Origen and the Orgin
Imagine a Christian teacher, renowned for his teaching and brilliance, who taught that souls preexisted before early life, that reincarnation was a fact, that at the end of time all things would be restored to God, including, it would seem, the figure of the Satan himself. A person who spoke of various levels of existence, both visible and invisible. Someone who wrote passionately that following the bare letter of holy texts was a mistake and that the entire story of God planting a garden in Eden was "silly."
We're not talking about a teacher whose newest book is being written. Instead, we're talking about Origen, disciple of Clement of Alexandria, who lived from 183-253 A.D.
In writing of the Genesis story, Origen said:
"Very many mistakes have been made because the right method of examining the holy texts has not been discovered by the greater number of readers....because it is their habit to follow the letter....
"Scripture interveweaves the imaginary with the historical, sometimes introducing what is utterly impossible, sometimes what is possible but never occured..the sam with the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles; for not even they are purely historical, incidents which never occured being interwoven in the 'corporeal' sense.
"And who is so silly as to imagine that God, like a husband-man, planted a garden in Eden eastword, and put in it a tree of life, which could be seen and felt...And if God is also said to walk in the garden in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that any one will doubt that these passages, by means of seeming history, though the incidents never occured, figuratively reveal certain mysteries."
Origen speaks to another point which was largely dismissed in the development of the Church that followed, namely the divisions of human beings into their own kind of Trinity. Rather than the idea of Body and Soul, Origen put forth there were three divisions.