Note (return) — Chapter VI

THE DOCTRINE OF THE FALL AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. All created spirits must develop. When they have done so, they attain perfection and make way for new dispensations and worlds.767 In the exercise of their freedom, however, disobedience, laxity, laziness, and failure make their appearance among them in an endless multiplicity of ways.768 The disciplining and purifying of these spirits was the purpose for which the material world was created by God.769 It is therefore a place of purification, ruled and harmoniously arranged by God's wisdom.770 Each member of the world of spirits has received a different kind of material nature in proportion to his degree of removal from the Creator. The highest spirits, who have virtually held fast by that which is good, though they too stand in need of restitution, guide the world, are servants of God (αγγελοι), and have bodies of an exceedingly subtle kind in the form of a globe (stars). The spirits that have fallen very deeply (the spirits of men) are banished into material bodies. Those that have altogether turned against God have received very dark bodies, indescribably ugly, though not visible. Men therefore are placed between the angels and demons, both of whom try to influence them. The moral struggle that man has to undergo within himself is made harder by the demons, but lightened by the angels,771 for these spiritual powers are at all times and places acting both upon the physical and the spiritual world. But everything is subject to the permission of the divine goodness and finally also to the guidance of divine providence, though the latter has created for itself a limit in freedom.772 Evil, however, and it is in this idea that Origen's great optimism consists, cannot conquer in the end. As it is nothing eternal, so also it is at bottom nothing real; it is "nonexistent" (ουχ ον) and "unreal" (ανυποστατον).773 For this very reason the estrangement of the spirits from God must finally cease; even the devil, who, as far as his being is concerned, resulted from God's will, cannot always remain a devil. The spirits must return to God, and this moment is also the end of the material world, which is merely an intermediate phase.774