One of these new publications is an inquiry into Origen's views on the origin of sin, the other a collection of essays by various hands on the most disputed riddle of his biography. He emerges from Bagby's study of his Commentary on Romans as the first Greek to maintain that our moral capacities have been vitiated by the fall of Adam. Against those who maintain that he never ascribed defilement to the newborn child before he came upon infant baptism in Caesarea, Bagby persuasively argues that he defended this practice only because he found Paul arguing for the ubiquity of inherited sin, and that he reached this position without misconstruing the Greek of Roman v.12, as Augustine later misconstrued the Latin, to mean that every human being has sinned in Adam. At the same time, a purely historical understanding of Adam seems to Bagby incompatible with Origen's hints that he is a general cipher for humanity and with the supposed allusions in First principles to the fall of human souls from a state of pure intellectuality. He concludes that Origen posited a pre-cosmic fall of the race, entailing its embodiment in a single man, who then misused his precarious freedom to sin once more, with consequences that are inescapably passed on to his descendants by sexual congress. This deduction, however, is poorly supported by his own quotations from the Commentary, unless we assume, like the scholars on whom he relies, that every descent from the presence of God is a fall, that the rational beings who fell in the beginning were souls and not angels and that every sixth-century calumny is a direct transcription from Origen himself.

Only with such a parti pris are we likely to infer the pre-existence of the soul from the innate longing for salvation (p. 45) which is attributed to it not only by Origen but by Augustine; conversely, once we set aside the old libels, we will not find Origen's hesitation between the symbolic and the historical Adam any more heterodox than the similar ambivalence of Augustine and Athanasius. All were aware that in the Mosaic Scriptures, which were older and truer than Plato, Adam is sometimes merely the term for ‘man’. This is not to say that they had no use for Plato but that he was always their interlocutor rather than their master, the subject of exegesis being God's word, not his own. Bagby correctly notes that Origen sometimes rejects Platonic theories even in First principles, and that when he credits the hegemonic element of the soul with a natural inclination to virtue, his language is more reminiscent of the Stoics. He observed that the infirmity of the flesh is not identified by Origen with the mere fact of embodiment, and that as a cause of sin it is assisted by an impulse that is native to the soul. His argument that this thesis represents an advance on the more naive anthropology of First principles deserves some elaboration, and is more clearly warranted than his pervasive assumption that the soul's peccability must be the consequence of a pre-cosmic fall.

Origen the colleague of Plotinus wrote no more than two books, the second of which (That the king is the only maker) he addressed to Gallienus, whose reign commenced in 253: will this suffice to prove that he was not the Christian Origen, who cannot have dedicated any of his 6,000 books to Gallienus if he died, as Eusebius says, in the reign of his predecessor Gallus? Christoph Riedweg, in the first contribution to Origenes der Christ und Origenes der Platoniker, is willing to accept an emendation of the name Gallienus in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus; it would be less arbitrary to suppose that Gallienus was a friend of the author of The king is the only maker before he assumed the throne, but can that author have been Origen the Christian when the book was still unknown to the ‘walking library’ Longinus in 262? In the final essay Balbina Bäbler argues that that the notices of Origen's life in Eusebius are too inconsistent to support a precise chronology; but is he not most likely to be correct in the dating of his hero's death, which he unequivocally assigns to the reign of Gallus? Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler observes that, while Porphyry's portraits of the Christian and the Platonic Origen are both hostile, the differences are at least as remarkable as the affinities. Those who doubt the importance of the question may consider, with Peter Gemeinhardt, how we might write intellectual history if we were certain that the most eminent Christian thinker of the third century was an acknowledged Platonist throughout his life.

But was he so? Theo Kobusch answers in the affirmative, ascribing to both Origen and Plato the conviction that all humans partake of divinity, with the associated doctrine that the immortal soul must pass through many lives. Origen's clear denial of transmigration and his assertion that the image of God can be lost present strong objections to this theory; it is also worthy of note that, whereas Kobusch regards the marriage of theory and practice as a common element in the two philosophies (p. 78), Villani's study of Origen's treatment of Plato in the Contra Celsium concludes that the failure to reconcile theory and practice was the chief ground of criticism (p. 125). Origen invariably speaks of Platonism as a philosophy held by others, and even his adoption of its concepts and vocabulary, as Winrich Löhr observes in his subtle study of the theory of ideas in his writings, is motivated by a desire to answer question raised by his own tradition, often in controversy with other professing Christians. Jens Halfwassen ensures that the metaphysical system of Origen the Platonist receives some attention, arguing that his refusal to set the first principle above being aligns him with the original Parmenides against Plotinus' reading of the logomachies which Plato had put into the mouth of that philosopher.