Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by tdwightdavis
On First Principles by Origen
4.0
Rating clarification:
5 stars for Origen's thought
3 stars for the edition I read.
Average=4 stars
Having only learned of Origen second hand through lectures, it's fascinating to actually delve into his work. Always characterized as somewhere between misguidedly wrong to a heretic in lectures I've heard, Origen is remarkably orthodox here. What we have in this work is (possibly) the first Christian systematic theology. Origen deals with almost all major doctrines and is always interesting. I was shocked to see how advanced he was in his trinitarian thought, writing well before any conciliar codification and articulating basically (with some significant differences) what would come to be orthodoxy. It made me wonder how much was original in Origen and how much was added by Rufinus in his later Latin translation.
Not helpful was the English translation, which could have used a good editor. Sometimes words were left out (i.e. the text reads "a kind breath" instead of "a kind of breath," a significant change in meaning), random punctuation errors like periods in the middle of sentences, and, perhaps most egregiously, the decision to run side by side translations of the Latin text and Greek text in certain parts of the book, the least user friendly choice I've seen in a book meant not just for an academic audience.
5 stars for Origen's thought
3 stars for the edition I read.
Average=4 stars
Having only learned of Origen second hand through lectures, it's fascinating to actually delve into his work. Always characterized as somewhere between misguidedly wrong to a heretic in lectures I've heard, Origen is remarkably orthodox here. What we have in this work is (possibly) the first Christian systematic theology. Origen deals with almost all major doctrines and is always interesting. I was shocked to see how advanced he was in his trinitarian thought, writing well before any conciliar codification and articulating basically (with some significant differences) what would come to be orthodoxy. It made me wonder how much was original in Origen and how much was added by Rufinus in his later Latin translation.
Not helpful was the English translation, which could have used a good editor. Sometimes words were left out (i.e. the text reads "a kind breath" instead of "a kind of breath," a significant change in meaning), random punctuation errors like periods in the middle of sentences, and, perhaps most egregiously, the decision to run side by side translations of the Latin text and Greek text in certain parts of the book, the least user friendly choice I've seen in a book meant not just for an academic audience.