Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 8.51

After this, he accepts those who hope that the soul—or the mind, or the so-called spiritual or rational spirit, the intellectual, holy, and blessed spirit, or the living soul—will have eternal life and will be with God. He also adopts as correct the doctrine concerning those who have lived well, that they will be happy, and concerning the unjust, that they will be bound up entirely in eternal evils. I have been astonished at Celsus, above all the things said by him, at this statement added to the preceding ones, in which he says that neither these people nor any other human being will ever depart from this doctrine. It was necessary for him, when writing against Christians—whose entire foundation of faith is God, and the promises through Christ concerning the righteous, and the teachings concerning the punishment of the unjust—to see that a Christian who turns away after accepting Celsus's arguments against Christians will likely, having thrown away the word, also throw away the doctrine which, he says, neither Christians nor any other human being will depart from. But I think Chrysippus acted more philanthropically than Celsus in his therapeutic work on the passions. Wanting to heal the passions as urgent and troubling afflictions of the human soul, he proceeds first with the arguments that seem sound to him, secondly and thirdly even with those doctrines that do not please him. "For even if there are three kinds of goods," he says, "the passions must be healed in this way—not busying oneself at the time of the inflammation of the passions with the previously grasped doctrine of the soul troubled by the passion, lest somehow the timely treatment be hindered by the ill-timed leisure for the overturning of the doctrines that previously seized the soul." He also says, "Even if pleasure is the good, and the one dominated by passion thinks this, it is no less necessary to help him and demonstrate that every passion is not to be admitted, even to those who set pleasure as the good and the end." Therefore it was necessary for Celsus, having once accepted the doctrines concerning those who have lived well as being happy and concerning the unjust as being bound up entirely in eternal evils, to act consistently with himself and, if possible, after the argument that appears primary to him, to build upon it and prove through more extensive demonstrations that truly the unjust will be bound up entirely in eternal evils and those who have lived well will be happy.