Origen followed Philo in believing that the original creation consists of a world of beings that are pure intelligences, and that the cause of creation is God’s goodness. He further believed that the Logos or Wisdom of God is God’s Son. Both the creation of the ideal world of intelligences and the existence of the Son is from eternity. The origin of the visible world is to be contrasted with this eternal creation. The visible world had its beginning in time and is only one of a series of worlds. It will finally return to God, and has in God its beginning and end. Thus man lives in a visible world of time with eternities on either side. Creation, viewed as a whole, is everlasting, and consists of an endless number of beings who are destined to become a part of the divine holiness and to participate in the divine blessedness. These beings are endowed with freedom of will, and they fall away from God. The visible world of matter has been created to purify the fallen spirits, and in consequence we find materialized spirits graded into angels, stars, mankind, and evil dæmons. In his emphasis on the will as the fundamental mental part of man, Origen is distinctly Christian and opposed to Greek intellectualism. The will of God and the will of man form the corner stone in his system. The will of God is the eternal development of His being, but the will of spirits is their temporal free choice. The will of God is reality itself; the will of spirits is phenomenal and changing. Freedom of the will of the spirits is the ground of their sin, and consequently of their materiality. Thus it is by the freedom of the spirits that Origen explains evil and the existence of imperfect matter without impeaching the eternal purity of God. Origen thus reconciled the ethical transcendence of God as creator with his immanence in the material world. God is the creator without being the creator of sin. _Through the conception of free-will Origen reconciled the two antithetical principles of Christian metaphysics: faith in divine omnipotence and consciousness of sin._