The author examines early Christian rhetorical language and its broader religious and cultural contexts. The tension of the dual subjectivity emerging in the asceticism of the heart and the ideological and material aspects of Christian imperialism in the context of the Holy Land and Constantinople takes the reader into new intellectual territory.

Progress is a structural and systematic concept in the thought of Origen of Alexandria. The concept indicates how human beings strive towards the divine. Origen's legacy was capable of radiating its influence through Western theology and philosophy, thus shaping its idea of theological, moral, intellectual, social and political progress.