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HUMAN AUTONOMY AND ITS LIMITS IN THE THOUGHT OF ORIGEN OF ALEXANDRIA1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2017
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As the church historian Henri Crouzel observed, questions about the nature of human autonomy were central to the thought of the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria. On this question, his influence on later generations, though complicated, would be difficult to overstate. Yet, what exactly Origen thought autonomy required has been a subject of debate. On one widespread reading, he has been taken to argue that autonomy requires that human beings have the capacity to act otherwise than they do in fact act; that is, that alternative possibilities of action are causally available to them. As Susanne Bobzien has argued, however, there is good reason to think that the view that such alternative possibilities are required for the ascription of autonomy did not explicitly emerge until Alexander of Aphrodisias, a rough contemporary of Origen's of whose thought he was likely unaware. In revisiting Origen on the notion of ‘free will’, Michael Frede, against the ‘alternative possibilities’ reading, argued that his theory of the will was largely attributable to Stoicism, and in particular to Epictetus’ theory of will as προαίρεσις. George Boys-Stones, for his part, has claimed that, while Origen's theory of the descent of the pre-existent minds is aimed at providing an account of how human beings are entirely responsible for their characters, in the embodied state we find no evidence that he understood human choice subsequent to the fall to depend upon the existence of alternative possibilities in order to be autonomous.
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Footnotes
1
Earlier versions of this paper benefitted greatly from discussions with George Boys-Stones and Robert Sinkewicz, as well as the suggestions of David Brakke, Lloyd Gerson and the anonymous referee of CQ; I thank them warmly for their generosity. I also extend my deepest gratitude to Ian Drummond for many years of stimulating philosophical conversation, about the argument of this paper and on matters relating to volition more generally.
References
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4 In theories of autonomy which depend upon a person's ability to choose or to act otherwise in order for that person to be understood as autonomous, it must be the case that that person, given that he or she has the character and the psychological states that he or she has in a particular set of circumstances, might act in a different way, at a different time, given the exact same character and psychological states and same set of circumstances. As Bobzien observes, however, theories of autonomy which understood that the same person, given the same character and psychological states and in the same set of circumstances, will always act in the same way without undermining autonomy were prevalent in antiquity; Bobzien, S., ‘The inadvertent conception and late birth of the free-will problem’, Phronesis 43 (1998), 133–75, at 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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7 How one construes Aristotle's theory of action shapes how one understands his influence on Stoic compatibilism, or the belief that one's actions being determined by antecedent causes is compatible with the ascription of moral responsibility. While Salles argues that Stoic compatibilism was a rejection of both fatalism and what he takes to be Aristotle's incompatibilism, Bobzien maintains that Chrysippus was responding only to fatalism. See Salles, R., The Stoics on Determinism and Compatibilism (London, 2005), 69–90 Google Scholar and Bobzien, S., Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford, 1999), 234–329 Google Scholar.
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12 Cic. Fat. 42–3. As Bobzien (n. 7), 234 notes, ‘[b]y “that which depends on us” and “that which happens because of us” Chrysippus seems to have understood simply the things (mainly actions) of which we, qua rational beings, are the possible or actual cause. Such causal origination is brought about by the faculty of assent. The freedom from force and external hindrances is guaranteed by the utilization of this very mechanism through which we become the cause of our actions. For it is part of the nature of this human mental capacity of assent that it is neither forced nor fully externally determined.’
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19 Frede (n. 5), 75.
20 Bobzien (n. 7), 342.
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23 Benjamins notes how Origen points to human experience as evidence for this claim; see Benjamins (n. 3), 61–2. For more on the discussion of autonomy in De oratione 6.1–6, see Eijk, J. van der, ‘Origenes’ Verteidigung des freien Willens in De oratione 6, 1–2’, VChr 42 (1998), 339–51Google Scholar and Hahm, D., ‘A neglected Stoic argument for human responsibility’, ICS 17 (1992), 23–48 Google Scholar.
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34 Crouzel (n. 2), 87–8.
35 How exactly Origen's account of the fall of the pre-existent minds relates to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve has been disputed. For readings which argue that Origen understood the fall of Adam and Eve as distinct from the fall of the minds, see Harl, M., ‘La préexistence des âmes dans l’œuvre d'Origène’, in Lies, L. (ed.), Origeniana Quarta: Die Referate des 4. Internationalen Origeneskongresses (Innsbruck, 1985), 238–58Google Scholar and Bammel, C., ‘Adam in Origen’, in Williams, R. (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989), 62–93 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Peter Martens has recently argued that Origen does take Adam's fall in Genesis as an allegory of the pre-existent fall in Martens (n. 6).
36 Crouzel (n. 1), 87–92.
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41 Sorabji (n. 39 [2000]), 346–51.
42 Origen discusses how Jesus uses his pre-passion to instruct Peter in the weakness of the flesh in his exegesis of Matthew 26:17–30 in Comm. Matt. 90.2–24; see also Sorabji (n. 39 [2000]), 349–50.
43 As Mark Scott has noted, the Exodus story provides one of the most important scriptural examples for his discussions of remedial punishment; Scott (n. 3), 74–101.
44 As Inwood observes in Inwood (n. 5), 59, ‘in early Stoicism we find no insistence that the assent given to a stimulus must be voluntary in our and Seneca's sense—that is, a consciously chosen response to a stimulus. For earlier Stoics it is enough if it is a response to a rational stimulus in a rational animal.’ For Origen, the idea of awareness is not developed in order to explain what constitutes voluntary action, but to explain what is required for a person to alter their character particularly for the better (which makes up only a subset of voluntary actions).
45 For other discussions that reject eternal punishment, see Olymp. In Grg. 24.5 and 70.13 and In Phd. 10.14; Dam. In Phd. 1.492, 2.147; Proc. In Remp. 2.178, as well as Jackson, R., Lycos, K. and Tarrant, H. (trans.), Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato's Gorgias (Leiden, 1998), 317 n. 1004Google Scholar.
46 Trans. from Jackson, Lycos and Tarrant (n. 45), 159. I thank George Boys-Stones for suggesting comparison with this text.
47 Benjamins, for example, takes it as an indication of Origen's commitment to the idea that human beings can act otherwise, though Boys-Stones's analysis of the hypothetical-fate argument among the figures of the Platonist revival raises problems for this view. See Benjamins (n. 3), 92–8 for a discussion of C. Cels. 2.20. For a discussion of similar issues in De or. 6.3–5 and Phil. 25, see Benjamins (n. 3), 99–121. On Boys-Stones's interpretation of the hypothetical-fate argument, see Boys-Stones, G.R., ‘Middle Platonists on fate and human autonomy’, in Sharples, R. and Sorabji, R., Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 BC – AD 200 (London, 2007), 431–46Google Scholar and Sharples, R., ‘The Stoic background to the Middle Platonist discussion on fate’, in Bonazzi, M. and Helmig, C. (edd.), Platonic Stoicism – Stoic Platonism: The Dialogue Between Platonism and Stoicism in Antiquity (Leuven, 2007), 169–88Google Scholar. For a discussion of the juridical and pedagogical functions of providence on Origen's thought, see Bergjan, S.-P., Der fürsorgende Gott: der Begriff der Pronoia Gottes in der apologetischen Literatur der alten Kirche (Berlin and New York, 2002), 184–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Boys-Stones argues that Origen's view that God's knowledge is finite commits him to this position; see De principiis 3.5.2 and Boys-Stones (n. 6), 494.
49 Again, however, Origen is immune to the criticism made against the Stoics that this theory renders God responsible for human blame, on the basis of his claim that human beings have the characters they have not because of a causal chain that goes back to God, but because of the pre-existent choices they made before the second creation (Phil. 23.1). While, on Origen's account, God does not directly compel human vice or virtue, God does manipulate affairs in such a way as to bring human failings to light for the sake of moral therapy.
50 If Origen was, as Ronald Heine has suggested, rethinking his notion of ἀποκατάστασις or universal restoration during his later period in Caesarea, this rethinking may have been informed by a recognition of difficulties of this kind. On the other hand, the ambivalence Heine perceives with respect to the idea of universal salvation in the texts he cites from this later period might also be explained by their protreptic contexts. See Greggs, T., ‘Exclusivist or universalist? Origen the “wise steward of the word” (Comm. Rom. V.1.7) and the issue of genre’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (2007), 315–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heine, R., Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church (Oxford, 2010), 241–56Google Scholar and Norris, F., ‘Universal salvation in Origen and Maximus’, in Cameron, N.M. de S. (ed.), Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell (Grand Rapids, MI, 1991), 35–52 Google Scholar.
51 In this respect my conclusions differ from Jacobsen, A., ‘Freedom and providence in Origen's theology’, Church Studies 3 (2006), 65–77, at 77Google Scholar.