Word and Mystery in Origen

A study of Origen published in French by Éditions du Cerf in Paris in 1957 (146 pages), a revised second edition, prepared by Pie Duployé, of an essay Balthasar had published earlier; it was reissued in Geneva in 1998. In the introduction he says his aim is to organise Origen's major theological ideas around the dominant idea of mystery, in order to understand Origen more immediately. By this 'method of crystallization', according to the Community of Saint John, he shows that behind the apparently piecemeal exegetical commentaries lies a coherent sacramental theology. It completes his set of monographs on three speculative Greek Fathers, with Présence et pensée on Gregory of Nyssa and Kosmische Liturgie on Maximus the Confessor. Balthasar had earlier compiled the Origen anthology Geist und Feuer (1938).