On First Principles

Contents

Reading pages: 0.0.1–1.0.10 · 1.1.1–1.1.9 · 1.2.1–1.2.13 · 1.3.1–1.4.5 · 1.5.1–1.6.4 · 1.7.1–1.8.4 · 2.1.1–2.2.2 · 2.3.1–2.3.7 · 2.4.1–2.5.4 · 2.6.1–2.7.4 · 2.8.1–2.8.5 · 2.9.1–2.9.8 · 2.10.1–2.10.8 · 2.11.1–3.1.5 · 3.1.6–3.1.14 · 3.1.15–3.1.23 · 3.1.24–3.2.7 · 3.3.1–3.3.6 · 3.4.1–3.4.5 · 3.5.1–3.5.8 · 3.6.1–3.6.9 · 4.1.1–4.1.7 · 4.2.1–4.3.3 · 4.3.4–4.3.15 · 4.4.1–4.4.10

1. 0.0.1Rufinus recalls that Jerome translated Origen's homilies on the Song of Songs with great praise for him, and fears that his own Latin will make Origen seem inferior.
2. 0.0.2Yielding to Macarius, Rufinus undertakes the translation on the condition of following Jerome's method of removing what disagrees with the faith.
3. 0.0.3Rufinus says that Origen's books were corrupted by heretics, and that he has passed over or recast statements on the Trinity and added explanations drawn from Origen's other works.
4. 0.0.4Rufinus answers critics in advance and solemnly charges all who copy the work to add nothing, remove nothing, and correct their copies carefully.
5. 1.0.1The knowledge that leads to a good life comes from the words of Christ, who spoke also in Moses and the prophets and, after his ascension, in the apostles.
6. 1.0.2Because Christians disagree even on great questions, Origen first sets out the rule handed down from the apostles and preserved in the churches.
7. 1.0.3The apostles taught some things plainly to all, but left the reasons for them, and other questions, to be investigated by those gifted with wisdom.
8. 1.0.4The apostolic teaching affirms one God, Creator and giver of both Testaments; Jesus Christ, born of the Father before creation, truly incarnate, dead and risen; and the Holy Spirit, equal in honour and the same in both Testaments.
9. 1.0.5The church teaches judgment of the soul after death, the resurrection of the body, and free will against astrological fatalism, but has not settled the origin of the soul.
10. 1.0.6The church teaches that the devil and his angels exist but has not defined their nature; many hold that he was an apostate angel.
11. 1.0.7The church teaches that the world had a beginning and will be dissolved, but not what came before or will come after it.
12. 1.0.8Scripture has both a plain and a hidden spiritual sense; the philosophical term “incorporeal” is not found in Scripture, and the saying in the Teaching of Peter does not use it in the philosophers' sense.
13. 1.0.9Whether God, Christ, the Spirit and rational souls are corporeal or incorporeal is left for inquiry.
14. 1.0.10Angels and the souls of the stars are not defined by the church's preaching; the task is to build from these first principles one coherent body of doctrine from Scripture and reason.
15. 1.1.1Against those who infer from Scripture that God is a body, Origen argues that God is called light because he is the power that enlightens minds.
16. 1.1.2God as consuming fire consumes sins in the soul, and Scripture calls “spirit” what is opposed to body, as in the spiritual sense of the law.
17. 1.1.3The Holy Spirit is shared by many saints not as a divided body but as a sanctifying power, an intellectual subsistence that truly exists.
18. 1.1.4Jesus' saying “God is spirit” answered the Samaritan woman's question about holy places: true worship is bound to no bodily place.
19. 1.1.5God is incomprehensible: whatever we understand of him, he surpasses it as the sun surpasses a spark.
20. 1.1.6God is a simple intellectual nature, a unity known through his works, needing neither place nor bodily size, as the human mind itself shows.
21. 1.1.7Against those who think the mind a body, Origen points to its grasp of incorporeal things and to the superiority of the mind's sense over the bodily senses.
22. 1.1.8Scripture confirms that God is by nature invisible; between Father and Son there is not seeing but knowing.
23. 1.1.9“The pure in heart shall see God” means knowing God with the mind, since Scripture applies the names of the senses to the soul.
24. 1.2.1In Christ the divine nature of the only-begotten Son is distinct from the human nature he assumed; the Son is called Wisdom and firstborn.
25. 1.2.2Wisdom, the Son, is a real subsistence, begotten of the Father without any beginning in time or thought, and contains beforehand the forms of all creation.
26. 1.2.3Wisdom is also the Word, the interpreter of the Father's mind; to give the Word a beginning is to deny that the Father was always Father.
27. 1.2.4The Son is the truth, life, way and resurrection of all things, and his generation from the Father is eternal and beyond comparison with any bodily begetting.
28. 1.2.5Scripture supports this: the Son is the image of the invisible God and the brightness of his glory, and the Wisdom of Solomon describes Wisdom as the emanation of God's glory.
29. 1.2.6The Son is the invisible image of the invisible Father, begotten as will proceeds from mind, without division of the divine nature; whoever understands him understands the Father.
30. 1.2.7As the brightness of God's light, the Son gently accustoms weak human eyes to bear the light and so mediates between them and it.
31. 1.2.8As a small statue exactly like an immense one lets people see it, the self-emptied Son is the express figure of the Father's substance, showing his greatness in his works.
32. 1.2.9Wisdom is the vapour of God's power, subsisting in its own right and having no beginning but God himself, so that Christ is power from power.
33. 1.2.10God has always been almighty, so there have always been beings over whom he rules; the Son shares the glory of omnipotence, by which all things are subjected through reason, not force.
34. 1.2.11Wisdom as the brightness of eternal light shows that the Son comes from the Father without any beginning in time.
35. 1.2.12Wisdom as the spotless mirror of God's working shows that the Son does the very same works as the Father, without any dissimilarity.
36. 1.2.13The Son is the image of the Father's goodness, with no second goodness in him; “No one is good but God” does not deny goodness to the Son or Spirit, who derive it from the Father as its fountain.
37. 1.3.1Philosophers know of God and even of his Word, but the Holy Spirit is known only from Scripture; the Father is known from creation, the Son from both Testaments.
38. 1.3.2Scripture teaches the Spirit's existence and dignity: he is named with the Father and the Son in baptism, and blasphemy against him is unforgivable.
39. 1.3.3All things were created by God, as Hermas also says; but no Scripture calls the Holy Spirit a creature, and the Spirit over the waters is the Holy Spirit.
40. 1.3.4Like the Son, the Holy Spirit reveals the Father; he did not come from ignorance to knowledge, but was always the Holy Spirit within the unity of the Trinity.
41. 1.3.5Salvation requires the whole Trinity: the Father and the Son work in all things, but the Holy Spirit only in those who turn to the good and walk in Christ's ways.
42. 1.3.6All beings share in God the Father's existence and all rational beings in Christ the Word, who makes them answerable for sin once reason distinguishes good from evil.
43. 1.3.7The Holy Spirit is given to the saints alone, yet this does not make him greater than the Father and the Son; the one power of the Trinity works in the different gifts.
44. 1.3.8Rational beings receive existence from the Father, reason from the Word and holiness from the Spirit, and so advance toward the blessed life; but even the perfect may, through satiety, gradually slip.
45. 1.4.1Origen illustrates the gradual falling away of rational beings by the example of a man skilled in an art who neglects it and slowly forgets it.
46. 1.4.2Origen closes his digression on the soul and defers to its proper place the discussion of rational nature in its three kinds.
47. 1.4.3The Trinity, the good and creative power, was never idle, so it seems there were always creatures on whom God bestowed his benefits.
48. 1.4.4Since creatures cannot be coeternal with God, Origen proposes that the creation was always present, as a prefiguration, in God's Wisdom, the eternal Son.
49. 1.4.5So creatures are neither coeternal with God, nor did God begin to create after doing nothing: all things existed always in Wisdom by prefiguration, as Ecclesiastes suggests.
50. 1.5.1Origen begins his account of rational natures by listing the orders named in Scripture: angels, thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, and names to be named in the age to come.
51. 1.5.2Every rational creature is capable of praise and blame; Scripture names the devil and the hostile powers, and distinguishes orders among human beings as well.
52. 1.5.3Origen asks whether the holy and the hostile powers hold their rank by nature or by merit, and concludes that in every creature rank follows its own movements, not the privilege of its creation.
53. 1.5.4Ezekiel's lament over the prince of Tyre describes a once holy and spotless power that fell by its own fault, showing that evil powers were not created evil.
54. 1.5.5Isaiah's fallen Lucifer and Christ's saying about Satan falling like lightning show that the devil was once light; holiness in creatures is accidental, so none is spotless or polluted by nature.
55. 1.6.1Origen offers his view of the end as discussion, not definition: God's goodness through Christ will bring the whole creation, even his enemies, to one end, and their subjection to Christ means their salvation.
56. 1.6.2The end will be like the beginning: from one beginning rational beings were ranked by their own merits, the human race arising from those who fell but not beyond remedy, and all will be restored to the unity Christ prayed for.
57. 1.6.3Some fallen beings became the devil and his angels, opponents of humanity; whether they can ever be converted Origen leaves to the reader, while others are restored through long corrections, every rational being able to rise or fall by free choice.
58. 1.6.4At the end the visible world will not be annihilated but transformed; Origen cannot conceive created beings without bodies, though bodies may become pure as ether, and leaves the certainty to God.
59. 1.7.1According to the church's faith all souls and rational natures, though incorporeal, were created through Christ, as John and Paul declare.
60. 1.7.2Origen asks whether the sun, moon and stars belong among the principalities and, since every creature can receive good and evil, questions the view that the stars cannot change: “the stars are not clean in his sight.”
61. 1.7.3Origen argues that the stars are living and rational beings, since they receive commands from God and keep their courses in perfect order.
62. 1.7.4Origen suspects that the souls of the stars were implanted from outside after their bodies were made, as human souls seem to exist before their bodies (Jacob, John the Baptist, Jeremiah), lest God seem unjust.
63. 1.7.5The creation subjected to vanity (Rom 8) is the heavenly bodies bound to material bodies to serve humanity; like Paul they long to be with Christ, and will be freed when Christ hands the kingdom to the Father.
64. 1.8.1The angels receive their offices, such as healing, war and prayer, according to the merits they showed before the world was framed, by God's just judgment.
65. 1.8.2Against heretics who assign rational beings different natures from different creators, Origen points to Paul and Peter, whom they call spiritual, yet who sinned.
66. 1.8.3Every rational creature, even the devil, is capable of good and evil; only God, Christ and the Holy Spirit are good by nature, while creatures hold holiness, righteousness and wisdom as accidents.
67. 1.8.4Every rank of rational beings, good or evil, is held by merit; the second order has given itself to wickedness, the third is human souls, some of whom rise to the angels; transmigration into animals is rejected.
68. 2.1.1The world's great variety, of rational beings, bodies, animals and places, is caused by the different movements and falls of rational beings from their original unity with God.
69. 2.1.2God by his wisdom draws the varied wills of creatures into the harmony of one world without forcing their free choice, some being helped, others helping, others providing contests.
70. 2.1.3The world, though diverse, is like one immense living being held together by the power of God; its end will furnish the beginning of another world.
71. 2.1.4The variety of the world requires bodies; matter, which takes on qualities, was made by God and is not unbegotten or coeternal with him, as some philosophers held.
72. 2.1.5Second Maccabees, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Psalms confirm that God created all things out of nothing.
73. 2.2.1Some ask whether bodily matter is joined to rational natures as eternally as the Son and the Spirit are to the Father, or will cease when its service is over.
74. 2.2.2Since only the Trinity can live without a body, matter was made for rational natures and changes with their merits, gross for the lower and glorious for the blessed.
75. 2.3.1Origen asks whether there were worlds before this one and will be others after it, and whether any world could be exactly like another.
76. 2.3.2To learn whether matter exists only at intervals, Origen asks whether anyone can live without a body, and explains how “this corruptible will put on incorruption” when the soul, clothed with Christ, clothes the body.
77. 2.3.3Those who think rational beings may live without bodies argue that bodily nature will be destroyed when all are subject to God; Origen answers that, since free will remains, bodies and a varied world may be needed again.
78. 2.3.4Origen rejects the idea of identical, recurring worlds, since free souls do not repeat the same course, though different worlds, better or worse, may exist.
79. 2.3.5This world is the consummation of many ages, and other ages will follow; beyond them lies something greater, when God will be in all.
80. 2.3.6“World” has many meanings in Scripture; Christ speaks of another, more glorious world, perhaps a higher sphere enclosing all others, the “good land” promised to the meek, which is not corruptible.
81. 2.3.7Origen leaves the reader to choose among three views of the end: an incorporeal life, bodies transformed into an ethereal state, or a higher “good land” and heaven where the purified dwell and progress.
82. 2.4.1Against those who distinguish the Father of Christ from the God of the law, Origen shows from the Gospels that Jesus' Father is the Creator who spoke through Moses and the prophets.
83. 2.4.2Acts, the great commandment and Paul's letters show that the God of the law is the God of the Gospel, preached by Christ and the apostles.
84. 2.4.3The heretics' claim that the Creator was seen while the Father is invisible fails: God is incorporeal and invisible, and between Father and Son, as for Moses, there is knowing rather than seeing.
85. 2.4.4God's anger in the Old Testament is matched in Jesus' parables; in both Testaments it is to be understood spiritually, in a way worthy of God.
86. 2.5.1Origen introduces the heretics' division between a good God, the Father of Christ, and a just but not good God of the law, which they support by the Old Testament punishments.
87. 2.5.2The heretics' own definitions fail: the Old Testament punishments must be read spiritually, while the Gospels too show the Father of Christ punishing, as in the parable of the wedding garment.
88. 2.5.3Since justice and goodness are both virtues, the just God is good; his punishments are remedies for amendment, as Peter's words on those who perished in the flood show.
89. 2.5.4Against the heretics' appeal to “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit” and “no one is good but God,” Origen shows that the law is called good and the Father of Christ is called just.
90. 2.6.1Origen turns to the incarnation: the Son, the mediator and image of God whom only the Father fully knows, emptied himself, became man, and sent prophets before him and apostles after him.
91. 2.6.2The incarnation of the Word, born, suffering and dying, is the greatest wonder; the truth of both natures in one person must be held reverently, neither degrading the divine nor treating the human as illusion.
92. 2.6.3The soul of Jesus, clinging to the Word from the beginning with perfect love, became one spirit with him and mediated between God and the flesh; hence divine and human names are exchanged in Scripture.
93. 2.6.4The soul of Christ was united to the Word by the merit of its love, anointed above all with the fullness of the Spirit, and free from all sin.
94. 2.6.5Christ's human soul had the same nature as all souls, but by its immense love for righteousness it became unchangeable, so that it had no possibility of sin.
95. 2.6.6As iron always in the fire becomes wholly fire, Christ's soul, always united to the Word, is unchangeable; it is anointed above its fellows as the very vessel of the ointment.
96. 2.6.7Christ's soul is the “shadow of Christ the Lord” in which the nations live; Origen offers these views on the incarnation provisionally.
97. 2.7.1The same Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, was in the prophets and the apostles; not even the heretics who divide God and Christ claim two Holy Spirits.
98. 2.7.2Since Christ's ascension the Spirit is poured out on all, so that multitudes of believers now understand the law spiritually, as only the prophets once did.
99. 2.7.3The Holy Spirit gives different gifts to each; some who misunderstood his title Paraclete compared him to base spirits and forbade marriage.
100. 2.7.4The Spirit is called Paraclete from consolation, teaching what cannot be uttered, while the Saviour is called Paraclete as advocate with the Father.
101. 2.8.1All living things, including water creatures, have souls, defined as substances capable of perception and movement; Scripture speaks of the soul of God and of Christ, but never calls angels souls.
102. 2.8.2Christ had a true soul; the definition of soul may apply to the angels, and Paul joins the Spirit to the mind rather than to the soul.
103. 2.8.3Origen asks, as an inquiry, whether the soul (psyche) is so called from having grown cold, a mind fallen from the fervour of the divine fire that can return to being mind.
104. 2.8.4Minds fell into souls in different degrees, explaining differences of ability; Origen offers this as inquiry, not dogma, and notes that the Gospel ascribes Christ's distress to his soul and his offering to his spirit.
105. 2.8.5The “soul of God” is to be understood figuratively, perhaps as the only-begotten Son; Origen leaves these views on the soul for readers to discuss.
106. 2.9.1God created in the beginning a definite number of rational beings, as many as he could govern, in that heaven and earth from which ours borrowed their names.
107. 2.9.2Being created and changeable, rational beings fell more or less from the good by their own movements, and this gave the Creator the causes of the world's variety.
108. 2.9.3The world includes all beings in heaven, on earth and below, in great diversity of rank and condition.
109. 2.9.4Since all things were made in Christ, who is righteousness, the world's diversity must be just; Origen prays for help to find the general reason for it.
110. 2.9.5Followers of Marcion, Valentinus and Basilides object that the unequal ranks of heavenly beings and the unequal births of humans can only be explained by different natures of souls or by chance.
111. 2.9.6God created all rational beings equal and alike out of his goodness; their diversity comes from their own free choices, and God justly arranges them in one world like vessels in one house.
112. 2.9.7Paul's question about Jacob and Esau applies to all creatures: their diversity is just only if each has its causes in itself, preceding bodily birth.
113. 2.9.8As God will judge each according to merit, so he did before: vessels for honour or dishonour are such as they have cleansed themselves, and God arranges all by the most equitable judgment.
114. 2.10.1Before discussing punishment, Origen argues against heretics that the body rises, our own body, but changed from a soulish into a spiritual and incorruptible body.
115. 2.10.2Against heretics who deny bodily resurrection, Origen reads Paul's comparison of heavenly and earthly bodies as describing the differing glory of the saints and the condition of unpurified sinners.
116. 2.10.3Against a low idea of the resurrection, Origen explains that the body rises spiritual and incorruptible from a principle preserved in it, as a grain grows into an ear.
117. 2.10.4Each sinner kindles his own fire, fed by his sins as fever by bad food; the punishment is conscience recalling all its crimes and becoming its own accuser.
118. 2.10.5The punishment of sinners may consist in the torment of their own passions, or in the soul's being torn from its proper harmony, which the fire then restores.
119. 2.10.6God, the physician of souls, uses painful remedies, even fire, to purify them, as images in Scripture show.
120. 2.10.7The unfaithful steward “cut in two” may mean the withdrawal of the Spirit's gift, the separation of the better part of the soul, or the withdrawal of one's guardian angel.
121. 2.10.8The “outer darkness” is deep ignorance, perhaps shown outwardly in the dark bodies of the impious after the resurrection.
122. 2.11.1Every living being, and still more a rational one, is always active; as people in this life seek pleasure, the common good or wisdom, Origen asks what the life of the world to come will be.
123. 2.11.2Some Christians, reading the letter only, expect after the resurrection bodily pleasures, marriage, a rebuilt earthly Jerusalem and earthly rule, misreading prophecies meant figuratively.
124. 2.11.3The saints will feed on the bread of wisdom, be restored to God's image, and continue to be taught in the heavenly Jerusalem; its “rulers” are those who instruct others.
125. 2.11.4God has implanted in the mind a natural desire to know the reasons of his works, which must be fulfilled; study in this life is like an artist's preliminary sketch, to be completed with true colours hereafter.
126. 2.11.5Paul desired to depart and be with Christ, knowing that he would then understand the reasons of all things on earth: the soul, Israel, the law, the powers and providence.
127. 2.11.6The departed saints are first taught in paradise, a school of souls, and the pure in heart then ascend through the spheres of heaven, learning what is done there and why, following Christ.
128. 2.11.7In the heavens the saints will learn the nature of the stars and of invisible things, and the rational nature, growing in mind, will come to perfect knowledge, seeing the causes of things face to face.
129. 3.0.1Rufinus tells Macarius that he has finished Books 3 and 4, expects attacks for translating Origen, and repeats that he has passed over what he judged contrary to the faith.
130. 3.1.1Since the church's preaching includes God's just judgment, which implies that our life is in our power, Origen turns to the question of free choice.
131. 3.1.2Some things are moved from outside, others from within; living beings are moved by themselves through a phantasia, an impression that stirs them, as with spiders and bees.
132. 3.1.3A rational being can judge its impressions: what befalls us from outside is not in our power, but how we use it is, by the judgment of reason.
133. 3.1.4Outside incitements cannot compel us: nothing is done without the mind's assent, as a man resolved on chastity can resist a woman's enticement.
134. 3.1.5To blame outside causes or bodily temperament for our sins makes us like stones; conversions and corruptions show that the use of what befalls us is in our power.
135. 3.1.6Scripture confirms free choice: Moses, the prophets, the Psalms, the Saviour's commandments and Paul all speak to us as able to keep or transgress what is commanded.
136. 3.1.7Origen sets out the passages that seem to exclude free choice: the hardening of Pharaoh, the heart of flesh in Ezekiel, the parables, and Paul's words on mercy and the potter.
137. 3.1.8Against heretics who say Pharaoh was lost by nature, Origen argues that a hardening by God and a need for mercy both presuppose that a soul could have turned either way.
138. 3.1.9Those who make the God of the law only just, not good, must explain how a just God can harden Pharaoh's heart and then condemn him.
139. 3.1.10As one rain makes tilled land fruitful and neglected land thorny, so God's signs and patience soften some hearts and harden others according to their own cultivation.
140. 3.1.11As the sun's one heat melts wax and hardens mud, God's one working revealed Pharaoh's hardness; “I hardened” is a figure of speech, like a patient master's “I made you what you are.”
141. 3.1.12The prophets' “why have you hardened our heart?” means that God's sparing let sin grow; God corrects those he receives as sons and leaves others for a later cure, so that no one may think his goodness his own.
142. 3.1.13God's patience with sinners serves their healing, as a physician lets a wound drain before closing it, for God cares for immortal souls over all ages, not only this short life.
143. 3.1.14As a farmer sows rocky ground late so the crop may root, God delays the healing of some souls; his providence toward Pharaoh did not end even at his drowning.
144. 3.1.15God's promise to take away the heart of stone does not remove our freedom: like a teacher with a willing pupil, or the Saviour healing the blind who come to him, God acts in those who offer themselves.
145. 3.1.16The Saviour's words about speaking in parables “lest they turn and be forgiven” seem to deny free choice, and also show the heretics that the Gospels too need interpretation, like the Old Testament.
146. 3.1.17Christ veiled his teaching from those not yet ready, lest a hasty healing make them worse; God orders the hearing of the word with mercy and justice for immortal souls over all ages.
147. 3.1.18Against those who infer from “not of him who wills” that salvation is not in us, Origen argues that willing and running toward the good is itself good, and cannot come from a bad nature.
148. 3.1.19As a house, a besieged city, a harvest or a ship's safe arrival is credited to God though human labour was needed, so salvation is God's mercy completing our will and effort.
149. 3.1.20“To will and to accomplish are from God” means that the power of willing and acting comes from God, while we direct it to good or evil.
150. 3.1.21The potter's making of vessels for honour and dishonour does not remove free choice, for Paul blames and praises, and says that whoever cleanses himself becomes a vessel for honour.
151. 3.1.22Vessels are made for honour or dishonour from earlier causes, as Jacob was loved before birth; the “one lump” is the one nature of rational souls, and Paul's rebuke is aimed at the faithless, not the saints.
152. 3.1.23The one lump refutes the doctrine of different natures; vessels may change from honour to dishonour or the reverse in later ages, as rational beings rise or fall through immeasurable ages.
153. 3.1.24Paul's two sayings about vessels must be read together: nothing in our power is done without God's help, and nothing in God's hand is completed without our acts and purpose.
154. 3.2.1Scripture shows hostile powers inciting human beings to sin, from the serpent in Eden to the rulers who crucified the Lord, so that simpler believers think all sin comes from them.
155. 3.2.2Many sins arise from natural bodily motions such as hunger and desire; the hostile powers then inflame these beyond measure, at times even to madness.
156. 3.2.3Some sins arise from the flesh warring against the spirit; God, like a just president of the games, lets each be tempted only according to his strength, while the use of that strength is in our power.
157. 3.2.4Thoughts arise from ourselves, from hostile powers, or from God and the angels, as Scripture, Hermas and Barnabas attest; but in every case we remain free to accept or reject them.
158. 3.2.5No one fights all the hostile powers at once; God, the just umpire, measures each contest, and the saints prevail only by Christ's power, as Jacob's wrestling shows.
159. 3.2.6The demons' warfare is spiritual: misfortunes like Job's are allowed by God and aim to drive us to anger, despair or complaint against God.
160. 3.2.7Misfortunes happen not by God's doing yet not without him, since he permits the hostile powers within limits; next Origen turns to false knowledge.
161. 3.3.1Paul distinguishes the wisdom of this world, the wisdoms of the rulers of this world, and the wisdom of God, which was revealed more fully in Christ than to Solomon.
162. 3.3.2The wisdom of this world is the ordinary arts and sciences; the wisdom of the rulers of this world is the secret lore of nations, inspired by the spiritual princes set over them, who plotted against Christ.
163. 3.3.3The wisdom of the rulers of this world may be instilled by hostile powers, as in the arts of poets, magicians and diviners who give themselves over to demons.
164. 3.3.4Heresies may be devised by hostile powers; the soul can receive the workings of evil or of good spirits, and true inspiration leaves the mind clear and its judgment free.
165. 3.3.5Why some are moved by good spirits and others possessed from birth: Origen suggests causes earlier than bodily birth, since the soul always has free choice and is never without motion.
166. 3.3.6Good or evil suggestions may also have causes before birth, but our watchfulness or sloth opens the heart to the ministering spirits or to the devil.
167. 3.4.1Origen turns to temptations from flesh and blood and sets out three views of the soul: two souls in us, the influence of the body, or the Greek threefold soul, which Scripture does not support.
168. 3.4.2The view of two souls: a heavenly soul and a lower 'soul of the flesh' transmitted with the body, which is meant to explain Paul's war of flesh and spirit and a middle will between them.
169. 3.4.3On this view a lukewarm soul in the middle is worse off than one that follows the flesh, which may tire of its evils and turn more quickly to the spirit.
170. 3.4.4The opposing view holds that there is one soul: inner conflict is ordinary deliberation, and 'flesh against spirit' means the body's needs and pleasures distracting us from divine things.
171. 3.4.5Those who hold to one soul explain the 'works of the flesh' as a soul grown coarse, and argue that a hostile 'soul of the flesh' would make God the creator of an enemy, as the heretics' fixed natures do.
172. 3.5.1Scripture (Moses, Jacob, the Psalms, Christ and Paul) teaches that the world had a beginning in time and will come to an end.
173. 3.5.2Since God comprehends all things, and what has no beginning cannot be comprehended, the world must have a beginning and an end.
174. 3.5.3To the question what God did before the world, Origen answers that there were other worlds before this one and will be others after it, though not several at once.
175. 3.5.4Scripture's word καταβολή for the founding of the world suggests a “casting down” of rational beings from the invisible to the visible, some by merit and some, like the stars, for service.
176. 3.5.5God foresaw from the beginning the causes of each being's state; those who do not see that the world's variety arises from free choice blame chance or fate and cannot clear God's providence.
177. 3.5.6In the last times the Son himself came, emptying himself to teach obedience and to restore true rule; his final subjection to the Father includes all the saved in him.
178. 3.5.7The Son's subjection to the Father is good, the crowning of his work; so the subjection of his enemies to him means their salvation and the restoration of the lost.
179. 3.5.8The subjection of all to God will come about not by force but by teaching, persuasion and fitting threats, in ways known only to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
180. 3.6.1The end of all things is likeness to God: the image given at creation is to be completed as likeness through our own efforts, and Christ prays that the saints may be one with the Father and the Son.
181. 3.6.2God will be “all in all” at the end, not in beasts, stones or malice; although God is everywhere now, he is not yet “all” in those in whom he is.
182. 3.6.3God will be “all” in each purified mind, which will perceive and think nothing but God; the end will restore the state before the knowledge of good and evil, when death and evil are nowhere.
183. 3.6.4The spiritual body will be of a purity and glory beyond all visible bodies; our body can be brought to it, and when all are one there will be no more diversity.
184. 3.6.5The last enemy, death, will be destroyed not in its substance, which God made, but in its hostile will; so too the flesh is changed by death, not annihilated, and rises again.
185. 3.6.6All our bodily substance will be brought to the glory of a spiritual body gradually, over immeasurable ages, as all rational souls are restored and God becomes all in all.
186. 3.6.7There are two general natures: the invisible rational nature, which changes in purpose, and bodily nature, which changes in substance at the Creator's will.
187. 3.6.8When God is all in all, bodily nature may take one splendid quality, and the heaven and earth of the beginning become the dwelling of the godly, where the true forms of the law's worship are found.
188. 3.6.9In the restoration the saints will advance by stages until Christ subjects them to the Father and God is all in all; Origen leaves to the reader the choice between the views on the body.
189. 4.1.1To prove that the Scriptures are inspired, Origen points first to Moses and Christ, whose laws, unlike those of any other lawgiver, have been embraced by countless people of every nation despite persecution.
190. 4.1.2The rapid growth of the faith through persecution, spread by unlearned teachers, fulfils Christ's own predictions and shows that he who became man is truly God.
191. 4.1.3The prophecy that rule would not fail from Judah until the expected one came is fulfilled, since kingship, temple and priesthood have ceased and the nations believe through Christ.
192. 4.1.4The song of Deuteronomy foretold that God would provoke Israel by choosing “a foolish nation,” fulfilled in the calling of the nations through Christ.
193. 4.1.5The Psalms, Isaiah, Micah, Daniel and Job foretold Christ's grace, birth and victory; the spread of the Gospel by the apostles shows a power beyond human strength.
194. 4.1.6The fulfilment of prophecy in Christ proved that the prophets and the law of Moses were divinely inspired, and his coming removed the veil from the letter of the law.
195. 4.1.7That the divine sense of Scripture is not obvious to all no more disproves its inspiration than providence is disproved by being hidden; the treasure lies in earthen vessels, so that faith rests on God's power.
196. 4.2.1Misreading Scripture by the letter led the Jews to reject Christ, the heretics to divide the just Creator from the good God, and some simple believers to think unworthily of God.
197. 4.2.2Errors arise from reading Scripture by the letter; all agree that Scripture holds hidden mysteries, as in the stories of Lot, Abraham and Jacob and the tabernacle, which those who seek piously may find.
198. 4.2.3Hidden meanings are found not only in the prophets but in the Gospels, the Revelation and the Epistles; the “key of knowledge” held by the lawyers shows that truth was with those who had the law.
199. 4.2.4Scripture, like a human being, has body, soul and spirit, edifying the simple, the progressing and the perfect, as Origen illustrates from the two little books in the Shepherd of Hermas.
200. 4.2.5Some passages of Scripture have no literal sense, only a soul or spirit, as the six water jars holding two or three measures signify.
201. 4.2.6Paul gives examples of the soul of Scripture (the muzzled ox) and of its spirit (the law as a shadow, the rock that was Christ, the allegory of Abraham's two sons), extending even to the histories of Kingdoms.
202. 4.2.7The Spirit revealed to the prophets and apostles the mysteries of God, of the incarnation, of rational creatures, of the world and of evil, and they wrote them down figuratively for those who seek with discipline.
203. 4.2.8For those unwilling or unable to labour, the Spirit veiled the mysteries in histories of creation, of the righteous and the wicked, of battles, and in the law; this garment of the letter is the body of Scripture.
204. 4.2.9The Spirit placed stumbling-blocks, things impossible or incongruous, in the history and the law, and likewise in the Gospels and the apostles, to turn readers from the letter to a sense worthy of God.
205. 4.3.1The days of creation without a sun, God planting trees and walking in paradise, Cain leaving God's face, and the devil showing Jesus all kingdoms from one mountain cannot be taken literally.
206. 4.3.2Precepts of the law, such as cutting off the uncircumcised infant, eating the tragelaphus, forbidding the griffin, and sitting still on the Sabbath, are impossible to keep by the letter and lead to Jewish and Samaritan fables.
207. 4.3.3Gospel and apostolic precepts too, such as greeting no one on the way, owning no shoes in winter, offering the left cheek, plucking out the right eye, and not drawing on a foreskin, cannot all be taken literally.
208. 4.3.4Origen does not deny that most of Scripture's history happened or that most precepts are to be kept literally; the patriarchs' tomb, Jerusalem, the Decalogue and Christ's commands stand as written.
209. 4.3.5Since it is often uncertain whether a history or precept is literal, readers must study with reverence, remembering that the words are divine.
210. 4.3.6Scripture's chosen nation, Israel, Jacob and Judah, with Jerusalem as its mother-city, has a counterpart, for Paul speaks of an Israel according to the flesh and so implies an Israel according to the spirit.
211. 4.3.8Israel is a race of souls “seeing God” and Jerusalem the heavenly city, so the prophecies about Judea and Jerusalem, and the cities promised in the parable, refer to the heavenly land.
212. 4.3.9Prophecies about Egypt, Babylon, Tyre and Sidon, such as those on Pharaoh, the prince of Tyre and Lucifer, do not fit earthly kingdoms, so they refer to places and souls near the heavenly Jerusalem, from which some fall into captivity.
213. 4.3.10As the dead go to the underworld or Abraham's bosom, so souls “die” from higher places into this world and are born according to merit; prophecies and histories about the nations refer to such souls.
214. 4.3.11These meanings are hidden like treasure in a field beneath the letter; God alone breaks open the gates to the mysteries of the souls' descent into Egypt, where the seventy became as the stars and as the sand.
215. 4.3.12The exodus, the tabernacle, the purifications, the census of men fit for war, the deaths in the desert, the tribes beyond the Jordan and Deuteronomy's second law all figure the progress of souls toward Christ's perfect law.
216. 4.3.13As Deuteronomy is a clearer law, so Christ's glorious second coming will fulfil the shadow of his first and bring the saints from the temporal to the eternal Gospel.
217. 4.3.14The divine meaning lies hidden in the humble letter, and no created mind, not even the highest powers, can fully grasp God's ways; only the Son and the Spirit, figured by Isaiah's two seraphim, know the beginning and end of all things.
218. 4.3.15Meaning matters more than words: the Greeks' “incorporeal” is Scripture's “invisible,” and the Trinity is wholly incorporeal; Scripture must be judged by the Spirit who inspired it, not by its humble language.
219. 4.4.1The recapitulation begins: the Son is begotten of the incorporeal Father without emission or passion, as will from mind and radiance from light, so there was never a time when he was not; and he is contained in no place.
220. 4.4.2The Son's divinity is in no place and absent from none; he dwells in Paul, Peter and the archangels alike, but more fully in some than in others, according to their merits.
221. 4.4.3All things were created through the Son, as Colossians, John and Psalm 33 show; in the incarnation his divinity was neither confined to his body nor separated from the Father, as the Baptist's words 'among you stands one' imply.
222. 4.4.4The Son's undivided divinity took a human body and soul; that soul, joined to the Word in a spotless union, chose the good and could not sin, and is the example for believers to imitate.
223. 4.4.5Some apply Philippians 2 to Christ's soul; all rational beings, souls and angels alike, need participation in the one incorporeal Trinity; Origen turns to the question of 'matter'.
224. 4.4.6The word 'matter' for the substrate of bodies is not used in the canonical Scriptures, only in Wisdom; matter is not unmade, and bodily substance can change from any quality to any other.
225. 4.4.7Matter never exists without qualities but is distinguished by thought alone; some say bodies are only qualities, others that qualities are added to an underlying substance, as accidents to Paul.
226. 4.4.8Scripture hints at formless matter (the Psalm's “imperfect,” Enoch's walk to the imperfect); God made all things in number and measure, and bodily nature, changeable at his will, will last as long as rational beings need bodies.
227. 4.4.9Since rational beings share, in differing degrees, in the intellectual light of the eternal Trinity, the human soul is of one nature with the heavenly powers and is immortal, always keeping seeds of renewal.
228. 4.4.10To deny the immortality of what is made in God's image insults Christ, the Image; the image lies in the virtues, acquired by imitating God, and the mind advances by a 'divine sense' from visible to intellectual things.