te Logos any significance for "Gnostics." To these Christ merely
appears as the Logos who has been from eternity with the Father and has
always acted from the beginning. He alone is the object of the knowledge
of the wise man, who merely requires a perfect or, in other words, a
divine teacher.[704] The Gospel too only teaches the "shadow of the
secrets of Christ;" but the eternal Gospel, which is also the pneumatic
one, "clearly places before men's minds all things concerning the Son of
God himself, both the mysteries shown by his words, and the things of
which his acts were the riddles" ([Greek: saphos paristesi tois noousi
ta panta enopion peri autou tou huiou tou Theou, kai ta paristamena
musteria hupo ton logon autou, ta te pragmata, on ainigmata esan hai
praxeis autou]).[705] No doubt the true theology based on revelation
makes pantheism appear overthrown as well as dualism, and here the
influence of the two Testaments cannot be mistaken; but a subtle form of
the latter recurs in Origen's system, whilst the manner in which he
rejected both made the Greek philosophy of the age feel that there was
something akin to it here. In the final utterances of religious
metaphysics ecclesiastical Christianity, with the exception of a few
compromises, is thrown off as a husk. The objects of religious knowledge
have no history or rather, and this is a genuinely Gnostic and
Neoplatonic idea, they have only a supramundane one.

This necessarily gave rise to the assumption of an esoteric and exoteric
form of the Christian religion, for it is only behind the statutory,
positive religion of the Church that religion itself is found. Origen
gave the clearest expression to this assumption, which must have been
already familiar in the Alexandrian school of catechists, and convinced
himself that it was correct, because he saw that the mass of Christians
were unable to grasp the deeper sense of Scripture, and because he
realised the difficulties of the exegesis. On the other hand, in solving
the problem of adapting the different points of his heterodox system of
thought to the _regula fidei_, he displayed the most masterly skill. He
succeeded in finding an external connection, because, though the
construction of his theory proceeded from the top downwards, he could
find support for it on the steps of the _regula fidei_, already
developed by Irenaeus into the history of salvation.[706] The system
itself is to be, in principle and in every re