ABSTRACT
Origen was a philosopher, who made his task to prove that Christianity was neither one philosophy among many, nor a negation of philosophy, but a philosophy superior to all those cultivated by its educated critics. Much as he respected Plato, he could not embrace his dualism, his notion of a self-subsistent incorporeal universe or the theory of the transmigration of souls which Plato deduced form these assumptions. Nor, for all his admiration of Stoic ethics, could he embrace the Stoic doctrine of eternal recurrence or the limitation in God which this implies. His God is at once supreme mind and superior to mind, endowed not merely with absolute being but with a capacity to effect change by acts of will. His true precursor in the pagan world in Anaxagoras; in his understanding of creation out of nothing by divine volition, his most faithful, successor is Gregory of Nyssa.
