t, however, as divine teacher and hierophant he had
to reveal the depths of knowledge, and to impart in this very process a
new principle of life, so that they might now partake of his life and
themselves become divine through being interwoven with the divine
essence. Here, as in the former case, restoration to fellowship with God
is the goal; but, as in the lower stage, this restoration is effected
through faith and sure conviction of the reality of a historical
fact--namely, the redeeming death of Christ,--so, in the higher stage,
it is accomplished through knowledge and love, which, soaring upward
beyond the Crucified One, grasp the eternal essence of the Logos,
revealed to us through his teaching in the eternal Gospel.[790] What the
Gnostics merely represented as a more or less valuable appearance--
namely, the historical work of Christ--was to Origen no appearance but
truth. But he did not view it as _the_ truth, and in this he agrees with
the Gnostics, but as _a_ truth, beyond which lies a higher. That
historical work of Christ was a reality; it is also indispensable for
men of more limited endowments, and not a matter of indifference to the
perfect; but the latter no longer require it for their personal life.
Here also Origen again contrived to reconcile contradictions and thus
acknowledged, outdid, reconciled, and united both the theses of the
Gnostics and those of orthodox Christians. The object and goal of
redemption are the same for all, namely, the restoration of the created
spirit to God and participation in the divine life. In so far as history
is a struggle between spirits and demons, the death of Christ on the
cross is the turning-point of history, and its effects extend even into
heaven and hell.[791]

On the basis of this conception of redemption Origen developed his idea
of Christ. Inasmuch as he recognised Christ as the Redeemer, this
Christ, the God-man, could not but be as many-sided as redemption is.
Only through that masterly art of reconciling contradictions, and by the
aid of that fantastic idea which conceives one real being as dwelling in
another, could there be any apparent success in the attempt to depict a
homogeneous person who in truth is no longer a person, but the symbol of
the various redemptions. That such an acute thinker, however, did not
shrink from the monstrosity his speculation produced is ultimately to be
accounted for by the fact that this very speculation afforded him the
me