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Providence, Freewill and Predestination in Origen

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Providence, Freewill and Predestination in Origen Chapter 16 Providence, Free Will and Predestination in Origen Mark Edwards The doctrine of divine providence is an indispensable article of Christian be- lief.1 For this we have to thank Paul, but his apostle in the early church was Origen, who was conscious in all his dealings with philosophy that the only acknowledged ‘atheists’ of his time were not those who disbelieved in the gods but those who denied them any superintendence of mundane affairs. He was also conscious that even those who affirmed this superintendence might re- strict it to the sending of omens, the allocation of rewards and punishments after death, or simply the ordering of the world with a view to the general good of his denizens. For him, as for his co-religionists, providence implied not only all of these things, but the direct intervention of the deity in mundane affairs in response to the prayers of his church and for the sake of each individual who belonged to it. Such tenets brought with them difficulties regarding the certainty and precision of divine foreknowledge, which had not been faced by any Greek philosopher before him.2 In the course of the present paper, I shall set the texts in which he formulates his own beliefs against the teachings of the schools with which he appears to be best acquainted; I shall go on to ex- amine the further problems that were raised for him by his refusal to admit predestination, by his universalism and by the apparent contradictions in the scriptures. I hope to show at the end that his eschatology is not so much one branch of his theology as the trunk of, as it determined his exegesis of the scriptures which in his view were the only appointed means of knowing God.3 1 The subject of free will in Origen has recently attracted the interest of classicists, e.g. George Boys-Stones (2007), who, like Michael Frede (2011), is chiefly concerned to set Origen in his place in the history of Greek philosophy, and therefore takes the First Principles as his centrepiece. The present study raises questions that fall under the rubric of theology rather than philosophy, and therefore consults a different range of Origen’s works. 2 Plutarch, in such works as On the Delays in Divine Punishment (548–568) and On the E at Del- phi (384–394) seems to affirm divine cognition of the contingent future even for individuals, but he is more concerned with ethical conclusions than logical niceties, and at On the E at Delphi 6.387B–C he considers the possibility that the oracle reveals only what will occur if a certain precondition is realised (cf. Cicero, On Fate 32). 3 The following editions of Origen’s works have been consulted: Koetschau 1897–1899, Kloster- mann 1901, Baehrens 1920, Harl and Junod 1976–1983, Limone 2012, Behr 2017. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004436381_018 294 Edwards 1 Divine Foreknowledge There are two texts of some length in the surviving Greek works of Origen which undertake to prove that God’s omniscience does not compromise the freedom that he vouchsafes to us as creatures. In the treatise On Prayer an unnamed interlocutor, citing numerous verses from scripture to prove that God foresees our petitions, concludes that it is therefore unnecessary for us to present them (5.2). This is a version of the “lazy argument”, according to which if a man is destined to beget children he will do so even if he refrains from sexual intercourse. In his work Against Celsus Origen shows that he is familiar both with this sophistry and with the ridicule that is poured upon it (2.20);4 in the case of prayer, however, he has also to disarm the objection that, whether or not we seek the good from God, he is bound by his nature to bring it about, so that any request on our part will be at best superfluous and at worst profane. We can scarcely suppose that he whose will is sovereign in all affairs will fore- see any good that he himself has not foreordained; therefore, while we rightly deride the man who thinks that his orisons have caused the sun to rise, we should deem him even more a fool if he importuned God to arrest its motion (5.3). Scripture itself informs us that the prescience of God implies predesti- nation, for if a sinner is “estranged” from the time of conception (Psalm 58.3) and the righteous man “set apart” from his mother’s womb (Galatians 1.15), no human overtures will turn an Esau into a Jacob, and no act was open to Judas which would have overruled the prophecy, written long before his birth, that his days would be short and his estate would pass to another (Psalm 90.1–2). It is therefore futile to engage in prayer, as we cannot hope to countermand the will of God (5.4). Origen begins his reply by distinguishing three orders of motion: that of the inanimate, which comes entirely from without, like the quarrying of a stone; that of a plant, which proceeds inevitably from the internal working of nature; and that of a sentient being, which is attributable to the agent inasmuch as it had the power to do otherwise (6.1). It is worthy of note that, while Origen elsewhere concurs with the Stoics in restricting the faculty of rational choice to human beings (Against Celsus 4.74), he acknowledges no difference here between humans and other animals. By contrast, the Stoics appear to have credited humans with a capacity for initiating motion which they did not as- cribe to animals, while Alexander of Aphrodisias argues that we are set apart 4 For a full discussion of the definition of prophecy and the role of the prophet in this apolo- getic text, see Ramelli 2017..
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