Logic and theology were once spoken of together in a divine speech with which we spoke of God, even as God spoke to us, in one and the same sacred speech. Logic had been conceived as a simulation of speech in argument from the divine Logos. Yet logic has since been repeatedly separated from theology by Aristotle, Ockham, and Kant, just as often as it has been re-united by Plotinus, Cusa, and Hegel. Each separation has resulted in the successive construction of logic into more articulate forms of argument and inference.

Origen of Alexandria (fl. AD 184–253/4) has contributed the first Christian theological interpretation of logic. He has, beginning in his systematic theology On First Principles, interpreted logic as a simulation of the Logos, communicated by Christ, in and through the divine hypostases of God as Trinity. And he has, in his scriptural commentaries, shown how, beginning in the ‘spiritual sense’, logic is virtually ‘interwoven’ in all the philosophical sciences, and supremely through the mystical or ‘epoptic’ science of theology.

This ‘theology of logic’ announces a new way to study the subject of logic for theology. It should be doubly distinguished, on the one hand, from theoretical or philosophical logic, which asks what are the rules of logic, and on the other hand, from practical or applied logic, which asks how these rules of logic can be used to demonstrate the conclusions of any science. It thus starts with no standing presumption as to the absolute necessity of logic, but, rather and more radically, asks the prior question of the contingent grounds for our very belief in the truth of logic. It raises the most originary questions of the beginning and end of logic before any separation from theology.

This discovery has, however, since been submerged and silenced, first due to the Origenist controversies, but finally due to the progressive formalization of logic in medieval and modern logic, culminating in the ‘pure analytic’ of mathematical logic. Once it has reduced the living spirit of speech to the dead letters of writing, and suspended this spirit in an artificial syntax, the logical can lapse into the formalization of a secular logic. Logic then tends to forget and frustrate its own formality as it signifies without speaking of its first formalization. It has thus tended to render logic a-theological, theology a-logical, and both altogether inarticulate. Yet so long as logic remains separate from God, theology can never demonstrate its conclusions, and logic may never come to know its highest truths.

Origen can, as this dissertation will show, be read by a theological interpretation of logic, or a theology of logic, which asks theological questions of the fundamental assumptions of any possible form of logic. He had, in contrast to later secular, formal, and mathematical logics, shown how logic can be simulated as it is spoken in and from the higher ground of the divine Logos, and communicated by Christ in God as Trinity. We may, with Origen, begin to weave each exercise of logic through all the sciences, in this speech that may be spoken, as it ever is spoken, in one and the same sacred speech.