Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article evaluates Origen's criticism of Christian participation in the Roman army in relation to two prominent themes in his writings: the moral progress of the Christian and the role of demons in God's providence. I argue that, for Origen, to be a Christian is to be a soldier, albeit one whose adversaries are not human combatants, but the Devil and his angels. The battle is won when Christians refrain from sinning, attaining moral perfection through their study of the scriptures, and adoption of ascetic practices. By avoiding the physical battlefield, Christians remain unsullied by the passions that inflame the soldier, enabling them to fight demons more effectively. But this spiritual combat is not without risks to the physical body. As Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom attests, execution could be the providentially ordered outcome of a Christian's combat against demons. Origen presents the violent persecution of Christians as consistent with divine providence and martyrdom as a gift of God to the church. His opposition to Christian military participation is rooted neither in a wholesale rejection of warfare nor a deep respect for embodied life, but in his concern for human moral progress—progress that could be advanced by providentially sanctioned violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".