Origen -- father of Christian mysticism

"ALL the disciples of the new Platonic philosophy, Origen was by all means the greatest, both in learning, according to the popular standard, and in the position which he held in the church.

Killen rightly calls him… ...the father of Christian mysticism; –and

Waddington says that he was the founder of the scholastic system of theology. His direct teaching inculcated many errors; but his views in regard to the Scriptures tended to undermine the whole fabric of Christianity. 

His idea was that... ...as man consists of body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does Scripture. 

The “corporeal” sense, which is the simple meaning of Scripture, he did not wholly despise, but he built the most on the “psychical” sense, or the soul, and the “spiritual sense,” neither of which could be deduced from the words. 

This “spiritual” sense which Origen lauded was not that understanding of the Scriptures which the Holy Spirit alone can reveal, but that which was evolved solely by human speculation. 

It was arrived at by the method adopted by Ammonius in common with other pagan philosophers, of evolving some notion from one’s “inner consciousness,”..... 

Of course, in order to get this “psychical” and “spiritual” sense out of the Bible, that is, to get out of it something that was never in it, much violence had to be done to the sacred record. Origen paved the way, not only for the reception of his vagaries, but for the utter disuse into which the Bible very soon fell, by boldly declaring that the Bible contains many falsehoods.

Acts 17:21 ...spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing." 

E.J. Waggoner