Faith & Spirit Quote by Origen

Devotion, in Origen's hands, is not a mood but a total program. "Whole activity" and "whole life" land like an administrative takeover: every hour, habit, and desire gets annexed to God. The line is deliberately comprehensive because Origen is writing in a world where Christianity is still precarious, socially suspect, and intermittently persecuted; to live as a Christian is to accept that faith will not stay politely inside a temple or a private conscience. Totality is the point, and it’s also the pitch.

The subtext is that spiritual life is directional. "Bent on progress" rejects the idea that holiness is a status you achieve and then keep on a shelf. Origen, shaped by the Greek philosophical atmosphere of Alexandria, frames Christian existence as an ascent, an education of the soul. The verb "bent" matters: it suggests disciplined will, even a kind of holy stubbornness. This is less Hallmark piety than training regimen.

That emphasis also reveals an implicit argument with the surrounding culture and with lazier versions of religion. Origen is fending off a Christianity reduced to ritual compliance or intellectual assent; he wants a faith that reorganizes the person. At the same time, he’s marking boundaries against rival "progress" narratives in the ancient world - civic ambition, philosophical prestige, sensual fulfillment - by insisting that the only advancement worth naming is "in divine things."

The sentence works because it blends ascetic demand with an appealing promise: your life can have a single, coherent aim, and that aim is infinite.