Abstract

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.