There are three stages of Christian progress, according to Origen. In the first and lowest man may advance through faith and by a belief in the redemptive death of the historic Christ to a state of sinlessness and to fellowship with God. Here the Logos incarnate in Jesus acts through revelation and redemption as a physician to cure men of their sins. But beyond is a higher stage in which through love and knowledge the soul may mount from its view of the phenomenal world to the “invisible things of God,” that is, to an understanding of the whole creation; and still further soar from these upward to “the eternal power of God, in short, to God’s own divinity.” In these higher stages the Logos is the teacher of the divine mysteries; they make the contemplative life in which the Christian may obtain perfect knowledge. To such a Gnostic as the Christian becomes who has been granted the vision, the historic Christ is no longer significant; the Logos in his manifold revelations teaches him the supreme truth.[372] Thus we see that Origen assumed that there were two forms of Christianity, an exoteric for the mass, who were capable only of faith and who could not grasp the deeper truths, and an esoteric, reserved for the few who could understand the mysteries of God and whose souls could rise to the knowledge of God himself. This double view depended in part on his Gnostic tendencies, in part on his interpretation of Scripture, to which we shall presently turn. We have now followed the development of Christianity from the simple teachings of Jesus into a Greek philosophy, as illustrated by the later writings of the New Testament, the Apologists, the Gnostics, and Origen. The last of these completed the process which began in Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews, for he united successfully and fully, the religious principles of the Christian religion with the content of Hellenic philosophy. It must be evident furthermore that Origen and those who prepared the way for him, were no less debtors to the Greeks than they were to the Hebrews, to Jesus, and to Paul, since the form and in no small degree the very matter of their philosophy had been provided by secular thought. Indeed Porphyry with some reason charged Origen with being more Greek than Christian.[373]