On the First Principles

On the First Principles (Περὶ Ἀρχῶν) is Origen’s attempt to set out the whole of Christian doctrine as a reasoned system. It treats in turn God and the Logos, the rational creatures or souls and their fall, the freedom of the will, and the consummation in which all things return to their source — the hope of apokatastasis.

Surviving chiefly in Rufinus’s Latin, with stretches of the original Greek preserved through the Philocalia, it is the most ambitious speculative work of the early Church. The text is given here in Frederick Crombie’s translation, with the surviving Greek of Books I–II alongside.