A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Origen’s preoccupation with the classic concerns of Greek philosophy was as apparent in his work on systematic theology as in his biblical commentaries. Particularly in his book entitled On First Principles, one of the first attempts at a universal summary of a single Christian tradition, he grappled with the old Platonic problem of how a passionless, indivisible, changeless supreme God communicates with this transitory world. For Origen as for Justin, the bridge was the Logos, and like Justin Origen could be quite bold in terming the Logos ‘a second God’, even tending towards making this Logos-figure subordinate to or on a lower level than the supreme God, whose creature he is – a doctrine known as subordinationism.