Though declared a heretic after his death, the Greek church father Origen is omnipresent in the Western history of ideas. After being re-discovered in Italian humanist thought in the 15th century, his philosophy of freedom contributed significantly to the formation of the notion of unalienable human dignity. Moreover, it was a source of inspiration behind the first profound criticism of philosophical naturalism put forward by the Cambridge Platonists, as they took issue with the science and new philosophy of the 17th century. Lastly, there is an affinity between Origen’s metaphysics of freedom and the ethics of autonomy developed by Kant and further refined in 18th century idealistic thought.

                Origen embodies a theology that, for all its metaphysical consistency, rejects static dogma, expressly inviting alternative solutions and open discussion. This academic stance, which distinguishes the Alexandrian theologian from all the other authors of ancient Christianity, mirrors the overall concern of his philosophy, namely moral freedom and the individual’s development. His metaphysics of freedom is one of the profoundest speculative systems in all antiquity. Its starting point is human freedom, which deterministic cosmologies of Gnostic and philosophical origin seek to undermine: In a first Christian treatise on its nature, Origen defends its reality by referring both to the Bible and man’s reason. His sermons offer a demanding Christian ethics, and his great apology of Christianity, the first of its kind, puts forward a theory of natural law and the first philosophical defence of the right to resist. Starting from the reality of freedom, his systematic work On First Principles considers God, man and nature as essentially historical. Thanks to his notion of moral freedom, which he seeks to elucidate on the basis of man’s likeness to God and the immanent laws of human reason, Origen, the Christian Platonic, is an intellectual father of early modern philosophy.

                15th century humanism is also a Renaissance of Origenian thought. The young humanist Pico della Mirandola, for instance, a representative of the Platonic school of Florence, advocates the revocation of Origen’s unjust condemnation, eloquently pleading for the salvation of his immortal soul. His famous speech on human dignity is, in fact, a re-iteration of the Alexandrine’s dynamic anthropology. It is above all Erasmus of Rotterdam who, following the English theologians John Colet and Thomas More, studies Origen’s writings. His literary dispute with Martin Luther is based upon Origen’s freedom metaphysics, which he resolutely opposes to the latter’s Augustinian concept of grace. He, thus, becomes an “Advocate of modern Christianity” (Christine Christ-von Wedel), which is obviously informed by Origen’s spirit.

                Among the chief merits of the largely-forgotten Cambridge Platonists is the renewal of significant insights of Origen’s ethics and anthropology within the context of the ground-breaking success of early modern experimental science and the new philosophies of Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza. Their greatest systematic thinker, the philosopher Ralph Cudworth, zealously opposes an atheistic materialism that Hobbes, in his view, seeks to deduce from scientific atomism: His apology of incorporeal substance as the free and self-determined origin of movement that is itself moved by universal goodness is the core of a first major draft of an ethics of autonomy. Like their great Alexandrian model, Cudworth and the other Cambridge Platonists set great store by the practical consequences of their ambitious ethos of freedom: Advocating moral autonomy and the individual’s freedom of belief and conscience (a singular phenomenon in the religious conflicts of the 17th century), the Cambridge Platonists embody a tolerant rational theology of Origenian character, in which the claims of the self-determined individual and those of scientific rationality and traditional religion are not deemed incompatible or mutually exclusive.

                It is very likely that Kant read the Cambridge Platonist Cudworth’s great systematic treatise in a Latin translation. In any case, his ethics of autonomy and of the incommensurable value of man is part of the intellectual tradition formed by such thinkers as Cudworth, Erasmus and Origen himself. The same holds true for his Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, his doctrine of the postulates, which translates the basic ethical convictions of Christianity, i.e. the ethos of universal love, into the common language of practical rationality that is binding for all beings endowed with reason. The concept of nature propounded in his Critique of Judgement and certain passages in the Opus postumum reveal the outlines of an attempt at a speculative, natural-philosophical contextualization of his philosophy of freedom that was to be carried out extensively in the systems of his great idealistic diadochi. Though known, the striking parallels with Origen’s freedom metaphysics have so far hardly been dealt with in any detail. The aim of this interdisciplinary symposium, which addresses philosophers and theologians as well as scholars of history and the classics, consists in pilot studies meant to depict Origen’s philosophy of freedom and its early modern reception until German Idealism. Moreover, Origenian thought, both in its original and later forms, is to be critically assessed and systematically appreciated with regard to contemporary issues such as the justification of norms and the role that Christian religion and systematic philosophy of religion can and should assume in it.