Angelos Palioudakis

Often celebrated for transforming “male” and “female” into spiritual pedagogy, Origen’s allegorical exegesis is also notorious for sexing the inner life: “male” becomes the sign of spirit and rational mastery, while “female” becomes the sign of soul, flesh, sensibility, and affect. Modern readers frequently treat this as harmless “internalization,” a move that neutralizes gender by relocating it from bodies to faculties. This article challenges that assumption by reading Homilies on Genesis 1.15 (and adjacent loci) through Luce Irigaray’s critique of sexual indifference and the specular economy of Western discourse. I argue that Origen’s spiritualization does not dissolve the hierarchy of sexual difference but can universalize it, installing a metaphysical grammar in which the feminine functions as the sensible/material remainder that the masculine must govern and, in the limit, transcend. Yet the Origenic economy does not close neatly. By attending to women as pedagogically exemplary speakers of Scripture and to Origen’s occasional authorization of women’s instruction (under constraint), I show where the scheme fractures: the sensible and the feminine cannot be merely disposable because they are indispensable conditions of spiritual formation. The article thus offers not a moral verdict on Origen but a precise diagnosis of how gender operates as a philosophical-theological operator in patristic exegesis.