Faith & Spirit Quote by Origen

Origen is doing something audaciously risky for a theologian in a young, quarrelsome church: he limits the imagination on purpose. By “refuted... every notion” of a bodily God, he’s not just tidying up bad metaphors; he’s policing the boundary between Christian teaching and the religious common sense of the ancient world, where divinity was often pictured with scale, shape, and location. The line lands like a trap door under the reader’s certainty: once you stop picturing God as a super-sized person, you also lose the comfort of thinking you can map God with the same mental tools you use for everything else.

“Incomprehensible” here isn’t devotional haze; it’s a strategic claim about epistemology and authority. Origen wants a faith that can survive philosophy, not a faith that collapses into anthropomorphic folklore the moment a Platonist starts asking questions. The subtext is also disciplinary: if God is “incapable of being measured,” then any faction claiming precise possession of God - through literal images, crude definitions, or spiritual bragging rights - is exposed as mistaking confidence for truth.

Context matters: Origen writes in an era when Christians are trying to articulate monotheism against pagan critics, gnostic mythologies, and internal disputes about how to read scripture. His move is to protect transcendence while still defending rational inquiry. The paradox is the engine: strict truth leads not to a clean concept, but to a humbled intellect. That humility isn’t retreat; it’s the ground rule for speaking about God without turning God into an object.