Free Will by Frede Michael

Author:Frede, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

An Early Christian View

on a Free Will: Origen

It is quite striking that, once we move beyond the age of the New Testament and the apostolic fathers, Christian literature soon begins to abound in references to freedom and to a free will. The references are not quite as abundant as a look at translations and commentaries on early Christian literature might make us believe. They often rely on a vague and supposedly ordinary notion of a free will, and they also translate or paraphrase expressions like “what is up to us” in terms of “free will,” a phenomenon we have already noticed in the case of how pagan philosophical texts are treated. But even restricting oneself to unambiguous and explicit references to freedom, a free will, or the freedom of the will, one finds them in abundance, beginning slowly in the middle of the second century A.D., but then, by the next century, turning into a torrent. Thus Justin Martyr repeatedly uses the technical term autexousion to refer to our freedom.1The first person ever, whether pagan or Christian, to use the expression “the freedom of the will” (eleutheria ts prohaireses) is Tatian in his Oratio ad Graecos (chapter 7.1) in the third quarter of the second century A.D. Thereafter these terms become more and more frequent, relatively much more so, it seems, than in contemporary pagan literature. Obviously, some doctrine of a free will came to matter greatly to Christians. There is no doubt that the notion of a free will found almost universal acceptance owing to the influence of Christianity.

We have to ask ourselves where the Christians got this notion, whether and how they adapted it in certain ways so as to fit their Christian beliefs, and whether those beliefs even allowed them to find or see a radically new way of understanding human beings, human freedom, and the will.

The answer to the first question seems relatively easy. The Christians got their notion of a free will from Platonism and, most of all, from Stoicism. Many of the massive assumptions associated in Stoicism with the doctrine of free will, for instance, the assumption of a universal divine providence and a divine order regulating everything which happens in the world down to the smallest detail, were utterly unacceptable to Peripatetics, acceptable only with serious qualifications by Platonists, but apparently quite congenial to Christians. If we look at scripture in the form of the Septuagint or at the New Testament as it was beginning to evolve, there is no authority for the language of either human freedom or a free will or, so far as I can see, for the assumption of a free will. When, early in the third century A.D., Origen collects passages from scripture to support the doctrine of a free will, all he can find are passages which you might take to imply that there is a free will but only if you already believe that there is such a thing or that God would not order us to do certain things unless we had a free will which allowed us to comply with these commands.

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