WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

Luis de Alcasar (1614)
"Origen, after pursuing the subject in a beautiful train of reasoning, concludes at last with the following words, 'Therefore may all things be referred upward from the visible to the invisible, from the corporeal to the incorporeal, from the manifest to the hidden ; so that the objects of the world may be understood to be created by divine Wisdom according to such a divine dispensation, as from visible things, by means of the things and exemplars themselves, teaches us the invisible, and transfers us from earthly things to those which are of heaven.'  Thus far Origen ; who doubts not that, in the creation of things corporeal, it was the principal design of the divine Artificer that they should be symbols and traces, as it were, of the mysteries of our faith.  Therefore the merely natural office proper to every particular thing, in virtue of which it ministers to other bodies, and in which the philosophy of Aristotle rests, by no means satisfies the infinite Wisdom of God, and His especial providence in the salvation of souls ; nor indeed His own wonderful counsel whereby He hath determined to raise us from the corporeal to the incorporeal.  It is probable, therefore, that the omnipotence of God, when He had the power of making infinite species of souls, plants, and stones, selected and created out of the infinite things which he had in his power, such as were the more apt to signify the mysteries of our salvation, and a conformably moral instruction. "And this was accomplished in such a manner, that the universal mechanism of things created should maintain a most beautiful harmony with the wonderful counsel of God in the salvation of men ; and that things corporeal should subserve to the representation of those which are spiritual."  Vestigatio Arcani Sensus in Apocalypsi

Johannes Oecolampadius (1525)
"Seraphim were standing above him.) The glory of the judge and king, in itself immense, is now supremely indicated by the (angelic) servants, as also in Daniel: thousands of thousands served him, and and ten times 100,000 attended him.  Origen makes here two seraphim, and very dangerously and also impiously, for he understands them to be the Son and the Holy Spirit, as if they were creatures.  In like manner the passage is treated by Jerome, who also makes it two seraphim, although the Hebrew and Greek do not compel this conclusion. 

Six wings, six wings to one.) It is a Hebraism, meaning six wings to each.  It does not mean twice to one, as in the Greek, [six wings to one six wings to one].  Whence some found occasion for postulating two seraphim.  The use of the wings was that they should cover their face and their body and that they might fly.  So the targum, as in some others, so also the LXX follows.  Concerning the use there is no agreement among interpreters.  Origen wishes that they cover the face of God, so as to hide mysteries from us.  In the cherubim, he says, the Lord is shown.  In the seraphim [p. 58a] he is partly shown and partly hid." (In Iesaiam Prophetam HUPOMNEMATON, hoc est, Commentariorum, Ioannis Oecolampadii Libri VI. Basel: Andreas Cratander, The second book of Isaiah Commentary, p. 55)

On The Pre-existence of Souls

Johann Mosheim
"If the enquirer's object was to develope the causes of the different dogmas propounded in Holy Writ, the course for him to observe was not merely to call in the assistance of reason or philosophy, but also most assiduously and indefatigably to search after the recondite or hidden sense of Scripture. For it was the firm persuasion of Origen, that the Holy Spirit had, under the guise or veil of words, figures, imagery, and histories, concealed the interior reasons of things, or, as he himself expresses it, that in the body of Scripture (thus he terms the ordinary sense of the words,) there is contained a soul (by which he obviously means a hidden or recondite sense,) and that this soul exhibits, as it were in a mirror, to the contemplative and diligent enquirer, the causes of divine things, and the continuation and conjunction of human and divine wisdom. And in this he treads most exactly in the steps of Philo Judaeus, whom, like his master Clement, he considered as having beyond all others, attained to the clearest insight into the nature of the sacred writings, and therefore proposed him to himself as a model for imitation. When however it was designed to investigate merely the mode or form of things, the enquirer could not have recourse to the Scriptures as well as philosophy for assistance, inasmuch as they were altogether silent on the subject. He had therefore nothing whatever in this case to resort to. or confide in, save the dictates of the latter, and the strength of his own powers of ratiocination." (Commentaries on the affairs of the Christians before the time of Constantine, p. 290)

Matthew C. Steenberg
"The ideas that God created all extant souls in a previous time, and that these were absorbed in the continual contemplation of His divinity, shine through with the metaphors of Platonism.  So, too, does Origen’s notion that these pre-existent souls attained materiality as they descended from the pure contemplation of God: that the lower they fell, the more ‘material’ they became, and thus the less divine. "