The Charismatic Intellectual: Origen's Understanding of Religious Leadership

Origen's vocabulary is quite definitely that of an intellectual; it owes little to daily life or to the vernacular of his time.… He seems …to manufacture his own language, often hermetic, abstract, or difficult to understand, the language of a man concerned above all with ideas, somewhat cut off from the real world, and constitutionally separated from concrete realities. Are we wrong in attaching a particular significance to the fact, so characteristic of his passionate idealism as well as of his introversion, that he made himself a eunuch ?