## 1. Origen's life and work



The Greek name Origenes signifies "born of Horus," an
Egyptian falcon-headed deity. The Christian scholar of this name was a
native of Alexandria (Eusebius, *Church History* 6.1), though
it is only his detractor Epiphanius who says that he was also by race
a Copt (*Panarion* 1.1). Eusebius records the jibe of the
Neoplatonist Porphyry that Origen, though a Greek by education, became
a Christian, whereas his philosophy teacher Ammonius, having once been
a Christian, converted to a more lawful way of life (*Church
History* 6.19.7). Although most scholars assume that this is
Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Plotinus, there was another
philosopher of the same name, who is credited with "unequalled
polymathy" by the philosopher Longinus at Porphyry, *Life of
Plotinus* 20.49-50. (For further information see Edwards
1993: 179.) Eusebius, moreover, asserts that both Origen and his
teacher were Christians throughout their lives (6.19.10); as evidence
of the latter's Christianity in his youth, he records that his
father Leontius died as a martyr in 202, and that Origen himself, then
17, not only exhorted Leontius to persevere but thirsted for the same
death (6.2.7). His mother could curb his enthusiasm only by hiding his
clothes so that he was ashamed to leave the house (6.2.6). Eusebius
also tells us that his sexual diffidence or his ascetic temper induced
Origen to make himself literally a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven
(6.8.2); the act is not unparalleled (Markschies 2007: 15-34),
but Epiphanius was unable to verify the story (*Panarion*
64.2).



After his father's death, Origen devoted himself to scholarship
and became a notable teacher, perhaps succeeding Clement as head of
the catechetical school in Alexandria (Eusebius, *Church
History* 6.3.1 and 6.7-8.1; but cf. Osborn 2008:
19-21). He appears to have studied Hebrew with a converted Jew
(*First Principles* 1.3.4 etc.), and one of his letters alludes
to his studies in philosophy with an unnamed teacher (Eusebius,
*Church History* 6.19.13). Among the works Eusebius says that
he composed at this time, dictating to "more than seven
stenographers" (6.23.2), were the first five books of his
*Commentary on John*, eight books of a *Commentary on
Genesis*, two books *On the Resurrection* and his major
surviving work, a synthesis of scriptural teaching under the name
*First Principles* (6.24). Of these the last survives entire,
but only in the Latin of Rufinus. A few books of the *Commentary on
John* survive in Greek, while portions of the work on the
resurrection were preserved in a rejoinder by Methodius of Olympia,
which itself survives only in the excerpts and epitomes of later
authors (see Dechow 1977). It was also in Alexandria, in imitation of
the Homeric scholars of the Hellenistic era, that Origen addressed
himself to the preparation of his great Hexapla, in which a corrected
edition of the Septuagint, the original, allegedly inspired
translation of the Hebrew scriptures (3rd c. BC?), stood in
parallel to the Hebrew and the renderings of other Greek translators
(Eusebius, *Church History* 6.16. See further Neuschafer
1987; Dorival 2013).



According to Eusebius, his talents excited the jealousy of Demetrius,
the Bishop of Alexandria, who cited his self-castration as a reason
for refusing to ordain him as a presbyter (Eusebius, *Church
History* 6.8.4-5). Nevertheless, when Origen left Alexandria
in 216 to escape the ferocity of the Emperor Caracalla, Demetrius
recalled him from Caesarea, where he had already begun to increase his
reputation (6.19.16-19). On a subsequent visit to Caesarea he
was ordained a presbyter, and took up residence in the city (6.8.5;
6.23.4). Having commenced a commentary on the Song of Songs in the
course of a sojourn in Athens (6.32.2), he completed this in Caesarea,
together with his *Commentary on Matthew* and his refutation of
the *True Logos*, a pagan satire on Christianity written around
170 by an otherwise unknown Celsus (6.36.2). Never rising above the
rank of presbyter, he was often employed, according to the custom of
the times, as a mouthpiece of orthodoxy in trials of heretics before
an episcopal synod. Eusebius commends his refutation of Beryllus of
Bostra (6.33), adding that he was summoned to play a similar role in
Arabia (6.37), and that in his books he tore the mask from heresies
old and new. To this period of his life we should also date the
*Dialogue with Heraclides*, discovered at Tura in 1951
(Chadwick 1959). Yet even at the height of his career, his orthodoxy
was impugned. Jerome knows of a letter in which he rebuts the
accusation that he had prophesied the salvation of the devil (Crouzel
1973); the same letter indicates, according to Jerome, that his
teachings had given offence to Heraclas, his former student who had
now succeeded Demetrius as bishop of Alexandria. It is clear at least
that no censure was extended to Dionysius, the successor of Heraclas
and another of Origen's pupils. In Caesarea the ageing
theologian suffered tortures under Decius in 251 (Eusebius, *Church
History* 6.39.5) and, according to Eusebius, died as Gallus came
to the throne in 253 (7.1.1). His assertion that Origen was then in
his seventieth year is inconsistent with the date implied for his
birth (185). Most scholars have elected to postpone the death of
Origen to 254 or 255, without explaining why they think the biographer
more likely to have erred with regard to the year of his
subject's birth than that of his death. 



His library in Caesarea was inherited by his admirer Pamphilus, then
by Eusebius as a disciple of Pamphilus and bishop of that city. It
also fell to Eusebius to finish the *Apology* which Pamphilus
had begun to write against Origen's first detractors. From this
work and the philippics of such enemies of Origen as Jerome,
Theophilus of Alexandria, Epiphanius of Salamis, and the Emperor
Justinian, we can cull fragments of writings that have otherwise
perished (see further Clark 1992). We also possess an anthology of
choice excerpts from his writings the *Philokalia* (McLynn
2004), and two short texts *On Prayer* and *To the
Martyrs*. Much had already been lost by attrition in the time of
Eusebius (died c. 339); more may have perished after Origen was
anathematized in or around the year 553. Many of Origen's
Commentaries and Homilies, like the *First Principles*, survive
only in the Latin of Rufinus, who translated him in the fourth century
with reverence but not always with fidelity (see further Pace 1990).
The following synopsis of Origen's thought is based primarily on
the extant corpus in Greek and Latin, making use of polemical matter
only with the caution that is now enjoined by the most learned
scholars.


## 2. The intellectual milieu



Scholars are apt to speak casually of Origen's Platonism, more
technically of his "middle" Platonism, most commonly, and
not often with conscious paradox, of his Christian Platonism. The
Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren (1953), who protested that a
Christian Platonist is not a Christian, differed only in his judgment
of the facts, not in his reading of them, from his critics J.M. Rist
(1964) and Catherine Osborne (1994), who maintained that Platonism in
Origen's hands was not so much an adulteration as a salutary
refinement of the gospel. Nevertheless, whatever the merits of
Nygren's theology, Origen would have agreed with him in the
matter of nomenclature. The majority of his explicit references to
Plato are to be found in the work *Against Celsus*, a reply to
a dead polemicist who is nowadays characterized as a middle Platonist,
though Origen hints that he may have been an Epicurean (*Against
Celsus* 1.8; see further Bergjan 2001). Origen undertakes to show
that the simplest disciple of God's word knows him better than
the philosophers who seek him by their own methods (*Against
Celsus* 7.42), that Plato misrepresents the fall and diminishes
the Creator, that if his myths are deep, the biblical allegories are
deeper and less perverse, and that Numenius, the foremost Platonist of
recent times, has spoken of both Moses and Jesus with esteem
(*Against Celsus* 4.51 etc.).



The Bible (consisting for Origen only of the New Testament and the
Septuagint) is the matrix of every argument in this as in all his
writings; while it would be naive, and a contradiction of his own
practice, to deny that his exegesis was conditioned by philosophical
assumptions, the propaedeutic to biblical study in his school at
Caesarea was not Platonism but a professedly unprejudiced survey of
all the Greek schools. We learn this from his pupil Gregory
Thaumaturgus (*Panegyric* 13.151-152), to whom he also
wrote a letter assigning to Greek thought an ancillary role in the
elucidation of the scriptures; while he was less inclined than his
predecessors to accuse the Greeks of plagiarizing their philosophical
views from the books of Moses, he held that, since every exercise of
reason is inspired by Christ the Logos, a Christian has as much right
to the tools of pagan philosophy as the Israelites had to reimburse
their labour from the "spoils of the Egyptians"
(*Philokalia* 13; see further Martens 2012: 29-33).
Theologians have at last begun to take Origen at his word as an
interpreter of the scriptures; this is not to say that all other
influences are ignored, but that he is thought to deserve the same
courtesy that Classicists show to Plotinus when they acknowledge that
even doctrines which he consciously shares with the Stoics or
Aristotle can be derived without subterfuge from the text of
Plato.



The epithet "Platonist" will of course be warranted if
Origen the Christian is identified with the Origen whom Porphyry
represents as one of the privileged disciples of Ammonius Saccas, the
Alexandrian teacher of Plotinus. According to Porphyry (*Life of
Plotinus* 3.20-38) this Origen swore an oath with Plotinus
and a third disciple, Herennius, not to reveal the esoteric doctrines
of Ammonius after the latter's death in 243 A.D. This story
implies both personal intimacy and geographical proximity, yet Origen
the Christian was at this time almost sixty (twenty years senior to
Plotinus), had left Alexandria for Caesarea some years before, and
already had a multitude of books to his name as a Christian teacher.
Porphyry does not allude to these lucubrations in his *Life of
Plotinus*, but says that the Origen he refers to breached the pact
by issuing first a treatise *On Daemons*, then another, with
the title *That the King is the Only Maker*, in the reign of
Gallienus (253-268). He includes in the *Life* a letter,
written in 262 or 263 by his former tutor Longinus, which ascribes to
Origen only the work *On Daemons* (Porphyry, *Life of
Plotinus* 20.36-45). All scholars agree that Origen the
Christian could not have written anything in the last years of
Gallienus; if we can trust Eusebius, he did not live to see this reign
at all, but died in that of Gallienus' predecessor Gallus
(251-253). So, if this Origen is our author, Porphyry must at
least have misstated the period at which he violated the agreement.
Those who contend that there was only one Origen reply that it is the
chronology of Eusebius that must be flawed because, although his
account of Origen's youth implies that he was born in 185, he
asserts that his death occurred in his seventieth year, and hence not
earlier than 254, the first year of Gallienus. The same apologists
argue that Porphyry fails to mention his Christian writings either
because he despised them or (more cogently) because the publication of
them did not violate the oath (cf. Ramelli 2009). If this argument is
to prevail, a reason must also be furnished for the silence of
Longinus on this part of Origen's work, the Christian works of
Origen must be regarded as aids (in some degree) to the reconstruction
of the teaching of Ammonius, and something must be said to explain the
failure of Origen's Christian detractors in late antiquity to
cite the two works--still extant, according to
Proclus--which he added to the Neoplatonic canon. For these
reasons, while theologians have often maintained, or simply assumed,
the identity of the two Origens, the author of the article on Origen
in the *Oxford Classical Dictionary* asserts that the contrary
position is nowadays the more widely held (Smith 2012; see further
Edwards 1993). 


## 3. Doctrine of God



The opening chapter of Origen's *First Principles* is a
paradigmatic instance of his application of philosophic reasoning to
biblical exegesis. He assumes here what he asserts elsewhere, that the
nature of God is known to us only by his own revelation in the sacred
text. The scriptures tell us both that God is fire and that God is
spirit, but Origen warns us not to deduce, from a literal construction
of these terms, that he is a body (*Princ*. 1.1.1). It is
possible but not certain, that he has in mind the Stoicizing theology
of Tertullian: the Bible speaks more plainly on this matter than any
Stoic, and few of Origen's contemporaries would have doubted the
corporeality of fire or spirit. In urging the contrary position, that
God is incorporeal. Origen speaks not only for the Platonists but for
all the Greek apologists of the church: the prevalent thought of his
time (and perhaps of ours) required that if God is to be invisible,
immutable, eternal, omnipresent, and irresistible in power he must not
be confined to one place or composed of labile matter. The
philosophical sympathies of Origen become evident when he goes on to
equate this bodiless god with *nous* or intellect. In Plato,
*nous* had been an occasional synonym for the Demiurge, while
Numenius of Apamea, half a century before Origen, had subordinated the
Demiurge, as a second *nous*, to the "first
*nous*", which is Plato's form of the Good.
Although the Good in Plato is superior to *ousia* or being,
Numenius like the majority of Platonists before Origen, appears to
have posited nothing higher than intellect; Origen too--in this
respect a good Platonist--is less inclined to apophatic theology
than Philo the Alexandrian Jew or his Christian predecessors in Egypt,
Clement and Basilides. To explain the selective use of the definite
article in John 1.1, he characterizes the Father (*ho theos*)
as *autotheos*, very God, in contrast to the Son who is merely
*theos* (*CommJohn* 2.7.16-18); when he suggests,
however, that the Father is higher than *nous* (*Against
Celsus* 7.45), he does not develop a metaphysical theory, any more
than he develops his hint in the same work that God may be the
Aristotelian "thought of thoughts" (see further Whittaker
1969). Tobias Bohm's ingenious suggestion (2002) that for
Origen the being of God is his *nous*, and his unity that which
is higher than *nous*, assumes that he was acquainted with the
first and second hypotheses of the *Parmenides*, a dialogue of
which he evinces little knowledge in his extant works. 



Whether he is noetic or supranoetic, Origen's God cannot be
known to us in his essence, nor is it by his *ousia*, or
essence, but by his *dunamis*, or power, that he acts upon
other beings (*On Prayer* 25.3). His *dunamis*, which is
infinite and mediated by the second person of the Trinity, is the
source of every *dunamis* that is exercised by his creatures,
even by those who have fallen into apostasy and rebellion
(*CommJohn* 1.39.291). On the other hand nothing, not even the
second person, proceeds directly from the immutable *ousia* of
God (*CommJohn* 13.25.153 and 20.18.157: see below). Yet, while
he asserts that God is by nature impassible--in the sense that he
is the agent, not the patient, in every transaction and cannot be
moved by any external force--Origen is one of the first
theologians to assert that he can suffer, in a sense, as God, and not
only by virtue of the incarnation (*Homilies on Ezekiel* 6.1;
see Osborn 1994: 164-184). This suffering takes the form of
commiseration for the plight of his sinful creatures, never of sorrow
on his own account. Compassion supposes knowledge, and Origen appears
to have been untroubled by the difficulties that arise from the
ascription of contingent knowledge to an eternal being. That God
transcends the temporal order is evident from his answer to those who
ask what God was doing before he created the world: the question, he
argues, presupposes a time before the beginning of the world, but
reflection teaches us that time and the revolutions of the cosmos are
coeval (*Princ*. 3.5.3). This is a Platonic doctrine, but it
had now become common for Platonists to argue, in submission to
Aristotle, that the temporal world has neither end nor beginning and
is "generated" only in the sense that it is a theatre of
vicissitude, in which all that exists has come into being and will
pass away. 



The agent whom we call the Second Person of the Trinity is
"another god" at *Dialogue with Heraclides* 2 and a
"second god" on two occasions in his work *Against
Celsus* (5.39, 5.61). This appellation is not attested in earlier
Christian prose, though it is anticipated in Philo and Numenius. It
does not occur in works addressed by Origen to Christians of sound
faith, not even in those which show no fear of subordinating the Son
to the Father--an indication perhaps that it was avoided because
it savoured of polytheism and not because it belied the equality of
the divine persons (Edwards 2006). It seems that in Numenius it is the
contemplation of the first intellect by the second that gives rise to
the forms, or Platonic ideas; Origen, as a Christian, holds that the
contemplation is mutual, since "no-one knows the Son but the
Father and no-one knows the Father but the Son" (Matthew 11.27).
Thus he maintains, on the one hand, that the Son, as truth (John
14.6), knows all that is in the mind of the Father; the infamous
proviso that the Son does not see the Father signifies only that
within the Godhead vision is not mediated by our physical organs
(*Princ*. 1.1.8). On the other hand, when we read that the Son
is the wisdom and power of the Father (1 Corinthians 1.24) and that
the world was created through him (Hebrews 1.2), we are to understand
that he is that divine helpmate who declares at Proverbs 8.22 that the
Lord created her in the beginning of his ways, and at Wisdom 7.26 that
she is the mirror of his unspotted majesty. The verb
"created" in this text (which Origen prefers to the
alternative reading "possessed") does not imply that the
Son has a temporal beginning, but that, having no other substrate than
the Father's will, he expresses that will more perfectly than
the things that are "made" from matter. It is
inconceivable that the Father could ever have lacked wisdom, and
equally inconceivable to Origen that this wisdom could ever have taken
a different form from the one that it now possesses as the second
person or hypostasis of the Trinity (*Princ*. 1.2.2). He is the
first theologian to state unequivocally that the "three
hypostases" which constitute the Trinity are eternal not only in
nature, but in their hypostatic character; there was never a time when
wisdom was the latent thought of the Father and had not yet come forth
as speech.



Though Origen rejects it, this was in fact the prevailing thesis of
most Christian writing in the second century when it undertook to
explain the Fourth Evangelist's assertion that the one who
became incarnate was the Logos who had been with the Father as
*theos* (god) if not *ho theos* (God) from the beginning
(John 1.1). Since it was this speech or word that created the world,
it was argued, there would have been no reason for it to exist before
the creation as a distinct hypostasis. If he existed at all, it was as
the *logos endiathetos*, the word within, which had not yet
emerged from the mind as *logos prophorikos*, or verbal
utterance. In this latent phase he could be identified (as Philo had
already argued) with the paradigm, or world of forms, which supplies
the Platonic demiurge with his pattern for the creation. Clement of
Alexandria accepts this equation, albeit perhaps without denying the
hypostatic eternity of the Logos (Edwards 2000). Origen, however,
resists the interpretation of Logos as "speech" because
there are some who take this to imply that the second person is merely
a function or epiphenomenon of the first (*CommJohn* 1.24.151;
Orbe 1991). Logos, in his view, is one of the numerous designations
(*epinoiai*) which are conferred on the second person to define
his relation, not to the Father (as "Son" and
"Wisdom" do) but to his creatures (*CommJohn*
2.9.66 etc.): he is Logos as the paradigm and parent of all the
*logikai*, or rational beings, who exercise reason only by
participation in him. He cannot be identified with the world of forms,
or Platonic ideas, because to Origen these ideas are imaginary
entities which the Greeks absurdly suppose to be independent of the
Creator (*Princ*. 2.3.6). It appears then that he endorsed the
older and more literal reading of the *Timaeus*, according to
which the Demiurge, the forms and matter are three autonomous
principles of being. Before him Philo, Alcinous, and Clement of
Alexandria had construed the forms as thoughts in the mind of the
Demiurge, while Alexander of Aphrodisias held that they gave content
to God's eternal contemplation of himself (Armstrong 1960).
Origen himself opines that all genera, all species and even the
archetypes of all particular things are eternally present in the mind
of God (*Princ*. 1.4.5), but he holds this as a Christian
antidote to difficulties which arise from the temporality of the
world.


## 4. The created order



These difficulties, as Origen perceived, had not been fully resolved
by the argument that since the world is coeval with time we need not
ask what God was doing before he created it (see further Tzamalikos
2006: 179-271). From Genesis 1.1 we learn that God created the
world in the beginning, and from John 1.1 that the Logos was with him
in the beginning; but as we are also told that God created all things
in wisdom, Origen takes this beginning to be not a temporal origin but
the eternal desideratum of existence who is also the second person of
the Trinity (*CommJohn* 1.39.289). It follows, however, that if
this temporal world is the only one, an infinite cause has exhausted
itself in a finite effect. Perhaps it was in the hope of evading this
paradox that Origen interpreted Solomon's dictum, "there
is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1.10) to mean that
worlds have existed before the present one (*Princ*. 3.1.6).
This manoeuvre, however, will bring no escape unless one posits an
infinite succession of worlds before and after the present one, and
even Origen's enemies do not say that he went so far. An endless
series, after all, would be sempiternal rather than eternal, and the
Stoics might have replied that their belief in the perpetual
reduplication of *the same* cosmos--a belief disowned by
Origen (*Cels.* 4. 68)--comes closer to matching timeless
activity with a timeless product. A better solution than either of
these, in Origen's view, was to posit a noetic realm, created
but eternal, populated by *logika*, or rational entities, under
the hegemony of the logos, and preceding ours in the ontological
hierarchy rather than in the temporal continuum (*Princ.*
2.9.4). Evidence for this conceit could be found in the creation of a
heaven and earth at Genesis 1.1 before the creation of the visible
firmament (*Genesis Homilies* 1.5). To the modern mind this is
forced exegesis, representing the triumph of philosophy over
philology; the philosophy, however, is not that of any Greek school,
but of a Christian who has set himself a conundrum by his fidelity to
Moses. It is a striking observation, however we explain it, that the
forms of particular things which coexist in the mind of Origen's
God with the genera and species are not attested in any pagan
Platonist before Plotinus, his younger contemporary and (as most
believe) a fellow-pupil of Ammonius Saccas (cf. Plotinus,
*Enneads* 5.7).



As the absolute and transcendent *dunamis* of the Father
(*Cels*. 1.66; *CommJohn* 1.18.107 etc.), the second
person is properly the lord of every *dunamis* in heaven and
earth (*Cels*. 5.45). At the same time, it can be said that he
is the food of the celestial *dunameis* who have remained true
to the Creator, while Satan is the food of those who have fallen
(*On Prayer* 27.12). It is the angelic *dunameis* who
keep watch over his cradle at the time of his nativity (*Cels*.
1.61), and who sometimes form a retinue at the scenes where he
performs those works of power which we call miracles
(*CommJohn* 2.4.40). This polysemic usage of the term, which
mirrors that of the New Testament, presents no difficulty so long as
every other *dunamis* is conceived as a lower or local
manifestation of the undivided power which appertains to him as Logos.
As we have seen, this term defines his hegemonic relation to the
created order; Wisdom is another of his biblical appellations, yet
this Wisdom is the beginning in which the Logos was with God
(*CommJohn* 1.39.289; see further Tzamalikos 2006:
119-178). However one accounts for these obscurities, it seems
unlikely that Origen could have signed the Nicene Creed of 325, in
which the Son is declared to be from the *ousia* of the Father,
and therefore *homoousios* (of one essence, substance or
nature) with him (cf. *CommJohn* 20.18.157). A community of
nature between the two is asserted, however, at *CommJohn*
2.10.76); and in his *Commentary on Hebrews*, he deduces from
Wisdom 7.26, where Wisdom is styled an *aporroia* or emanation
of the Father, that the relation between the two persons of the
Trinity is analogous to that which holds between an ointment and the
exhalation which is *homoousios* with it (Pamphilus,
*Apology* 99-104; see Edwards 1998). Thus he can make
oblique use of a term which he cannot predicate directly of
incorporeals; Plotinus, who could have done so, could not have said
that *nous* was *homoousios* with the One because the
latter is superior to *ousia*.which can be posited only at the
level of nous. 



Although the Son is not "from the *ousia*" of the
Father, he is said in the Latin translation of Origen's
*Commentary on Hebrews* to be *ex substantia patris*,
from the *hypostasis* of the Father. That *hypostasis*,
not *ousia*, was the original noun in Greek can be deduced from
the text of Hebrews 1.3, where the Son is described as an impression
of his [the Father's] *hypostasis*. Here
*hypostasis* appears to signify the reality disclosed by a
phenomenon; the formula *ex substantia patris* was already
axiomatic for Origen's African contemporary Tertullian
(*Against Praxeas* 7.9). In Latin of this period
*substantia* was used indifferently to represent both
*hypostasis* and *ousia*; these Greek terms are not
explicitly distinguished in Origen's writings, though he
refrains from attributing either one *ousia* or three to the
Godhead. Some difference in concreteness is implied by his strictures
on those who fail to qualify the *ousia* of the Son and thus
deny him a *hypostasis* altogether (*CommJoh* 1.24.152):
it seems, then that the *hypostasis* is a specific
determination of the more generic *ousia*. Origen stipulates in
his treatise *On Prayer* (15.1) that the Son should not receive
the prayer of adoration which is offered to the Father because he
differs from the Father in *ousia* and in substrate
(*hupokeimenon*); the latter word is best understood with
reference to the body that he assumed in the incarnation, and we
cannot therefore be sure whether the *ousia* of which Origen
speaks is that of the exalted Christ in his eternal or his human
character. It is generally true that he takes fewer pains than later
Christian authors to winnow what is said of the Son as second person
of the Trinity from what is said of him as Jesus of Nazareth. When he
compares the Father to a statue of infinite magnitude and the Son to a
smaller statue accommodated to our perceptions, he begins as though
the visible were a metaphor for the invisible, but ends by quoting
Philippians 2.7 on the manifestation of Christ in the form of a slave
(*Princ.* 1.2.6).



Origen strongly affirms the ontological dependence of the Spirit, or
third hypostasis of the Trinity, on the second. To say otherwise would
be to deny that he was brought into being, since the author of all
that was brought into being, according to John 1.3, is the Son or
Logos. It would be truer, however, to say that the Spirit did not come
into being without the Son than that he came into being through him
(*CommJohn* 2.12.17-19). The Spirit, as
*hypostasis*, is not only eternal but incorporeal in the
strictest sense: this follows from *First Principles* 1.6.4,
where Origen finds it impossible to imagine that any being apart from
the members of the Trinity can subsist without a body. If these
persons were incorporeal only in the looser sense that Origen
recognises in *First Principles*, proem 10, he could not have
drawn such an antithesis between the Godhead and the angelic creation.
The powers and operations of the Spirit are not so clearly delineated
in his writings, as those of the other two persons; the same could be
said of almost any writer before Nicaea, and the cause, no doubt, is
the absence of unanimity in the scriptures. It is the Spirit who moves
(or broods) on the face of the waters before creation at Genesis 1.2;
at John 1.3 the Logos supplants the Spirit, which is now said at John
7.39 to have been given only when Jesus was glorified at the end of
his ministry. Origen follows John when he writes that the Father is at
work in the entire creation, the Son in those beings who possess
*logos* or reason, and the Spirit in the elect (Justinian,
*To Menas*; cf. *Princ*. 1.3.5). It may be that this
restriction of the Son's office implies a Greek rather than a
biblical understanding of the term *logos*, but Greek thought
knows of no supernal being who acts in the realm assigned by Origen to
the Spirit (*pace* Dillon 1982). This Trinitarian hierarchy has
been compared with that of the noetic principles being, life and mind
in the system of Proclus, for whom being encompasses all that exists,
life the more limited sphere of living creatures and mind the still
more limited sphere of the rational. The correspondence, however, is
far from exact, and, as Proclus wrote two centuries after Origen and
under later influences, more compelling arguments will be required
before we assign to a Platonic source the doctrine that Origen draws
so effortlessly from the scriptures. No evidence has been produced to
show that the Spirit functions in Origen as the soul of the world; he
surmises on one occasion that the Logos is the soul of God
(*Princ*. 2.8.5), but only because he needs to account for an
anthropomorphic metaphor at Psalm 84.6. .



That the Godhead is incorporeal--and therefore, in Origen's
lexicon, immaterial--is, as we have seen, an unassailable premiss
of his theology. If the second person has any substrate--any
matter, as we might say--it is the will of God the Father. The
significance of this doctrine becomes apparent when we recall that
Christ is wisdom and that in the myth attributed to the Gnostic
Ptolemaeus, the error of wisdom lies in her acting without the assent
of her consort Thelema, or Will (Irenaeus, Against Heresies
1.1-4). The Father's will, on the other hand, is not the
substrate but the cause of the material universe, which Origen held,
with every orthodox Christian of his day, to have been created out of
nothing. For most Christians this did not entail that God creates
without matter, but that the matter from which he shaped the world was
the first of his creations. Matter had seldom been defined in
Christian prose before Origen, but for him, as for Aristotle, as he
has often been interpreted, it is the unqualified receptacle of all
qualities, a mere potentiality for existence in contradistinction to
essence, of which nothing can be predicated until it is actualised as
determinate being. But then follows Bishop Berkeley's question:
if matter is not something, why not conclude that it is nothing?
Origen is perhaps the first extant writer who informs us that this
question had been posed in his time, though in his accustomed manner
he neither affirms it at *First Principles* 4.4.7 nor names its
proponents. We must say "perhaps", because the
*Philokalia*, a florilegium of his writings, contains a short
dialogue in which the redundancy of matter is established by Socratic
interrogation (*Philokalia* 24). In view of his diffidence in
*First Principles*, it seems more likely that this text is the
work of Maximus, a second-century author to whom it is also attributed
in our manuscripts.


## 5. Theodicy and sin



It is clear at least that Origen's God creates the world from
nothing and without toil or opposition (*Princ*. 2.1.5).
Because he asserts that such a world will inevitably be finite, as God
himself cannot comprehend the infinite, Origen was later accused of
slighting the omnipotence of the Creator. His meaning, however, is not
that there are limits to the power of God, but that any particular
exercise of it must logically have some limit. The infinite is by
nature incomprehensible; hence it is no shortcoming in God that he
cannot comprehend it, and he remains omnipotent in the sense that
there is no finite enterprise that lies beyond his power. In contrast
to the Gnostics, therefore, who held that our world is the residue of
a rupture or fall within the Godhead, Origen maintains that a single
God is the creator of both the intellectual and the material cosmos.
He also purports to demonstrate the priority of the intellectual Adam
to the material Adam, first by giving an allegorical sense to the
firmament which divides the waters at Genesis 1.7, then by a literal
reading of Genesis 1.26-2.22. In this text the creation of
humanity as male and female in the image of God, as the crown of his
handiwork, is succeeded by a narrative of quite a different tenor, in
which God fashions the body of the first man from the soil and then,
after populating the garden with beasts and plants and infusing the
spirit into his nostrils, derives the body of the first woman from his
rib (Genesis 2.1-7; 2.21-25). It is not clear whether a
temporal, as well as an ontological, priority is accorded to the inner
man, or whether the protoplasts owe their creation to his fall.



That the denizens of the present world have sinned, and will sin
again, is a ubiquitous premiss of Origen's theodicy.
Misadventures which the world ascribes to fortune, fate or the malice
of our superhuman guardians will always in fact be trials of virtue,
chastisements for sin (perhaps forgotten) or correctives to hidden
injustice. Thus if we cannot divine (for example) why God loved Jacob
and hated Esau--the explanation must lie in causes prior to the
birth of either (First Principles 2.9.7). Origen may have been aware
of Jewish speculations that Esau offended God in the womb, but it is
usually assumed that when he speaks of a "former life" in
which Esau sinned he alludes to a previous embodiment or to a
disembodied state. Perhaps this is why his detractors in late
antiquity ascribed to him the doctrine that all rational beings were
once pure intellects in the presence of God, and would have remained
so for ever had they not fallen away through *koros* or
satiety. Each of the delinquents, we are told, received a body
corresponding to the gravity of the original sin: those who fell least
became angels, those who fell most became demons, and human souls
constitute order in keeping with the mediocrity of their
transgressions (Antipater of Bostra at *Patrologia Graeca*
96.504-505). This account of Origen's teaching was already
known to Augustine, who perceived its incoherence, since it implies
that the bodies of demons, who inhabit the air above us, are grosser
than ours. In the form that is now canonical, it is a bricolage of
Platonic myths recounting the fall of the soul from the
"supercelestial place", the peculiarly Christian and
anti-Platonic concept of the demons as fallen angels, and
Philo's opinion that *koros* is the cause of the
soul's estrangement from its maker (*Heir of Divine
Things* 240). If Origen held such a theory, it was not on the
Platonic ground that soul, as the cause of motion, cannot be brought
into being and hence must be immortal; his object, typically
Christian, is to vindicate biblical teaching and at the same time to
show that it cannot be used to support any Gnostic or pagan
animadversion on divine justice (Martens 2015). Accordingly (though
some of his ancient critics pretended otherwise), his writings are
unequivocal in their rejection of Plato's theory of
transmigration, whether from human to human or from human to beast.
Although these theories (hesitantly accepted even by Platonists in the
third century), gain some colour from Jewish traditions about Elijah
and from punishments meted out to animals under the Levitical law,
Origen bows to the wisdom of the church, which declares them
inadmissible (*CommJohn* 1.11.66; *Princ*. 1.8.5).



Certainly at *First Principles* 1.4.1 he writes that satiety is
the commonest cause of falling, but the soul of which he speaks may be
an embodied one, as it is when it repents a few lines later
(*Princ*. 1.4.1). At *First Principles* 3.5.6, and again
in his fragmentary commentary on Ephesians, he interprets the noun
*katabole* at Ephesians 1.4 as an allusion to the
soul's descent to a body from the hand of God; but this descent,
which is not a fall, is not said to coincide with the creation. We
read that the soul of Christ adhered to the word with indissoluble
love *ab initio creationis*, but these words could signify
either "from the beginning of the creation" or "from
the beginning of its creation" (*Princ*. 2.6.3-4).
At *First Principles* 1.7.1 we are said to be properly
identical with our rational element; but Gregory of Nyssa and
Augustine said the same without being understood to mean that we have
ever existed as disembodied souls. At Commentary on Matthew 16.35 he
entertains the theory that souls await embodiment in Sheol, the place
from which the soul of Samuel was raised by the Witch of Endor; since
he appears to be hinting here not only at a primordial existence of
the soul but at transmigration from body to body, we should not rely
too heavily on this parenthetic chapter in a text which poses more
than the usual share of difficulties for its editors. That souls are
already rational in the foetal state is evident from the leaping of
John the Baptist in Elizabeth's womb when he recognises the
child in the womb of Mary (*Princ*. 1.7.4). In his exegesis of
John 1.31, Origen suggests that the Baptist deplores his failure to
recognise Jesus at the River Jordan because he has already known him
in a previous life; since, however, he was prepared to entertain the
theory that the Baptist was an angel embodied for our sake, we cannot
deduce that Origen credited all souls with a sentient existence before
their entry into this world (*CommJohn* 2.31.186). That the
elements are ensouled can be inferred from Isaiah 1.2, where God calls
heaven and earth to witness; and Job's exclamation, "the
stars are not clean in his sight" is applied by Origen to the
sun and moon, who have been made "subject to vanity" for
the sake of those who inhabit the physical cosmos (*Princ*.
1.7.2). Here it may be true that he borrows a tenet from the
Platonists, but not without biblical warrant, and the uncleanness of
the sun and moon is a consequence of their voluntary enthralment, not
its cause (see further Scott 1994).



In Origen's extant writings, then, the doctrine of the
soul's fall through satiety, after centuries of beatitude as a
"pure intellect", is never so clearly stated as in later
indictments of his heterodoxy. Many hold none the less that the
charges are true, and that Origen's advocacy of these doctrines
is concealed from us by the loss or mutilation of the incriminating
texts. Others, relying chiefly on the texts that have been preserved,
maintain that for Origen the fall of souls was a tentative and
occasional speculation or a myth, in Plato's sense, that was
later mistaken for a dogma (Harl 1987). It has also been argued that
his preserved words testify only to Origen's belief in the fall
of angels (*Princ.* 1.5.3) and to the creation of the soul
before its descent into the body; on this view, readers who came to
his work with formulaic expectations mingled his own opinions with the
Platonic tenets to which they bore a calculated but incomplete
resemblance. No hypothesis has yet accounted for all that is said in
the surviving corpus of Origen's works. If, as Origen seems to
hold (*Princ*. 3.6.1), the likeness of God was not yet
conferred on the intellectual man who was created in the image of God,
should we infer that Adam's body was given to him as a means of
acquiring the likeness, just as the Neoplatonist Porphyry, fifty years
later, taught that souls are implanted in bodies in order to cultivate
virtue through the struggle against temptation? On the other hand, if
our initial state was in some respects unlike the present one, we may
find it hard to interpret Origen's dictum that the end, or
consummation (*apokatastasis*), is "the same as the
beginning" (*Princ*. 1.6.2). The provenance of the noun
*apokatastasis* is more easily established than its meaning,
for even in the New Testament it may signify not so much the
restoration of that which was once the case as the realisation of that
which ought to be (see further Tzamalikos 2007: 237-356; Ramelli
2013: 129-221).



At First Principles 4.4.1 Origen scoffs that only a fool would suppose
that God had really planted a garden in Eden, as the second chapter of
Genesis records. This has been taken to mean that he regards Eden not
as a physical locality but as the state in which all souls enjoy the
presence of God before they descend to bodies (Martens, 2013). Yet
Origen's chief concern here is to forestall the literal reading
of the verb "planted", which, like other anthropomorphisms
in scripture, is likely to mislead a recent convert from idolatry. No
critic infers, from Origen's denial that God descended in a
bodily sense to destroy the tower of Babel (*Against Celsus*
4.15-21), that he believes the tower itself to be fictitious; we
should therefore not be too ready to assume, with the malignant
Epiphanius, that he denies the historicity of the when he adopts a
metaphorical construction of God's sewing of coats of skin for
Adam and Eve at Genesis 3.21 (Epiphanius, Panarion 64.4.1; cf Heidl,
2003: 138). If he also doubts that the trees of Eden were botanical
plants, he is equally willing to give up other details in the story of
babel, but not the event itself. In a fragment preserved in a Greek
catena, he cites Adam's exclamation "This is bone of my
bone and flesh of my flesh at Genesis 2.24 as proof that even before
the fall he possessed a body" (*Commentary on Genesis*,
Fr. 22, p. 190 Metzler); from the sequel, as from *Homilies on
Leviticus* 6.2, we may conclude that he held this body to be a
different texture from ours, but in his own parlance this would be an
instance of "homonymy", the use of a scriptural term in
different senses which are equally literal. While the sin of Adam is a
precedent for all subsequent transgressions in his *Commentary on
Romans*, this claim does not preclude, and has even been thought
to presuppose, the physical descent of all human beings from this one
ancestor (Bammel, 1989). At *Against Celsus* 7.39 the
protoplasts fall from a state of immediate knowledge of God to one in
which the mind is blinded by the senses but nothing is said to imply
that they then became corporeal agents for the first time. Of course
many ambiguities remain, and grammar alone will not determine whether
the phrase "all saints who have lived since the foundation of
the world" (Martens, 2013: 532)implies that every soul has
existed from the beginning or only that from the beginning to the
present new souls are coming into existence with their bodies. 



However the soul's detention in the present world is accounted
for, its freedom to choose its own goods, and its own god, is an
indefeasible premiss of Origen's philosophy. Astrologers who
pretend to read our fates from the stars can be answered with a quip
from Epicurus: if all that comes to pass is predestined, so is the
belief in predestination, and we therefore have no reason to think it
true (*Philokalia* 25.4). Even if the stars vouchsafe some
premonitions of the future to the saints, we are not to suppose that
they are the causes of what they signify, or that God, who inscribes
his own knowledge in the heavens, is the cause of everything that he
foresees. Because he is exempt from time, our future lies open to him
as the past and present lie open; he knows, in the words of Paul,
whether each of his creatures is to be a vessel of honour or a vessel
of dishonour. It is we, however, who make his knowledge true by our
own choice of good or evil; the Gnostics misconstrue the
apostle's statement that God "makes" us vessels of
honour or dishonour when they argue that the damned and the elect are
of different natures. None of us is born virtuous but each of us (as
Aristotle says and common experience goes on telling us) has the power
to advance in virtue by performing virtuous acts (*Princ*.
3.1).


## 6. The Work of Christ



Nevertheless, since the fall has darkened our minds and subjected our
bodies to corruption, we cannot effect our own salvation without the
assistance of God's word made flesh. For Origen the virgin birth
is a datable event, an appropriation by the Word of full humanity in
body, soul and spirit. The union can be described as an
*anakrasis* or mixture (*Cels*. 3.41), a voluntary
cleaving of the flesh or soul to the Word, and (in defiance of
chemical facts) as the sublimation of the humanity by the divinity, as
iron loses its form when held in an incandescent flame
(*Princ*. 2.6.4) The humanity, for all that, is not
annihilated, and Christ can speak at times as man and at others with
God without being guilty of dissimulation (*CommJohn* 19.2.6).
His own words "my soul is sorrowful unto death" reveals
his possession of a soul, which mediates between the flesh and the
divinity which would otherwise destroy it. While the soul (for Christ
as for us) is invariably the seat of passion, some of his passions
originate in his spirit, which, though human, is divinely irradiated
by the Word. By virtue of this irradiation, he foresees his own death,
and his prescience gives rise not to a commotion *of* the
spirit but to a commotion *in* the spirit, which is experienced
as a passion *of* the soul (*CommJohn*
32.18.221-224). The body which clothes him before the
crucifixion is as palpable as ours, and equally vulnerable to physical
affections. After his resurrection, he does not show himself to
Caiaphas and Pilate because he is visible only to the eye of faith
(*Cels.* 2.60-65). This means not, however, that his body
is no real body, but that it no longer suffers the consequences of the
fall.



The blood of Christ, first in his circumcision and then on the Cross,
is a ransom paid to Satan (*Commentary on Romans* 2.13.29; cf.
1 Corinthians 6.23), whose prisoners we become, willingly if
unwittingly, when we allow his image to oust that of god in our souls
(*Genesis Homilies* 1.13). Yet Satan is never master of our
wills: if he enters the soul of a Judas Iscariot, it is because the
thought that he plants there has received assent and ripened into a
sinful disposition (*CommJohn* 32.281-285; see further
Layton 2004: 129-131.) We are taught to suppress such thoughts
and to refrain from sin, by the teaching of Christ, the chief of his
bounties during his earthly sojourn, which we now receive in even
greater measure through the scriptures. As the primordial Word of God,
he is present in every word from God that the church has canonised
under the direction of the Spirit; the many words of scripture, in
fact, are one (*Philokalia* 5.4). When we are instructed to eat
the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, it is clear that the
words cannot be taken literally; while Origen does not deny the
allusion to the eucharist, he argues that the higher sense--but
also the quotidian sense--of the saying is that believers must
draw nourishment from the scriptures in which Christ "as it
were, takes flesh and speaks with a literal voice" in order to
draw us on to the invisible mysteries (*Cels.* 4.15; *On
Prayer* 27.10-14). The scriptures, then, are the daily bread
for which Christians are taught to pray; to accept eating as a
metaphor for reading is to acknowledge that whenever the scriptures
speak of tasting, hearing or seeing God, they are not only imparting
what we might call a spiritual sense to these words, but appealing to
our own spiritual senses (*Princ*. 1.1.9), the loftier
faculties which were freely exercised by Adam and Eve before the fall
(*Cels.* 7.39; see further Rahner 1979).



To distinguish only two senses of scripture is to forget that Christ,
the true Word, became incarnate in a threefold human nature. At
*First Principles* 4.2.4, Origen asserts that the body, the
soul and the spirit of the human reader find their respective
analogues in the text that is being read. The body is the plain text,
whether narrative or didactic, construed according to common
grammatical or semantic norms. The spirit, which must generally be
sought beneath the surface, acquaints us with the work of Christ and
the mysteries of faith, and thus corresponds to the typological sense
in mediaeval and modern exegesis. The soul of scripture is illustrated
by Paul's translation of the Mosaic precept, "thou shalt
not muzzle the ox which treadeth the corn", to ministers of the
church (*Princ*. 4.2.6). For this reason, and because the
church is the bride of Christ in Origen's exposition of the soul
of the Song of Songs, the term "ecclesiastical" has been
applied to this intermediate plane of reference. In works which
survive in Latin certain passages are said to be amenable to a
literal, a moral and a spiritual exposition, but we cannot say whether
Origen employed a Greek equivalent to the term "moral". It
is possible that he offers us a further clue to the content of the
psychic sense in the prologue to his *Commentary on the Song of
Songs* (ed. Baehrens 1925: 75), where he argues that each of the
three books ascribed to Solomon in the Hebrew canon corresponds to a
branch of Greek philosophy, and also to one stage in the
believer's progress from the foothills to the summit of
understanding. Ethics is represented in this itinerary by Proverbs,
physics by Ecclesiastics, the science of contemplation (theorics,
epoptics or enoptics) by the Song. The first of these texts is phrased
and may be understood somatically; the third, in which Solomon forgoes
his own name and becomes the bridegroom, lifts the veil between the
enlightened soul and her Redeemer (see further King 2005:
222-263). If we pursue this seductive analogy, the second book
of Solomon, which reveals our place in the cosmos, is a mine of
cosmological or sapiential teaching which may be said to represent the
soul of scripture.



This pattern would appear to have been suggested not by the usual
division of philosophy into ethics, physics and logic, but by a
passage in Clement of Alexandria, where three edifying senses are
accorded to the scriptures, the last of which is the
*epopteia*, or discernment of the mysteries (Stromateis
1.176.1-2). Origen may also have been aware that certain
teachers had sorted Plato's dialogues into different categories,
each suited to a different level of aptitude in the pupil (Edwards
1997). If, as some manuscripts indicate, he gave the name
"theoric" (either instead of or in addition to
"epoptic") to the most elevated level of understanding, he
may have had in mind a Platonic or Pythagorean division of philosophy
into ethics, physics and theology, which is attested in a commentary
by Iamblichus on Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to
Mathematics. In attributing this taxonomy to the Hebrew king, however,
he is making a claim for the chronological primacy of the scriptures.
No Platonist before him had undertaken a sustained allegorical reading
of any text, as Porphyry confessed when he inaccurately charged him
with forcing Stoic techniques of exegesis on a barbarous text
(Eusebius, *Church History* 6.19). Commenting line by line on a
sacred text was not, so far as our evidence goes, a typical enterprise
for a Stoic. Among the Greeks the commentator who most resembles
Origen is Alexander of Aphrodisias; his concern, however, is to smooth
the surface of Aristotle, not to dig beneath it (see further
Bendinelli 1997). Origen's true predecessor is Philo of
Alexandria, who had teased moral and metaphysical profundities from
the Torah, verse by verse, in order to demonstrate that nothing taught
among the Greeks had been concealed from the Lawgiver of the Jews (see
further Dawson 1992).



Philo is called a mystic because of passages which thirstily
anticipate the mind's bacchanalian ecstasy in the presence of
the ineffable. For Origen the term *mystikos* denotes the most
arcane sense of the scriptures, and the encounter with the Bridegroom,
"which no-one can understand who has not experienced it",
is described in his *Homilies on the Song of Songs* (I.7 [ed.
Baehrens 1925: 39]). Whether it is a true ecstasy or a sense of
hermeneutic illumination (Louth 2000: 69), this transient rapture
foreshadows the culmination of the soul's journey after death,
when God will at last be all in all. In answer to the jibes of Celsus,
Origen asserts that, while the church teaches the resurrection of the
body, the "spiritual body" of which Paul speaks will be of
a rarer and hence more durable texture than the gross flesh which now
ensheathes the soul (*Cels*. 5.18-5.23). In a dialogue
which now survives only in excerpts, the soul is said to retain the
*eidos*, or form, of the body, perhaps a counterpart to the
tenuous vehicle which the soul carries into the afterlife in the
eschatology of some Platonists (Methodius, *On the
Resurrection* 22 [ed. Bonwetsch 1899: 93]; see further Schibli
1992). Most souls, having failed to purge their sins in this life,
will be required to pass the flaming sword that bars the entrance to
the earthly paradise (see further Crouzel 1972). Once its cleansing
there is complete, the soul will pass through the seven planetary
spheres, acquiring a more comprehensive knowledge of the cosmos and
our place in it than is vouchsafed to us in this world
(*Princ*. 1.11.6). Once again, kindred notions can be found in
Platonic and Hermetic literature; the posthumous itinerary mirrors the
transition from the ethical to the sapiential teachings of Solomon,
and we see here in an inchoate form the purgative and illuminative
ways of the western mystical tradition. A body of some kind is
presupposed by this celestial topography; nevertheless, at the point
where God becomes all in all, we hear nothing of a body, but only that
soul will be entirely subsumed in spirit. Some scholars hold that a
body must be either retained or imparted to us, since only the persons
of the Trinity can subsist without one (e.g., Crouzel 1980); others,
invoking the maxim that the end will be like the beginning, argue that
we shall return to the incorporeal state in which we were first
created (e.g., Scott 2012, with further discussion of this intricate
topic in Blosser 2012 and Rankin 2017). If that is so, the final state
must lie beyond the paradise of the saints, of which Origen says in
the plainest terms that the church does not hold it to be incorporeal
(First Principles 2.36; cf. Edwards 2021). In any case, this union
with God appears to correspond to the last stage in the perusal of the
Solomonic canon, and to the "unitive way" of the mystic in
later Christian literature. 



This purgatory after death is not confined to those who have died at
peace with God; if any should fail to be saved, it is not because the
opportunity to repent has been withdrawn, but because the soul has
become so brutish that it is incapable of amendment (*Princ.*
1.5.5). This is the only truth that Origen thinks can be ascribed to
Plato's doctrine of transmigration into beasts (*Princ.*
3.4.3), and it cannot be presumed that even the demons will remain
obdurate for ever. Commenting on Paul's promise that "the
last enemy, death" will be vanquished, Origen surmises that
death will not be annihilated but will cease to molest the saints
(*Princ*. 3.6.5). It is generally assumed that the proper
subject of this passage is the devil, and the word *diabolus*
does indeed occur in a ninth-century quotation (Eriugena, Periphyseon,
*Patrologia Latina* 122, 930C). On the other hand, in a letter
to his friends in Alexandria, Origen is said to have exclaimed that
only a lunatic would prophesy the salvation of the devil (Crouzel
1973). Perhaps he means only that Satan is not destined for beatitude;
this need not preclude his release from torment on the last after his
peaceful acquiescence in the victory of God (see Edwards 2010).


## 7. Conclusion



By convention Origen is a "Christian Platonist of
Alexandria". In fact, his native city was only intermittently
his place of residence; on the other hand, his intellectual home
throughout his life was one in which Plato was never his compatriot
but an honoured guest. There is no doubt that he knew the works of the
great Athenian intimately, and credited him at times with more than a
superficial grasp of the highest truths. Nevertheless, no Greek
philosopher possessed for him the authority that he accorded to the
scriptures; Plato was only the most prominent of the dead pagans who
assisted him in the exegesis and harmonisation of this infallible
text. The work in which Origen makes most frequent reference to Plato,
his reply to Celsus, as noted above, is also the one in which he
asserts that Christ takes flesh in the written word, disclosing
mysteries that no human intellect has fathomed without revelation
(*Cels.* 4.15). He was never troubled, as a mediaeval schoolman
might be, by a conflict between ecclesiastical dogma and the best
thought of the ancients, because the Word who taught the ancients from
afar is, for him, the daily shepherd of the Church.