themselves, but
testify: "We have not made ourselves." As the absolutely immaterial
Spirit, God is contrasted with the spirit that is clogged with matter,
but which strives to get back to him from whom it received its origin.
The One is something different from the Manifold; but the order, the
dependence, and the longing of that which is created point back to the
One, who can therefore be known relatively from the Manifold. In
sharpest contrast to the heretical Gnosis, Origen maintained the
absolute causality of God, and, in spite of all abstractions in
determining the essence of God, he attributed self-consciousness and
will to this superessential Essence (in opposition to Valentinus,
Basilides, and the later Neoplatonists).[720] The created is one thing
and the Self-existent is another, but both are connected together; as
the created can only be understood from something self-existent, so the
self-existent is not without analogy to the created. The Self-existent
is in itself a living thing; it is beyond dispute that Origen with all
his abstractions represented the Deity, whom he primarily conceived as a
constant substance, in a more living, and, so to speak, in a more
personal way than the Greek philosophers. Hence it was possible for him
to produce a doctrine of the attributes of God. Here he did not even
shrink from applying his relative view to the Deity, because, as will be
seen, he never thinks of God without revelation, and because all
revelation must be something limited. The omnipresence of God indeed
suffers from no limitation. God is potentially everywhere; but he is
everywhere only potentially; that is, he neither encompasses nor is
encompassed. Nor is he diffused through the universe, but, as he is
removed from the limits of space, so also he is removed from space
itself.[721] But the omniscience and omnipotence of God have a limit,
which indeed, according to Origen, lies in the nature of the case
itself. In the first place his omnipotence is limited through his
essence, for he can only do what he wills;[722] secondly by logic, for
omnipotence cannot produce things containing an inward contradiction:
God can do nothing contrary to nature, all miracles being natural in the
highest sense[723]--thirdly, by the impossibility of that which is in
itself unlimited being comprehended, whence it follows that the extent
of everything created must be limited[724]--fourthly, by the
impossibility of realising an aim com