Origen’s “On First Principles” (Book II, Ch. 4.3)

Gary Pollard

[This is a continuing translation of Origen’s systematic theology in modern language]

Since those who promote this teaching often confuse simple believers with intelligent-sounding (but deceptive) arguments, it seems appropriate to lay out their claims plainly and then expose their errors. Their argument goes like this: Scripture says, “No one has ever seen God.” Yet the God proclaimed by Moses was seen by Moses himself, and also by the patriarchs before him. By contrast, the God proclaimed by the Savior has never been seen by anyone. Therefore, they claim, the God of Moses must be different from the God revealed by Christ.

Let’s ask them (and ourselves) this question: Do they say that the God they acknowledge, whom they distinguish from the Creator, is visible or invisible? If they say that he is visible, they immediately contradict scripture, which says that Christ, “is the image of the invisible God.” It gets even more absurd, since whatever is visible must also have form, size, and color — properties that only bodies have. And if God has a body, then he must be material. If he is material, he must be composed of matter. But matter is subject to decay. On this reasoning, God himself would be subject to decay. This is not a tolerable conclusion.

Let’s question further. Is matter created or uncreated? If they claim that matter is uncreated, don’t we then have to say that part of matter is God and part of it is the world? But if they say that matter is created, then the God they describe—being composed of matter—must himself be created. This, of course, neither their reason nor ours can accept. They will then respond that God is invisible. Very well—but in what sense? If they say he is invisible by nature, then he shouldn’t be visible to the Savior. Yet Christ says, “He who has seen the Son has seen the Father.” This would indeed present a serious difficulty—unless we understand “seeing” here in the proper sense, not of bodily sight, but of understanding. Whoever truly understands the Son also understands the Father.

In this same way, Moses must be said to have “seen” God—not with the eyes of the body, but with the insight of the heart and the perception of the mind, and even then only partially. For it is clear that the one who spoke with Moses also said, “You shall not see my face, but my back.” These words must be understood in a spiritual and symbolic sense appropriate to divine speech, and not according to crude and foolish stories invented by the ignorant about physical parts of God.

Let no one suppose that we speak irreverently when we say that even the Father is not visible to the Savior. The distinction we are making is essential in answering these errors. To see and to be seen belong to bodies; to know and to be known belong to intellectual and incorporeal natures. Vision is a property of bodily creatures in relation to one another. It cannot properly be applied to the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit in their relations to one another.

The divine nature transcends vision. It grants the capacity for sight to creatures who live in bodies, but it itself is apprehended only by understanding. Therefore, for incorporeal and intellectual beings, the proper terms are not “seeing” and “being seen,” but “knowing” and “being known.” This is exactly what the Savior teaches when he says, “No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son reveals him.” He does not say, “No one has seen the Father except the Son,” but “No one knows the Father except the Son.”