Time & Perspective Quote by Origen

Origen is doing something more daring than predicting an apocalypse: he is putting time itself under ecclesial jurisdiction. By insisting the world "took its beginning at a certain time", he draws a hard line against the era's rival cosmologies in which matter and the cosmos are eternal, cycling endlessly or emanating necessarily from the divine. Creation, here, is not just a doctrine; it is a polemical boundary marker. If the world has a birthday, it is contingent, not divine. It can be judged.

The second clause tightens the screw. "Is to be destroyed on account of its wickedness" gives moral causality the final word over physics. The cosmos doesn't end because it wears out; it ends because it deserves to. That is an emotionally potent move in a persecuted, morally embattled church: it frames history as intelligible, charged, and ultimately adjudicated. Wickedness is not merely personal failure but a condition that stains the world-order and calls down a cosmic reckoning.

The subtext also disciplines the listener. If the world's horizon is termination, attachment looks like a category error. Eschatology becomes social technology: it relativizes empire, wealth, and status by rendering them temporary, and it pressures the community toward repentance by making time scarce and morally audited.

In Origen's third-century context, this is also a bid for Christian intellectual seriousness. He is translating Jewish apocalyptic inheritance into a philosophical register that can compete in the late antique marketplace of ideas, while still keeping the scandalous claim intact: history is going somewhere, and it answers to God.