Become Like the Angels

1. Soul Division

[17] Chapter 1 Soul Division Before establishing Origen’s own teaching on the soul, it is necessary to explore Origen’s analysis of, and response to, the teaching of his Middle Platonic contemporaries, where these can be found. In the following three chapters, three distinct Middle Platonic formulations will be examined—soul division, embodiment, and dual souls—with a view toward grasping Origen’s treatment of each formulation . As all three of these formulations are treated most explicitly in one section of his On First Principles (3, 4), that passage will be at the forefront of these chapters. A beginning will be made with the question of soul division, or soul composition. A serious discussion of the soul and its purpose cannot go far without addressing the fundamental problem of the soul’s composition . For the philosophical schools of the second century ad this meant the sometimes controverted question of whether the soul is divided. Origen himself recognized that a considerable amount of theological weight rested upon one’s answer to this question.1 The Middle Platonic tradition possessed no unanimous, coherent theory of soul partition, as this had long been a subject of contentious debate among the schools. Positions ranged from Platonic tripartition to Peripatetic bipartition and Stoic monism, not exclud1 . He points out, for example, that the very definition of “righteousness” depends upon which part of the soul, if any, is seen as responsible for it. See Against Celsus 5, 47. [18] Inner Moral Conflict ing numerous attempts to intermingle these models. Origen assesses each of these theories in light of the norm of biblical revelation, accepting insights from each theory while rejecting from each what is incompatible with this revelation. Origen’s own position on soul division, taken as a general theory, is somewhat more complex than any of these alternatives, though it tends toward a modified version of soul bipartition, albeit inspired by motivations altogether different from those of the Middle Platonists. In the end, Origen attempts to incorporate the insights of these various philosophical schools into a genuinely Christian anthropological schema, a schema that is not only theological but fundamentally ascetic and spiritual. Origen views the soul as suffering not from an ontological partition into distinct metaphysical units, but rather from a moral crisis, the confrontation of its transcendent spiritual vocation with its current fleshly condition.2 To establish this point it will first be necessary to survey briefly the doctrine of soul division as it emerged from Plato’s dialogues and was further developed in the Middle Platonic schools, resulting in three distinct strands of speculation. An assessment of Origen’s works will follow, focusing on his critique and partial assimilation of each of these three strands, and concluding with a general comparison of his doctrine with that of the Middle Platonic schools. Plato and Soul Division Origen, like most of his peers in Alexandria, worked in the shadow of Plato, whose unsystematic and often ambiguous body of philosophical teaching left to his successors as many questions as answers. Part and parcel of this ambiguity are the two different pictures of the soul that emerge from Plato’s surviving dialogues: the apparent 2. This moral crisis, which strikes at the heart of the human person, is discussed by Origen in both its interior and exterior elements. Interiorly, it is the conflict between the image of God and the fleshly or earthly image within him; exteriorly, it is the spiritual combat between the angels and demons who compete over his soul. These two aspects are both explored by Henri Crouzel. See Théologie de l’image de Dieu chez Origène and “L’anthropologie d’Origène dans la perspective du combat spirituel.” [19] Soul Division soul-body dualism of the Phaedo and the apparent soul tripartition of the Republic. The Phaedo represents Plato’s earliest, dualistic tendency of attributing all sins and sufferings of the psychē to pollution arising from contact with the body.3 In this view, moral conflict arises not from any irrational element in the soul itself, nor from any strictly interior conflict or division within the soul, but solely from the soul’s regrettable association with the body.4 The soul itself is thereby preserved from any internal discord and remains entirely uniform throughout. As a result, for example, Plato is able to argue from the premise of the soul’s homogeneity to its immortality: because the soul...