Origen

Origen ran the catechetical school in Alexandria while still in his teens, after his father was martyred and the family's confiscated property left him supporting six younger siblings. He read Scripture the way the Alexandrian Platonists read Homer: literally where the text demanded it, allegorically where the literal sense seemed unworthy of God. His Hexapla set six versions of the Old Testament side by side in parallel columns, a work of textual scholarship not equaled for over a thousand years. He taught that souls existed before their bodies and that even the devil might eventually be reconciled to God — a position called universal restoration that scandalized the more literal-minded among his readers. According to a later historian, he castrated himself as a young man in a too-literal reading of a line from Matthew, a story disputed but never fully dismissed. Tortured during the persecution of Decius, he died from his injuries a few years later. Three centuries afterward, an emperor and a church council condemned his teachings on preexistence and universal salvation as heresy, and most of his vast output survives only because someone kept copying the parts judged safe.