ans of nullifying all the utterances about Christ and falling back on
the idea of the divine teacher as being the highest one. The whole
"humanity" of the Redeemer together with its history finally disappears
from the eyes of the perfect one. What remains is the principle, the
divine Reason, which became known and recognisable through Christ. The
perfect one, and this remark also applies to Clement's perfect Gnostic,
thus knows no "Christology", but only an indwelling of the Logos in
Jesus Christ, with which the indwellings of this same Logos in men
began. To the Gnostic the question of the divinity of Christ is of as
little importance as that of the humanity. The former is no question,
because speculation, starting above and proceeding downwards, is already
acquainted with the Logos and knows that he has become completely
comprehensible in Christ; the latter is no question, because the
humanity is a matter of indifference, being the form in which the Logos
made himself recognisable. But to the Christian who is not yet perfect
the divinity as well as the humanity of Christ is a problem, and it is
the duty of the perfect one to solve and explain it, and to guard this
solution against errors on all sides. To Origen, however, the errors are
already Gnostic Docetism on the one hand, and the "Ebionite" view on the
other.[792] His doctrine was accordingly as follows: As a pure
unchangeable spirit, the Logos could not unite with matter, because this
as [Greek: me on] would have depotentiated him. A medium was required.
The Logos did not unite with the body, but with a soul, and only through
the soul with the body. This soul was a pure one; it was a created
spirit that had never fallen from God, but always remained in faithful
obedience to him, and that had chosen to become a soul in order to serve
the purposes of redemption. This soul then was always devoted to the
Logos from the first and had never renounced fellowship with him. It was
selected by the Logos for the purpose of incarnation and that because of
its moral dignity. The Logos became united with it in the closest way;
but this connection, though it is to be viewed as a mysteriously real
union, continues to remain perfect only because of the unceasing effort
of will by which the soul clings to the Logos. Thus, then, no
intermixture has taken place. On the contrary the Logos preserves his
impassibility, and it is only the soul that hungers and thirsts,
struggles and suff