the divine
thoughts, looking up with longing to heaven its native city,[693] the
created spirit attains its likeness to God and eternal bliss. It reaches
this by the victory over sensuousness, by constantly occupying itself
with the divine--"Go ye believing thoughts into the wide field of
eternity"--by self-knowledge and contemplative isolation, which,
however, does not exclude work in the kingdom of God, that is in the
Church. This is the divine wisdom: "The soul practises viewing herself
as in a mirror: she displays the divine Spirit in herself as in a
mirror, if she is to be found worthy of this fellowship; and she thus
discovers the traces of a mysterious way to deification."[694] Origen
employed the Stoic and Platonic systems of ethics as an instrument for
the gradual realisation of this ideal.[695] With him the mystic and
ecstatic as well as the magic and sacramental element is still in the
background, though it is not wanting. To Origen's mind, however, the
inadequacy of philosophical injunctions was constantly made plain by the
following considerations. (1) The philosophers, in spite of their noble
thoughts of God, tolerated the existence of polytheism; and this was
really the only fault he had to find with Plato. (2) The truth did not
become universally accessible through them.[696] (3) As the result of
these facts they did not possess sufficient power.[697] In contrast to
this the divine revelation had already mastered a whole people through
Moses--"Would to God the Jews had not transgressed the law, and had not
slain the prophets and Jesus; we would then have had a model of that
heavenly commonwealth which Plato has sought to describe"[698]--and the
Logos shows his universal power in the Church (1) by putting an end to
all polytheism, and (2) by improving everyone to the extent that his
knowledge and capacity admit, and in proportion as his will is inclined
to, and susceptible of, that which is good.[699]

Not only, however, did Origen employ the Greek ethic in its varied
types, but the Greek cosmological speculation also formed the
complicated substructure of his religious system of morals. The Gnosis
is formally a philosophy of revelation, that is a Scripture
theology,[700] and materially a cosmological speculation. On the basis
of a detailed theory of inspiration, which itself, moreover, originates
with the philosophers, the Holy Scriptures are so treated that all facts
appear as the vehicles of ideas and