 Philo is called a mystic because of passages which thirstily anticipate the mind’s bacchanalian ecstasy in the presence of the ineffable. For Origen the term mystikos denotes the most arcane sense of the scriptures, and the encounter with the Bridegroom, “which no-one can understand who has not experienced it”, is described in his Homilies on the Song of Songs (I.7 [ed. Baehrens 1925: 39]). Whether it is a true ecstasy or a sense of hermeneutic illumination (Louth 2000: 69), this transient rapture foreshadows the culmination of the soul’s journey after death, when God will at last be all in all. In answer to the jibes of Celsus, Origen asserts that, while the church teaches the resurrection of the body, the “spiritual body” of which Paul speaks will be of a rarer and hence more durable texture than the gross flesh which now ensheathes the soul (Cels. 5.18–5.23). In a dialogue which now survives only in excerpts, the soul is said to retain the eidos, or form, of the body, perhaps a counterpart to the tenuous vehicle which the soul carries into the afterlife in the eschatology of some Platonists (Methodius, On the Resurrection 22 [ed. Bonwetsch 1899: 93]; see further Schibli 1992). Most souls, having failed to purge their sins in this life, will be required to pass the flaming sword that bars the entrance to the earthly paradise (see further Crouzel 1972). Once its cleansing there is complete, the soul will pass through the seven planetary spheres, acquiring a more comprehensive knowledge of the cosmos and our place in it than is vouchsafed to us in this world (Princ. 1.11.6). Once again, kindred notions can be found in Platonic and Hermetic literature; the posthumous itinerary mirrors the transition from the ethical to the sapiential teachings of Solomon, and we see here in an inchoate form the purgative and illuminative ways of the western mystical tradition. A body of some kind is presupposed by this celestial topography; nevertheless, at the point where God becomes all in all, we hear nothing of a body, but only that soul will be entirely subsumed in spirit. Some scholars hold that a body must be either retained or imparted to us, since only the persons of the Trinity can subsist without one (e.g., Crouzel 1980); others, invoking the maxim that the end will be like the beginning, argue that we shall return to the incorporeal state in which we were first created (e.g., Scott 2012, with further discussion of this intricate topic in Blosser 2012 and Rankin 2017). If that is so, the final state must lie beyond the paradise of the saints, of which Origen says in the plainest terms that the church does not hold it to be incorporeal (First Principles 2.36; cf. Edwards 2021). In any case, this union with God appears to correspond to the last stage in the perusal of the Solomonic canon, and to the “unitive way” of the mystic in later Christian literature. 