I have previously noted the stress Justin Martyr (fl. 140–165) placed upon will and comprehension in the act of baptism. Recently, I was rereading what he had already said in an earlier passage of the First Apology about free will. Addressing the relation of prophecy and freedom of the will, Justin affirms that free will is necessary for moral accountability. In my own, choppy translation:
And that none might suppose (from what was previously stated by us) that we are saying things happen according to the inevitability of Fate, things foreknown from foretelling, we shall also dispel this notion. Having learned through the prophets that punishments, chastisements, and good rewards are given according to the worthiness of each person’s actions, we affirm this as true. Because unless this is so, and everything instead occurs by Fate, then nothing is up to us: you see, if So-and-So is fated to be good and Such-and-Such to be bad, then neither is So-and-So commendable, nor Such-and-Such execrable. And again, unless every category of human has the power of free will for fleeing the shameful and choosing the good, he is in any case not accountable for the things being done.
Notably, “every category of human” could be rendered as “every human nation,” which is perhaps important for what he will say further down about righteous pagans. For now, Justin continues to insist upon the necessity of free will:
But we are so showing that a person succeeds or stumbles with free will. Let’s consider the same human making a pursuit of the opposites [i.e., good and evil]. Now, if he had been fated to be either bad or earnest, he would not ever be capable of the opposites, and he would not be changing so often [from one to the other]. Nor would there really be “earnest” people on one hand and “bad” people on the other, since we would show that Fate is responsible for evil and for opposing itself [in doing good]. Or the previously stated idea would seem to be true—that nothing is truly excellent or bad but it is only considered “good” or “bad” by convention—which idea is, as the true account holds, the greatest impiety and injustice. For God made humanity not like other things such as trees and four-footed animals, lacking the ability to act with will. For a person would not be worthy of reward or praise, not having himself chosen the good but simply having been born as such. Nor, if he was evil, would he justly incur punishment, being so not from his own accord but being unable to be anything other than what he had been born.[1]
A few chapters later, Justin turns toward another classic theological-apologetic problem: what does God do with those who “have never heard”? In particular, he considers the so-called righteous pagans:
And so that nobody says, mis-reasoning toward a perversion of the things taught by us, that we claim Christ was born 150 years ago under Quirinius and that he taught what we say he taught later in the time of Pontius Pilate—and so that no one objects that “all human beings born before that time are morally unaccountable,” let us anticipate and dispel this idea. We were taught that Christ is the firstborn of God and we stated this previously, being Logos in whom every nation of humanity shared part. And those having lived with Logos are Christians, although they are conventionally known as “godless”: among the Greeks, those such as Socrates, Heraclitus, and those similar to them. And among barbarians, there is Abraham, Hananiah, Azariah, Mishael [Dan. 1:6], Elijah, and many others (whose actions and names we know would take a long time to list, which we won’t do now). So even those born prior, having lived without Logos, were ne’er-do-wells and hostile to Christ, and murderers of those living with Logos. And those having lived with Logos and presently living as Christians are fearless and undisturbed.[2]
To me, Justin seems pretty unambiguous: the righteous pagans were Christians before the name, akin to the OT saints who also had partial knowledge of the Logos. When he says that those sharing in the Logos now and in the past are “fearless and undisturbed,” I take that to refer to their ultimate fate. Rather famously in the Divine Comedy, Dante’s rather different solution was to park the righteous pagans in Limbo, the least bad section of Hell. In fact, several of the same characters mentioned by Justin specifically appear at the end of Inferno 4.
I suspect Justin’s own emphasis on free will and personal accountability is closely linked to how he scores the righteous pagans: free will still has stakes even if you lived apart from Israel, before the time of Jesus. Additionally, we know Justin greatly admired figures such as Socrates and Plato, even partly crediting them for leading him to Christianity.
It’s a shame Justin never left an extended commentary on Romans. I imagine he would have had some interesting extended remarks on Paul’s thought experiment of the righteous Gentile in Chapter 2, so too about will and predestination in Chapter 9.
