 The opening chapter of Origen’s First Principles is a paradigmatic instance of his application of philosophic reasoning to biblical exegesis. He assumes here what he asserts elsewhere, that the nature of God is known to us only by his own revelation in the sacred text. The scriptures tell us both that God is fire and that God is spirit, but Origen warns us not to deduce, from a literal construction of these terms, that he is a body (Princ. 1.1.1). It is possible but not certain, that he has in mind the Stoicizing theology of Tertullian: the Bible speaks more plainly on this matter than any Stoic, and few of Origen’s contemporaries would have doubted the corporeality of fire or spirit. In urging the contrary position, that God is incorporeal. Origen speaks not only for the Platonists but for all the Greek apologists of the church: the prevalent thought of his time (and perhaps of ours) required that if God is to be invisible, immutable, eternal, omnipresent, and irresistible in power he must not be confined to one place or composed of labile matter. The philosophical sympathies of Origen become evident when he goes on to equate this bodiless god with nous or intellect. In Plato, nous had been an occasional synonym for the Demiurge, while Numenius of Apamea, half a century before Origen, had subordinated the Demiurge, as a second nous, to the “first nous”, which is Plato’s form of the Good. Although the Good in Plato is superior to ousia or being, Numenius like the majority of Platonists before Origen, appears to have posited nothing higher than intellect; Origen too—in this respect a good Platonist—is less inclined to apophatic theology than Philo the Alexandrian Jew or his Christian predecessors in Egypt, Clement and Basilides. To explain the selective use of the definite article in John 1.1, he characterizes the Father (ho theos) as autotheos, very God, in contrast to the Son who is merely theos (CommJohn 2.7.16–18); when he suggests, however, that the Father is higher than nous (Against Celsus 7.45), he does not develop a metaphysical theory, any more than he develops his hint in the same work that God may be the Aristotelian “thought of thoughts” (see further Whittaker 1969). Tobias Böhm’s ingenious suggestion (2002) that for Origen the being of God is his nous, and his unity that which is higher than nous, assumes that he was acquainted with the first and second hypotheses of the Parmenides, a dialogue of which he evinces little knowledge in his extant works. 