 Whether he is noetic or supranoetic, Origen’s God cannot be known to us in his essence, nor is it by his ousia, or essence, but by his dunamis, or power, that he acts upon other beings (On Prayer 25.3). His dunamis, which is infinite and mediated by the second person of the Trinity, is the source of every dunamis that is exercised by his creatures, even by those who have fallen into apostasy and rebellion (CommJohn 1.39.291). On the other hand nothing, not even the second person, proceeds directly from the immutable ousia of God (CommJohn 13.25.153 and 20.18.157: see below). Yet, while he asserts that God is by nature impassible—in the sense that he is the agent, not the patient, in every transaction and cannot be moved by any external force—Origen is one of the first theologians to assert that he can suffer, in a sense, as God, and not only by virtue of the incarnation (Homilies on Ezekiel 6.1; see Osborn 1994: 164–184). This suffering takes the form of commiseration for the plight of his sinful creatures, never of sorrow on his own account. Compassion supposes knowledge, and Origen appears to have been untroubled by the difficulties that arise from the ascription of contingent knowledge to an eternal being. That God transcends the temporal order is evident from his answer to those who ask what God was doing before he created the world: the question, he argues, presupposes a time before the beginning of the world, but reflection teaches us that time and the revolutions of the cosmos are coeval (Princ. 3.5.3). This is a Platonic doctrine, but it had now become common for Platonists to argue, in submission to Aristotle, that the temporal world has neither end nor beginning and is “generated” only in the sense that it is a theatre of vicissitude, in which all that exists has come into being and will pass away. 