Origen’s Castration: Between Spirituality, Agape and Non-Binary Intimacy

The aim of this manuscript is to analyse the intersection of intimacy – agape – spirituality in light of Origen’s biography, one of the greatest minds of the ancient Christian world, whose beliefs and works secured his lasting place in Western culture. Origen is known not only as the author of the theory of apocatastasis (the belief in the final salvation of all people, including even the greatest sinners as well as demons and the Devil) but also as the author of the original view of intimacy exceeding traditional model of gender and sexuality. At the age of 20, he castrated himself for religious reasons and in later years, he created a vision of ideal relationships based on a specific understanding of spiritual love, pushing genital sexuality beyond the margins of his personal and social life. In this regard, Origen presented one of the most radical and significant visions of agape, which to this day has a profound influence on the perception of the human body and sexuality. The article demonstrates that Origen’s experience reveals, hidden in the cliché of religious concepts, a search for a solution to a universal human problem: the need to go beyond the definition of love/intimacy understood in bodily-sensual and primarily binary terms. The first part of the manuscript presents Origen’s biography and his vision intimacy, agape and spirituality. The second part analyses the problematic aspects of such an understanding of love, which on the one hand can lead to the spiritualisation of intimacy and sexuality, and on the other, paradoxically, to the eroticisation of spirituality. The conclusions of the proposed study seem to be essential for a better understanding of the subtle dimensions of our sexual activity. They may also prove helpful in therapeutic practice where spirituality collides with the realm of sexual activity.