 That the denizens of the present world have sinned, and will sin again, is a ubiquitous premiss of Origen’s theodicy. Misadventures which the world ascribes to fortune, fate or the malice of our superhuman guardians will always in fact be trials of virtue, chastisements for sin (perhaps forgotten) or correctives to hidden injustice. Thus if we cannot divine (for example) why God loved Jacob and hated Esau—the explanation must lie in causes prior to the birth of either (First Principles 2.9.7). Origen may have been aware of Jewish speculations that Esau offended God in the womb, but it is usually assumed that when he speaks of a “former life” in which Esau sinned he alludes to a previous embodiment or to a disembodied state. Perhaps this is why his detractors in late antiquity ascribed to him the doctrine that all rational beings were once pure intellects in the presence of God, and would have remained so for ever had they not fallen away through koros or satiety. Each of the delinquents, we are told, received a body corresponding to the gravity of the original sin: those who fell least became angels, those who fell most became demons, and human souls constitute order in keeping with the mediocrity of their transgressions (Antipater of Bostra at Patrologia Graeca 96.504–505). This account of Origen’s teaching was already known to Augustine, who perceived its incoherence, since it implies that the bodies of demons, who inhabit the air above us, are grosser than ours. In the form that is now canonical, it is a bricolage of Platonic myths recounting the fall of the soul from the “supercelestial place”, the peculiarly Christian and anti-Platonic concept of the demons as fallen angels, and Philo’s opinion that koros is the cause of the soul’s estrangement from its maker (Heir of Divine Things 240). If Origen held such a theory, it was not on the Platonic ground that soul, as the cause of motion, cannot be brought into being and hence must be immortal; his object, typically Christian, is to vindicate biblical teaching and at the same time to show that it cannot be used to support any Gnostic or pagan animadversion on divine justice (Martens 2015). Accordingly (though some of his ancient critics pretended otherwise), his writings are unequivocal in their rejection of Plato’s theory of transmigration, whether from human to human or from human to beast. Although these theories (hesitantly accepted even by Platonists in the third century), gain some colour from Jewish traditions about Elijah and from punishments meted out to animals under the Levitical law, Origen bows to the wisdom of the church, which declares them inadmissible (CommJohn 1.11.66; Princ. 1.8.5).