A decorative woodcut headpiece features two cherubs flanking a floral arrangement.

PREFACE TO THE READER.

An ornamental drop cap 'O' depicts vine and leaf motifs.To Origen Adamantius, a celebrated Doctor of the Church, that Homeric line from Iliad 23, verse 116 fits better than it does to Agamemnon:

Many things came uphill, downhill, side-ways, and cross-ways.

That is, if it is permitted to express the roughest fortunes in a rough verse:

Downward, upward, and transverse, reverse things came.

For he experienced such varied fortune, and such diverse judgments of many, both in life and after death; that love and hatred, envy and emulation seem to have exercised all their power in one man. If we recall how dear his person was to Gregory Thaumaturgus, solemnly celebrated in a panegyrical oration, to whom Demetrius of Alexandria was most hostile, sending letters to defame him throughout the whole world:
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, book 6, ch. 29 and 7; Jerome, Catalogue on Origen, page 285.

Not to mention what he had to experience and suffer from those outside meaning pagans or heretics..

His writings, in particular, underwent a doubtful fate. For Pamphilus, Bishop of Caesarea, burned with such love for them that he copied the greatest part of Origen's volumes with his own hand: as testified by Jerome's Catalogue in the section on Pamphilus. Theophilus of Alexandria, however, strove to snatch them from everyone's hands. A Synod held at Alexandria in the time of Sulpicius Severus (as reported by Gennadius in On Ecclesiastical Writers under Severus) decreed more moderately: that Origen should be read by the Wise with caution as a source of good, and by the less capable should be rejected as a source of evil. But the fifth ecumenical Council anathematized Origen most severely of all, on account of various errors found here and there in his works. From that time, his writings, as if infected with heretical poison, were almost entirely spurned by everyone and lay immersed in perpetual darkness, at least whatever was written in the Greek language. Their translations, and those sufficiently interpolated and distorted, Ruffinus'