leviticus, according to the spiritual understanding.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In this passage, as in the one above, Origen provides a “rational” and “spiritual” interpretation of the Levitical sacrifices as the excision of pleasure and passion from the self. This spiritual interpretation operates hand-in-hand with a bodily training whereby one “puts to death” one's members from the dangerous passions of “lust” and “rage.” Allegorical reading is, for Origen, an askēsis unto itself.Footnote ⁹¹

Origen thus understands the act of unveiling as required not only of the biblical text (housed as it is in a “vessel of dishonor”) but also the self (cloaked as it is in shameful flesh). In his fifth homily on Jeremiah, Origen argues that the veil (of language, of flesh) is a veil of shame, which recalls the ancient conception of the veil as manifestation of a woman's aidōs. The removal of the veil thus appears as the excision of passions that effect shame. Reading Jeremiah 3:25 (“Let us lie down in our shame, and let our dishonor veil us”) with Psalm 44:15 (“The shame of my face veiled me”) and 2 Corinthians 3:18 (“But we all with an unveiled face behold the glory of the Lord”), Origen preaches:

Drawing out the connection of shame and dishonor, already present in Jeremiah 3:25, Origen says, “As it is then said there, ‘the shame of my face veiled me,’ so in the same way it is said here, ‘Our dishonor [ἀτιμία] veiled us.’ To the degree that we do the works of dishonor, we have a veil resting upon our heart. If we want the veil of dishonor to be lost, let us come to the works of honor.”Footnote ⁹³ Reminding the members of his congregation that the veil is removed by turning toward the Lord, Origen then exhorts them to renounce wrath, and indeed, all passions: “In as much as wrath [ὀργὴ] against anyone lies over our soul a veil lies over our face . . . If we take off the anger, even all the passions, then we take off the veil. To the degree that these things are in our mind, in our reasoning, the veil and the dishonor are hanging upon our inner face, our inner governing faculty [ἡγεμονικόν], in order that we not see the glory of God shining.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Later in this same homily, Origen compares the outer teachings of scripture to a foreskin that must be circumcised.Footnote ⁹⁵ The spiritual exegete must tackle biblical language, cutting off its shameful, fleshly excess, to uncover the glory beneath.

In these interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, Origen theorizes the practice of Christian spiritual interpretation as an eroticized “undressing” or “flaying” of the text and, simultaneously, as a masculinized performance of bodily self-control whereby one removes the text's shameful (womanly, Jewish) excess. In so doing, he preserves two competing markers of Greek and Roman masculinity: sexual domination and penetration, on the one hand, and sexual renunciation and bodily self-control on the other.

Despite Origen's insistence that rational, self-controlled interpretation attains a meaning which is unveiled and stripped-down (dejudaized, defeminized), Origen's vivid depictions of the work of the spiritual interpreter reveal his unrenounced enchantment with the text(ure) of scripture. In addition to describing the spiritual meanings of biblical passages, he delights in and lingers over the moments in which interpretational transparency is anticipated and achieved. Veils are never fully renounced. In fact, in Origen's presentation, the lift and play of the veil are the reader's jouissance.

V. Origen's Myopia

In her essay, “Savoir” (her contribution to Veils, a book co-authored with Jacques Derrida), the feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous describes her experience of myopia. She describes it as an “imperceptible native veil,”Footnote ⁹⁶ an endless source of frustration. Cixous writes of herself in the third person: “She had been born with the veil in her eye. A severe myopia stretched its maddening magic between her and the world. She had been born with the veil in her soul. Spectacles are feeble forks only just good enough to catch little bits of reality.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Cixous decided to undergo a surgical procedure to remove this “veil” from her eyes. Here is how she describes the experience of no-longer-not-seeing:

In another passage Cixous describes the removal of the veil as an experience of pleasure: “Is seeing the supreme jouissance,” she asks, “ or is it no-longer-not-seeing?”Footnote ⁹⁹

The surgery that removed the veil on her eye, though successful, prompted nostalgia for her myopia, which had kept the world forever “suspended, desirable, refused.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ She writes, “Only that myopia of a Tuesday in January—the myopia that was going away, leaving the woman like a slow inner sea—could see both shores.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Now that it has gone forever, she misses her “imperceptible native veil.”

Origen, like Cixous, is not so easily finished with the veil. At times Origen is a bit myopic himself, reveling in scriptural language, delighting in his new bride, and allowing the letter itself to seduce him. This is most apparent in his commentary and homilies on the Song of Songs. Origen insists that the reader of the Song of Songs must take great care in interpretation, for in this book, the “charm” of the letter—or what he calls in On First Principles the “sheer attractiveness of language”Footnote ¹⁰²—can be a cause of stumbling. The “strong meat” contained within “the words of the Song of Songs” is appropriate only for those who are well advanced on their path to perfection and who have “trained their senses to distinguish good from evil (Heb 5:14).”Footnote ¹⁰³ It is not meant for those who are “at the stage of infancy and childhood in their inner life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Origen explains:

“The names of love” must appeal only to one's spiritual hearing; the ear must be trained by the renunciation of bodily passion and the pursuit of manly sōphrosynē. For the carnal reader who has abandoned the spirit for the flesh, the Song of Songs will serve not as an occasion to enhance spiritual understanding but as a provocation to lust.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For the spiritual reader, by contrast, the Song of Songs provides an occasion to “purify” the soul “in all its actions and habits” and to advance to “the contemplation of the divine with sincere and spiritual love.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet, even here in Origen's insistence on the figural reading of the Song, the trace of the literal, the beautiful body of the text—the veil itself—remains the site of the initial seduction of the exegete and the beginning point of his spiritual transformation through language.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Despite his sustained efforts to disavow a reading that attends solely to the “veil of the letter,” Origen cannot escape the veil. The language of scripture (especially the Hebrew scripture) remains for him as the origin of desire. The books of the law and the prophets, he writes in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, are lightly sprinkled with “silver inlays,”—”small sparks (scintillae) of spiritual understanding.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These small sparks function as enticing amuse-bouches for beginning readers, “so that they may somehow acquire a taste for the sweetness (dulcedinis) that is so much to be desired; otherwise . . . there would be no desire, if that which is desirable is wholly unknown.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Despite striving to renounce the veil of the letter as mere fleshly covering, Origen cannot help but reveal his continual fascination with the language of scripture. The jouissance suprême lies not in the spiritual truth itself, but in the moment and movement of the veil, the carefully calibrated choreography of unveiling and revelation.Footnote ¹¹¹

The description of biblical language as tantalizing and seductive, enticing the reader to unveil spiritual truths, is especially apparent in Origen's endeavors to “save” Hebrew Bible narratives for Christian use. Commenting on the story of when Abraham's servant, dispatched to find a wife for Isaac, encounters Rebecca at the well (Gen 24), Origen insists on the capacity of the historical narrative to mask deeper mysteries. Here he argues that this narrative about the search for a wife for Isaac is of value insofar as it entices the reader to union with Christ:

The Hebrew prophets woo the Christian reader insofar as they encode the lover's voice and announce his impending arrival. The prophetic texts are the love notes of Christ.

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen writes that the Law and the Prophets serve as “wedding gifts” (recall the anakalyptēria) given by angels to the bride as she anticipates the arrival of her beloved in the flesh. The prophets, in particular,

The Hebrew prophets, weaving their veils of language, spark in the reader's heart an unquenchable fire of desire for Christ.

As Patricia Cox Miller has observed in an article on Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen understands the words of scripture not as “bare” but as “visible provocations toward the invisible, the unspoken.” She continues, “Words signify, but they do so only as a seductive flash, as gapes in the garment of the text.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The reader, whom Origen figures as the bride of the Song of Songs, receives from the word “a dart and wound of love,” which “kindles” in her the fire of the bridegroom's love.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Origen imagines the moment of discernment—of interpretational transparency—as the kiss of the bridegroom. He pictures the reader immersed in interpretive work as a bride amid veils:

The ascetic discipline of spiritual interpretation, moreover, is rewarded by the intimacy of a face-to-face (and mouth-to-mouthFootnote ¹¹⁷) encounter with the logos: the bridegroom “wants her to come to this place and, when the veil has been removed, there to gaze upon his unveiled face, that face-to-face she may become known to her bridegroom, and that he may not only see her face unveiled and free, but may also hear her voice there; for he is certain both that her face is beautiful and that her voice is sweet and a delight to hear.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In this passage, Origen recalls both the Exodus imagery of Moses speaking with God “face to face” (Ex 33:11) and the Pauline imagery of encountering “the glory of the Lord” with “unveiled face” (2 Cor 3:18). Spiritual interpretation is the anakalyptēria of reader and logos.

In Origen's view, the veil of the letter—the “beautiful body” of the scriptural text—entices the reader to discover what lies hidden. Proper unveiling, however, is the work of one who has fashioned himself according to the dictates of self-control and sexual renunciation. The spiritual exegete, for Origen, represents the “culture's conception of virility—hard rather than soft, erect rather than slack or aslant, dry rather than moist or slippery.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ He is a model of rationality and discipline, armed for battle with his weapons of spiritual intelligence, ready to fight off the profligate exegesis of Jews and heretics. Yet the sphere of the feminine, the fleshly, the Jewish—the materiality of language itself—is not so easily cast aside in this manly endeavor for spiritual understanding. The feminized, Judaized language of the Bible remains for Origen as the initial and necessary provocation of desire for truth.