Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 103 - Fall and Rise - Origen.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Fall and Rise, Origin. How do you feel about this whole all men are created equal thing? Is it, for example, a truth you hold to be self-evident? Thomas Jefferson did, which is why he led with it in the greatest divorce letter ever written, the American Declaration of Independence. But as self-evident truths go, it looks pretty controversial. Before we agree we will presumably want to understand men to refer to all humans, not just adult males. Then there is Jefferson's implication that a divine creator has bestowed the equality in question. That is made explicit in the following clause, which says that it is God who has endowed all of us with inalienable rights, such as the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Yet even atheists would probably agree that Jefferson was on to something. Most of us believe that all human beings have equal moral standing, and most ethical theories endorsed by today's philosophers reflect that. Followers of Kant want to say that every human should equally be considered an end and not a means. The echelitarians, the heirs of Mill and Bentham, typically think that we should be trying to maximize happiness universally, with each person having an equal claim to that happiness. These sentiments need to be squared against other apparently evident truths that push us back in the direction of inequality, for instance that our loved ones should have more weight in our moral calculations than total strangers do. Still, the equality of every human seems to be a promising starting point for moral reflection. Equality is not only a starting point, it is also a goal. We strive to achieve equality in democratic political arrangements, to treat all parties impartially in legal judgments, to eliminate inequality in social and economic conditions. All of which prompts the following thought. If we humans were indeed created by a just and loving God, then why weren't we created equal? It's patently obvious that we come into this world with radically different talents and capacities. Some are naturally intelligent, others are not. Some are gifted athletes, others uncoordinated and clumsy. Some have flowing, silken locks of hair cascading to their shoulders, while others have to content themselves with making podcasts. Even worse is the fact that some people are apparently born morally better than others. Certainly different childhood environments have an impact on our moral character, yet it does seem that certain people are born with the gifts of instinctive kindness, effortless self-control, and a cheerful outlook on life. Having lived in the American Midwest for several years, I can tell you that most of these people live there. At the other end of the spectrum are the bad seeds. People who have every advantage of privilege and upbringing, but find that, like Oscar Wilde, they can resist everything except temptation. In the ancient world, it was if anything taken for granted that all men, to say nothing of women, are not created equal. Just think of the three classes in Plato's Republic who are distinguished in terms of their inborn tendencies, or of Aristotle's views on natural slavery. Such natural inequalities, including morally significant inequalities, became increasingly difficult to explain as ancient philosophy developed. First, the Stoics, then the Platonists and Christians, insisted that the world is the result of providential divine activity. Why does God, despite untrammeled power, fail to arrange the world as we humans strive to arrange our own modest affairs, with equality and justice for all? The difficulty is narrower than the one we have looked at under the rubric of the problem of evil when we discussed Plotinus. Now we are asking not why there is anything bad in the universe at all, but more specifically why some people are born without gifts that are naturally given to others. One answer was given by a group we also mentioned when we looked at Plotinus, the Gnostics. For them, God's plan simply included a division of souls into three types. The best souls, the ones possessed by the Gnostic masters themselves, are permanently righteous and immune to the seductions of the physical world. Such souls are guaranteed to receive salvation. The worst souls cannot achieve salvation, and are lost from the day of their creation. In between are the souls who must struggle towards righteousness. The Gnostic view is bound to seem shocking, not only in its elitism, but also in its assumption that God would play favorites in a seemingly unjust manner. It certainly shocked Christian polemicists like Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, who insisted that Christ came to redeem the whole human race, not just a fortunate few. But they did not think through the consequences of this rejection as thoroughly, indeed radically, as another Christian theologian. He was the most philosophically sophisticated and theologically daring of the early Greek church fathers. His name was Origines, known to us in English as Origen. Origen was the son of a Christian father who died in the persecutions of the emperor Septimus Severus at the dawn of the third century. At the same time, the wealth of the family was confiscated, but Origen, about twenty years old, had already received an excellent education in the grammatical curriculum I described back in episode 84. This enabled him to support his family as a teacher of grammar, and gave him the tools to exploit the unparalleled intellectual environment of his home city, Alexandria. He followed in the footsteps of Clement by teaching in the city's School for Converts to Christianity, and followed him again by drawing on the great Jewish philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria. As we've seen, Alexandria was also the center of pagan Platonism already in the time of Philo and, for centuries still, after the age of Origen. The pagan Platonists seemed to Origen to be allies, not enemies. He singles out Numenius for special praise. Origen probably became familiar with them by studying with none other than Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Plotinus. We know from Porphyry that Ammonius had a student named Origines. Though some have been skeptical that this was the same man, our Origen's extensive knowledge of Hellenic philosophy is consistent with the idea that he studied with Plotinus's master. If you had had a chance to sit on the dockside of Alexandria with him, admiring the lighthouse and trading anecdotes about the many philosophers named Ammonius, you might have asked Origen what he considered his greatest achievement. He could with some justification have mentioned either one of two massive works that survive today. One responds to a withering critique of Christianity by a Platonist philosopher named Celsus. Here Origen carries on the apologist tradition of Irenaeus, Justin, and Clement. A second treatise, On Principles, is a tour de force of theological speculation, the high point of Greek patristic literature for philosophically minded readers. It survives in quotations of the Greek by later authors and, in a Latin translation, by a later admirer and defender, Rufinus, who lived almost two centuries after Origen. Origen also wrote lengthy commentaries on several books of the Bible, which are partially preserved. But if Origen really wanted to impress you, he would probably have named a work that is now lost, the Hexapla. One of the most astounding feats of philology in the ancient world, this offered a side-by-side comparison of six versions of the Hebrew Bible. In six columns, Origen laid out the original Hebrew text, a transliteration of the Hebrew into Greek characters, three attempted Greek translations of the Hebrew, and finally, the most widely accepted Greek version, the Septuagint, noting places where this diverged from the Hebrew. Origen was born at the wrong time. He would, I think, have loved to publish the Hexapla on the internet and do the whole thing with hyperlinks and pop-up windows. As it was, he had to hope scribes would be willing to preserve this massive piece of erudition by copying it out over the coming millennium. They weren't. Which brings us back to our theme of what an unjust place the world is. Like the earlier church fathers, Origen could not accept the elitist doctrine of the Gnostics, which made God as arbitrary in his choices as a scribe deciding which text to preserve. But nor could he see how the world as we see it could be the direct creation of the perfectly just God whose scripture he so lovingly studied in the Hexapla. As Sherlock Holmes would say, once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. Appealing to divine justice, Origen could eliminate the Gnostic theory that God chose to make us unequal. By the evidence of his own eyes, he could eliminate the idea that we are all in fact born equal. What remained was the possibility that souls were originally created equal, and only afterwards became unequal as a result of their own choices. A more timid thinker than Origen might have shied away from this radical conclusion. A more timid thinker could thus have avoided repeated condemnation in the coming generations. Origen was denounced by authors as varied as the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and the Latin Church Father Jerome, who debated the orthodoxy of Origen with the translator of On Principles, Rufinus. Origen though was anything but timid. As I mentioned two episodes ago, Origen explains in the opening pages of On Principles why he takes himself to have great license in devising solutions to theological and philosophical problems. As Christians, Origen and his reader have certain fundamental commitments derived from the clear meaning of Scripture. Origen lists these, but then points out how much remains unresolved. These are the areas that remain open for inquiry. His method is the opposite of the one we found in Irenaeus, who cautioned his readers not to pursue questions that have no answers in Revelation. The nature of the soul, the way in which God created the world, whether anything exists without a body, these are just such questions and Origen will pursue them in On Principles. Although his ideas about the soul are formulated in part as a response to the Gnostics, Origen shares something in common with his opponents. Like them, he sees the salvation of the soul as residing in intellectual fulfillment. Origen's intellectualism is also at play in explaining how souls fell away from God in the first place. When God first created the souls, they were all alike. This is not only because of the demands of justice, the theme I've been emphasizing, but also because God himself is simple and without any diversity, so that his effects cannot come from him already possessing variety and diversity. Instead, the souls were all created on an equal footing, rational beings without bodies but with the power of free choice. Being nothing but minds, they could only exercise this freedom by forming various beliefs. Origen is pointing here to the way that desire influences belief. He draws a connection between the Greek word suhē, or soul, and the verb suhastai, meaning to cool down, because the souls fall away from God when their love for him grows cold. Here Origen is picking up the theme we found in Clement. We do not just passively find ourselves believing things. Rather, belief always involves the exercise of choice. This is an insight we will meet again in Augustine. We like to imagine that our beliefs are formed rationally in reaction to the evidence at our disposal, but more commonly we rationalize our beliefs in response to our desires. For Origen, this is not just a psychological observation, but a key to explaining how diversity comes into the world. The souls who chose to adhere most closely to the truth became angels divided into ranks by their various beliefs. Others became wicked demons. In the middle, like the struggling souls of the Gnostics, are the souls that find themselves in human bodies. Our embodiment is the result of a prior intellectual failure which was also a failure of will. To undo the damage, God himself must become embodied in the person of Christ and lead us to salvation. Again, Origen understands this process as an increase in wisdom. He describes Christ as a teacher who is instructing the souls on how to improve their status. This pedagogical theme, one we already observed in Clement and will observe again in Augustine, is exactly what we'd expect from Origen, the instructor of new converts. He is also in tune with Irenaeus, who taught that life is a challenge laid down to souls, an opportunity to achieve greater perfection. Unlike Irenaeus, however, Origen boldly suggests that the whole cosmos can be understood as the product of the souls fall and rise. It is only because of the foolishness of souls that a complex and varied cosmos comes about in the first place, instead of the immaterial community of souls first created by God. Origen further believes, on the basis of certain Biblical passages, that eventually all souls, maybe even those of demons, will manage to return to a state of salvation. He indulges in further speculation here, pondering the Stoic doctrine of world cycles and wondering whether there might be a series of cosmic dramas in which souls first fall away from and then return to God. Characteristically, Origen discusses that possibility without quite committing himself to it wholeheartedly. His willingness to explore ideas in such a tentative way is an appealing feature of his thought, but it can make his actual views difficult to pin down. It doesn't help that our fullest version of On Principles is the Latin one by Rufinus. Since Rufinus's project was to defend Origen against charges of unorthodoxy and even heresy, he quietly corrected passages where Origen strayed into dangerous territory. Meanwhile, later critics of Origen, like Justinian, tendentiously quote Origen in an effort to make him seem as heretical as possible. Thus, passages from On Principles are sometimes preserved in two versions, a Latin one that looks rather banal, and a Greek one that seems flagrantly heretical. Discerning Origen's settled view in such cases, if he even had one, is not easy. For instance, Origen's critics tell us in no uncertain terms that he rejected the doctrine of bodily resurrection, and thought that when the souls achieve salvation, they will lose their bodies. This makes Origen sound like a committed Platonist. The soul is fundamentally an immaterial thing which acquires a casual association to a series of bodies, but can free itself entirely from the physical realm by achieving wisdom. In Rufinus's Latin version, though, Origen is somewhat more circumspect about whether we will ultimately be totally disembodied. Be that as it may, On Principles is certainly a work deeply influenced by Platonism, so it is rather ironic that Origen's greatest opponent was also a Platonist named Celsus. The two did not meet in person. Celsus lived in the generations before Origen, and his vicious attack on Christianity came to Origen's attention only when he received a copy from his patron, Ambrosius. Celsus had called his diatribe Logos Aletheis, meaning true doctrine, or true word. The word Logos in the title is of course a mocking reference to the assertion that Christ is the word of God. At the request of Ambrosius, Origen wrote a massive refutation which reasserted the truth of the Christian Logos over that of this pagan upstart. Origen guesses that the irreverent Celsus is an Epicurean. Apparently he finds it hard to believe that a philosopher this appalling could be anything else. But it's clear that Celsus was a Platonist, and one of those Platonists who really, really don't like Christians. Celsus painted adherents of this new faith in the most unflattering of terms, accusing them of deliberate secrecy born out of cowardice, and describing them as vermin. The Apostles, he said, were a low-born rabble, and Jesus was not the son of a virgin, but the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier. He also had a more principled complaint about Christian belief. He disdained their reliance on faith, their habit of discouraging questions and demanding unthinking acceptance of doctrine. Besides, the doctrines they are required to accept are absurd. The virgin birth is hard enough to swallow, but the notion that a god could become a man is simply metaphysically impossible. This is one of the places that Celsus's Platonist inclinations become clear, because of his sharp contrast between the divine and the physical, a contrast that no Epicurean would have recognized. We know all this thanks to Origen's quotations from Celsus which are interspersed with lengthy refutation. Celsus made the tactical error of putting many of his attacks into the mouth of a fictional Jewish spokesman. So Origen is to some extent able to turn the debate into one over the meaning of the Scriptures shared by Jew and Christian. Here we are in something like the territory of Justin's Against Truffaut, as Origen shows that the virgin birth and incarnation are in fact prefigured in the Old Testament. Mercifully, here he gives us only one version of the biblical texts he cites, not six. In fact, he is perhaps more keen to display his deep knowledge of the pagan tradition than his biblical erudition. Celsus had depicted Christians as ignorant, unquestioning lowlifes, a slander Origen can refute by displaying his own knowledge of philosophy and Hellenic culture. For instance, when Celsus says that the apostles were reprobates before they became followers of Christ, Origen says yes, just as were the followers of Socrates before they converted to philosophy. After Celsus's claim that God cannot inhabit a body, Origen asks what about the oracle at Delphi? Against Celsus's most general point that the Christians demand blind belief in place of reasoned argument, Origen follows the lead of Clement. Hellenic philosophy, or at least the Platonist part of it, is largely in agreement with the Gospels. And no wonder. As Clement had also said, the ideas supposedly discovered by Greek thinkers can themselves be traced back to Moses. There is then no opposition between faith and philosophy. None of this is to say that Origen saw the Bible as just one more philosophical text. To the contrary, he admits in Against Celsus and in his surviving commentaries on Scripture that the Bible nearly defies correct interpretation at times. It even contains outright historical impossibilities and contradictions, something eagerly pointed out by critics like Celsus and Porphyry. These do not, however, undermine the validity of Scripture. Rather, they are providentially included in the text to make sure we read it not as a straightforward historical narrative, but with higher allegorical methods of interpretation. The Scripture is designed to help everyone make progress, from the simplest to the most advanced reader. The most basic meaning, what we might call its literal sense, is what Origen calls the bodily interpretation. When we find contradictions at this level, we are pointed to a so-called spiritual interpretation which involves the sort of symbolic reading pioneered by Philo of Alexandria. To Philo's armory of interpretive weapons, Origen adds his own considerable philological skills. For instance, when the Bible says, In the beginning was the word, Origen catalogues all the different meanings of the Greek word arche, or beginning. It is, as it happens, the very same Greek word used for principle in the title of Origen's On Principles. The career of Origen shows us both the power and the limitations of Hellenic philosophy, and in particular Platonism, for the early Christian tradition. On the one hand, Origen's learning could be used to defend the faith, not least by presenting himself as an example of just how sophisticated a Christian can be. On the other hand, all that learning did not keep Origen from being persecuted along with his fellow religionists. He was tortured during the persecution of Decius around 250 AD, and died shortly thereafter. There were also limits to how much Hellenic philosophy a man like Origen could accept. One comes away from his treatise Against Celsus, realizing that Celsus was a truer Platonist than Origen could ever be. For instance, Celsus assumes that the world's rational design is unchanging, so that it can never contain more or less evil than it does now. Origen, by contrast, sees the world as evolving towards a more perfect state, in which all souls are reconciled to God. With Origen and the other Church Fathers, history becomes central in the history of philosophy. No longer is the world a static, unchanging object for us to contemplate, it is rather a stage on which is played out the greatest story ever told. At the center of that story are concrete historical events, especially the birth and crucifixion of Jesus, which give the whole cosmos its meaning, and even its intelligibility. Still, figures like Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen only begin to show us what Christianity will mean for the history of philosophy. In particular, though they do speak of the three Persons of the Trinity and the Incarnation, they are not yet grappling with the complex debates that will rage once Christianity becomes the dominant faith of the Empire. The Fathers of the second and third centuries had Gnostics, Pagans, and Jews as their primary opponents. In the fourth century, the debates will instead pit Christian against Christian. Conflict will rage around the most vexed topic of late ancient Christianity, the Trinity. This is, of course, a theological question, but in the next episode we'll see just how philosophically interesting it could become. Appropriately enough, it will be an episode where you get three thinkers for the price of one, the Cappadocians, next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.