these different orders of human souls were the direct result of distinct creative agents in the universe—one good, the other deceptive and defective. The main problem that Origen had to address in response to his doctrinal opponents was “how it was consistent with the righteousness of God who made the world” that he should make some souls of higher rank and others of “second and third and many still lower and less worthy degrees,” a problem that, for them, was solved by positing multiple creative agents in the cosmos.27 Origen countered this particular conception of a hierarchy of souls with what some have called his “universalism” or the idea of apokatastasis, the idea that all created intelligences, even those that have fallen the furthest away from God, will someday be restored to their original created nature.28 We find his spiritual taxonomy embedded in Origen’s answer to the proponents of the view that there are different spiritual species of human beings.29 And although this takes up most of Chapters 8–10 of Book 2, Origen cautions his reader that he “must not be supposed to put these [ideas] forward as settled doctrines, but as subjects for inquiry and discussion.”30
One of Origen’s main concerns in these three chapters was to explain why some rational souls happen to be angels, others evil daemons, and still others humans. Furthermore, within these general categories, he also notes many finer-grained distinctions. He is also concerned about why some humans have better lives than others, and why nonhuman spirits are ranked according to different orders. He is responding to those who ask “how it is consistent with the righteousness of God who made the world that on some he should bestow a habitation in the heavens, and not only give them a better habitation, but also confer on them a higher and more conspicuous rank, favoring some with a ‘principality,’ others with ‘powers,’ to others again allotting ‘dominions,’ to others presenting the most magnificent seats in the heavenly courts, while others shine with golden light and gleam with starry brilliance.”31 On his view, human beings could not hold God responsible for these differences, because that would imply that God either created deficient beings or participated in the fall of good ones.32 In order to resolve this problem of theodicy, Origen asserted that all rational souls were created equal and each made a primordial choice with regard to its Creator that subsequently situated it in the cosmic order.
In Chapter 9 of Book 2, Origen states that in the beginning, “God made as large a number of rational and intelligent beings” as “he saw would be sufficient.”33 In Chapter 8, Origen called these “minds” and distinguished them from “souls.”34 He claimed that before these creatures were souls, including the souls of angels, celestial bodies, and humans, they were minds. He uses the designation “soul” to indicate what these intelligences or minds became after they fell from their primordial state. Unfortunately, in all cases but one, namely Christ’s, these intelligences, using their God-given capacity for free and voluntary movement, “began the process of withdrawal from the good,” on account of their “sloth and weariness of taking trouble to preserve the good coupled with disregard and neglect of better things.”35 Origen describes this fall in terms of “becoming lost” and also in terms of a cooling process, drawing on key Platonic ideas that associate divinity with fire. In the cosmos of the Timaeus and Heraclitus, for instance, divinity was associated with the element of fire. And as we saw in the previous chapter, cold and moisture are associated with grosser forms of matter, body, and generation.36 In his discussion of this cooling process, Origen identifies God as fire, angels as flames, and saints as “fervent in spirit,” clearly drawing the analogy between divine ardor and elemental thinking.37 According to Origen, the degree to which each created intelligence had cooled determined its subsequent place in the cosmos as a rational soul. Intelligences then acquired some kind of body reflecting the degree to which they had given in to “sloth and weariness,” and they subsequently became subject to both feeling and motion.38 One of Justinian’s anathemas included in the Second Council of Constantinople’s (553) condemnation of Origen summarizes these positions and highlights the taxonomic implications of Origen’s suppositions again in elemental terms. According to this statement, Origen supposedly held the view that as souls cooled to varying degrees, “they took bodies, either fine in substance or grosser, and became possessed of a name,” and this accounts for the difference in both name and embodiment that one finds among “the cherubim,” “the rulers and authorities, the lordships, thrones, angels and all the other heavenly orders.”39 These heavenly orders also include, as they do for so many of Origen’s contemporaries, the stars and planets. Unsurprisingly, he does not refer to them as gods, as Porphyry and Iamblichus will, but they are living, ensouled beings. Origen raises a series of what he refers to as “daring” questions about these creatures. He asks “whether their souls came into existence along with their bodies … and further whether we are to understand that after the consummation of this age their souls will be released from their bodies” and whether “they cease from the work of giving light to the world.”40 In the end, Origen chooses to include these beings in the larger cosmological story he tells by arguing that their preexistent souls entered their bodies at a later time, and leaves it up to his reader to conclude that they will also dispense with these bodies after the “consummation of this age.”41 In other words, the stars and planets are akin to species of angels in certain important respects.
Origen extends the logic that informed his systematic ordering of different kinds of spiritual beings to specific differences between the characters and circumstances of individual humans. He discusses how humans as both larger groups, such as Greeks and “barbarians” (ethnoi), and as individuals partake of very different fates, many living in diminished and difficult circumstances, some “from the very moment of their birth” being in a “humble position, brought up in subjection and slavery,” while others “are brought up with more freedom and under rational influences.”42 Origen once again bases these distinctions on the degree to which, as created intelligences, the ardor of these individual beings for the contemplation of their Creator was cooled prior to embodiment.43 He uses as his case study the tension between Jacob and Esau over their birthright, asking how God’s justice is preserved in the case where “the elder should serve the younger” and God should say, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Romans 9:11–13).44 According to Origen, Jacob’s supplanting of Esau in the womb was only just, “provided we believe that by his merits in some previous life Jacob had deserved to be loved by God to such an extent as to be worthy of being preferred to his brother.”45 And this situation mirrors the more general order of spirits prevailing in the cosmos: “so also it is in regard to the heavenly creatures, provided we note that their diversity is not the original condition of their creation.”46
As mentioned earlier, Origen constructed his framework in response to his interpretation of the cosmologies of individuals such as Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides. Origen rejected the implications of the view that differences in character and circumstance could be accounted for in terms of multiple creative agents and distinct orders of human souls, and he felt compelled to provide an alternate theodicy. In contrast to the explanation that posited multiple parallel cosmoi, Origen provided a single narrative that encompassed all spiritual beings—various classes of angels, humans, and evil daemons—and in important respects, he elided the differences between them by positing a single primordial ontological equality. Thus humans, angels, and evil daemons all share in the same cosmogenesis. And the difference between them is one of degree and not ontology in some important sense. Furthermore, this framework not only encompassed their original state and disintegration into diversity; it also had important soteriological implications.
Although scholars continue to debate whether Origen definitively held the view that all souls, including those of evil daemons, would eventually be restored to their original, created condition, a state of union with and contemplation of God, there is strong evidence that Origen entertained this idea seriously at a number of junctures, On First Principles being the main place where he alludes to this notion.47 In Book 3, Chapter 6, for instance, Origen interprets the destruction of the “last enemy,” “not in the sense of ceasing to exist (non ut non sit), but of being no longer an enemy and
