Alexandrian Church Father (c. 184-c. 253) and the most prolific theological writer of the early church. Born at Alexandria to Christian parents (his father Leonides was martyred in the persecution of 202); succeeded Clement of Alexandria as head of the Catechetical School at Alexandria at the young age of about eighteen (c. 203); taught at Alexandria for over thirty years until controversies with Bishop Demetrius led to his deposition and relocation to Caesarea in Palestine (c. 230). At Caesarea Origen continued his teaching, biblical-exegetical work, and pastoral labor until imprisoned and tortured during the Decian persecution (250-251); died several years later from the lasting effects of the torture. Origen's literary corpus is the largest of any early Christian writer: the Hexapla (a six-column comparative edition of the Old Testament in Hebrew, Hebrew transliteration, the LXX, and three other Greek translations — the foundational work of Old Testament textual criticism); extensive biblical commentaries and homilies covering most of the Bible; On First Principles (the first systematic Christian theology); Against Celsus (the great Christian apologetic response to the pagan philosopher Celsus); the Philocalia (selections compiled by Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus). Origen's exegetical method emphasizes the threefold sense of Scripture (literal, moral, and spiritual/allegorical), particularly the spiritual/allegorical reading at which Origen excelled. Several of Origen's doctrinal positions became controversial in subsequent centuries: subordinationism in the Trinity (treating the Son as subordinate to the Father in being, not just in mission); the preexistence of human souls; apokatastasis (the eventual restoration of all rational beings, including the devil, to God); the Origenist controversies of the late fourth century and the sixth-century Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) led to formal condemnation of these specific Origenian positions. The patriarchal-Reformed reader engages Origen as the prodigious biblical-exegetical scholar of the early third century, receiving the substantive exegetical work with profit while explicitly rejecting the doctrinal aberrations that subsequent orthodox tradition has condemned.