Contra Celsum as Socratic Philosophy

This piece is part of an ongoing forum devoted to the publication of A New Translation of Contra Celsum. See more here.

Joseph Trigg and Robin Darling Young interpret Origen’s Contra Celsum as a work of philosophy, and rightly so. If its philosophic merits have not been sufficiently appreciated, perhaps this is because it embodies an unfamiliar Socratic style of philosophizing. 

Like much ancient philosophy after Plato, modern philosophy tends towards a scholastic or academic style, focused on the written elaboration of technical concepts, in dialogue with a learned tradition. By contrast, Socrates philosophized using dialectic, an oral practice of inquiry targeting the beliefs of ordinary people, whatever their sources (reason, the senses, tradition, religious inspiration, etc.), so long as they were willing to submit to questioning and to answer sincerely.[1] Dialectic examines people, not merely ideas. 

Socrates was widely revered as a kind of philosophic saint.[2] Some of the most interesting ancient philosophers not only mastered the technical literature of the schools but also channeled Socrates’s example. Among others we might mention Antisthenes[3] (later regarded as the founder of Cynicism), Carneades the skeptic,[4] and Epictetus the Stoic. Epictetus is particularly noteworthy: he is both one of the most overtly Socratic of the philosophers,[5] and one of those praised most fulsomely by Origen. In the Contra Celsum, Origen cites Epictetus approvingly as sharing Origen’s recognizably Socratic concern that philosophy benefit ordinary people in everyday language.[6]

Origen too imitated Socrates’s example, not least in his approach to rational inquiry. Origen frequently speaks of Socrates as a model philosopher, though he is not above criticism.[7] Origen taught dialectic as part of his philosophical curriculum, convinced that “the divine Word also exhorts us to study dialectics.”[8] His person made a profoundly Socratic impression on his students: he dealt with us, said Gregory Thaumaturgus, “in the genuinely Socratic fashion.”[9]

Socratic philosophy too had its scholastic expressions. Dialectic itself was subjected to precise technical analysis, particularly in the logic of the Stoics.[10] Stoic terms and concepts were adopted freely by Platonists, who shared the Stoic reverence for Socrates and likewise took dialectic as the paradigm of philosophic method, though they justified its use differently. 

Origen too drew liberally on Stoic logic,[11] though translators of the Contra Celsum have sometimes misunderstood his Stoic terminology. At one point, for example, Origen argues that rational dialogue presupposes three elements: the voice or signifier (φωνὴ), the signified state of affairs (σημαινόμενα), and the objects aimed at or referred to in discourse (τυγχάνοντα), an ambiguous word that can be translated in this context “name-bearers.”[12] The same terminology appears in near-contemporaries like Sextus Empiricus[13] and Plutarch.[14] This tripartite Stoic semantics aims to account for dialectical practice by showing that the meaning of our sentences is a shared object existing, as it were, between those engaged in dialectical discussion and that which they are discussing, in contrast to Aristotle’s semantics, which reduces meaning to a concept in the mind. Not recognizing this logical terminology, the old Ante-Nicene Fathers translators translate τυγχάνοντα nonsensically as “accidental things.” Even Chadwick translates incorrectly as “experiences.” 

More obviously relevant for contemporary readers is the Stoic concept of “common notions,” which has had a long afterlife in the natural law tradition and in common sense philosophy.[15] Common notions are our shared but vague preliminary grasp of the general concepts philosophers characteristically discuss, such as justice, love, goodness, or the divine. Stoics posited that, in conjunction with the clear testimony of the senses, these notions should guide philosophic inquiry as a criterion.[16] Origen echoes this view in Peri Archon 4.1, adding scripture as a third criterion.

It is less frequently recognized that the concept of common notions emerges in the context of the technical analysis of dialectical practice. In dialectic we undertake the paradoxical sort of learning discussed in the Meno—learning in which we seem, in some sense, already to know that which we seek to learn.[17] The common notions are those concepts that are appropriate targets for dialectical inquiry, which are somehow both the object and the criterion of inquiry. 

Platonists tended to focus on defining such concepts. According to an anonymous Middle Platonist commentary on the Theaetetus, drawing on Stoic terminology, “the natural notions are in need of articulation,”[18] and the definitions at which dialectic aims “articulate the common notions.”[19] Origen’s approach is closer to the pragmatism of Epictetus, who asserts that philosophic education aims primarily not at securing a definition but rather at learning to use and apply them in practice: “What is it, then, to be educated? It is to learn how to apply the natural preconceptions to particular beings in accordance with nature.”[20] In Stoic thought, “preconceptions” are the genus of which common notions were the primary species.[21] As Epictetus argues in another place, one sign of our deep trust in these preconceptions is that we happily use words like “good” and “evil,” “fitting” and “inappropriate” in our everyday discourse, as though we understand what these things are.[22] Epictetus’s dialectic confirms that while we certainly err, our use of such terms is not wholly baseless or arbitrary. 

For Epictetus, contradictory beliefs about ultimate matters are not culturally relative particularizations of universal truths, but rather different practical articulations of deeper beliefs that are shared but vague. Contradictions are real, and they invite critical inquiry through dialectic. But by bringing these deeper commitments to the surface, dialectic can help resolve these differences or at least make us more intelligible to one another in our differences. 

Religious difference is a key issue for Celsus as well. But with evident smugness, in the name of “true reason”[23] he treats religious difference as a matter of arbitrary social convention. He glibly enumerates varieties of worship in different communities and observes that each person is convinced that his community’s ways are best. But whereas for Origen (as for Socrates), such a conviction should occasion distinct lines of inquiry into the reasons for these various beliefs and practices, Celsus is content to quote Pindar: “Custom is king of all.”[24] All this religious variety makes no difference—that is, no difference pertaining to its conceptual content: “I think, therefore, that it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians. Moreover, they would certainly not be holier than other people because they are circumcised; for the Egyptians and Colchians did this before they did. Nor because they abstain from pigs; for the Egyptians also do this, and in addition abstain also from goats, sheep, oxen, and fish.”[25]  

Modern people often view the arbitrariness of religious difference as a reason for mutual tolerance. If it makes no difference whether one calls God “Zeus” or “Adonai,” why persecute Christians for refusing to participate in pagan[26] cultic practices? Celsus shows how tenuous that line of argument is. If the content of a religious practice provides no reason for adopting it, then Christians also have no good reason for abandoning the traditions of their fathers for Christianity, this stubborn and rebellious child of Judaism. The public significance of changing established customs arbitrarily is anti-social obstinacy and rebellion, which the state has a right—nay, a duty—to stop by force. “It is impious,” Celsus says, “to abandon the customs which have existed in each locality from the beginning;”[27] or as our contemporary conventionalists say, “Stay in your lane!” 

Origen can be sharply critical of pagan worship, but he is never smug. He assumes that there are implicit reasons for the beliefs and practices of others, reasons that can be examined and criticized. Indeed, the reasons for a custom are integral to its meaning. True, he says, Jews and Egyptians both circumcise, but they do so for different reasons.[28] Origen displays a kind of ethnographic sensitivity wholly absent in Celsus. 

Similarly, he argues, because Christians share with others the “common notion” of God, we may rightly use the common noun “God” or its equivalent in our respective languages, even though pagans apply the same word to their deities. For a common noun like “God” is grammatically indefinite: linguistic convention does not of itself determine the complete definition of the word or the circumstances under which it may rightly be predicated.[29]  

But Christians refuse to invoke the proper names of other gods, which make the concept of God definite by applying it to particular individuals—Origen believed such names literally invoke demons—who stand in definite relations to other particulars. “Zeus” refers to the husband of Hera, the father of Artemis and Aphrodite—and the one who committed incest with his own daughter.[30] To assert, as Celsus does, that God can rightly be named “Zeus” implies that the common notion of deity can be applied even to one who commits incest. 

It is no wonder that even the philosophers, who refuse in practice to make a clean break from pagan stories and practices, tend to articulate philosophical theologies that, Origen argues, are unworthy of our common notion of God. The Stoics, for example, predicate “God” of the whole natural order—a corporeal entity. But how is this consistent with our common understanding that “God” is the highest and best reality? Is there nothing higher than corruptible bodies? By contrast, implicit in the practice of simple Christians who refuse to call God “Zeus” is a higher wisdom, which can be elicited and vindicated in the Socratic way: through dialectical examination of ordinary people. 

For Origen, then, if ordinary Christians prefer to die rather than to abandon their beliefs, it is not because they are irrationally devoted to arbitrary customs. Rather, like Socrates, they are devoted to Reason and its unique way of bending wills: through persuasion, not coercion. It is this spirit of Socratic reason, understood by Origen as transfigured and perfected by the Spirit of the divine Logos through the scriptures, that animates the Contra Celsum and makes it worthy of renewed attention in our own day.

Mark Randall James is an independent scholar and the assistant rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. He is the author of Learning the Language of Scripture: Origen, Wisdom, and the Logic of Interpretation (2021).

[1] On Socratic dialectic, see Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies, ed. Miles Burnyeat (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Kenneth Seeskin, Dialogue and Discovery (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).

[2] Cf. A. A. Long, “Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy,” The Classical Quarterly 38.1 (January 1988), 150-171.

[3] Cf. Susan Prince, “Socrates, Antisthenes, and the Cynics,” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamteker, eds., A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 75-92.

[4] Cf. John Dillon, “Carneades the Socratic,” Dionysius 36 (Dec. 2016): 27-45.

[5] Cf. Klaus Döring, Exemplum Socratis (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1979) and A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 67-96.

[6] CC 6.2; see also CC 3.54, 7.54.

[7] CC 1.64, 2.41, 3.67, 8.8. On Origen’s attitude towards Socrates, see Michael Frede, “The Early Christian Reception of Socrates,” in Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis, eds., Remembering Socrates: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 188-202, esp. 198-200.

[8] CC 6.7.

[9] Panegyric 7.

[10] Cf. Eric Brown, “Socrates in the Stoa,” in Sara Ahbel—Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, eds., A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 275-284 and A. A. Long, “Dialectic and the Stoic Sage,” in A. A. Long, ed., Stoic Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 85-106.

[11] On Origen’s use of Stoic logic, see Ronald E. Heine, “Stoic logic as handmaid to exegesis and theology in Origen’s commentary on the Gospel of John,” The Journal of Theological Studies 44.1 (1993): 90-117 and Mark Randall James, Learning the Language of Scripture: Origen, Wisdom, and the Logic of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2021), esp. 27-72.

[12] CC 4.84.

[13] Contra Math. 8.11-12.

[14] Adv. Colotes 1119F.

[15] See especially Charles Brittain, “Common sense: concepts, definition, and meaning in and out of the Stoa,” in Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood, eds., Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 164-209.

[16] Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.54; see also Plutarch, On the common notions 1060a.

[17] See Gail Fine’s study, The Possibility of Inquiry: Meno’s Paradox from Socrates to Sextus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[18] Commentary on the Theatetus, 46.43-45.

[19] Ibid., 23.5-8.

[20] Discourses 1.22.

[21] See e.g. Aetius, Doxographi Graeci 4.11.3, Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 7.54. Cf. the excellent study by Henry Dyson, Prolepsis and Ennoia in the Early Stoa (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009).

[22] Discourses 2.11.

[23] True Reason was the name of Celsus’ anti-Christian tract, against which Origen writes his Contra Celsum.

[24] CC 5.34.

[25] CC 5.41.

[26] Many modern scholars avoid the term “pagan” due to its polemical intent and sweeping generality. Although imperfect, I use this term as the most economical way to identify the targets of Origen’s criticism in this context. 

[27] CC 5.26.

[28] CC 5.47-48.

[29] CC 1.25.

[30] CC 1.25.