ON FIRST PRINCIPLES by Origen, excerpt

"The daring of his genius must not blind us to the drives of his piety. The shortcomings of his doctrine --inevitable in a thinker of the third century who was the very first to build a theology--must not make us mistake the pure quality of his faith . "His [Origen's] intellectual formation, we must not forget, was entirely Christian; we might even say ecclesiastic... 'I, a man of the Church, living in the faith of Christ and set in the midst of the Church...' Justin, Taitan, Clement and others like them were converts; because of a turn of mind due to their early formation they remained philosophers... Clement after his conversion kept the vocabulary of the Greeks that had already imposed itself on Philo, and then on Taitan; he still called the doctrine of Moses and of Christianity itself by the name of 'barbarian philosophy.' But Origen contrasts the 'barbarians' who were the Egyptians with the 'Saints' who were the great men of Israel. He had been introduced to the Bible on his father's knees, and he always maintained that outside of the Bible, there was nothing holy... He knows that 'the knowledge which converts men to lead a holy life comes only from... Christ' and that Christ is found only 'in the Church' which is filled with his splendor... "We ought to imitate no one, he says, save only Jesus. Apart from Jesus, nothing to him is worthy of being loved. He would have us love with the same love that we owe to God; more, he would have us to love God in him . He prays to him and would have us pray to him even as to the Father. The absence of Christ is for Origen a desert barren of righteousness . His homilies vibrate some of the first notes of that human piety toward Jesus which to us seems to have become inseparable from our religion... "He often speaks of 'my Jesus,' 'my Lord,' 'my Savior.'.. It is a Pauline trait; but Origen's insistent usage makes something new of it, a sort of conquest of Christian piety." P. xv-xix, "Introduction. His Piety and Orthodoxy," ON FIRST PRINCIPLES by Origen , introduction by Henri de Lubac (2013)