On First Principles
Origen, De Principiis (Peri Archon)
Origen of Alexandria
The first systematic theology. Written before there was a word for that.
- Catch rate
- 50 / 255
- Base research
- 178
- Stat total
- 254
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
The Greek original is mostly gone. What survives whole is Rufinus’ Latin translation, made a hundred and fifty years later.
The first systematic theology anybody wrote: God, Christ, the Spirit, creation, freedom, Scripture, all in order. Enormous Contend for its size.
And here is the cost. Rufinus admitted he smoothed Origen’s wording as he translated, and Jerome accused him of smoothing away the parts that had got Origen condemned. Scholars still argue about what the book originally said — so a large book defends badly, because Defend measures textual certainty and not bulk.
No book of the pre-Nicene church has been argued over more. Three hundred years after Origen died a council was still condemning it, and people were still copying it afterwards. A book nobody can leave alone is a book everybody has read: it usually speaks first.
Cited for this book
Not an apology in form, but part of its aim is to state and defend the rule of faith against the Marcionites, gnostics, docetists and Arians Origen was living among. It upholds the Old Testament, the one God of both Testaments, the full humanity of Christ, the eternal generation of the Son, and one God in three persons — a century before a council had to fix the vocabulary.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | First Principles | Theology Proper | Argument | 70 | 95% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 9 | Question the Premise | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 17 | From What Is Made | Natural Theology | Argument | 62 | 100% | 15 |
| 22 | Steelman | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 26 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 30 | The Spiritual Sense | Allegory | Argument | 64 | 100% | 15 |
Read it: Left to Be Inquired Into
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Greek, surviving chiefly in Rufinus’ Latin.
“As the teaching of the Church, transmitted in orderly succession from the apostles, and remaining in the Churches to the present day, is still preserved, that alone is to be accepted as truth which differs in no respect from ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition.”
Origen, De Principiis, preface 2 (trans. Crombie, ANF 4, public domain) — Rufinus’ Latin; no Greek survives for this sentence.
“…leaving, however, the grounds of their statements to be examined into by those who should deserve the excellent gifts of the Spirit…”
Origen, De Principiis, preface 3 (trans. Crombie, ANF 4, public domain, lightly modernized).
“God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.”
Origen, De Principiis 1.1.5 (trans. Crombie, ANF 4, public domain).
The first systematic theology anyone wrote, and the first one to say plainly which parts are settled and which are open.
That is what the preface is for. It lists what the apostles handed down flatly and without argument — and then says, of everything else, that they left the reasons to be looked into later. Origen then spends four books looking into them.
⚑ Read the citations. Most of this book survives only in Rufinus’ Latin, and Rufinus said openly that he had smoothed out passages he thought heretics had tampered with. Jerome then produced a rival translation to prove Rufinus had softened it.
So you are reading a contested book through a translator with a stated agenda, quarrelled over by a second translator with another one. The parts where Greek survives are the ones to trust hardest.