Origen’s treatise On First Principles

Abstract

This article is about Origen’s treatise On First Principles, one of the most influential and controversial works in patristic literature, which was written in Greek, but has come down to us for the most part in a later Latin translation. Beside some questions concerning its genre and the adequacy of the extant Latin translation, the author discusses the general problems concerning Origen’s highly original religious and philosophical worldview that found in this treatise an especially vivid expression, largely contributing to his reputation as unorthodox or even heretical thinker (among other things, here belong his views on the preexistence of souls, on successive worlds and on universal salvation). The author aims to show where precisely these views diverge from the standards of orthodox Christian thought and which motives prompted Origen to formulate such hypotheses. In particular, Origen admitted the preexistence of souls in order to put forward his own version of theodicy, i.e. the universal salvation, because in his opinion the universe can only be perfect if it is completely free of any evil, and he argued for multiple successive worlds to make it possible to reconcile his own universalist eschatology with traditional particularism.