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.Footnote 2 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.Footnote 3 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.Footnote 4 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.Footnote 5 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.Footnote 6
Here, I argue that, while Frede and Boys-Stones are right to call into question those interpretations of Origen that take him as committed to the view that human beings have the ability to act otherwise, his modifications to Stoic theories leave some problems with his account. For all his use of the Stoics, unlike them he understands autonomy to require that every human being have available to him or her the motivation to revise radically his or her character, whatever its current state. This claim is made in the context of a larger discussion of how, on Origen's view, all human beings will eventually be redeemed in the final restoration or ἀποκατάστασις. Yet, this commitment raises the question about what motivates a person of a vicious character, even in worst-case scenarios, to make moral progress.
In his explorations of moral development, Origen argues that it is within the context of certain historical circumstances that human beings become adequately motivated to improve morally. On Origen's understanding of the relationship between autonomy and grace, God acts by bringing about the appropriate situations necessary for individual human beings to condemn their present characters and consequently to be motivated to make certain present but defeated desires for the good of their effective will. On this account, God does not directly compel the will, but brings about the circumstances such that an individual, given the character that he or she has, will be subject to the motivations that necessitate the will's revision. As I aim to show, however, in arguing that sufficient motivation for moral progress requires God's intervention to bring about the appropriately motivating circumstances, Origen has difficulties explaining how the character of a superlatively vicious person can serve as the absolute cause of its own revision. This difficulty has larger implications for Origen's understanding of the relationship between autonomy and grace.
ORIGEN ON ASSENT AND ΠΡΟΑΙΡΕΣΙΣ
In exploring the idea of what is ‘up to us’, Origen participates in a discussion with a long history. Aristotle's theory of voluntary action and choice was one of the major watersheds in his thought on volition and action. In Eth. Eud. 2.6–10 and Eth. Nic. 3.1–5, Aristotle discusses voluntary behaviour as that of which we are the ἀρχή or principle. According to Aristotle, voluntary actions are those actions for which it is ‘up to us’ (ἐφ’ ἡμῖν) to do or not do (1113a-b, 1226a). One class of actions, which falls under the category of what is ‘up to us’, are those actions which are done from our προαίρεσις (1111b, 1226b). One of the major questions in contemporary studies of Aristotle has focussed on whether he had a sense of the question of whether the attribution of praise or blame required the ability to act without one's actions having been causally determined, particularly in light of his discussion about how, after a certain time in life, it is difficult to alter one's character (1114a).Footnote 7
The concern with what is ‘up to us’ was revisited by the early Stoics in their theory of co-fated actions.Footnote 8 Chrysippus of Soli, the third scholarch of the school, developed the Stoic theory of human action in its canonical form by arguing that human action was co-fated along with the circumstances in which a certain action took place; according to the testimony of Cicero, Chrysippus’ teaching on co-fated events appears targeted to refute the Idle Argument.Footnote 9 At the same time, human action is caused by character, which is itself caused by antecedent causes, the collection of which made up Fate or εἱμαρμένη.Footnote 10 While the characters that result from these antecedent causes determine action, human beings are still responsible for their actions, for the nature of their characters is still the principle in virtue of which the action comes about. Chrysippus drew on his analogy between a cone and a cylinder to express this point; given a push of the same force in the same direction, a cone will roll differently from a cylinder. While their motions are occasioned by the initial force, it is nevertheless only because they have the shape that they do that they roll in a certain direction. Likewise, when a representation impresses itself onto the mind of a human being, it exerts a certain force; yet, human beings are able to assent or dissent, through the exercise of the ἡγεμονικόν, to the propositional content borne by that representation, depending on their mental content.Footnote 11 If a representation is impulsory, assent to the proposition will produce an impulse to act, which the human being will follow unless prevented from doing so;Footnote 12 certain false representations will produce a passion (Cic. Fat. 7–8).Footnote 13 The mechanism of assent explains why human beings are responsible for their actions; ‘the order, rationale, and necessity of fate sets in motion the actual types of causes and their beginnings, but the deliberative impulses of our minds and our actual actions are controlled by our own individual choice and intellect (ipsa uoluntas cuiusque propria et animorum ingenia moderantur)’ (Gell. NA 7.2.6–13 = SVF 2.1000).Footnote 14 On Frede's account, the desires formed by the ἡγεμονικόν are rational desires or willings; they do not, however, represent choices for what one can always effect, and therefore cannot represent a will.Footnote 15
In Epictetus, we find less discussion of the mechanics of the relationship between fate and human action and more protreptic exhortation aimed at encouraging human beings to change what they value and how they act based upon that evaluation. As a result, he has sometimes been read as less committed to compatibilism than was Chrysippus; both Inwood and Bobzien, however, have argued that there is no reason to take this shift in emphasis as a departure from determinism.Footnote 16 Epictetus does, however, distinguish himself from the Stoics who preceded him in his theory of προαίρεσις, a term which, though originally Aristotelian in provenance, came to have a new sense in Epictetus’ thought as the capacity by which human beings make choices about things which it is within their power to acquire.Footnote 17 Frede argues that the sense of προαίρεσις in Epictetus’ thought is not a concept of willing or rational desire, such as we find in Chrysippus, but of a will as such, in so far as it is a disposition to form those second-order desires for things which do not depend upon certain external circumstances to obtain. On his reading, ‘our προαίρεσις, which defines us as the kind of person we are, is not a disposition … to choose to act in a certain way, because we do not have that choice, but rather a disposition to deal with our impressions in a certain way, most crucially to choose how to assent to impulsive impressions’. In Frede's example, I may not be able to choose to walk across the street (for I might get hit by a car), but I can choose to will to walk across the street. The idea that our προαίρεσις is responsible for specifically that kind of choice represents a narrower interpretation of what is ἐφ’ ἡμῖν.Footnote 18
Yet, if our προαίρεσις is a will, it is not necessarily a free will, for such a will is only possessed by the sage. This, Frede claims, is because only the sage's προαίρεσις is unconstrained; the will of non-sages is enslaved because non-sages identify their well-being with what is outside their power (Epictetus, Dissertationes 1.4.18–21).Footnote 19 As Bobzien notes, Epictetus, unlike earlier Stoics such as Chrysippus, understood the freedom that only the sage has as linked to what is in our power, for a person becomes free when they adequately appreciate what falls under the category of things that are ‘up to us’; ‘You possess freedom if, knowing what depends on you, you do not ever desire or deplore anything that does not depend on you.’Footnote 20
Origen drew substantially on Stoic discussions of volition in his own account of autonomy and the criteria by which human beings are subject to praise and blame. He develops this account, however, in the context of his theory of the second creation. According to this theory, God, in the first creation, made rational minds for the purpose of contemplating the Trinity. These rational minds, however, eventually became satiated and fell away from contemplation (De principiis 1.6.2, 1.4.1, 2.8.3–4). In order to assist their return to their original state, God created the sensible world as an occasion for the minds, now transformed into souls and placed into material bodies, to experience the various trials that would provide them with the opportunity to progress morally (De principiis 3.8.1; cf. Dialogus cum Heraclide 154–6).Footnote 21 Many of Origen's discussions of how God motivates human beings to revise their characters take into account the role that the second creation plays in this revision.
As Boys-Stones has argued, Origen's account of the fall allows him to argue that human beings have an unqualified responsibility for their character; that is, the moral character they are born with in the sensible world is entirely a consequence of their prelapsarian movements (De principiis 2.9.5–7).Footnote 22 Once human beings are embodied, however, Origen's account of autonomy in many senses appears to be more or less straightforwardly Stoic. In De oratione 6.1–2, he offers a discussion of the scala naturae, in which he explains that human beings are properly understood to be causes of their actions in virtue of their rationality. While God can foresee human action and can exploit that foreknowledge, this foreknowledge does not compel assent (De oratione 6.3–5).Footnote 23 This mechanism accounts for why human beings are the author of their actions. Like the Stoics, Origen maintains that, while non-rational animals are subject to mental representations, which they must follow necessarily, human beings are capable of assenting or dissenting to those representations. In De principiis 3.1, we find Origen arguing that human beings can act according to tempting mental representations or not (De principiis 3.1.3–4):
To be subject, therefore, to some external thing (τι τῶν ἔξωθεν), which moves in us this or that representation (φαντασίαν ἡμῖν κινοῦν τοιάνδε ἢ τοιάνδε), is agreed to be not one of the things which is up to us (τὸ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν)Footnote 24 ; but to decide to use what has happened in one way or another is not the work of anything other than the reason within us, which, in the face of opposing impulses, either turns us towards the impulses that command us to the noble (τὸ καλόν) and the appropriate (τὸ καθῆκον) or turns us toward the opposite. But if someone says that the thing from without is such that it is impossible to resist it, whatever it is, let this one know by his own passions and movements whether there is not approval and assent and inclination of the ruling part of the soul for such a thing through its persuasions.
This does not imply the ability to act otherwise, but that whether one assents or not will be a matter of one's own character. Comparing two ascetics who have made a resolution to protect their chastity, Origen argues that the fact that the one ascetic remains true to his resolution despite the tempting representation that he is subject to, while the other does not, indicates that each ascetic is himself the absolute cause of his action (De principiis 3.1.4):
For example, a woman who displays herself to one who has decided to be chaste and avoid sex and encourages him to act against his purpose, is not herself the absolute cause (αὐτοτελὴς αἰτία)Footnote 25 of his setting aside his purpose (πρόθεσιν). For he is altogether delighted by the tickling and pull of the pleasure and does not wish to resist it or strengthen his earlier judgement, and he does the intemperate act. On the other hand, the same things happen to one who is more studied and practised. The ticklings and incitements occur, but reason, because it has been strengthened and nourished more by care and made firm, or has come close to being firm, by teachings in what is good, repels the incitements and weakens the desire.
The example of the two ascetics who perform contrasting actions reveals that our use of representations is not necessitated by their contents. Two different people, subject to the same representation, use those representations in different ways, revealing human action to be different from that of the lower animals, which follow their representations of necessity (De principiis 3.1.2). In each instance, both the resolute and the irresolute ascetic are subject to certain feelings. As we will see below, these feelings are affects identified by the Stoics as pre-passions or προπάθειαι. For Origen, we experience these pre-passions to a degree that reflects the inclinations of our characters; we will see that this has an important role to play in Origen's account of self-judgement.
In his discussion of De oratione 4.1–2 and De principiis 1.1.2–5, Benjamins notes that human rationality is emphasized in both texts as the basis for human moral responsibility.Footnote 26 Yet, as Frede argues, Origen uses Epictetus’ concept of προαίρεσις to articulate an understanding of moral wrongdoing not only as a failure in terms of calculative error, but also as a failure to form the right rational desires.Footnote 27 Origen uses the terminology of προαίρεσις throughout his writings. In commenting on the morality of Lot's incest with his daughters after the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19 in Contra Celsum 4.45, Origen observes, citing Stoic doctrine on incest as potentially permissible (SVF 3.743–56), that those who have rightly examined the ethics of human actions have identified προαίρεσις as the locus of praise or blame:Footnote 28
And the Greeks have examined the nature of good, bad and indifferent actions, and those who have succeeded say that what is good and bad with respect to actions is found in the will (ἐν προαιρέσει) alone, and that indifferent actions are, in the proper sense, found to be without the will (προαιρέσως), and that the will (προαίρεσιν) rightly made use of is praiseworthy, while the one which is not is blameworthy. (cf. De principiis 3.1.10)
In Philocalia 23.21, taken from Origen's Commentarii in Genesim, Origen discusses the προαίρεσις of both the opposing powers and human beings, explaining that it is through the activities of our προαίρεσις that we go wrong.
But just as unjust men perform injustice from their own wickedness, not from having learned that God foreknows that they will do this injustice, thus do the opposing powers do such things by their own shameful will (τῇ ἰδίᾳ αἰσχίστῃ ἐπιτελοῦσι προαιρέσει), although God foreknows the evil of human beings and powers devising wretched things … As we said above, we do the things which we do, or the opposing powers do the things which they accomplish against us, by our own will (προαιρέσει).
In these passages, προαίρεσις—our capacity to assent and dissent to our mental representations—is identified as the locus of human autonomy. That we choose to have the rational desires we have accounts for why we are agents rather than mere cosmic pawns. So much is relatively straightforwardly Epictetean. Yet, Frede notes that for Origen, unlike Epictetus, it is not only the virtuous person who retains his or her free will; all rational beings, in fact, have a free will (De principiis 1.3.8).Footnote 29 This difference reflects his departure from Epictetus in his stronger sense of taking the autonomy of the will to reside specifically in its capacity to revise what desires it is motivated by, regardless of one's present character. Origen makes this argument in his denial that our natures can contribute in any way to our actions (De principiis 3.1.5):
Again, to blame our own constitution (κατασκευήν) is against what is evident, since education takes the more intemperate and most savage people and, if they follow its exhortation, alters them, so that the change and the alteration for the better are great, often with the most intemperate becoming better than those who before did not seem to be such by nature, and with the most savage becoming civilized in a similar way, so that those who have never been wild seem to be savage in comparison to the one who has changed toward civility. And let us see others, steadfast and honourable by upbringing, change toward the worse, falling from honour and steadfastness, so that they alter toward intemperance, frequently beginning to lead an intemperate life in middle age and falling into disorder after youth, which is naturally unstable, has passed. Therefore, reason shows that things external to us are not up to us; but to use them in this way or that, since reason receives them as a judge and examiner of how it is necessary to respond to the things which are outside us, is our work.
We find a similar claim in, for example, Origen's Commentarii in evangelium Joannis, where he offers an extended criticism of the psychology of the Valentinian teacher Heracleon.Footnote 30 Citing the Johannine literature on the devil's role in human sin, Origen argues that one can change whether one is a child of God or a child of the devil, depending on whether one chooses to follow the commandments (Commentarii in evangelium Joannis 20.106–7). The passage from De principiis 3.1.6 cited above, however, raises important questions about Origen's relationship to his Stoic background. The idea that human autonomy depends upon one's ability to use one's mental representations this way or that does not, in the traditional Stoic formula, imply that what is ‘up to us’ is a matter of revising our characters in a radical way, but merely that whether we assent to a particular representation or not is a product of our character. Clearly, the very existence of paraenetic literature implies that its audience is capable of at least some degree of moral improvement, and, as Bobzien observes, for Epictetus the appropriate recognition of this fact can facilitate moral progress. Yet, for Epictetus, the possibility for moral progress is not itself understood as constitutive of our autonomy. While he continually exhorts his listeners to improve upon their characters by examining their representations, we do not find this same idea, that the superlatively vicious can become virtuous and the superlatively virtuous vicious; nor is the possibility of this radical character-reversal presented as the basis for saying that our assent or dissent to mental representations is ‘up to us’. Origen seems to broaden the question of what it means for something to be ‘up to us’ to include a professed concern to deny that previous choices can impose limits on the degree of virtue one can achieve. While several of his discussions of representation and assent more or less straightforwardly report Stoic views, in his own constructive thinking on the matter he ties the idea that assent or dissent is ‘up to us’ to the claim that human character not only is not compelled by external forces, but also is unconstrained in the degree of improvement available to a person, irrespective of that person's previous choices (cf. De principiis 1.3.8).
Yet, the revision of character for a non-virtuous person requires one's perception of oneself as vicious. As Origen writes in relation to the Exodus story of Moses and Pharaoh, Pharaoh is punished by God so that he might eventually perceive his own vices and revise his character accordingly—a possibility that, of course, depends upon the immortality of the human person, given Pharaoh's death in Exodus 14Footnote 31 (De principiis 3.1.12):
For God leaves most unpunished, so that the character of each person might be demonstrated from the things that are up to us (ἐκ τοῦ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν) and the better ones might become apparent as a result of the test, and the rest, remaining unnoticed—not by God, for he knows all things before they happen, but by rational beings and themselves—might later chance upon the way of healing, since they would not have recognized the benefit if they had not judged themselves. This indeed is beneficial to each one, so that each one might perceive himself and the grace of God.
For Origen, however, this redemption requires a certain kind of self-perception that comes about in certain moments in one's historical existence in the world of the second creation. As we will see, this self-perception helps explain how even in worst-case scenarios, human beings can be motivated to make moral progress. First, we will need to consider how Origen defends the view that a virtuous desire is available to a vicious person and vice versa, but also how, in particular circumstances arranged by God, a vicious person can be motivated to take that virtuous desire as indefeasible.
ORIGEN ON MORAL MOTIVATION
In his account of how human beings, whatever their character, are subject to conflicting motivational desires, Origen draws on the Pauline division of the embodied human person into πνεῦμα, ψυχή and σῶμα (1 Thess. 5:23). The soul is ruled by the mind or νοῦς/mens (De principiis 1.1.6), sometimes called the ἡγεμονικόν (De principiis 3.1.4), with occasional mention of a thumoeidic or appetitive part of the soul (Selecta in Genesim 125.4).Footnote 32 The spirit and soul are identified as belonging to the ‘invisible’ or ‘inner’ part of the human person, while the body constitutes the ‘visible’ or ‘outer’ part, evocative of the distinction made in Phaedo 80c-d between the body as the visible part of the human person and the soul as the invisible part of the human person (De principiis 3.6.7; cf. Dialogus cum Heraclide 6–8).Footnote 33 Prior to the resurrection, when the body will become immaterial, bodies take on flesh or σάρξ; in these discussions, the division from 1 Thess. 5:23 is often elided with the discussions of the spirit and the flesh in Galatians 5:13–24 and Romans 8:1–12. The spirit is described, in Rufinus’ translation, as the conscientia of the soul, its pedagogue and guide (Commentarii in epistulam ad Romanos 2.9.3). It may be tempting to identify Origen's division between the spirit, soul and body with the Platonic division of the intellect (νοῦς), soul and body, but, as Crouzel has noted, the spirit plays an importantly different function than the intellect in either the Platonic or the Origenian schema, in that it is a gift from the Holy Spirit meant to exhort the soul to moral improvement.Footnote 34 The soul, whatever its present character, therefore always has both better and worse desires available to it, a fact which presents the occasion for the will to change whether it takes the pursuit of the appetitive desires or the pursuit of the normative good as its end.Footnote 35 Whether the soul aligns itself with the flesh or with the spirit determines the character of the person (De principiis 3.4.4):Footnote 36
When dragged away by the necessity of the body, we are not permitted leisure for those things which are beneficial and prepare us for eternity, just as, on the other hand, the soul at leisure in divine and spiritual things and joined to the spirit of God is said to make war on the flesh, as long as it does not allow itself to relax in pleasures and to waver in the delights by which it is naturally pleased.
The soul can identify with either the body or the spirit; while the desires of each present motivations for the will to direct itself one way or the other, either of these desires is in itself defeasible. In discussing Paul's account of the opposition between flesh and spirit in Rom. 8:9, Origen considers how this particular anthropology ensures that alternative motivations are available to the human person (De principiis 3.4.2; cf. Homiliae in Genesim 1.15):
It is plain that the choice (uoluntas) of the soul is something intermediate between flesh and spirit, without a doubt serving and obeying one of the two, whichever it has chosen to obey. When it makes itself subservient to the delights of the flesh, human beings become fleshly, but when it joins itself to the spirit, it causes human beings to be in the spirit and on account of this to be called spiritual. Thus the apostle seems to specify, when he says ‘However, you are not in the flesh but in the spirit’ (Rom. 8:9).
Origen is careful to argue that the appetitive inclinations towards those things which give pleasure are not the desires of a lower soul but the desires of the body, a view which again is likely informed by Plato's discussion of the desires of the body in the Phaedo, but also is a reception of the account of the body's desires found in the Timaeus (though elsewhere Origen does, rarely, speak of a thumoedic and an appetitive part of the soul; cf. Selecta in Psalmos 54.730). He argues that the appetitive desires are the desires of the body properly speaking, and not of a lower soul in refutation of the view held by certain Christians who believed in the existence of two souls, one good, one evil.Footnote 37 ‘So, when it is thought that flesh provokes lust, while a better counsel opposes this sort of enticement, it must not be thought that this is one life opposing another, but that it is the nature of the body, which is eager to empty out and drain the places filled with seminal fluid’ (De principiis 3.4.4; cf. Pl. Ti. 91a1-b6). Yet, we might contrast how Origen's thought resonates with what we find in the Phaedo with, for instance, Plotinus’ own use of Plato's text. For Plotinus, human souls are only autonomous when they are no longer subject to the affections of the body (Enn. 4.8.3.21–34); that is, the activities of the soul can only properly be said to be within its power when it has dissociated itself from the body to the appropriate degree. Origen likewise understands dissociation from the flesh as required for the soul to become virtuous. What distinguishes his use of the body in his account of what is ἐφ’ ἡμῖν from the reception of the Phaedo in Plotinus is his understanding that what is ‘up to us’ is the ability to revise radically one's character. For Origen, all souls, whatever moral condition they may be in, have the ability to endorse either the appetitive or the spiritual desires; only because of the actual capacity to revise our conative motivations that all human beings have can the virtuous person achieve the normative freedom from the body that constitutes virtue.
In a certain sense, Origen here demonstrates certain intuitions that might be shared with someone committed to the view that moral revision depends upon the existence of alternative possibilities. In addition to his understanding of human character as formed by one's prelapsarian decisions, thus rendering one's character (on Boys-Stones’ assessment) ‘entirely self-created’,Footnote 38 his claim that autonomy requires the availability of conflicting motivations perhaps shares something with intuitions about indeterminist freedom as well. None of this, however, actually commits Origen to indeterminacy in human choice. Rather, what accounts for one's authorship of one's own revision of character is that it is a revision done on the basis of one's own present (but hitherto-defeated) motivation.
THE ROLE OF ΠΡΟΠΑΘΕΙΑ IN REMEDIAL PUNISHMENT
While conflicting motivations always remain available to the human will, Origen still needs to provide an account of why a will that has endorsed the desires of the flesh will reverse its decision. Once the defeasible spiritual desires have been defeated, what motivates the will or προαίρεσις to revise its endorsement of its appetitive inclinations and the desires that follow from them? In his account of what motivates moral revision, Origen draws on and develops Stoic ideas of pre-passion in order to explain how one becomes aware of the psychological ramifications of embodiment in the moments of temptation, an awareness which allows for the possibility for one to judge critically the impulses towards which one's προαίρεσις is inclined and revise one's character accordingly.
Origen's concept of προπάθεια developed the way in which Stoic theories of pre-passion drew on ideas about the ethical dualism between body and soul from the Phaedo. Yet, Origen argued, as the Stoics did not, that pre-passions could render transparent the degree to which the soul has identified with the body. Much of what we know about Stoic theories of pre-passion comes from Seneca. Pre-passions for Seneca are not, of course, full-blown passions; they are not the product of assents but of agitations such as the pallor of the face that arises when one is in a position of mortal danger (De ira 2.3.1–3). In discussing how non-rational affects emerge in Seneca's discussion of pre-passion, Inwood points to instances in Seneca's discussion that display the influence of the Phaedo (Ep. 71.29). He argues that we find in Seneca's treatment of involuntary affects an adaptation of a larger Stoic receptivity to understanding moral conflict in terms of the body/soul dualism of the Phaedo, one he likewise finds in the evidence from Aulus Gellius for Epictetus (Gell. NA 19.1.19–20).Footnote 39
This analysis of pre-passion is exploited by Origen. Like Seneca, he elaborates on Phaedo’s claim that problematic affects are derivative from the body. Both seek to explain how the virtuous person can be subject to affect without incurring moral blame; Origen contrasts pre-passion, which he describes as something involuntary or ἀπροαίρετον, to the passions caused by the assents of our προαίρεσις (Selecta in Psalmos 4.5).Footnote 40 In Origen's case, however, while the pre-passions themselves do not incur blame, he takes the severity of the pre-passion to give some indication about the degree to which our προαίρεσις is inclined toward the desires of the flesh. Pre-passions therefore play a role in Origen's account of how temptation serves as an occasion to judge our will as corrupted, a judgement that motivates us to revise its conative ends. Recall the discussion from De principiis 3.1.4 cited above, in which the resolute and the incontinent ascetics were contrasted.Footnote 41 In that description, the resolute ascetic, after dissenting to the pleasurable representation on several occasions, is subject to increasingly weaker pre-passions in comparison to the dissolute ascetic.
Origen elaborates on the relationship between pre-passion and the exacerbation of vice in De principiis 3.2.2. While the proper function of these affects is to motivate us to pursue our bodies’ natural needs, the demons can take advantage and further lead us astray when the desires extend beyond what we naturally need. At the same time, however, the boundary between voluntary and involuntary forms of passion opens up the possibility for our propathetic affects to provide an occasion for one to evaluate one's volitional dispositions and make the choices required for moral progress. As the comparison of the continent and incontinent ascetics illustrates, one can assent or dissent to the representations that accompany these affects; the more often the ascetic dissents to a representation that accompanies the pre-passion, the less the ascetic will be subject to it.Footnote 42 A limitation of this analysis of character revision is that it does not account for a person who is clear-eyed about his or her motivations and remains happy to leave them as such.
While it is in virtue of my self-judgement and my opposing spiritual desire that I, recognizing my will as corrupted, can revise that will's underlying motivational desires (if only temporarily), God can nevertheless interfere in order to bring about certain situations in which my defeated spiritual desires will become indefeasible. His understanding of how certain circumstances elicit certain affective responses, which make the depravity of one's desires transparent to oneself, provides the basis for his account of the efficacy of remedial punishment.Footnote 43 For Origen, remedial punishment is only efficacious when it is accompanied by the right self-interpretative activity. As he says in De oratione 29.17,
The things which our soul has received, escaping the notice of all except God, even ourselves, become clear through temptations (πειρασμῶν), so that we might no longer avoid acknowledging what sort of persons we then are; and so that, observing ourselves, we might also become aware (συναισθώμεθα), if we should choose, of our own evils; and so that, observing them, we might give thanks for the good things apparent to us through temptations.
This perception described here requires, however, that we perceive remedial punishment as punishment, and that we experience the struggles we undergo as the chastising action of God (Homiliae in Exodum 4.8):
When the soul has been sufficiently chastised on account of its habits and constrained for the sake of rebuking it to a more faultless life, when it perceives the author of these blows, and has now begun to confess that it is the finger of God, and receives some small understanding, then it sees the shadows of its deeds especially, and it perceives (sentit) the darkness of its errors. And when it comes to this, then it will merit that the firstborn of Egypt in it be destroyed.
The particular circumstances God arranges are occasions to bring one's own vices to light. Part of emerging victorious from the contest (De principiis 3.2.3) requires that we recognize that we are in fact being tested—that we undergo a certain experience as an occasion for us to alter the orientation of our προαίρεσις. These trials therefore serve as the occasion for the interpretation and judgement of our character that are necessary to weaken the motivational strength of our bodily desires.Footnote 44
One might contrast Origen's understanding of the connection between autonomy and moral progress with Bobzien's interpretation of Epictetus. For Epictetus, as we noted above, reflecting upon one's own autonomous capacity to use representations as one chooses can motivate one to hold indifferents in appropriate esteem and act accordingly. In this case, a proper understanding of one's προαίρεσις as unhindered by external causes can motivate moral development. This is, however, a somewhat different way of understanding the connection between human autonomy, self-awareness and moral progress from that we find in Origen. In Origen's case, the ability of even a superlatively vicious person to reflect upon his or her character and be motivated to improve it, even to the point of becoming a superlatively virtuous person, is a necessary condition for the possibility of our assents and dissents to be counted as ‘up to us’. Moral progress is not just made possible by a recognition of the sense in which one is autonomous, as it is for Epictetus; rather, for Origen the possibility for moral progress is itself partially constitutive of autonomy.
Many of the later Platonists denied that even vicious characters would be eternally punished, a position that required them to provide allegorical interpretations of discussions of the ‘incurable’ punishables of Grg. 523a-526d. For these Platonists, the punishment after death suffered by the tyrant would only last until the passing of this aeon. Yet, Origen's understanding of the efficacy of remedial punishment is interestingly different on this point as well. Take, for example, Origen's discussion of why God waits to punish certain individuals, here again referring to the example of the Pharaoh but also, it would seem, alluding to Platonic passages like Grg. 475e-480e (Philocalia 27.5; cf. Pl. Grg. 480c-e):
Just as in some bodily illnesses, when the sickness has, you might say, settled deep within, the doctor, through certain medications, brings out and makes the matter apparent (εἰς τὴν ἐπιφάνειαν ἕλκει καὶ ἐπισπᾶται τὴν ὕλην), causing painful inflammations and swellings and more pains than the person had experienced before he went for treatment, such as is the custom for them to do in cases of rabies and other similar illnesses. Thus I think that God manages (οἰκονομεῖν) the hidden illness situated deep within the soul.
The remedial punishment of the divine physician functions by making a person's vices evident to him or her; this allows for the self-judgement we have seen him discuss elsewhere. In Olympiodorus’ discussions of just punishment imposed upon the tyrant, on the other hand, remedial punishment is spoken of as something that is done to one, without a sense that one must interpret one's suffering as punishment if it is to count as punishment. The tyrant whose children are executed in retribution for his crimes is better off than the tyrant who escapes punishment (In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria 19.2); yet, Olympiodorus offers no discussion of the role that self-perception must play in the efficacy of punishment for such people.Footnote 45 Consider, for example, Olympiodorus’ own version of the doctor analogy (In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria 19.3):
If someone says ‘How is it that a man who commits injustice endures no burden, but on the contrary says what he likes and enriches himself and gets his hands on everything and is honoured?’, reply that God seeks the right time, with a view to the beneficial. For just as a doctor does not immediately heal someone suffering from an eye sickness, but waits until he sees the eye liquid has set and as long as a period of delay aims at benefit, not at harm, so too God leaves a man for a greater chastisement.Footnote 46
This passage bears some obvious similarities to the passage from Philocalia 27.5 quoted above; yet, the function of agency in the two passages is interestingly different. In the reception of the medical imagery of the Gorgias by Olympiodorus, the analogy with the doctor illustrates how God must wait for certain dispositions to set and become stable in order to correct them. In Origen's case, however, God waits to intervene so that human moral failings can become apparent to the person who is afflicted by them. For Origen, the analogy is meant to drive home the claim that a certain sort of self-perception is necessary for remedial punishment to have any benefit. For remedial punishment to be efficacious, it must be interpreted by the person who experiences it as punishment, either in the moment or at a later time, when the person is ready—its corrective impact lies in the way that it induces human beings to reflect on the orientation of their προαίρεσις and judge it as in need of correction. Otherwise, such punishment is not punishment but simply a random act of suffering. In so far as its effectiveness requires that the person experiencing it understands it as such, the improvement of moral character requires the exercise of one's own capacity to revise radically one's motivations on the basis of one's own critical judgement of one's dispositional higher-order volitions. While Origen and Olympiodorus both agree that a superlatively vicious character can become rehabilitated, Origen appears to place a greater emphasis on the role of human agency in that rehabilitation than we find in Olympiodorus.
AUTONOMY AND ITS LIMITS IN THE SECOND CREATION
On Origen's account, then, God does not directly compel character revision. That does not, however, mean that revisions of character are instances in which one might be able to choose otherwise; we do not see in Origen a concern with indeterminacy in human choice. On his account of moral development, God arranges events so that human beings will end up in precisely those circumstances which will eventually render their previously defeated spiritual desires necessitating motivations in the circumstances in which they are necessitating. In the absence of such divine intervention, one might never find oneself in the circumstances necessary to provoke the required reflection. There would therefore seem to be rather significant situational qualifications on the motivational availability of moral progress to any given person—in the absence of a theory of autonomy dependent on alternative possibilities, it is only given the right contexts and circumstances that our defeated spiritual motivations become indefeasible.
Despite Origen's preoccupation with the question of how human beings become motivated to revise their characters, there appear to be limitations to his account. In particular, whether he can adequately account for how the superlatively vicious person can be motivated to revise his or her character remains unclear. On this point, let us consider the example of Judas taken up in the second book of Contra Celsum. In Contra Celsum 2.20, he invokes the Platonic hypothetical-fate argument against the Idle Argument in claiming, against Celsus, that Jesus’ foretelling of Judas’ betrayal did not compel Judas’ action and therefore does not render God responsible for Judas’ actions. Origen's use of the hypothetical-fate argument has been given in support of the interpretation of his theory of will, which takes him as committed to the ability of human beings to choose otherwise; yet, in light of Boys-Stones’s work rejecting this interpretation in the Platonic context, just the fact that Origen invokes it does not provide evidence for this interpretation.Footnote 47
Rather than focussing on the hypothetical-fate argument itself, I would like to look at the question which prompts Origen's appeal to it—Celsus’ criticism of the idea that a Son of God would be the kind of being who would allow one of his disciples to hand him over to death. In response to Celsus’ criticism, Origen argues that Jesus’ prediction of Judas’ betrayal does not entail that Judas was not the author of his own action (C. Cels. 2.11):
Judas was subject to conflicting and opposing judgements concerning his teacher, and was neither against him wholeheartedly, nor did he wholeheartedly preserve the respect of a pupil for his teacher. ‘For he who hands him over will give a sign’ to the crowd coming to seize Jesus, saying ‘The one whom I kiss is him; take him’, preserving something of the respect due to him. For if he had not preserved it, he would have handed him over frankly without the friendly pretence of a kiss. This will persuade anyone concerning the will of Judas (περὶ τῆς τοῦ Ἰούδα προαιρέσεως) that, in addition to the covetous and wicked will (προαιρέσεως) which led him to betray his teacher, he had something beside it in his soul from the words of Jesus, which bore some image of a remnant, so to say, of virtue.
Here, Judas is subject to two opposing motivations, one for the virtue inspired by Jesus and one for the money offered by the elders. When Judas betrays Jesus, he is acting on the basis of his covetous desire; yet, his virtuous desires remain available to him, even if they are defeated at the moment the betrayal takes place. After events have come to a head, however, the aftereffect of Jesus’ moral teachings and predictions provide an occasion for Judas to reflect upon what he has done and repent on the basis of the present, yet hitherto-defeated virtuous motivation. God's activity, in Jesus’ interactions with Judas and the subsequent fallout, provides to a defeated motivation a certain motivational force it did not previously have, by referring Judas’ attention to the corruption of his will. On the reading of Origen which attributes indeterminist freedom to him, it must be the case that Jesus’ activity here could have failed, and that it was causally open to Judas not to repent even after Jesus’ intervention. If this is the case, it would be possible for God's intervention to fail, a possibility Origen does not seem to entertain.Footnote 48
While Origen argues that the actual act of will that constituted Judas’ repentance was not directly compelled by Jesus’ activity, there are still other ways of understanding how this act of will might have been determined. We could interpret his discussion here to require that, given his knowledge of Judas’ character, Jesus be capable of bringing about precisely that set of circumstances—through his past teachings, through the prediction itself, and so forth—that necessitate the desired volitional response from his disciple. The ensured efficacy of God's activity in this instance seems to require that the previously defeated spiritual motivation become indefeasible. Yet, can the revision of a superlatively vicious will against its own established orientation really be deterministically caused by the will itself? Origen understands God to intervene for the revision of Judas’ character not by directly compelling his will, but indirectly by bringing about circumstances in which Judas, being the person he is and having the character that he has, cannot do otherwise than reflect on his actions and endorse a previously-defeated motivation. Again, behind this account is the Stoic distinction between proximate and absolute causes.Footnote 49 Yet, one might ask—what is it about the superlatively vicious person's character that explains that revision? And if it cannot explain that revision, how can it be the determining cause of it?
In moral development, one might argue that a person's self-improvement depends upon a certain degree of psychological scaffolding. Suppose, for instance, I am a person who is not terribly tidy. Left to my own devices, I might let the dishes go longer than is ideal, or fail to throw out my old mail. However, say I acquire a new room-mate. Because I am concerned for my room-mate's well-being and happiness, or because I am ashamed to be seen as slovenly, I am motivated to, say, will to clean the kitchen more than usual. In this instance, my moral improvement with respect to one virtue or quasi-virtue (cleanliness) is caused by the presence of another virtue or quasi-virtue (such as concern for others, or shame). In the absence of a theory of autonomy which requires the presence of alternative possibilities, it might be the case that my concern for others causes me to be in such a psychological state that I cannot do otherwise than will to clean the kitchen more frequently. Under my present circumstances, my current set of virtues provides the determining causes of the revision of my character. If I have no relevant virtues or quasi-virtues, however, it is difficult to see how my present character might be the determining cause, under certain circumstances, of its own moral revision with regard to any particular virtue or quasi-virtue.
For all of his concern to demonstrate how every human being can be motivated to revise his or her character, I think that this question of bootstrapping remains a more pressing problem for him than it is for the Stoics, who have more room to admit that certain characters are simply not capable of being motivated to develop morally. While his philosophical appropriation of Pauline anthropology is meant to account for how alternative motivations are available to a person, what about a superlatively vicious character would account for why such a person would endorse a previously defeated spiritual motivation remains something Origen has a difficulty accounting for. Such a difficulty might prompt a thinker committed to the possibility for moral redemption even in the worst cases of human character to move in one of two directions. Either one might understand that such a person's present motivations are indeterminate causes, or one might understand that God, rather than the human agent, is the absolute cause of moral revision. Neither of these options is an option that Origen endorses, though both of them would be options taken up by later Christian philosophers. For Origen, however, despite his use of Stoicism to argue that human beings are the absolute cause of their actions, his non-Stoic insistence that any and every person must have available to them the motivations necessary for the radical revision of will entails that this theory has difficulties accounting for how the will of the superlatively vicious person is not revised by an absolute cause outside of itself.Footnote 50
In the absence of a commitment to the view that autonomy depends upon the ability to act otherwise, Origen's use of Stoic discussions of assent helps him develop an account of human autonomy in which God's interactions with individual human beings cannot fail to have the outcomes God intends, without rendering God the absolute cause of human choice. As I have aimed to illustrate here, however, his account appears to suffer from certain explanatory limitations, particularly in the case of the superlatively vicious person. We therefore seem to find Origen's theory of autonomy and motivation raising the kinds of questions about the relationship between grace and free will with which authors like Augustine would later wrestle.Footnote 51 While his efforts to argue for universal restoration require him to understand all human beings—not only the virtuous—as in possession of a free will, the theory of moral motivation he provides in defence of that commitment remains incomplete. The extent to which Origen himself recognized these problems is difficult to say. Nevertheless, his thought on moral progress in the context of his theory of universal restoration illustrates how, despite his debts to the classical philosophical tradition, early Christian preoccupations with soteriology injected a new set of concerns into ancient discussions of self-determination and moral responsibility.
