This led him to ask a question: If I were to die tomorrow, and had to stand before my God for judgment, what would I say to Him? Socrates had said that the unexamined life was not worth living. The same was true for Origen and, he believed, for every Christian.27 The task of Christianity had to be to prepare believers for that awful moment and to show them how to live a life that reflected the light of divine truth in every aspect. Origen was the first Christian thinker to make the conscience, Socrates’s daimon, or inner voice, the focus of moral life. For Origen, the conscience is all that
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