Erasmus’s discreet fascination with Origen and equally discreet coldness towards Augustine was a pointer to a possible new direction for Western Christianity in the early sixteenth century. It was a direction rejected alike by mainstream Protestantism and those who remained loyal to the pope, but it did inspire many of the more adventurous minds of the period, radicals who refused to be absorbed into hardening theological categories – many of whom no doubt first encountered the unfamiliar name of Origen through the pages of Erasmus’s Enchiridion.
