Origen Story

And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.

But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. Matthew 19:9-12

While Origen was conducting catechetical instruction at Alexandria, a deed was done by him which evidenced an immature and youthful mind, but at the same time gave the highest proof of faith and continence. For he took the words, There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, Matthew 19:12 in too literal and extreme a sense. And in order to fulfill the Saviour’s word, and at the same time to take away from the unbelievers all opportunity for scandal,— for, although young, he met for the study of divine things with women as well as men,— he carried out in action the word of the Saviour. Eusebius, Church History, Book VI

Once upon a time, o boys and girls, I was alleged to have done a thing, a thing which made me neither boy nor girl. It was, you know, a difficult decision, reached during the same process of ratiocination that yielded my Commentary on Matthew.

The heart filament of the teachings in Matthew–how else should I put it but that, “heart filament?”–is oneness. Not twoness, not threeness, not fourness. In spite of that, human imperfection necessitates a “coming-together” of unfinished beings, the pairing motivated by impulses we can neither totally understand nor completely control.

The flawed twoness of the human condition was overcome only by the One, which in its essential glory (i.e., in the glory of its essence) produced One from One. Mary, whose seed grew without germination, was only half, and what she unbegot was, in its corporeal form, merely the other half, though elsewise and abstractly it was One. Get it? Got it? Good.

But at least that transaction was pure, as distinguished from every other terrestrial encounter, which always amounts to a kind of rape. Between woman and man, man and man, woman and woman, adult and child, animal and human–what else could it be but rape, which presupposes inequality, an imbalance, one entity wanting or needing it more than another?

In the marketplace, the assembly, the flat fields with grain as far as the eye can see: what is every interaction but a rape? When there are two, one takes from the other. One wants it more; the other less–and so when there are two, one loses and the other wins. One enforces his or her will; the other is forced and submits.

To be a teacher, which I had long dreamed of becoming, I believed that twoness was a liability. Duality implied desire; “it is not good to marry” even as “all men cannot receive this saying.”

The world I knew, which is a world you feckless postmoderns must study through a mirror darkly, was a world of men. Women were acted upon; women were never safe. To act upon a woman–Lucretia, Helen, Europa–was ipso facto to rape, for it could not be otherwise. “Action” in every circumstance was rape, and “inaction” was not-rape…but, as the teacher noted, not all men could understand this.

The world you know, a world in which I’m dead, is still the same, albeit with some cosmetic distinctions: air conditioning, parking lots, chili dogs, Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies. It remains a raping society, in which men, overcome by concupiscence and stupefied by thousands of years of abhorrent cultural conditioning, rape women and other men.

I could not overcome my twoness, so I abandoned it. I castrated myself with a gelding knife and brought a swift end to the ordeal. In so acting, I opened myself to the sort of criticism that attaches to anyone who seeks an alternate course, who abandons the status quo to those hardy unfortunates still willing to thrash around in it.1

My act, like every human act, was a failure: from two, I became none. But my noneness was better than everyone else’s self-aggrandizing something-ness. Even in your world, which dreams of brute equality between & among twoness/threeness/fourness2, you cannot escape the fact that some have more of a particular aggressive quality, while others have less. You might make your rape more civilized, but your new gender derivations categorized as “more masculine than not” (whatever that means) are still just euphemisms for “rapist,” some worse than others, still halves trying to enforce their wholeness on the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

Alas, my noneness, achieved at the tips of a double-pronged blade3, did not remove me from the ranks of those who act and those who are acted upon. I waged intellectual battles against my rivals, suffered abuses at the hands of foes both past and present, and inflicted the innumerable hurts no living being can avoid.

The dream, or at least my dream, was to complete my work and then die. It was a thoroughly practical dream, and I achieved it. Heaven beckoned.

Thereupon I discovered that the concept of heaven, about which I had written and lectured extensively, most directly comports with the description provided by modern theologian David Byrne: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” “It’s hard to imagine,” Byrne continues, “that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” Believe the conventional wisdom: nothing lasts forever, and it is what is.

Enough about me; I am no longer anybody. You are still here, still a part of this ugliness, though maybe not for much longer. It will never make sense, all that hating and killing you’ve done, but at least it will be over.

e.g., the Desert Fathers, those silly fakirs, rolling on the dirt floors of their caves and hermit-holes to stave off the onset of a nocturnal emission. What heroes they were, what athletes for the One! But in their madness, certainly no more divinely inspired than my own, they merely reaffirmed the endless, exquisite torture posed by desire. Desiring beings can either damage others or torture themselves; there is no way out.
Owing to your generation’s expanded field of vision, which benefits from a well-documented hindsight to which I and my ilk were not privy, you have recognized that there are many possible pair-combinations, many more classifications of human, an infinite set of classifications even…but it seems to me that these classifications are still insufficient on account of their over-reliance on that humanity, of their reveling in it. Are they not?
A not entirely pleasant experience for those who have undergone the process. To be blunt–anachronistically so, for yours is a franker time than mine–a eunuch tends to accumulate smegma and other debris at a higher rate than those who are still fully functional, probably because eunuchs rarely fully extrude the penis, and thus dirt and smegma build up in the folds of skin. I leave a more detailed discussion of this matter to your natural scientists.

–orwen elvenborn