What is "origen"

Usage examples of "origen".

Origen, that is, in the transformation of the Gospel into a scientific system of ecclesiastical doctrine, appears in the Christian Apologetic, as we already find it before the middle of the second century.

The pneumatic sense, which is the only meaning borne by many passages, an assertion which neither Philo nor Clement ventured to make in plain terms, has with Origen a negatively apologetic and a positively didactic aim.

Origen, in opposition to the fables about deification, sought to prove that Christ is divine because he realised the aim of founding a holy community in humanity.

But, as this method implied the acknowledgment of a sacred literature, Origen was an exegete who believed in the Holy Scriptures and indeed, at bottom, he viewed all theology as a methodical exegesis of Holy Writ.

We must here content ourselves with merely pointing out that the method of scientific Scriptural exegesis also led to historico-critical investigations, that accordingly Origen and his disciples were also critics of the tradition, and that scientific theology, in addition to the task of remodelling Christianity, thus began at its very origin the solution of another problem, namely, the critical restoration of Christianity from the Scriptures and tradition and the removal of its excrescences: for these efforts, strictly speaking, do not come up for consideration in the history of dogma.

To Clement and Origen, however, teacher and mystagogue are as closely connected as they are to most Gnostics.

No doubt it shows at the same time how uncertain Origen was as to the applicability of popular conceptions when he was dealing with the sphere of the Psychici.

Notwithstanding the cruel disposition of Maximin, the effects of his resentment against the Christians were of a very local and temporary nature, and the pious Origen, who had been proscribed as a devoted victim, was still reserved to convey the truths of the gospel to the ear of monarchs.

Origen excluded both the creation and traducian hypotheses of the origin of the soul.

This conviction plainly shows that Origen was dealing with a different kind of Christianity, though his view that a mere relative distinction existed here may have its justification in the fact, that the untheological Christianity of the age with which he compared his own was already permeated by Hellenic elements and in a very great measure secularised.

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Origen records that Peter was crucified head downward.

We learn this from Celsus, in Origen, who says that the symbolic image of this passage among the stars, used in the Mithraic Mysteries, was a ladder reaching from earth to Heaven, divided into seven steps or stages, to each of which was a gate, and at the summit an eighth one, that of the fixed stars.

Celsus, as quoted by Origen, tells us that the Persians represented by symbols the two-fold motion of the stars, fixed and planetary, and the passage of the Soul through their successive spheres.

Josephus attributes the invention of the constellations to the family of the antediluvian Seth, the son of Adam, while Origen affirms that it was asserted in the Book of Enoch that in the time of that patriarch the constellations were already divided and named.

This allows Origen to put into the myths whatever meanings from a higher level he wishes to put into them, so that he can both claim scriptural authority and basically ignore it at the same time.