Origen's conception of God the Father is: -a perfect unity, -invisible and incorporeal, -transcending all things material, -inconceivable and incomprehensible, -unchangeable, -transcends space and time. God's power is limited by his goodness, justice, and wisdom; entirely free from necessity. His goodness and omnipotence constrained him to reveal himself.
This revelation, the external self-emanation of God, is expressed by Origen in various ways, the Word being only one of many. Revelation was the first creation of God, in oreder to afford creative mediation between God and the World, such mediation being necessary, because God, as changeless unity, could not be the source of a multitudinous creation.
The Word is the rational creative principle that permeates the universe. Since God eternally manifests himself, the Word is likewise eternal. He forms a Bridge between the created and uncreated, and only through Him, as the visible representative of Divine Wisdom, can be inconceivable and incorporeal God, be known.
Creation came into existence only through the Word, and God's nearest approach to the World is the command to create. While the Word is substantially a Unity, He comprehends a multiplicity of concepts, so that Origen terms Him: -"essence of essences" and 'idea of ideas."
The defense of the Unity of God against the Gnostics led Origen to maintain the subordination of the Word to God, and the doctrine of the eternal generation is later. Origen distinctly emphasized the independence of the Word as well as the distinction from the being and substance of God. The term "of the same substance with the Father" was not employed. The Word (and the Holy Spirit also) however, does not share in the divinity of God. He is an image, a reflex of God, in which God communicates his divinity, as light radiating from the sun.
Origen taught that, though the Son was subordinate and less than the Father in power, substance, and rank, the relation of the Son to the Father had no beginning, and the Son was "eternally generated."
The activity of the Word was conceived by Origen as the World Soul, wherein God manifested His Omnipotence. His 1st creative act was the Divine Spirit, as an independent existence; and partial reflexes of the Word were the created rational beings, who, as they had to revert to the perfect God as their background, must likewise be perfect; yet their prefection, unlike in kind with that of God, and the Divine Spirit, had to be attained.
The freedom of the Will is an essential fact of the Reason, notwithstanding the foreknowledge of God.
The Word, eternally creative, forms and endless series of finite, comprehensible Worlds, which are mutually alternative.
The material World, which at first had no place in this eternal spiritual progression, was due to the fall of the Spirits from God, the first being the serpent, who was imprisoned in matter and body. The ultimate aim of God in the creation of matter out of nothing was not punishment, but the upraising of the fallen Spirits.
Man's accidental being is rooted in transitory matter, but his higher nature is formed in the image of the Creator. The Soul is divided into the Rational and the Irrational, the latter being material and transitory, while the former, incorporeal and immaterial, possesses Freedom of Will and the Power to Reascend to Purer Life.
The return to original being through Divine Reason is the object of the entire cosmic process. God so ordered the universe that all individual acts work together toward one Cosmic End which culminates in Himself.
Man conceived in the image of God is able by imitating God in good works to become like God, if he first recognizes his own weakness and trusts all to Divine Goodness. He is aided by Guardian Angels, but more especially by the Word.
To the multitude to whom instruction was beyond grasp, Origen left mediating images and symbols, as well as the final goal of attainment.
In Origen's time Christianity blended with the non Christian philosophy in which the desire for Truth and the longing for God was left.
Origen had many admirers and followers, one in particular, DionYsius of Alexandria, who caused controversy throughout Libya in 259 CE due to his theology in regards to the Unity of the Trinity.
Three centuries later his very name was stricken from the "Books of the Church;" yet in the monasteries of the Greeks his influence still lived on, as he spiritual father of Greek monasticism.
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