The Address of Thanksgiving was composed sometime in the 230s on the occasion of its author's departure from Origen's school in Caesarea Maritima. This treatise, sometimes also called the Panegyric in English-speaking scholarship, is usually recruited as a source for Origen's educational program in the post-Alexandrian phase of his career. The author of this work has traditionally been identified as Gregory Thaumaturgus (the “Wonder-Worker”), eventual bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, though in recent decades this attribution has been contested. David Satran is not attempting to settle this debate, which likely proves irresolvable with the evidence at hand. Following convention, he refers to the author as “Gregory,” but he remains prudently agnostic about the authorship of this treatise.
Satran's main goal is to turn our attention to the Address itself. While there have been a number of scholarly forays into this work, it has yet to receive the full-length study that it merits. Mining the text for historical details, as has been the scholarly fashion—details about Origen, his school and curriculum, the city of Caesarea—has yielded us very little. The high artistry of this work, its florid prose, and its adherence to rhetorical conventions, have often frustrated traditional historical inquiry. Satran charts a different path. This late ancient expression of gratitude is shaped by a rhetoric that “neither conceals nor distorts but actually casts a new light” (11). Precisely what has escaped our attention is what the text offers: “one of the very richest and most intimate portraits we possess from antiquity of the inner lives of a student and his master” (7). In the Image of Origen is an elegantly composed work, inviting readers to explore the language, themes, and place of the Address in the wider pre- and post-Constantinian church.
The book's four main chapters follow the sequence of the Address and provide something like a running commentary on the treatise, interspersed with provocative observations, tentative inquiries, and open-ended questions. The treatise is richly contextualized in the worlds of ancient and late antique philosophy, from Plato through nearer contemporaries like Philo, Alcinous, and Albinus. A number of early Christian writings provide useful moments for comparison, none more so than Origen's own works, whose themes reverberate throughout Gregory's discourse.
Arguably the leitmotif of Satran's study is Gregory's testimony to the paradox of human freedom—such a central theme in Origen's own writings—in which new capacities can often only be realized through some form of constraint. This motif surfaces prominently in the first chapter of the book (“Providence, Eros, and Constraint”) where Satran examines the beginnings of this student's relationship to Origen. Gregory recounts how providential design brought both him and Origen to Caesarea. Theirs was an intimate relationship, in which Gregory fell in love (“eros”) with the Word of God and Origen, its friend and advocate. But it was also a relationship characterized by “persuasiveness and constraint,” in which the master exerted a forceful, even “bewitching,” presence that recruited Gregory away from law to the life of philosophy (37).
The second chapter (“Dialectic and the Training of the Mind”) examines the beginnings of the curricular regimen in Caesarea. I find two emphases in this chapter helpful. We tend to portray late ancient education as an additive process, but reeducation was sometimes just as important. For Gregory, so highly trained in rhetoric and yet now in the philosopher's schoolroom, this entailed the sometimes-painful process of stripping away bad habits and gradually realigning himself to the disposition of the philosopher: valuing truth over appearance and clarity over embellishment. Another particularly insightful thesis in this chapter is how Origen cultivated unusually open and inclusive attitudes among his students. His curriculum was opposed to narrowly dogmatic approaches to contested topics and encouraged pupils to study teachings from a variety of diverse sources. “Origen's educational practice in Caesarea … should be appreciated as a conscious alternative toward emerging forms of heresiological discourse in early Christianity” (87).
In chapter 3 (“Moral Formation and the Path to Scripture”), we arrive at ethics and theology, the two main areas of philosophical study in Origen's curriculum, scriptural study, the explicitly Christian element, and the ultimate telos of the educational program, assimilation to the divine—a Platonic theme, expressed famously in Theaetetus 176a–b and also, I believe, alluded to by Origen at Princ. 3.6.1. Satran further explores the close link between word and deed in moral training. He touches upon arguably the main theme of the Address: Origen as a particular sort of spiritual guide who both led students through the fields of philosophical study, but also embodied what he taught through ascetic self-control and depth of insight. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Pierre Hadot's scholarship on late ancient philosophy surfaces.
In chapter 4 (“Paradise and the Cave”) Satran examines the final section of the Address which forms an independent literary unit and perhaps the core of the actual address delivered before Origen. There are obvious parallels between this “leave-taking address” (logos suntaktikos) and Greco-Roman rhetoric. More provocatively, Rabbinic models of leave-taking might also reside in the background (144). Gregory anticipates his departure from Origen's school—the “paradise of God”—with a rich tapestry of motifs of banishment and exile drawn from scripture. Perhaps there is a reversal here of Origen's prized theme of the soul's progress through journey and ascent. Our student laments a regressive journey as a long period of companionship draws to an end (148–149).
In the final chapter (“Paideia, Loss, and Prospect”), Satran gathers together the main threads of the study and reflects upon how the Address forecasts a number of the transformations that Christianity would undergo in the fourth century: shifting attitudes toward charismatic teachers and their relationship with the institutional church, the emergency of asceticism, and links between the Address and hagiographical and pilgrimage literature. In the Image of Origen makes a fine companion to the Address of Thanksgiving.
