Origen was a Christian leader in Alexandria, Egypt Roman theater, Alexandria

Origen served for a time as head of the catechetical school in Alexandria and taught in several locations. At the end of his life he founded a Christian school in Caesarea. As an exegete Origen wrote commentaries and homilies on nearly the whole of the Bible. He also edited the text of the Old Testament and created the Hexapla in which he compiled several Greek texts of the Old Testament in parallel. In interpreting the Scripture, Origen recognized three senses of the text: the literal, the historical, and the allegorical. While Origen took seriously the literal and historical senses of biblical texts, the allegorical sense was for him the deepest and most significant. This approach to exegesis was undergirded by currents in Greek philosophical thinking, especially neo-platonism, which led Origen to contend that the created, historical world is mutable while the more fully real world of spirit is unchanging. Stories, for him, most importantly represented timeless truths about God rather than historical accounts of God's work. The same basic conviction animates Origen's great theological work On First Principles. The destiny of the Christian is to escape the material and historical world and to reunite with God in a spiritual realm by way of intellectual reflection, mystical contemplation, and ascetic practice. Origen taught that all spirits will one day escape matter and history in order to ascend back to God. This resulted in universalism, the doctrine of salvation for all.