ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how one of the earliest and most prolific Christian theologians, Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–254), incorporated Phil. 2:6–11 into his Christology, and how he dealt with the underlying problem of Christ assuming the form of a slave in the hymn. Plato's formulation of the doulological nature of the cosmos, according to Vlastos, was developed in response to the views of the Ionian philosophical tradition. Plato's dualistic cosmology is also, then, a doulologically structured cosmology. The principle of corporeal heteronomy, as it functions in a doulological cosmology, was a major feature of the Christological and pneumatological debates of the formative Christian centuries. Corporeality implied subjugation; but corporeal subjugation was a symptom of psychic frigidity. Spiritual and epistemological enlightenment is freedom from the bondage of carnality. Slavery and sexuality are never far separated from each other.
