Let us hold the difference between word and garment clearly: Origen shows how the Word makes visible and invisible realities intelligible while warning that language often masks rather than reveals; Augustine presses the inward drama—creatures receive being and may relapse into darkness unless they hold fast to God’s light; Aquinas ties those insights to agency, arguing that the will is moved not by stars or mere outward force but by an interior apprehension of the good, with external things and divine causality serving only as mediate occasions. Read together, the three offer a single arc: the cosmos is ordered by the Logos, human nature participates in that light yet remains fragile, and moral agency is properly interior even as it stands within a divinely ordered causal economy. (Colossians 1:15–17; Psalm 22:27; Philippians 2:13)

Readings:

Origen, De Principiis, Book 4, Chapters 31–34

Augustine, The Confessions, Book 13, Chapter 2

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1–2, Question 9, Articles 5–6

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